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ArenaNet lead writer Bobby Stein interviewed on script-writing, voice-overs
Today, Tap Repeatedly has an exclusive interview with ArenaNet's lead writer Bobby Stein. The interview covers a variety of script-related details, such as the difference in approach between Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, what led to the decision to implement full voice-overs, and some of the difficulties the studio faces in doing so. He also offers some juicy tidbits on just how voice-acting will affect the atmosphere of the game, one exciting example being: "Say you're travelling a road between two towns, when a guard approaches you in a frenzy. He emphatically tells you that the estate he's guarding is under attack, and that the family–including a small child–is in danger. You storm the property and cut through waves of pirates. Meanwhile, you hear the owners down below cowering in fear. But you've arrived a few moments too late. You overhear the kidnapping take place, and the pirates whisk the little girl to their hideout for ransom. If you're quick about it you can even watch them make the journey." It's an absolute gold mine for anyone anticipating GW2, and doubly so for any of you who are particularly interested in the writing end of game development. Click on over to Tap Repeatedly for the full interview.
Visual Thesaurus is a great tool for writers
After I wrote a post about the changes in Lion's Dictionary app and made suggestions about how Apple could still improve it, I got a nice email from a reader asking if I would write an article about some other writing tools I use. One of my favorites is Visual Thesaurus by Thinkmap. Visual Thesaurus is an interactive -- almost organic -- dictionary and thesaurus for your Mac. Enter a word, and you'll be presented with branch nodes displaying synonyms or antonyms for that word. The lines between the words are color-coded to indicate parts of speech. Depending on how you are using the word, click on its proper definition and then delve down through the semantic relationship of the word by clicking on its node. The whole process is a really fun way to find the right words you are looking for. You almost feel like an explorer traipsing through a thesaurus thanks to the interactivity of the app. In addition to containing 145,000 English words, the app also features 39,000 proper nouns and American and British word pronunciations. Visual Thesaurus is available as both a web app and a Mac/Windows app. The web app costs US$2.95 per month or $19.95 per year. I opted for choosing the actual Mac app, which costs $39.95. The advantage of the Mac app is that you don't need an internet connection to access the thesaurus, which is handy if you're like me and commonly take your MacBook to various non-connected places to write. Visual Thesaurus for the web requires Mac OS X 10.0 or higher, an internet connection and a web browser. Visual Thesaurus for Mac requires Mac OS X 10.0 or higher.
TUAW Giveaway: Scrivener 2.0
For those of you who don't know, most of us at TUAW are big fans of Scrivener. If you're a writer -- whether it is a screenplay, novel or blog you're working on -- Scrivener should be your tool of choice. It lets you organize and format your writing projects with an ease that is unparalleled. Scrivener 2.0 just hit the Mac App Store last week, and we're happy to be able to provide three lucky TUAW readers with promo codes that will let you download the full version of the app – a US$44.99 value. To enter the giveaway, simply leave a comment below. Even if you don't win, if you do any kind of writing, you should seriously think about getting this app. I've written four books using it and doing so would have been much more difficult had it not been for Scrivener's workflow. So, want to win a copy of Scrivener 2.0? Here are the rules: Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older. To enter leave a comment. The comment must be left before Thursday, April 14, 2011, 11:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time. You may enter only once. Three winners will be selected in a random drawing. Each winner will receive one Mac App Store promo code for a copy of Scrivener 2.0 (Value: US$44.99). Click Here for complete Official Rules.
Heavy Rain director encourages more 'personal' stories
Speaking to The Guardian about storytelling in games, Heavy Rain director Cage singled out the FPS genre -- its use of WWII and sci-fi settings in general -- as an example where that aspect of the medium is stagnating. His advice for other game writers: " Don't write about being a rookie soldier in WWII, because you don't have a clue what that's like." Heavy Rain has drawn accolades, Cage says, because the inspiration for its story is personal and relatable. "Talk about yourself, your life, your emotions, the people around you, what you like, what you hate," he advised. "This is how the industry will make a huge step forward. I'm fed up with space marines." In his case, inspiration came from something much more down to earth. "It was not about space marines fighting aliens, it was about my relationship with my first son and how he changed my life –- and also about how loving someone without expecting anything in return was something totally new." So, Modern Warfare 3 writers: instead of "how many people can you shoot?," why not try asking players "how many people would you shoot to save someone you love?"
Jordan Mechner on Prince of Persia, respecting game writers
In 1985, Jordan Mechner was thinking about baggy pants, arches and columns -- images that could be clearly conveyed in a low-resolution, pixelated computer game. While delivering his Prince of Persia postmortem during GDC earlier this month, Mechner delved into his memories, his journals (which you can read online) and his temporary departure from the game midway through development to pursue a screenwriting career in Hollywood. Mechner's interests and techniques have always been embedded in cinema. He filmed his brother David running about in a Reader's Digest parking lot with a VHS camera, and layered drawings on top of those movements (in a process called rotoscoping) to capture the protagonist's movements in Prince of Persia. You've heard that part, but you might not know about the fate of the camera that captured such iconic scurrying. According to Mechner, he purchased it, recorded the necessary footage, and then returned it within a 30-day guarantee. "I felt a little guilty about it, but I was trying to keep costs down," he said. Initially dubbed "Thief of Baghdad" (and inspired by the film of the same name), the game continued to come together in a modular fashion, at one time incorporating a full level editor that Mechner had to persistently test, making sure users couldn't introduce game-breaking bugs. "My job title was programmer, all those other things were extra."
Qualcomm's ultrasonic pen demo transcribes from paper to device (video)
LG's Netflix-lovin' Revolution wasn't the only standout demonstration at Qualcomm's MWC booth -- the company also cut out a bit of space to showcase a wild new ultrasonic pen that's able to transcribe writing on paper directly into one's phone, tablet or laptop. The gist of it is simple: the pen can be equipped with an actual ink pen or a simple nub, and there's a battery-powered transceiver inside. Using standard, off-the-shelf microphones on a mobile device, your future phone or tablet could pick up vibrations from the pen with a radius of around 30 centimeters. Underlying Epos software is used to convert vibration and coordinate information into text, and from there, any 'ole text app can be used to field the results. We were even shown a brief demo of a prototype language translation app that enabled the demonstrator to write a sentence on paper beside the phone, and have the phone itself take in the English phrase, convert it to text, and then translate into a foreign tongue. It's a fairly impressive feat, and there's some pretty obvious usage case scenarios here -- this could easily reinvent the art of note taking in class, where those who prefer to jot down reminders on paper will be able to log those same bullet points on their laptop as they scribble. Vid's after the break, per usual. %Gallery-116712%
WGA nominates Singularity, New Vegas, more for writing award
You may look forward to Christmas with the family or that first magical snow, but our favorite winter tradition is seeing what befuddling games the Writer's Guild of America has chosen to nominate for the year's best writing. Some notable previous nominees include Wet, X-Men Origins: Wolverine and (no joke) Crash of the Titans. But it's really let us down with the 2010 lineup: Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood Fallout: New Vegas God of War III Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands Singularity Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II Sure, we could have picked better games (Mafia II, Enslaved, Alan Wake, Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead Redemption, just for starters) but none of the selections have the puzzling punch of previous picks like The Simpsons Game or Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble. Congratulations, it would seem, are in order for whichever WGA member's nephew got to pick these this year. So way to go, kid. You don't have good taste in games, but at least you aren't a nutjob. Update: As some of our readers have been kind enough to point out, WGA awards are limited to members of the organization, which may explain some of the more notable omissions. So now you know.
Periodic table blasted onto a single human hair using ions, human reportedly wants his hair back
We've seen the Torah inscribed on a surface the size of a pin, and the atomic pen making inroads into even more impressive feats, but tiny writing never ceases to amaze us. Now, it seems, the entire periodic table of the elements has been scribed onto a single hair -- that of Martyn Poliakoff, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham. The project involved magnifying the hair under an electron microscope, and 'writing' on it with ions using an ion beam writer to imprint the entire table of elements onto the hair. As you'll see in the video after the break, the results are quite impressive albeit very small.
Want to write on your iPad? Here's some tips to get started
So, you received an iPad under the tree. As you're playing with it, you're wondering what you can do with it in regards to creating the written word. For the writer -- from fiction author to enterprising blogger -- the iPad is also a very portable way to get some serious writing done, even though it wasn't originally advertised as such. That's where users came in and turned the iPad into an excellent portable writing machine. Having toted my iPad into the mountains of Arizona and across the ocean to the UK, I was able to get a good amount of writing done and have it available on my desktop with little issue. Optional hardware First, however, you do need some hardware. If you're going to be doing any writing for a lengthy period of time, invest in an external keyboard. While Apple does have one with an iPad dock attached, it's a bit unwieldy for extended use. Skip the dock-enabled keyboard and grab Apple's Bluetooth model. Both cost US$69, but you get extra portability with the Bluetooth keyboard. There are several cases that now have Bluetooth keyboards built right in, including Kensington's KeyFolio for $99.99 and Zaggmate's case with keyboard also for $99.99. The upcoming ClamCase will take these a step further and turn your iPad into a mini netbook. That will run you $119.99, with the price expected to rise to $149.99.
Icon Notebook: textual communication avenue for the Microsoft Word averse
It looks like a document. It's chock-full of documents. But not Microsoft Word documents. Only documents that could dream of one day being scanned in and converted to a Word document. It's the Icon Notebook, brought to you by the brilliant minds at Brigada Creativa, and it's on sale now for €6.95 ($9.34) direct from Spain. Which is a whole lot cheaper than a Word license, no matter the font you're talking in.
The Observer watches as novelists and journalists jump to game writing
"Who writes this stuff?" It's something considerate game players and critics often ask aloud -- and they're barely heard over the sound of a laser chainsaw going into some monster's maw. The New York Observer has published an interesting piece on writing in games, with a focus on novelists, screenwriters and journalists that have made the leap to interactive storytelling. Some of these writers seem to have a higher profile than the plots, characters and dialogue they provide. "What I found on the other side was that I'd never really understood how hard it was to get any kind of coherent story into a game, let alone a good one," said Rhianna Pratchett, former journalist and writer behind the Overlord games. Her observation isn't just critical of the quality of games writing, but of how late it finds its place in the development process -- if it's incorporated at all. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter author Tom Bissell and his writing partner, Rob Auten, were apparently called in to fix the dialogue for an upcoming franchise reboot at a stage where the game was "largely finished." "I always say that the games industry makes Hollywood look like avant-garde poetry publishers," Bissell said. Games writing pays a lot less than Hollywood, of course, and doesn't offer the same kind of recognition. Marc Laidlaw, novelist and writer at Valve, believes the world of books provides a more apt rival. "I think you learn a lot about writing dialogue and stuff from movies," he said, "but games just compare more closely to novels, I think, because you immerse yourself in them and they take up a big part of your life for a very long time." Valve is anomalous in having in-house writers like Laidlaw, and the studio's games, like Portal and Half-Life 2, are anomalous in being commended not just for dialogue or individual scenes, but for how well their scenarios and characters fit within the unique structure of a game. If writers become part of the collaboration at an earlier stage, we might again ask, "Who writes this stuff? And where can we play more of it?"
The Game Archaeologist's fear and loathing in the Kingdom: Interrogating Mr. Skullhead
I'm sure that after last week's introduction to our Kingdom of Loathing retrospective, many of you out there were going, "What? What is this tomfoolery? Where are my three-dee em em ohs?" Yet I guard a tiny flicker of hope in my heart that a reader or two out there felt their curiosity tingle, then burn, then spontaneously combust as he or she gave KoL a shot. In contrast to many of the other MMOs we play today, Kingdom of Loathing is downright old-school in terms of development and staff. There's no huge company here, no six floors of cubicles or corporate softball leagues. There's just a handful of gamers and writers who turned a pet project into a long-running success. Today I got the privilege of putting Josh "Mr. Skullhead" Nite to the question, and it was a treat to end all treats. An armageddon treat, if you will. So what's it like being one of the masterminds behind the most insane MMO in the world? And are the stories of its boozy origins true? Hit the jump and find out!
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Five years of scum and villainy
Let's face it, being a supervillain is fun. Sure, you root for the hero, because blowing up the entirety of California would probably be a bad thing, but in your heart you think that having come up with a plan to wipe out an entire state is pretty darn cool. City of Heroes might have launched letting players just take the role of a heroic sort, but five years ago tomorrow, they launched the game's first expansion, the appropriately named City of Villains. Of course, these days few players think of CoV as an expansion. Since the two games were merged two years ago, the very concept seems almost ridiculous, and the two have long felt like halves of a whole. City of Heroes is generally accepted as the name of the game, despite a better fashion sense and leveling experience over in the Rogue Isles. But let's take a step back through to 2005 and honor this hive of scum and... well, you know the rest.
Scrivener 2.0 public preview now available
Barely a week before NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) begins, the public preview of Scrivener 2.0 is out. This version is sans the project templates that will be available when the full version hits next week. In addition to the 2.0 preview, a beta version of the new Windows client is also available. We've been looking forward to the release of Scrivener 2.0 and will be putting the public preview through its paces in the next few days. The public preview version of Scrivener is free to use until December 7. Any NaNoWriMo participants who achieve their goal of 50,000 words will qualify for a 50 percent discount off of the full version of Scrivener 2.0. Those who do not make the quota can get 20 percent off by using the discount code NANOWRIMO during purchase. Scrivener 2.0 is US$45 for a regular license and $38.25 for an academic license. A registered owner of Scrivener 1 will be able to update for $25. Those who bought Scrivener on or since August 1, 2010 will be entitled to a free update. Scrivener 2.0 requires OS X 10.4 or higher and remains a Universal application, but there is some extra functionality with Snow Leopard. The full version is expected to be released a week from today.
A quick roundup of iOS text editors with Dropbox support
This morning we received word from Jesse Grosjean at Hog Bay Software that his new app, PlainText (free, in-app purchase to remove ads), is now available on the App Store. It's one of several iOS text editors that feature support for Dropbox, so we thought a quick roundup of these apps was in order. If you're thinking about joining me for NaNoWriMo 2010 starting on November 1st, it's a good idea to think about what device(s) you'll be writing on and getting your writing software ready to roll as soon as you can. Text editors make excellent writing tools, since they're bare bones and don't get in the way of putting words onto "paper." First, let's take a look at PlainText (see screenshot above). Hog Bay Software is the same company that publishes the wonderful WriteRoom application for Mac and iPhone, which we've covered many times here on TUAW. Once PlainText is installed on your iPad (it also works on iPhone and iPod touch), you can tap the settings button to change Dropbox settings, turn on TextExpander support, or lock the screen orientation. Since I wanted to test several of these text editors with Dropbox but did not want to have a ton of new folders created in my Dropbox, I loved the fact that I could link to an existing folder. As soon as your Dropbox credentials have been verified, more settings become available. Most of those are related to when synchronization takes place. According to a note from Grosjean, there can be an issue when files are not saved on a computer using UTF-8 encoding. If a file is opened with PlainText and appears blank, the computer didn't save the file with the proper encoding. What's interesting is that I had this issue with another text editor app, and the developer of that app didn't seem to know what the problem was.
Google Docs editing coming to iPad
This is pretty fantastic. Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, announced via the Google official blog today that mobile editing for Google Docs is coming to the iPad and Android. Up until now, the Webkit browsers used on the mobile devices have been missing a key capability for handling rich text editing. While you can access Google Docs through iPad office suites such as Documents to Go and Quickoffice, native access through Google will eliminate the need to purchase a 3rd party app and may make an iPad sound more appealing to those who want to use it to edit documents. It may prompt Apple to finally add cloud storage access to iWork. [hat tip to Electronista]
SWTOR devs dive deep in Jedi design in this week's dispatch
The character type that will likely be played the most in Star Wars: The Old Republic will be the Jedi. BioWare has been conscious of this from the early stages of the game. This is evident in the fact that there are two distinct Jedi classes: the knight and the consular. Yet, the designers have been the most tight-lipped about these two classes. They have said this is because they wish to get it just right before talking about it. But with this week's Fan Friday, things have changed. On the official SWTOR website, a new Developer Dispatch called Designing the Light Side has popped up. In the five-and-a-half-minute video, SWTOR writers, artists, and animators discuss the most important things it takes to create the two light side factions. "We want to give players the opportunity to be the heroic Jedi like Luke Skywalker or the darker, more avenging type of Jedi like his father, Anakin," Hall Hood, a senior writer, explains in the video. On which side of the moral spectrum do you fall? Are you a hero-of-the-ages light sider, or a ends-justifies-the-means gray Jedi? Watch the video after the break and let us know.
Developer offers enticing look at Scrivener 2.0
Developer KB made a series of blog posts about what will and will not be featured in the upcoming Scrivener 2.0. What I like is that he's not so focused on introducing new features, but improving on what's already there. The initial release came out back in 2007, but this is a case where slow and steady development is definitely worth it. Some of the highlighted features of Scrivener 2.0 include: Corkboard improvements such as a freehand form, with the corkboard being fully integrated into the product. The outliner moder allows you to add text columns and sort them. Changes to the text editor including a page layout view, a Pages-style format bar and allowing footnotes to appear in the inspector. Multiple project notes QuickReference panels, which are similar to OS X's QuickLook, but can be edited Document collections, which can temporairly replace the binder in the sidebar. This replaces the "saved search" feature. Custom templates and icons An advanced compile feature depending on the type of product Epub export, allowing you to read documents from Scrivener on the iPad. You can also view documents from Scrivener through Simplenote or external folder sync on the iPad and iPhone. Due to the additional features, the price of Scrivener will rise to US$45 for a regular license and $38.25 for an academic license starting Sept. 17. A registered owner of Scrivener 1 will be able to update for $25. Those who bought Scrivener on or since August 1, 2010 will be entitled to a free update. Scrivener 2.0 requires OS X 10.4 or higher and remains a Universal application, but there is some extra functionality with Snow Leopard. It will be released in late October, just in time for NaNoWriMo.
Irrational interviews Marvel's Brian Michael Bendis on writing
Moving from game development to multidisciplinary writing, Irrational Games' Ken Levine and Shawn Elliott chat with Amazing Spider-Man writer Brian Michael Bendis on the second episode of Irrational Interviews, released this week. Did you know that what became BioShock was heavily seeded by a trip Levine and his wife took to Rockefeller Center? You would've if you'd already listened to the episode! What're you waiting for, dummy? Direct Download / iTunes Feed / Irrational Interviews RSS Feed [Image credit: Pinguino]
Sharpie Liquid Pencil doesn't dry like a Sharpie
We were pretty excited about the Sharpie Liquid Pencil when we first heard about it -- it uses liquid graphite to write like a pen, erase like a pencil, and (supposedly) dry like a permanent marker after three days. Well, it's been just over a week since our first hands-on, and we've got some bad news: we can still erase what we've written pretty easily. If you squint just right it sort of looks like it might have dried a little darker, but it's certainly not Sharpie-level permanence. Sad faces all around. We've followed up with Sharpie to see what's going on and we'll let you know what we hear, but check the video after the break in the meantime.
