SJ Longthorne

'You can fit the story here' 'We can have that meeting in a couple of weeks' 'Don't worry' 'I don't see the problem' 'We changed the design 2 weeks ago' 'Just change the story' 'Does it matter?' Quality of life + project start with respect and understanding.https://twitter.com/cynixy/status/1352187954291236864 …

I've been an ND for <4 years. I've asked to be cut from the credits of one game, and another I just don't talk about. Why? Because I was brought in right at the end and given hardly any time to make my contribution, which was ultimately treated as expendable. The result was crap.

On one of those, I was allowed only a handful of days to work on each iteration of the story after design changes rendered the previous iterations obsolete. But the design then changed again - radically. We were not informed until it was about to ship and couldn't make changes.

The result is narrative design which is completely unfit for the game, which has been chopped up and Frankensteined by folks for whom it was just set dressing. Other 'set dressing' disciplines were treated similarly. It's such a shame.

One game I worked on, I found they'd cut 75% of the dialogue before shipping. No one told me. Nothing made sense. Another game we could not fit the story I'd been given into the cutscene space I'd been allotted, so we agreed VO dialogue bridges at the end of each level to blend