Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

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[Suggestion] Bring editorial lead/staff in early & strong

Rumours have suggested that this project will be the first Stardock game where editorial content gets a serious budget investment and will be worked throughout the project rather than spackled on at the end after the mechanics and UI are largely finished.

I found that notion quite attractive, but so far I've not seen much on the boards or in the builds to indicate that the rumour is actually true. Now that the major sections of beta are rolling out, the boards are more full than ever with extensive comments and questions that might all be 'answered' (or at least better-organized) by some OK-for-distribution editorial documentation.

Ideally, I'd like to soon see public versions of two types of guidepost document: a basic backstory outline and a style sheet (for human languages, not code). The news Brad shared today in his 3rd thread on channeler customization included personal history choices like Swindler and Mason, so we 'know' that our sovereigns will have had some pre-game history in something like a working society. I believe that both the devs and the peanut gallery here on the boards would both have more fun and 'be more productive' if we were working from at least a draft 1 version of The History of Elemental Up to Turn 0.

The style sheet thing is a bit more specific to working editorial types, and I've worked with coders enough to be pretty sure this part of my suggestion won't be loved even if it is somewhat appreciated. It basically boils down to establishing Elemental 'language' early so final cleanup of too-modern, too-gamey UI text will be easier as RTM approaches. Even if the style sheet starts out fairly short and simple, it could really help lead to long-term quality if the UI was purged early and often of phrases like "level up," which might not break immersion for every player all the time, but will definitely make many of us forget that we're wallowing in a swell digital fantasy.

p.s. I can imagine various scenarios where doing this part of the project as publicly as the code is being shaped might be too much hassle for the devs. Keeping an internal one-page timeline and top-ten style sheet points in the cubes of everyone who touches the code could help yield what I hope to see even if it doesn't let us hecklers play along.

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Text in general goes to external (non-code) resource files as it has to be localized. There the localization team/writers/whatever fill it, so coders won't be involved if the text looks too modern or not, that's out of their responsability...

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But 'too-modern', 'too-gamey' UI helps accessibility.

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Quoting VicenteC,

reply 1

My point was that with a game like Elemental, the text is not the relatively simple thing it is for a productivity tool--it's content with at least as much story/flavor value as it has functional value. Plus, I very strongly agree with a few other posters around here that what you name a given chunk of code can be as much or more important to how an end user experiences the code as are the underlying mechanics.

Perhaps more importantly, even if a given Stardock coder has little to no responsibility for how final UI text in English might appear, working in a team where the first-language story for the game is front and center for everyone will help them make 'purely functional' design choices that will help the game be more immersive and coherent.

Quoting zigzag,

reply 2

But 'too-modern', 'too-gamey' UI helps accessibility.

If we were helping build an alternative to Office or StarOffice, I'd completely agree. But for Stardock fans like me, one of the greatest hopes for the Elemental project is that it will both provide a spiritual successor to MoM et al and lead the genre by example instead of by reaching for the lowest common denominator to maximize sales. (I'm still working on my anger over how Spore turned out; the early hype was so ambitious, the final product so deck-worthy. Will Wright was a hero-dev to me since SimEarth, but no longer...)

p.s. If you were balking specifically at my objection to "city has leveled up," that's actually a very good example of why I want editorial people in right now. The fix there is easy; all you need is a metastring along the lines of "PlaceName has grown to become a PopulationCenterLevelName." Tada. Same information given, English is even 'modern,' but no need for jargon. (Jargon is actually a workload problem for localization.)

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Quoting GW Swicord,

reply 3

I think I understand your point, but the text that appears in the game has 0 to do with the work the coders do. Coders will do something like Show(STRING_GREET_MESSAGE_FOREIGN_NATION_UI), and the writers/designers will decide that's "Don't run, we are your friends" or "Hola, ¿que tal andamos?" or whatever.

And also, and more important: coders should speak coders language just exactly as you want the UI speak the users language. If a method should be called LevelUp because it does level up a unit, calling it instead EntitlingAPromotionBasedOnPastDeeds, while it make sound great for the "immersion", it's a suicide in the code.

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If we were helping build an alternative to Office or StarOffice, I'd completely agree. But for Stardock fans like me, one of the greatest hopes for the Elemental project is that it will both provide a spiritual successor to MoM et al and lead the genre by example instead of by reaching for the lowest common denominator to maximize sales. (I'm still working on my anger over how Spore turned out; the early hype was so ambitious, the final product so deck-worthy. Will Wright was a hero-dev to me since SimEarth, but no longer...)

I misinterpreted what you wanted, then. I thought you wanted something more inaccessible than what's common in fantasy RTS's (eg. MOM). ie. Instead of 'PlaceName has grown to become a PopulationCenterLevelName', games would be regaled with a sonnet.

Would you have a problem with 'SovereignName has advanced to level SovereignLevel'?

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Quoting zigzag,

reply 5

... Would you have a problem with 'SovereignName has advanced to level SovereignLevel'?

Gawds above, below, and sideways, No.

I think what has me concerned (more than the general thing I mentioned in the OP) is noticing a discussion on damage types where Brad typed "Sorry it is actually called lightning in the game. Not sure what I was thinking" in response to an argument about what "electrical damage" might mean in Elemental.

Coders, even though they can often have better command of formal English than most people, often fall prey to a combination of their ability to think mathematically about software and the ease with which they can adopt and use jargon, no matter how confusing or imprecise that jargon might be for an outsider with equally strong skills in basic English. The math is pretty and all that, but for a game like Elemental that aims to have a fantasy flavor, well, it really seems worth the effort to try to keep the 'flavor text' as tasty and digestible as possible.

p.s. I should confess that I'm a very picky diner in this regard; I have an old but largely-abandoned hope that the devs might actually purge any words beginning with "tech" from the UI. I'm nearly finished with Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, and while I've enjoyed it very much on many levels, when I compare it to something like Dune or Lord of the Rings, or even the Wheel of Time saga that Sanderson's been hired to complete, it just has far too many easy/modern turns of phrase. (Sanderson's WoT-worship has apparently given him at least a first good lesson in working around that weakness; The Gathering Storm has some Jordan-like excess verbosity, but nothing like the tech-talk I've seen in the Mistborn novels.)

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https://forums.elementalgame.com/360957

Frogboy said that a book is being written alongside the game. Sounds like early editorial involvement is in the plan.

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Quoting Teucrian,

reply 7

... Frogboy said that a book is being written alongside the game. Sounds like early editorial involvement is in the plan.

OK, maybe I was being a tad 'passive-aggressive.' That thread is part of why I started this thread, and knowing that a book deal is in the mix leaves me feeling really curious (in a vaguely pushy way) about how the beta process and that cross-marketing project will interact.

Scott's thread on data-driven unit stats is a good example of where I'd hope to see early and strong interaction between the coding and story sides of the project (e.g. one flavor of mana makes for simpler magic code/UI, but it will jar some uknown portion of the audience to have a game called Elemental reduce all damage types to "Arcane").

Still, I'm probably more impressed than the average ursine is with the fundamental flexibility that Scott's talking about in that data-driven stats thread. But I want to see the un-modded game show strong depth and complexity, regardless of how justly proud the devs might be of building a vigorous open framework for TBS modders. The data-driven stats theme almost begs for a more strongly story-driven set of game mechanics and UI text than Stardock has yet managed to produce.

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