tjubert

Ah, the classic question, like slipping into a warm bath.

Two high-level principles:

1. Practice writing a lot and/or be some kind of narrative wunderkind.
2. Persevere because it's a numbers game.

Don't just apply for listed jobs, they're a fraction of the opportunities out there and often require experience.

Find indie studios, research their games, email them with tailored samples and/or links to your portfolio, and a sentence or two on why you're a great fit. Don't bullshit.

Go to conferences, schmooze (politely).

Make your own games. It's a lot easier than it used to be with the tools available now, and it was never that hard in the first place. If you can't build a game in Twine, you can't get a job as a games writer (but you'll be brilliant at other things).

Persevere. Don't expect writing to pay your bills straight away. Consider it a hobby and enjoy it. Look at getting paid to do it as a possible future development that's truly a double-edged sword. Writers write.

Good luck!

Quick random list. The common thread through most of these is ambitious (interactive) narrative creativity and innovation; dark humour; philosophy; mind-openingness.

GAMES

Planescape: Torment

Fallout 2

Thief

Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines (Malkavian!)

Telltale's Walking Dead (finally finished the final season last month, I had a tear, I don't care if they're almost totally linear)

Disco Elysium (of course, feels like home)

MOVIES

Best ever funny philosophical guide to the answer to the Big Question: I Heart Huckabees. Really, this is my movie. I LOVE IT. Amazing. Exactly what I would want to write if I was brilliant. It's perfect.

Classic satirical scifi: Starship Troopers, The Thing, Brazil, Robocop (topical!)

Best action movie: Die Hard by far, such character, such realism, so Rickman

Best alien movies (I am super into non-human intelligence right now because I only realised it's really here about 5 years ago when the gimbal vid dropped). These movies capture the phenomenon in a realistic, philosophically intelligent and appropriately spiritual fashion for me: Arrival, Communion and Alien Code.

BOOKS

The two books that changed me that I recommend to everyone all the time: Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication, and Alan Watts' The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.

I don't read or game so much any more, but as a kid I loved Discworld and Hitchhikers' for obvious reasons.

Recently I also enjoyed Demian by Herman Hesse.

I also think if you're looking into philosophy books then Bishop Berkeley's writing on Idealism (or probably anyone else's) is vital because it's probably right. Materialism always has a problem with explaining consciousness. But if existence is fundamentally conscious then it has no problem explaining the creation of the physical world. We're one big consciousness pretending to be separate things. The sooner we realise that the better.

EDIT: I forgot! Inglorious Basterds is the best Tarantino movie. The way he gets the audience to laugh at and morally judge Nazis laughing at a propaganda war movie glorifying violence, then gets the same audience to laugh at his own propaganda war movie glorifying violence. Because when the violence is against Bad People it's okay, right? I do love his movies - although he fucked up bad with covering for Weinstein.

Fuck you, Jonas, I love you.

For those that aren't travelling back to this question from a future where Talos Principle 2 is already out this is a reference to a set of vetting questions I wrote for joining the different factions in my subplot in Talos 2. I would answer that analogue is wavy with infinite possible values, while binary/digital is concrete with finite possible values; however I think the real real is that they're one and the same: two different ways of interpreting a base reality that is both and neither, just like pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. It's just Alan Watts that I'm reciting here really (and he's just reciting others, who are reciting others, and so on forever). What's interesting is that in the game for obvious reasons you're encouraged to commit a binary answer so I can label you, but you can totally just respond with fuck you this is a false dilemma.

Checking my records... We were certainly talking about it way back in 2015 after completing Road to Gehenna. I think mild pre-production actually started in 2019, and we properly ramped up once Serious Sam 4 was done in early 2020. That's when we started weekly meetings and proper story planning at any rate. So long in the making, so worth the wait.

Woo, this question has meat on its bones.

First of all I should state that I shifted from being co-lead writer with Jonas on the first two games to something smaller on Talos 2. I don't remember what I'm credited as, but take your pick from Guest Writer, Junior Writer, Supporting Writer, Additional Writing From... So I can only speak from that perspective.

Surely the vibe has changed, and I'm certain as writers we prefer the vibrancy and dynamism of live voiced dialog. I think and hope the audience will too - but there will always be people who preferred the old thing, and that's lovely.

But I would say... YES! It's a huge game and there is lots of quiet time. Besides voiced dialogs there are also loads of text messages, downloadable documents, photography mode, just like the first game.

And here's a little teaser for the subplot that I wrote specifically:>! it is literally introspective.!<