David Gaider on Planning Ahead and Burn Out

BioWare’s lead writer David Gaider is writing on various aspects of his job on his Tumblr blog, the latest subjects being long-term plans and burn out.

A snip:

Am I complaining? Heck no. Part of being a game developer means you have to think on your feet. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. You’ll find that suddenly the arc you started no longer makes sense because something changed, and had you known that was going to happen you would have started it very differently or not at all. You can go to the Lead Designer and moan about it, but guess what? The writers are not princesses who get their way every time, and even if the rest of the team was totally on board with what you intended it might not even be something they can control. As a developer, you nod and you roll with it. you make it the best you can, and ideally it’ll seem as if that’s what you intended all along. If you can’t do that, you probably shouldn’t work in this kind of environment.

That’s not to say that it always happens, however. Far from it. In fact, with regards to Dragon Age I’m pretty happy to say that the big things have so far remained intact. They may not have happened in the order I originally envisioned, but the progression of events has occurred pretty much as I pictured way back in. gosh, 2004? 2005? I forget how long I’ve been working on this, now. It is kind of funny to look back at the legacy docs and see all the small things which have changed. Some of it seems really bizarre, as in (what was I thinking?) Some of it makes me wistful, things I really wish we could have done.

There’s this thing about Anders we were planning. man, I wish I could tell you about it. I won’t, because it’s possible we might resurrect it (perhaps in a different form), but every time it comes up in the Writers Pit we all laugh and laugh and laugh. It’s evil laughter. It feels good. Trust me, you’re probably better off not knowing. Still, there’s a few of those things lingering in the past which I guess I’ll always regret having gone awry. but if you’ve been reading my posts, you’re probably getting a sense that this isn’t new. Every project has stuff like that, and insofar as plans go no single game looks anything like it did in those first plans and that’s always going to require the larger stuff to be flexible lest it snap in two.

Of course, my perspective of the overall arc of (things we have done) does extend to Dragon Age 3 as well. so it’s a bit different from yours. Still, you’ll see what I mean eventually.