Sean Lawrence

  :: Activity   1.1 Welcome to The Business of Creative Writing ( Due: Mon, 06 Jun | Status: Not Completed ) :: Objective: In Mind Your Business: A Hollywood Agent's Guide to Your Writing Career, Michelle Wallerstein writes, "A writer is really a small business." The textbooks for this course have been carefully chosen to give you the most comprehensive overview of the business of doing business in film, television, comics and games. These textbooks are:   • Mind Your Business: A Hollywood Agent's Guide to Your Writing Career by Michelle Wallerstein • I Liked It, Didn't Love It: Screenplay Development From the Inside Out by Rona Edwards & Monika Skerbelis • The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design by Flint Dille & John Zuur Platten   If you're writing a comic book, you may be thinking, "What do these books have to teach me? I'm a comic book writer, not a screenwriter." Not true. You're a writer in an...

    2.2 Game Characters   1. Read Game Writing Chapter 6 “Game Characters”   2. Consider: a. In contrasting a character with an “icon,” Walsh is not talking about art quality or detail, but about the way in which many games used to have (and some still have) a “player character” without a personality, one which exists only to allow the player to play the game. b. Consider the conflict between creating a player character with a lot of personality and allowing a player to decide how his or her character will behave. c. Sometimes, a way to balance freedom against personality is to make the player character mostly “blank,” but to lavish attention and care on all of the other characters. d. Games Extra: computer and video games suffer from an excess of two kinds of protagonists: tough, rugged, macho guys with attitude problems, and tough but impossibly Barbie-shaped girls with attitude problems. If your protagonist is tending in either of these directi...

  ( Due: Sun, 1st Jan | Status: Not Completed )   1. Watch “Inner Life” Video https://youtu.be/VHA2sH87Wng   2. This week we’re going to have more podcast lectures than usual, and the lectures will overlap the reading to a degree. It is very important to do both, as the ideas we’ll be considering this week are some of the most difficult of the class.   3. Make time this week to look at at least one of these games that deal with psychology and memory: consider how they use these techniques to develop personality and motivation. a. Creaky Old Memory: http :// www . creakyoldmemory . com / b. Opera Omnia: http :// www . increpare . com /2009/02/ opera - omnia / c. Façade: http :// www . interactivestory . net / CAUTION: the Mac version of this game seems to be broken - unless you have access to a Windows PC, you'll need to try one of the other two options. d. Creaky Old Memory and Façade are both fairly easy to play (not necessarily so easy to ...