Interviews

Interview: Writer Andrew Walsh on his work with mobile games

Or how the pen made the Dirk Dagger mighty

Interview: Writer Andrew Walsh on his work with mobile games

Ever wondered who's in charge of writing the storyline for a mobile game? We have to admit, we haven't often - mainly because many of them still don't have storylines worth wondering about.

It's not so long since stuff like plot and dialogue in mobile games was left to, well, whoever fancied doing it at the last minute.

But slowly and surely, that's changing - we certainly notice when we play a game that's got a storyline that actually grips you. And if it's got a spark of wit and humour thrown in, that's even better.

A good recent example is N-Gage game Dirk Dagger and the Fallen Idol, which made us chuckle out loud throughout. And it's one of the games that's benefitted from having a dedicated writer attached, Andrew Walsh. We talked to him to find out more.

"I got involved through Nokia, having worked on the Warhammer 40,000 game for the original N-Gage," he says. "They contacted me a while later to say they were thinking about this adventure game, and a year later I ended up in Stockholm working away on Dirk Dagger."

Walsh works as a freelancer, and although he's done other mobile games (including PG fave SolaRola), he says it's unusual to actually work on-site for several months, as he did with Dirk Dagger.

Working with the team at developer Jadestone had a positive effect in terms of collaboration. "Everyone had their own ideas in the early days about what the game was going to be," he says.

"It could have gone in all sorts of directions, a more serious adventure game with more realistic graphics for example. But the more we played around with it, the more we fell in love with the cartoon feel and fun side of it."

JOKES TRAVEL

Dirk Dagger is a genuinely funny game, which must have been a pretty tough thing to achieve, given its global release. How do you make Finns, Brits, Americans, Germans and Italians (among others) laugh at the same jokes?

"It's always difficult," says Andrew. "It's easy to write things that you find funny in the office but not elsewhere. That said, you have to start somewhere - if it made us laugh, it was a good start! A few of the wordplays and some language might get lost in translation, but a lot of it seems to have travelled really well."

Walsh says that Dirk Dagger benefitted from having a small team of designers, artists and him working together, which he says is "as important if you're working on the next multimillion-dollar console smash or a small mobile project."

He should know - Walsh has worked on a long list of console and PC games, including the likes of Medieval 2, Earthworm Jim 3D and, most recently, the new Prince Of Persia game. (By the way, he's also written for TV soaps Emmerdale, Family Affairs and Byker Grove).

So what are the differences between writing for console games and writing for mobile games? Walsh says as a writer you can have more of an impact in mobile, where characters and storylines can be to the fore.

But there are also technical differences to master. "Working with text on a mobile game is different to working with spoken dialogue in a console game," he says.

"In a console game you have an actor to make your writing come alive, with things like subtext and timing you can work with the actor to get those subtleties. With text, what's on the screen is what's on the screen - that's all you've got to work with, so it has to be understandable straight away."

THREE-LINE LIMIT

For Dirk Dagger, the rule was to fit every piece of dialogue into three lines on the screen, not least to ensure it didn't cover up too much of the scenery when translated to longer languages like German.

In other respects, though, the game conforms to some age-old principles of writing. "What was very important to us was the way the whole world works," says Walsh.

"When designing any world, you have to come up with rules that work in that world, and don't stretch them too far. Even cartoons have their own world where you have to be able to stretch the rules without breaking them. We tried to do that within Dirk Dagger, so even when something weird or crazy was going on, it always made sense within that strange world!"

So what now? Walsh is still out in Stockholm, which fuels our hopes for a sequel to Dirk Dagger (naturally, he won't say what he's up to).

But he does have more general views on the potential for episodic gaming on mobile, which will often be driven by storylines and characters.

"There's been a huge amount of talk on PC and console about episodic gaming, but few actual examples," he says. "There probably is more scope for it in mobile games though, just because of the way games arrive and the way people play. They could be really cool."

Having worked on mobile games for 4-5 years now - Walsh is pleased to see writing getting more of a billing.

"I sometimes get the reaction from people of 'why are you doing a mobile phone game?', and I got that when I came to do Dirk Dagger. But the answer is look at the subject matter - it's fun! And there's maybe more of a willingness in mobile to take a risk with the unusual."

Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)