I´m back and I´ve brought presents!

Wow, I haven't posted something in here for almost two years? Man...

Don't worry, I have not been gone completely. In between, I wrote stories for the Destructoid main site for a few months and became a journalist for a national (luxembourgish) newspaper afterwards. Still, I consider the C-Blogs my birthplace in terms of being a writer.

So, why did I come back? Well, I´m now part of an indie developer in my home country. I´m the writer in a team of ten people, pretty much the first studio in Luxembourg and we´re working on a little game called "Ralin - Dwarf wars". What follows now is a repost of my original blog post. Hope you enjoy it, and I´m looking forward to your comments!





I’ve now been a videogame writer for almost a week now. To be frank, I still haven’t realized, that I am one now, that I somehow managed to break into that industry, but hey, I still have a lot of time to do that. One week might not seem like a lot, but I was able to get a lot of experience, which is worth a lot.


That´s mostly the case because writing while being part of a team is completely different from writing all alone. Or let´s say, writing a chapter and then sending it to your test-readers. You get way more direct feedback you can then use in order to improve the story. Unsurprisingly, that is way more fun and it also rewards experimentation, as you can quickly change something that isn´t quite working the way you intended it to.

What´s also kind of new to me is to write fiction in English. Now, I wrote plenty of blogposts and essays in English, but a narrative? No, that´s completely new to me and I´m surprised how well I´m doing, since up until now, all my experience with that has been a passive one. While nothing I’ve written for the game so far is perfect, I still manage to produce a certain level of quality, which reassures me in many ways.




Oh yeah, I should talk a bit about the game. So “Ralin – Dwarf Wars” (I’m going with Ralin, since that is shorter) is a roguelike dungeonrunner game produced by the Luxembourgish indie gamedev “Gaming-Gears”. I imagine it a bit like a harder version of Diablo with permadeath. That makes telling a story a bit more difficult, as I have no real protagonist to work with, so there’s more time flowing into backstory and dialogue at that moment.

While this is a different approach to storytelling than you can find in a novel for example, writing it is hugely enjoyable, since I know that it’s part of a greater experience. It´s clear to me that all the team members have a clear grasp of what they want to achieve, which is a great sign. In terms of narrative, we want to deliver something unique and dark with Ralin and as far as I can see, we´re right on track with it.

I´ll write more about the story behind Ralin and the development as things become more concrete. I hope you´ll enjoy reading about my work on that game as much as I enjoy working on the game.

Want to know more about Ralin? Like Gaming-Gears on Facebook and follow them on Twitter! Also, check the game out on indiedb! You can also follow me personally on Twitter!

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