If you enjoy being creative, telling stories, fine-tuning lines until they sing, and bringing characters to life through your dialogue, becoming a games writer might be a good fit for you. But be warned! The competition is fierce, and it’s tricky to make a career out of. As a self-employed games writer and narrative designer, I speak from experience.
I’d always liked to read and write stories, and I’d always wanted to make video games. So in my spare time I started learning how to make games, and writing on the side. I wasn’t sure, for most of my childhood, whether I wanted to write novels or make games for a living.
Eventually I graduated university (I studied English) and got a part time job teaching English to adults. In my spare time I continued making games. Eventually, one of these games got big enough that a friend suggested I run a Kickstarter. It succeeded, and I secured some grant funding. Finally, I finished and released it. Spinnortality is a management sim, so writing wasn’t my focus. But, I still had to write the game’s random events and the game’s in-game products and projects. The final wordcount is around 60,000 words: novella-length. Spinnortality wouldn’t have been possible without my ability to write and write and write.
My next project was much more focused on narrative: the cyberpunk interrogation game Silicon Dreams. The game revolves entirely around interrogating NPCs, so again there was a huge amount of writing to produce. The final wordcount is around 100,000 words, the length of a novel. On the strength of Spinnortality’s and Silicon Dream’s writing, I got a small freelance job writing text for grand strategy game Star Dynasties. This eventually grew into a much bigger contract to write for the game for a whole year.
Things started to turn around
It was around this point that people started coming to me for writing, editing, proofreading or narrative design jobs. Almost all of these have come from local connections, mostly devs from my local gamedev meetup group. So if I had to summarize how I got here, it’s a combination of internal projects with strong writing, as well as word-of-mouth among my community.
But I don’t want to suggest that I have it all figured out. Game writing freelance work is hard to come by: it’s a very competitive space. I keep an eye out for any writing or narrative work, but it’s still hard to get enough to get by. (Perhaps DevMatch.biz will assuage this problem!) As such, writing is not my main thing. My business still depends on me creating and releasing games. But occasional writing or editing contracts, plus the fact my writing skills help my games stand out a little, certainly help.
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