Hi there,
Here's a short version of my life in the past couple of years .... I used to have an Atari and a Playstation 1 consoles as a kid, but as soon as I got busy with school and studying, my parents took these consoles away from me and got me focused so hard on education. After high school, I gained some independence in my personal life and upgraded my PC the summer before college, that's like a year and a half now, and started catching on all the big titles I've missed all these years.
At the time I was away from gaming, I developed some sort of storytelling that helped me a lot with some school subjects researches, I even won a national trophy for best research just the year before graduating from High School. I usually presented the research in the form of a short story or a mix between a short story and a play and add dialogues among characters in it, most teachers really appreciated this method and used it as an example of our school educational modern techniques whenever a state official visits us.
I write short stories in my free time, most of the time never finishing them, and one day I showed a friend a story I was working on and he said: "It will be better as a video game, don't you think?" I reimagined the story in a more like video game concept and it was surprisingly good! Then tried the same with other old stories, some fitted perfectly in a video game universe and some were just terrible and better off as a short story.
So, I started looking up more about the gaming industry and how it evolved to be more story oriented, and how a studio like Telltale Games narrates its games with simple core mechanics for the gameplay. Then I came across a book called "The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design" by Flint Dille & John Zuur Platten. It was amazing! But soon I discovered not every game can be adapted to the strategies listed in the book although some of my ideas were extremely compatible to them.
I was never into programming so I tried drawing concept art to help my writing but quickly figured out I don’t have the talent. Tried using Unity3D but realized how deep it is and one need to have a brief knowledge of a lot of stuff and I want to give my full attention to only a few fields of work in the video game industry including writing and whatever is good for it and helps to boost my skills as a video game writer.
I'm now a 2nd-year History student at Mansoura University in Egypt. Taking more English lessons to apply to TOEFL exam next summer. I got, almost literally, a ton of video games stories ranging from Indie Studios/One-Man games type to AAA games type and some are ready for instant making. But the problem is …
The problem is that I don’t have a clue what a game script looks like. I don’t know how to organize my papers for a proper game script, and sometimes I end up writing the story in a form of cinematics and cutscenes.
**So, I was hoping you guys to tell me 2 things:
How to organize my work? It’s ok if you recommend other books or Udemy courses for this issue.
What other skills do I need besides being a writer that will help my writing for videogames but links as a whole to the industry? Is it Game Directing? Producing? Please suggest.**
Finally. Sorry if that was a long topic but I’m really at a crossroads right now and I need guidance from everyone. So, please tell me everything that popped up into your head while reading my words. My greeting in advance.
P.S.
I included one of my unfinished scripts in the link to my Google Drive below and would like your feedback on it. It’s not something big or AAA like although I’m writing one right now. So, if anyone actually liked it and thought it worth making, I’d be happy to share my thoughts and ideas.
Link: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0BzsPJT5YEHLsM2xJZThxMEU3R1E&usp=sharing
