The Myth of Specialization

We’re a small team. Smaller now than a few years ago, and we were small even then. Now it’s just four of us, each wearing many hats, on one mission. We’ve all had to learn a great deal to keep this project moving along, and that includes me- the narrative guy. When I joined up with this team I thought I’d only be writing scripts, maybe some marketing copy here and there. Not so. Far before we started HeavenX I learned that there are only so many blurbs, stories, or item descriptions one can stuff into a game before it becomes untenable for asset production. As a writer, it isn’t my job to justify the creation of assets just to keep myself busy. Rather, it is my job to keep the project moving forward even when there’s nothing to write- even when my duties fall far outside the traditional demands of my “narrative guy” title.

Anyone who has ever been on a small enough team knows what I’m talking about. You don’t have the right to specialize unless you’re a part of a machine- one where there are a dozen or so people on each team all honing their respective crafts to produce the shiniest, most polished product possible. When you’re a team of four guys with different degrees from four different states, you end up needing to pick up a variety of skills to keep the ball rolling. I received a formal education in literature, and before I dipped my toe into gamedev this was basically my only skill (if you’d be generous enough to apply that term to literary analysis). Around the time when the first draft of HeavenX’s story was completed, I was tapped by our lead to work on content integration using our card builder. With nothing left to write and a playtest on the horizon it seemed like a logical pivot. Simple enough, I thought, just a matter of learning how to navigate some menus. And while this was more or less the case, technically, it hadn’t dawned on me just how difficult it would be to create meaningful, balanced cards using this system. Turns out, game design isn’t something anyone really understands innately. It’s a process of trial and error.

I had flirted with screwing around in .json files to integrate content for a few games long ago. This includes descriptions for the ghosts in Shadow & Shining Gadget, and enemy descriptions and stats for our canceled title Wastebraver. It wasn’t until HeavenX that I learned that the addition of the content is the easy part. It is dealing with the consequences imposed by each piece of content that proved to be the most challenging. Things broke- some cards flat out didn’t work or were so underwhelming they had no reason to exist. Testing each new card always felt like a roll of the dice. My ideas, which as a writer had been able to hide behind abstraction and subjectivity, were being tested by objective metrics. And so, the classic lit major rule came into play: kill your babies. Nothing could be precious enough to warrant a lapse in scrutiny. Cards that I loved, conceptually, often had to be reworked, toned down, or even cut entirely. This cycle of creation, revision, and destruction took months.

Initially I felt like I was missing out when I’d have to work in Unity. My characters were begging me for rewrites from the page. My ugliest, most shameful lines of dialogue taunted me as I worked on spreadsheets. I had to go back. I had to get this part done as soon as possible so that I could get back to writing. As I created and tested cards, however, I found that this process had recontextualized the kind of game we were making and the story I wanted to tell with it. The laborious, thankless exercise of testing and integrating content drew me closer to many of the characters I had created- and allowed me to idealize the work itself. I felt like an employee at Zhaoxing Heavy Industries. Suddenly I was a drone in the Research and Development department, creating and testing cards for Neo-Frontiersmen.

And so, I deluded myself in a way that allowed me to enjoy the game design toil while bolstering the narrative work I’d be doing later down the road. I have no regrets about the time I spent testing and creating cards, nor any for the in-engine work I’ve done since then. It’s gratifying to learn new skills, and to make oneself useful at all steps during a project. I’ve learned to love all of my work as a vital part of the writing process itself.