Jurgen Botha - Writing for Video Games Portfolio

Jurgen

I have recently finished my studies at SA Writer's College and now I am looking for work. I am based in Fraaiuitsig, Mosselbay area.

A little bit about myself:
I am 32 and I have a great love for fantasy and sci-fi in gaming and in general. I enjoy writing and visualizing every day.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Attached is my portfolio as a PDF file.

Elyaradine

I'm no writer, so I don't want to comment too much on the writing itself, but in terms of presentation I don't feel this was presented as a portfolio. It feels more like some kind of questionnaire or assignment that a lecturer gave you, where you filled in the blanks. This is largely because many of your headings sound like assignment questions, e.g. "Map your MOB relationships" and "Complete a Profile on each of your MOB types".

And in terms of text layout, the paragraphing isn't clearly laid out, making large walls of text difficult to read. Usually, in large bodies of text, I find that paragraphs begin with a small indentation, which makes it easier to distinguish one paragraph from the next when you're scanning down the left side of the page. They also usually set the text alignment to be justified (as opposed to left-aligned as you currently have it), so that scanning down the right of the page can convey the same information. Alternatively, paragraphs may be separated by a small margin.

While at the end of the day it's the quality of the writing itself that matters, I think how you lay it out can go a long way to your coming across as being professional. This includes making things easy to read because of how you value the reader's time, as well as your putting your mind in the position of an employer/game designer and trying to answer exactly the questions that she may have about whether you'd be a competent hire. With that in mind, (and this is just my feeling, as, again, I'm not a game writer, although I do have great interest in it and have attended some workshops) you may want to address the structure of the document. Perhaps the summaries should be at the start, so that the reader already has context within which to place the other things before demanding further attention. And since it's a PDF, you may want your table of contents to link to those pages, to save the reader some time there too.

On the bit that I got from glancing through it, I felt as if the characters were quite flat. The Devil wants chaos, and wants to enslave humanity. The hero hates evil, and has super powers. These may be okay as a framework for a story, but I feel that it would be more interesting if the hero had nontrivial flaws and faults, and the Devil's evil was one that actually made sense. Something I learnt in a workshop with a lead writer from LucasArts was that, if you told the story from the point of view of the villain, the villain would be the hero. So, according to him (and I agree with him), the best villains are the ones who think they're doing the world a favour. In the context of the Devil, perhaps the Law of God is seen as a dictatorship, and the Devil merely wishes to bring liberation and "true freedom". (Of course, that'd conflict with his seemingly just wanting to enslave humanity with mind control, but then the Devil's currently written as pure evil, which isn't very interesting.)

I hope that helps! Again, I'm no writer, so feel free to toss out whatever I've said that you don't feel is applicable.

--
On a somewhat related note, I recently happened upon the tumblr blog of one of the lead writers at Bioware, and it offered some very interesting insight into how their games are written, the sort of word counts they deal with, and the problems they face as game writers. He has several series of posts there that may interest you. http://dgaider.tumblr.com/post/36331574543/on-narrative-design-part-1

I would also *strongly* recommend getting yourself a copy of David Freeman's "Emotioneering" book, if you haven't read that already. I found it to be an incredible source of information, both because of how it taught techniques for making your writing deeper and more interesting, and because it also gives you that in the context of games.

Jurgen

Thanks, Elyaradine. Very valuable feedback. I have edited my initial post with an updated attachment.