Of smart-talking birds and rhyming witches
Rare editor reflects on the hard work required to bring Banjo’s cast to life
If you’ve ever wondered what kind of sick, twisted individual is required to write a Banjo game, you’d do well to heed Leigh Loveday’s words. The infamous editor of Scribes recently completed his work on the script to Nuts & Bolts, and shared his experiences in the latest Banjo-Kazooie.com development diary.
With expectations high for the cheeky Banjo humour to return, it takes far more work than you’d realise for it to actually make sense in the game’s context. “Sometimes it seems like everyone in the Banjo universe has some kind of horrible speech defect,” Loveday says, “which is all well and good for characterisation; not so handy for conveying crucial gameplay details.” For something as involved as Nuts & Bolts’ vehicle editor, the tutorial clearly has to be comprehensible- made all the more challenging given it’s Mumbo’s garage. Then there’s the problem those Americans created when they decided that writing the letter ‘u’ was all too much, and sure enough, Rare has to conform to the grammatical expectations of its biggest market.
If all that didn’t give it away, it must be said that writing dialogue for a bunch of anthropomorphic animals isn’t all fun and games- “It’s been weeks since I actually got to amuse myself by writing a rubbish Grunty rhyme or a cheap innuendo for Jolly Dodger,” he admits, surprised at what the nature of the task involves. “The latter stages of the process have been all about ceaseless bug fixing, localisation queries, error messages and panicky incorporation of last-minute design changes.” It’s all worth it at the end of the day, though. “It’s a great way to make a living for a couple of months. Even better if the designers have already done some of the work and filled many of the remaining gaps with perfectly good placeholders ripe for the scavenging.”
As with any creative process in the industry, iteration is key to the development of the finished product, and there’s always material left on the cutting room floor. “I was going to list a few examples here as an insight into what is and what isn’t deemed appropriate for a family-friendly game in this day and age, but they’d get cut again for the same reasons,” muses Loveday regrettably. But despite some of the more lewd lines not making the cut, we’re assured the complete package “has ended up quirky and irreverent enough to be considered pretty faithful to his past exploits.” We’ll know soon enough.
Somehow related news
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- Grunty’s new rhyming and not-huge Tooie worlds a-milking ()
- Rare’s secret titles go smart ()
- Bill Gates: “Viva Piñata is for young girls” ()
- Rare wants VPDS media to be back to Wikipedia ()
Looking forward to the Grunty rhymes.;)
I’m guessing Leigh has written the manual’s content, too?
Comment by Rinx — 21.Sep.08 @ 8:25 pm