Making games made me realize that I'm a malformed freak of nature, but at least now I know why none of my shirts fit

 

– A Tragedy of Seeing With Open Eyes –

– – Also Some Rambling Advice about Narrative Delivery Systems – –

– – – And Why Your Narrative Designer Should Draw Even If It's Terrible – – –

Long long ago, in the before times, when phones flipped, and skinny jeans had yet to crush their first American reproductive capabilities, I started my very first professional game writing job (the criminally cult Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten).

I was working at a very small studio (the incredibly plucky Level Up Labs). Everyone was wearing a lot of hats. One of the hats that I ended up with (mostly because I grabbed it and ran away before anyone could take it back) was "Just Passable Enough Character Artist."

This is actually not a terrible thing for a writer to do. Seriously, I would recommend giving it a shot, if you have even an ounce of artistic talent.

Our "narrative-driven tower defense RPG hybrid" (like many games in its budget bracket) featured good old-fashioned speech-bubbles-and-character-portraits style cut scenes, right out of old Fire Emblem games (or the more recent Temple Run: Legends, cough cough, product placement, cough cough.) The player would finish a chunk of gameplay, and then big, brightly colored character portraits would pop up on screen and discuss the ongoing mystery in comic book style speech bubbles (or argue about boot wine… it was a strange game.) As far as narrative delivery systems go, it's simple, it's fun, and it works.

It also requires character art: ideally, a variety of character art that fits the lines the plucky writer is pluckily writing. Rather than losing a lot of time constantly requesting art from the only other developer who could draw, who also happened to be the game's lead programmer (super genius Lars Doucet), I started doodling character art myself, using nothing but Flash 6 and an encyclopedic memory of Calvin and Hobbes. It wasn't fantastic, but it was expressive – I could get exactly the right facial expression for the right line. Is this guy singing an ode to his new favorite sword? I can whip up a singing pose. It doesn't look artistically amazing, but it does look like he's singing. With passion. And perhaps a little bit of mental derangement.

Being able to rotate a character's eyebrows 45° and say "Now he has an angry pose!" in 2 minutes freed me up to write all kinds of crazy lines that would have totally fallen flat if characters only had a handful of technically excellent portraits.

You see, the dirty secret of this kind of narrative delivery system is that the script conforms itself to the art that exists. If there is no "character standing in a pot of soup" portrait, you can't have a scene about a character standing in a pot of soup. (Well, unless you get really creative with characters talking about things happening offscreen, but I usually reserve that for offscreen nudity.)

 

If a character sings an ode to his new favorite sword using the exact same face that he had when he was mourning his dead wife, players aren't going to care how technically excellent the portrait is: the line falls completely flat. The text is telling you one thing, and the character art is telling you something else.

I just can't believe she's gone, man.

 

(These rules get completely upended once you start voice acting things like Hades: an excellent voice actor can make a single character portrait feel like every emotion the character could ever need, but, you know, you have to be able to afford an excellent voice actor for all of your characters. ...There's only so much that I could bully my little brother into doing.)

The really cool thing here is that just-passable-enough-writer-art doesn't just get you a better script, it also gets you (eventually) better art. Once we brought actual artists on board, I could send them my enormous stack of just-passable-enough-but-highly-expressive character portraits and say, "This, but good." It was so much less time-consuming than spending hours of back-and-forth trying to get a long-suffering professional artist to draw a man singing to a sword with exactly the right level of lightly-eros-tinged-mania on his face. (Although, to be completely honest, I always play the game with the old art because I'm just a narcissist like that. ...A user review once remarked that "the new art is technically better but less expressive," and I have held that anonymous comment in my heart ever since.)

Okay, okay, okay, but where does the malformed freak of nature stuff come in?

WELL.

The other members of the development team were incredibly understanding of my just-passable-enough-writer-art…

EXCEPT FOR TWO THINGS.

The first was that they absolutely forbid me to put bright red curly-toed Persian slippers on our heroine because they "looked too much like Keebler elf shoes."

 …I reluctantly accepted that sometimes, artistic compromises have to be made with tasteless philistines in order to bring something into existence.

(Look at this woman. Look at those sole-crushingly sad, completely pizzazz-less shoes. Those are the shoes of a woman who has given up on life.)

 

The second completely baffled me.

"Why does everyone have grotesque monkey arms?" my codevelopers asked over Slack. (Editor's note: It was 2010, so we were actually communicating via smoke signal, but I've localized the story for the conceptual comfort of modern audiences.)

"It's stylized," I said, feeling the dart of art criticism sink deep into my heart, "All the proportions are just a little bit cartoony."

"That's not cartoony," they said, "These characters are devolving into primitive subhuman ancestors before our very eyes."

I sat there, staring at the almost perfectly anatomically accurate art that I had just shared, trying to comprehend where this totally baseless accusation was coming from.

"It's a really common mistake," they said, "Amateur artists always draw legs slightly too short."

I genuinely could not comprehend what I was doing wrong.

I was still pondering these completely unfounded allegations after I signed off for the day.

My roommate, an incredibly polite and long-suffering Norwegian-American named Kjell, happened to walk past and notice me staring vacantly into space in the throes of profound flabbergasted artistic melancholy.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

"Where do your arms end?" I asked, half in a trance.

"My hands?" he said, slowly.

"I mean if you let them hang at your sides," I said, "Where do they stop?"

"Um," he said, "Right here."

I stared in shock and horror: his hands hung barely past his hip pockets.

"It must be some kind of terrible recessive Scandinavian gene," I thought, "Like blondness, or the ability to survive lutefisk. I'll be polite not say anything about it."

Kjell spent a moment trying to decipher my barely masked look of pity and revulsion before asking, "Where do your arms end?"

I took my hands away from my chest (where they had been cradling my wounded artistic pride) and let them hang at my sides.

"Just above my knees," I said, "Like a normal person."

We stared at each other for a few minutes.

...I sat down at my computer and quietly typed a companywide email titled, "URGENT ATTN: WHERE DO YOUR ARMS END?!"

I sat, staring in disbelief as the answers rolled in and the truth slowly dawned on my horrified mind.

 

 

…Somehow, I had ended up at a company full of stumpy-armed genetic freaks.