How to describe something visual in preparation of said visual?
I'm working on a video game with visual novel style "cutscenes" inbetween, where you see characters talking, usually from the torso up. Most of the things you'd normally describe in text-only media can be shown by the expressions and actions of the characters onscreen, like their facial expressions.
Before you start actually creating the game and its visuals, how would you write these interactions down to describe such visual cues to someone creating the visuals, without it getting in the way of what is actually shown as text on screen?
Here's how I did it so far, just as an example:
EVENT: boy and girl hear someone angrily shouting outside of their house
boy: Sounds like someone's angry.
girl: *sarcastic* Noooooo! How could you tell?
Obviously things like the whole EVENT line and *sarcastic* won't appear like that in the text, they'd be turned into visuals, with boy and girl turning their heads to the window when they hear the shouting and the girl rolling her eyes or something.
How should you describe these kinds of interactions? Should I continue with this loose structure? Are there better alternatives?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/37603. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
You are writing a script (screenplay) for a visual display; I'd follow (roughly) the format of a script. For this particular question, you are looking for "Personal Direction" (of an actor) and the standard would be to specify what you want in parentheses after the name, before the speech. Although you might like a more concise format than the standard script format.
The standard script format is specifically designed with very wide margins and double spacing so a page of dialogue will require about 60 seconds to film; and overall the duration of the film in minutes will be approximated by the number of pages in the script. That may not be important to you in a game; and you can always stopwatch reading the lines out loud, or going through the motions of acting out your scene, to get an idea of how much animation will be required to render it.
Girl (sarcastic): Noooooo! How could you tell?
As you will see at the link, you can use more than a word, often whole sentences are used. As in a script, with no parenthetical, the expression to use is up to the actor and director; in your case that would be whomever is rendering your video. In your position I would make a point of deciding in each case; sooner or later someone has to decide.
boy (amused): Sounds like someone's angry.
girl (sarcastic, amused): Noooooo! How could you tell?
EDIT: Here is a list of 100 one-word facial expressions you might find useful.
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I've been writing an actual visual novel for a few years, so I'm going to approach this from a game development perspective as much as a writing perspective.
To help me with this problem, I borrowed a technique from the VN Katawa Shoujo. The images for the character sprites are all named using a pattern something like name_outfit_pose_expression, with outfit being omitted if they're wearing their school uniform.
So what I've started doing is, whenever a character's pose and/or facial expression would change, I insert a line of pseudocode with a fake file name, telling me what the new pose/expression would be. Something like:
Boy: Sounds like someone's angry.
[show "girl_foldarms_rolleyes"]
Girl: Noooooo! How could you tell?
This also helps you keep track of how many sprites you need for each character when it's time to do the artwork. If a search for show 'girl_ returns 400 results, you'll need to do a rethink of whether you actually need that many sprites, because that's a lot of work for the art department.
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