Creation of game texts

A good game does not only consist of high-quality graphics, a powerful story and interesting mechanics. An equally important place in it is occupied by in-game texts – those with which the user directly interacts: dialogues, descriptions of objects and quests, tips, instructions, and even pieces of lore. They help a person to adapt to the new virtual world and interact with it more effectively.

Writing texts for games has its own characteristics, because the gamer installs the application primarily in order to have fun, and is not at all ready to dive into “boring” reading. In this article, we will talk about the basic principles of creating in-game texts, which are followed by AVADA MEDIA specialists, who help us develop exciting projects.

To create high-quality content, a copywriter does not need only one desire or the limits of his own talent. He needs to provide the maximum amount of initial data for some important parameters:

• The target audience. In order for the text to be well perceived by users, you need to understand who will read it, the approximate age of people and their interests. To do this, even before the development of a game project, a large-scale marketing research is carried out.
• Setting. In what world and in what location does the action take place. For example, equipment descriptions for a fantasy universe like Elden Ring will be very different from texts for historical shooters like Battlefield and Call Of Duty.

• The nature of the characters. Each hero or NPC in the game is a distinct individual, with unique behaviors, traits, and even habits. Therefore, the style of presentation of the text can vary significantly.
• Plot. Dialogues, hints, text cutscenes – all of these help to reveal the main story of the game, so the copywriter must be quite knowledgeable about the storyline. For games from the Souls Like series, this is especially important, since in them the whole plot is revealed through only equipment descriptions.

Texts complement the gameplay, make it complete, deep and understandable. Therefore, it is important that they are easy to read and understand by the user. To achieve this, specialists follow a few basic principles while writing. Let’s consider the main ones in more detail.

Informative details

Despite the fact that the texts are recommended to be short, they should remain sufficiently capacious and informative so that the user can get the most useful information from several applications. An excellent example of implementation in this regard is the Final Fantasy III project, in which the developers managed to make one of the most powerful story-based games of their time, using simple graphics and short texts.

Serving style

The presentation of the text in each game must be authentic and fully comply with the specifics of the project. However, in descriptions it is recommended to avoid adjectives, adverbs and metaphors, it is better to replace them with stories and original images. In addition, games should avoid clericalism, which are often used in everyday life, but will bring little benefit to the project and passive pledges – for example, “the enemy was defeated by the hero” should be replaced with “the hero defeated the enemy”.

One text, one goal

Only one topic or thought can be revealed in one text. There is no need to load the user with a large amount of information and be distracted by extraneous thoughts, otherwise the description may become too large and incomprehensible.

Matching the text to the circumstances

In the process of passing the game, the main character may encounter a variety of events, and any text inserts must take this into account. That is, you always need to take into account frames – the frames of what is happening on the screen.

Getting into different frames, a character can use a completely different set of words, emotions and behavioral reactions. For example, during a battle, sharp and quick statements will be logical, while at the same time, when exploring the world and communicating with NPCs, communication can become more detailed and unhurried – memories, stories, and so on are appropriate here.

Abbreviation of texts

Large text blocks can turn off the user and even if everything is written perfectly, there is a high chance that they will not even be read. At the same time, short descriptions and notes are much easier to read and acceptable to most gamers. Therefore, each text that is written for the game is recommended to be reduced as much as possible.

In addition, when developing mobile projects or games for Telegram, it is important to take into account the limited space on the screen of smartphones.

It is difficult to imagine a modern game without text content. Texts are most valuable in projects with a pronounced storyline, a lot of different equipment and quests. This primarily applies to action-adventure, RPG, MMORPG, MOBA and open world games. Here they help players learn new mechanics and are essential to unlocking the main story.

However, small projects with simple controls, including casual ones, also cannot do without high-quality text support. For example, in “Candy Crush Saga” tooltips tell the user what he needs to do to complete the level and line up in a general plot, while in “Hay Day” the text is most often used in the description of tasks and temporary events.

AVADA MEDIA specialists have practical experience in creating and developing games for most popular platforms. We will help you create not only logical and thoughtful text content for your project, but we can also perform its full technical implementation.