by Bloggorus on Thu Aug 22, 2013 3:16 am
My two cents:
The writing in DD is good, especially in it's tone: a hilarious mix of one liners and caricatures. However, (maybe its the small font) it always struck me as heavy in places. Toasts and other visual indicators have helped, but the density of descriptions, trying to cram basic concepts along with witty writing, makes connections hard to make.
I've always felt that the best writers of this style like Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Ben Elton, etc (all British...?) have an excellent sense of pacing; slowing the narrative down with inventive exposition then speeding it up with solid dialogue and very direct, basic action. The characters act and speak quickly and clearly, leaving time and space to fill in the gap with off-the-wall humour and inventive language. THen again, they had a whole novel to do it in, so I hate to think what you were forced to cut for a streamlined experience like DD. Nothing worse than killing your darlings.
It's been a while since i started a new profile, but on my runs the writing threw me in the deep end from the beginning, and without any simple, solid foundations the interesting writing really ever got in the way. After repeated exposure the context sunk in, but i still feel like i've missed 50% of the content because I had no idea of the previous narrative threads.
It also didn't help that there was very little visual connections, which can be worth a thousand words of context without having to spell it out. Those hand drawn vignettes at the start of lots of indie games these days are cheezy and cheap, but they are still very useful, and pave the way for players forgiving textwalls later on.
I would probably do this too if i wrote a game; I hate the simplistic approach to everything in AAA game writing, so my immediate reaction would be to do the opposite of simple. But those games still cover the basics very well, and you don't know what you've got till its gone.
Shadowlands could be a good example of complex game writing: although lots of the concepts, dialogue and descriptive language are complicated and cerebral, the writers still take the time to spell it out simply when the need arises. With context under your belt you can handle all the batshit crazy stuff that happens after.
Hope this didn't come as a critique: the references to the writers above was an equal comparison, not something to strive for. Keep up the good work guys!