By Senator Anon

Once you have your ‘Why’, your characters, a story outline, and a team that won’t go Nuts! and kill you, it’s finally time to put pen to paper for your script. For a project like Snoot Game or Wani, the writing is the most important part. To help you, I’d like to open up about our own writing processes that we’ve developed.

Cavemanon is a studio most well known for it’s writing accomplishments, having made two very well-received visual novels. This is because we believe in fiction as a means to inspire people to improve their lives, and if that’s a goal worth pursuing we must constantly be pushing to improve the quality of our writing. If our writing team became lax, we would start making lower quality work that is not worth our own time to consume. Through the years we’ve been writing, we’ve come up with many methods, tools, and habits that make up our current workflow. Here’s a breakdown on how Snoot Game and Wani are written:

Part 1: Organization

The first thing you’ll want to keep in mind is the way that everything you write will be presented to the player, in the case of Snoot and Wani this is the textbox. We have a very large textbox that takes up the entire bottom third of the screen. But be warned – just because the text is given this massive real estate does not mean it should be used. You’ll notice that even though the textbox in our games can easily accommodate three rows of dialogue, almost all of the writing rarely exceeds even the first. This is to ease the effort on the readers’ part to follow along, by keeping their eyes regulated to as small a space onscreen as possible so keeping up with the action requires as little effort as possible. If it becomes a burden on your player to even read your script, you’ve broken their suspension of disbelief, something which is unacceptable.

Additionally, there’s some wide margins between the text and any of the edges of the textbox for the same purpose. The text is clear to read and in a very easy to locate space. Usually, we naturally divide lines by simply regulating them to one sentence per line. It is up to your own discretion and feeling about the pacing and tone of what you’re writing if a sentence should be split up, or doubled up with a second sentence for the benefit of your story.

There are different types of writers, play to your own strengths.

Cavemanon’s writing team is a team for a reason. While all of our writers are excellent in their own rights, they all have weaknesses that can be covered by other writers who are in turn covered by them. Writing with a team reduces the workload for a massive project as well, it should go without saying. Cavemanon’s active writing team is typically made up of three people. I, myself am a very excellent ‘foundational’ writer, I specialize in writing the very basic ‘here’s what happens, in what order it happens, why it’s all significant, and what problems this solves’. However, when it comes to prose and being descriptive, I begin to falter. This is where Gacha Anon comes in. He specializes in prose-heavy writing and description, but without direction he would tend to lose track of himself. I’ve heard it described like this once before, that I’m the guy laying the foundation and Gacha Anon is the bricklayer.

Then, we have a third writer, who tends to shift between a few people during the development of the project. We like to have at least three active writers to help settle any creative disputes and to further ease the workload.

Writing your script and keeping it organized.

The ‘Cavemanon way’ of writing we developed took the form of meeting every night over a voice call to take turns writing in a shared google doc. One writer works as long as he can, and then passes it off to another writer once he’s gotten tired. Between this other team members join in and comment alongside the writing.

This process, by nature of being a structural one, guarantees that progress is made so long as the writers show up. It’s most important benefit is the ability to communicate and cooperate in real time, allowing the direction to be altered and corrected the instant the need arises. A mistake made by one writer that otherwise would have taken hours of back-and-forth until it’s fixed can be caught the second it’s made.

Imagine for a moment, your writing team decides to instead write on their own. It is entirely possible for one writer to spend hours and hours finishing a scene alone, only for it to be entirely lost in direction and in need of being scrapped completely. Such scene direction errors need to be caught and adjusted as soon as possible so as to not waste time and effort.

When writing collaboratively, you’ll also want to color code your writing. Doing so will allow you to track which writer is responsible for what writing, so if someone is confused by something they know who to ask.

An important tool to keep in mind: while writing, the other writers and I will sometimes write a line that we’re unsure of, that we have a bad feeling about or just know is clunky, or simply don’t have any line in mind at all. Instead of getting caught up forever on how to phrase it correctly, [we place the line we wish to be edited within brackets, like so]. This is a signal to the other writers that we are requesting the line be edited or filled in. We can even write instructions within these.

Drafts

Regardless of if you write in a live discussion or alone, you’re still going to come across problems in your script. Your first draft, invariably, is going to be garbage compared to the final product. The ‘life cycle’ I’ve observed of a script is something like this: After concepting, there is a first draft. This draft is rough, will have holes in it, and as you flesh out your ideas you will start to notice the problems it has. There’s deficits in the desired tone or theming, there’s giant holes in the story, characters stand out as being two-dimensional, maybe you just didn’t feel like writing out one particular part and need to run back and finish it.

All of this will call for a second draft, where your new wish list of story changes is implemented. This wishlist may come from your own observations and gut feelings about how the game is progressing, from other devs participating, or from playtester feedback shining light on an issue you were unaware of. For Snoot Game, the second draft included writing whole new chapters (the gardening chapter), including new characters (Rosa and Stella were scarcely written in at all, only having a few lines each), and an entire rewrite of the first act of the story (everything up to the rooftop scene) to flow better and have more compelling drama. The second draft for Wani was a complete overhaul of a truly dreadful first draft. Wani’s a bit of a strange case as the ‘first draft’ was left incomplete, meaning the ‘second draft’ was the first draft of the second half of the game (working on Wani was an unorganized disaster I wouldn’t wish on anyone). The changes were so sweeping that one of the first things we did was place Olivia in the care of Damien’s family, which ended up being one of the foundational pieces of the game’s context.

The ‘final draft’ process is a lot more loose than the first two draft phases, while the first draft’s goal is to ‘write to the end’, and the second draft’s goal is to ‘fix this list of problems’, the third drafts’ goal is to fine-tune the story wherever it may need it, in no particular order. These fixes tend to be applied as a result of playtester feedback as well, but usually on a smaller scale (typo fixes, a line is made redundant by choreography showing what they’re already reading, etc.). This phase continues at it’s own pace up until the game is released. I like to reread our scripts over and over, checking back on my favorite scenes and checking for anything that might be at all suboptimal.

Part 2: Tools

It’s important to keep your document organized so focus can be kept on the writing itself. Before delving into our methods for making the writing great, there’s a few tools that we have to regulate our writing to keep it from being bad. Being able to identify bad writing when it happens is invaluable, and being able to keep it from happening to begin with even more so. Here’s the methods we’ve learned to keep the junk from our scripts:

Freewriting.

Your new all-time best friend.

Freewriting is the practice of writing your stream-of-consciousness while alone and not editing. You do not even go back to correct errors. This allows you to get the most unfiltered dialogue from your head and onto paper. Why is this useful? Say you’re at any given writer’s block. You can write out an entire stream of consciousness from listing out all of your constraints to reaching a conclusion, getting what you need in a fraction of the time it would have taken otherwise.

It’s not only useful for planning, though. I’ve been using freewriting for many fan-favorite scenes in our games, like the Rooftop scene from Snoot Game. We needed a scene where Fang just lays it all out, everything that’s bothering her needed to just be unloaded onto Anon. In order to write this, we needed to empathize heavily with Fang, putting ourselves in her shoes. So, I got the idea to do just that. Method acting is a technique in film and theatre in which an actor achieves complete ego identification of his/her character. The idea is simple, instead of method ‘acting’, I sought out to do some method ‘writing’.

Through reading everything we had on Fang’s character and motivations, I empathized with Fang as much as I could, warping my own ego into hers. Once I was done giving myself brain damage, I could write from that perspective, as though Fang herself were the one writing her own thoughts. Naturally, since you’re writing from your ego this writing will be very sensitive and dear to you. You’re empathizing with the character you’re writing from, after all.

The Cartman Test

The Cartman Test is a way to gauge if your dialogue breaks the tone of your writing in a way you do not intend. The way it works is simple – if you’re unsure about something you’ve written, re-read it in Cartman’s voice. If it sounds like he should burst into laughter, you should adjust or rewrite it.

The real mechanic behind it is simply to see if someone mocking it would be correct ( although reading it with any mocking tone will achieve the same effect). What you’re looking for is feelings of damaged ego or embarrassment if you read your work like this: if these feelings come up at a certain part it’s a good sign to take another look.

An example: We first came up with this tool when getting feedback for Wani’s second draft. Originally, after learning of their teachers’ death, Inco would follow Olivia to the staircase and witness her break her wheelchair, instead of showing up after the fact.

Olivia is literally climbing up the stairs in a wheelchair

This is comical, yet again. An emotionally broken girl, seeing stairs, and then going up them and “poetically” conquering her enemy, her disability, while making good on her mentor.
And at this point, all emotional tension has given way, as I am laughing at watching a green booger play “Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy” with her wheel chair because she got BTFO’d by fucking stairs and can’t walk.

Having her mentor die hurts, and then the satisfaction of seeing her get to an actually foreshadowed, poetic moment of her making good on her promise to a now dead man that she cherished being ripped away by >LITERAL STAIRS is comedy that puts my sides far into orbit.

Her hand reaches out, grasping for safety as she and her broken chair fall back to earth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX5Fcd8syp8

The above is an excerpt from our lead programmer Michael’s review, where he was rightfully harsh at a poorly-thought out scene. (Yes, we are this harsh to each other in our reviews, because we have to be. If we can be this harsh, so can you, and if we can take it, so can you. Being your worst critic is being your best friend, so long as it’s well placed criticism and not self-flagellation.)

Did you know Luke can talk to animals? (Avoiding shallow characterization)

One of Cavemanon’s biggest pet peeves is when an important figure in the game is characterized something like this: The character has a unique, special quirk, that is iterated once per appearance and is never developed further. We first noticed this when playing Professor Layton games in a voice call (note that these games are excellent for playing with friends) and saw that at least once per game, they would call attention to the fact that the second protagonist Luke can talk to animals. And in every instance to memory, once he speaks with the animal and the scene is over it is never referenced meaningfully again. It’s never directly and substantially tied to the plot, it’s only strange, cheap characterization.

Personally, my favorite character in Wani is Vinny, Olivia’s little brother. In every one of his appearances, he’s doing something new to advance his own character, and for what he is I believe he’s very well executed. All of his appearances are fun (or in the case of endings 1 and 2, substantial) and you’re always learning something new about him. Imagine if instead every time he showed up, it was just a repeat of him doing something with his acid spit over and over and over. It would be boring, and he would just be the acid character.

Find your writing tics and avoid them like the plague.

When our writers (and likely yours, too) start losing direction and vision for the scene, they tend to rely on certain habits to fill the scene with useless crap. There’s two major instance of this in Wani that needed to be stamped out before release, I’ll detail them here:

The first major writer tic was to have characters start laughing out of nowhere, as though to inform the audience they should be having fun. Naturally, good writing should not have to do that. Entire lines dedicated to characters yukking it up when literally anything else can be happening is worthless to the tone, barring of course that it is within the intended vision and is appropriate that the characters be laughing.

The second major one revolved around food. In about half a dozen now-removed instances (and in several that are unfortunately still in), whenever food was brought up it was dwelled on for way too long. And it would usually follow the same format: food is brought up -> repeat food being brought up, identify talking point -> get mc’s opinion on food -> characters’ opinion on food -> scene transition.

In both of the examples above, the only smidge of interesting characterization is outside of the food being mentioned. The player already knows Olivia’s ravenous eating habits. There is no need to bloat the script like this, keeping it concise and compact is of much greater importance than getting Inco’s opinion on steak fries.

Please, keep an eye out for these behaviors and nip them in the bud whenever you can.

White Man Documents

Visual novels are big projects. Any game project of this scale has an uncountable number of moving parts, and with so many people on your team you’ll run into problems quick. Everyone needs to be on the same page to make the right work, and they need to either share your vision or understand it. But how can you standardize this to realize these goals in your team? This is where the White Man Documents come in.

White Man Documents, known to everyone else in the industry as ‘Internal proposals’ (much like how our “Food Reviews” are typically called ‘Internal feedback’), are high quality, compact documents where a goal is stated, it’s needs are articulated, and a proposed execution of the goals is stated. Often times these documents build on each other and interface greatly with the “Why?” of your project. These can be about anything, from script rewrites to setting details to sound design. From our understanding, this method is scarcely used in the indie scene when it can make so much of your work easier and better. Naturally, you’re thinking through your issues when you write these, as opposed to just working on the fly and throwing everything to the wall to see what sticks.

The particular utility in these documents comes from them forcing you to take the scattered ideas in your mind and glue them together in a comprehensive way. Often times people have loose collections of ideas that do not have their full implications thought out. This leads to scenarios where people are just pitching ideas because they are personally alluring rather than the idea actually fitting or enhancing the “Why?” of a project. Ideas that do not enhance the “Why?” of the project in some way are superfluous and only work to waste your audience’s valuable time and attention.

A great example of not thinking things through would be Wani’s early characterization of Inco. Inco used to be a flat characture of a “stupid libtard who says dumb things”. Not only was this characterization bad because it was cringe and irrelevant (libtards being “pwnd” is boring, masturbatory writing) it also didn’t serve any greater purpose for the story. It was just Inco acting like a goof because a writer didn’t think out how the OC in their mind would exist in the context of a greater story. In no way did Inco being a strawman of a libtard aid in the romance with Olivia, teach anyone in the audience a valuable lesson to apply to reality, or bring any kind of substantial conflict or depth to him as a character. It was just something someone justified because they personally thought it was cool.

The “White man document” process forces you to think this through. You have to justify why your idea isn’t just something you think is cool, but also matters in the context of the story and solves a real problem it has. You can’t hide behind obfuscation and complexity as your document must make sense to the rest of your team. Your document should be simple to read, but terse enough that someone can get the idea. If you can successfully make a proper “White man document”, you should be able to successfully make concepts that interface with the “Why?” of your project in a meaningful way.

Here’s a few examples of our own, written for Wani. You can also see an internal proposal for Exit’s UI in a previous article, which I suggest you check out as well.

If we hadn’t used these three documents, then Wani’s second act would have been shoddy and the 4th ending would have been a complete mess. Liz would have even less characterization, Iadakan’s death would have been *much* less impactful as we wouldn’t have even had the painting destruction scene, and that would have bogged down the rest of the game as well. If the player didn’t care about Iadakan’s death, then was forced to read hours and hours of characters reacting to it as though it were pulled off well, is a nightmare scenario.

By knowing what you want, why what you want is good, and how to achieve it, you’re realizing and adjusting the real scope for your project and have a much clearer vision for it. There are absolutely no downsides to using these, and no reason to ever not use them. We find them so useful in fact, the articles on this site are written and formatted in a very similar way!

Part 3: Actually writing your story

With all of these methods at your disposal, you now have great tools for keeping workflow steady and keeping your work from dipping in quality. Games aren’t well known for not being bad, though. You want your product to have positive memorability, to be greatly enjoyed in a way you intend it to. Here’s some of our most important things to say on the matter.

Plot Twists

A good and effective plot twist is, to us, one that answers a question asked earlier in the story. Plot twists are payoffs to dominoes you set up earlier to come neatly toppling down the way you want them to. Snoot Game contains a very basic version of this, all through the game Anon clams up about his reasons for transferring schools. It is only revealed rather explosively in a desperate bid by Trish to come between him and Fang. The question is answered, and now the player has to deal with the immediate consequences of this event which serves as the capstone to the second act of the game, kicking off Fang and Anon’s relationship as well as the final act.

The placement of these plot twists also matter: Iadakan’s death serves a similar role to Anon being doxed, in that the event ends up kickstarting the romance proper as well as signaling the end of the second act. What’s important though is how his death is set up. The last the player has seen him, he has helped Olivia immensely by clearing away her old paintings and making her promise to make him new ones. This marks the end of Olivia’s previous arc and sets up a new one, one where Olivia would be making a new great painting for Iadakan. Only instead, the development is that he passes away. In both instances of a major plot twist, in Snoot Game and Wani, the plot twist serves as not a conclusion, but as a new start.

The settings of your scenes matter.

The setting in your game gives life and context into your writing, it goes without saying. This carries along into every minor location your story takes place in. But there is something to remain wary of: if your characters are having a deep conversation in some exotic location when if they had it in their own homes nothing would change, then they probably should. When you make a setting, you’re making a setpiece and you need to include it in your storytelling for maximum effect.

Here’s how you do this effectively. Do not ask ‘how can I make the setting relevant to the story’, ask ‘how can I make it so the scene cannot work in any other setting’. The arcade in Wani showed off more of Olivia that she could not get anywhere else. The Rooftop scenes in snoot game provide a safe place for Fang to visit that echoes the conditions of her trauma to begin with (being a very high location, similar to the bluffs that Naser nearly died at). If the characters are at a location, the reasons for being so must be what drives the plot, instead of simply being a pretty location. The worst case scenario is having your characters opening themselves up or engaging in serious conflict in a place that bears no significance to the story and does not do anything to further improve it. The date scenes in Wani tend to suffer from this, especially the date in the fourth ending. As a result, these dates aren’t among the remembered portions of the game, parts like Iadakan’s painting destruction, the bridge scene, the graveyard, etc.. Your settings are a tool to improve the emotional weight and intrigue of your scenes, do not let them go to waste.

Justification-based writing

If you want a character to do something outrageous, it must be because they believe it to be their best option, or their only option. From day one of writing Snoot Game, we wanted Fang to commit an atrocity in the worst ending. A school shooting is a very taboo, very evil thing to commit to, and if handled poorly would have sunk the entire game’s tone (see the Cartman rule above). Therefore, we had to write it in a way that the shooting was justified **In Fang’s eyes.** Not to justify the action itself, obviously, but to write it in a believable way, to make a situation where Fang would think that something as evil as this were her only option.

From there, we get to work. Since we’re starting from a conclusion, this process is a lot like figuring out a good mystery. Speaking of, I visualize justification-based writing a bit like the ‘line of thinking’ segments in Ace Attorney. You start from the beginning, the conditions you must start from to reach the conclusion, and figure out a solution that makes it not so the conclusion is *possible*, but so that it’s the *only way it can progress*. The characters can probably back out of whatever you have in mind if they truly felt like it, yes, but the idea is even the characters must be manipulated to believe their current actions are the only correct ones.

Not to put too much focus on purely negative developments, this is a tool that can be used for any number of purposes. Again, harkening to Iadakan’s decision to break Olivia’s paintings in front of her: This was set up so that Iadakan comes to the conclusion that this is his only option available. He is well aware his time is running very short, and sees that Olivia is only hurting herself more, all because of this dumb event years and years ago. He’s aware he can get away with quite a lot, and even if he gets into trouble for anything it won’t matter since he’s going to be gone very, very soon. Therefore, seeing Olivia’s wild bet with switching the paintings (which is in itself also justified using this method, if you’ll recall her reasoning), he realizes his best option, and his only option, is to do something outrageous to break the old Olivia and inspire a new one.

Care should be taken when doing this kind of writing, because it’s easy to start making excuses instead of justifications for why something should happen. This tends to happen when you’re in the thick of writing, where you might have a premise or plot point you don’t want to trample on, but still want to get to your desired conclusion. Instead of setting the story up so the conclusion is the only way it can happen, the story leads elsewhere or allows more reasonable outcomes to happen, and ‘course-correcting’ back to your conclusion will necessitate holes and contrivances in the plot. This will inevitably make it transparent to the reader what you’re trying to do, and breaks immersion.

Taking the shooting as an example again, imagine if we still wanted her to take this massive turn in character, but didn’t set up scenarios that lead into each other like her failing relationship with Anon, her doubling down on her beliefs, her disastrous prom performance, and her reaction to Naomi’s manipulation for her to think this way. Instead, Fang were to repeat her hatred rant about people being weeds and decides to go through with it as though this ideation were always with her. To say that would be a massive blunder would be an understatement and something more appropriate for the first draft of Wani.

Instead, we have these methods, and you can see the results. See how nicely Olivia and Iadakan’s motivations flow together, how every characters’ action affects the others around them? Good writing tends to lead to more good writing. In my experience, making a story more self-contained, making connections that weren’t there before is a wonderful feeling. With all of these tools in mind and these methods at hand, you should be able to write something as impactful as Snoot Game or Wani.

What do you think? Did we miss anything, or do you have any questions? As always, leave your thoughts below and we’ll try to respond. Our next article will be ‘behind the scenes of Snoot Game’, and will be free for everyone.