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Do you do lots of storyboarding before you start writing, or do you tend to just take a scene and see where it goes first?

TL;DRFor Squadron 42 they usually outline story beats first to sync with design and art before writing script pages, though they sometimes write a scene just to try it, leaving room for character moments.

Dave HaddockLead Writer, Star Citizen and Squadron 42

That's a good question. Particularly with Squadron 42, we would do very, very intensive... Because, again, we have to sync up with design and we have to sync up with art and stuff like that. So we have to keep in mind what the environment is going to be and what the game flow is supposed to be and all that stuff. By default, we definitely had a process like that, because we had to lock down the flow with design and in conversations with Chris and stuff like that. It would be easier to write it out as story beats. You go here, you do this, you talk to this person, they tell you this, drives you here, you do this. That type of stuff, rather than just jumping right into a script page, because it would be entirely possible that you would be going down the wrong direction or something like that, and then you've wasted a couple of days working on a flow. I mean, sometimes you'll just write a scene just to be like, hey, I think this might be cool. And one of the great things about the game itself is that you have these opportunities to hang out with the various characters a bit. So not everything is plot-driven, which, as Chris has said in the past, is very different than movies, where you have to be very lean and mean, and you can have character moments, but usually they tend to be an aid to the plot because you don't have a lot of time. In a 90-page script, you don't have a lot of time to mess around. In this, we had to go, what does the janitor do? What do they care about? Because the player can go wandering away from, we can be dangling the beautiful story threads and they can be like, hey, who's that guy, and go off and try to follow him, and we have to accommodate that. So it allowed having these little unique character moments that I think are really going to make it amazing.

Happy Hour›w/ Dave Haddock·
Published on this date.10 Feb 2017