by John Dale Beety
A standard game writing portfolio showcases a writer’s work and skills for a general audience of potential patrons and collaborators. Frequently, however, game writers will create custom portfolios designed to get work with a specific studio or project. Here are six steps to tailor your game writing portfolio.
Step 1: Measure the Client
No self-respecting tailor would alter a garment without first taking the client’s measurements. Similarly, the first step of tailoring a game writing portfolio is gathering information.
Consider a call for writers put out by a known studio, but for an unknown project. The studio’s previous releases will suggest a medium (video game, tabletop role-playing game, card game) as well as genre and mood (first-person shooter, cozy, cooperative). Even a brand-new studio working on its debut will have key personnel whose past projects and social media offer clues.
Tailoring a portfolio for a known project is simpler, yet more demanding. Certainty replaces guesswork, yet proper tailoring becomes all the more important. If a board game has no tie-in fiction and no plans to start, including short story samples in a portfolio tailored for that game is a mistake, especially at the expense of more relevant writing.
Step 2: Select the Structure
Often, the structure of your existing game writing portfolio will work just fine for a tailored portfolio. These tailored portfolios only require minor adjustments to account for the client’s needs, such as trading out a sample for a more relevant one or moving the branching dialogue section to the top.
Other scenarios, such as applying for a new-to-you mode of game writing, call for greater interventions. In these cases, it is best to use an empty template and then fill it in. For Step 2, this means creating headers in their relative order of importance for the role and then adding the usual number of samples under each heading. Starting fresh allows for greater focus on the client’s needs while also giving you a chance to rethink which samples are in your standing portfolio and why.
Step 3: Choose Published Samples
In all game writing portfolios, relevant published samples are gold. They prove that you have done professional work while showing off your skills. All published samples in a tailored portfolio should be on the same level as those in your general portfolio. A sample of marginal quality will weaken the tailored portfolio, even if it seemingly has other virtues, such as showing off a past client.
After choosing your best published samples, your tailored portfolio will likely still have gaps. If you are trying to get your first game writing gig, it might be completely blank. Do not despair! There are two useful ways to fill those gaps: close comparisons and samples you make yourself.
Step 4: Add Close Comparisons
Close comparisons can cover a client’s need for specific skills by showing your potential in a related medium. As with your published samples from Step 3, you should focus on your highest-quality work, preferably published and credited, while overlapping with the client’s needs as much as possible.
Imagine a short story writer trying to join the lore team for her favorite trading card game. If that game publishes tie-in short fiction, her best works make excellent samples. She can also use parts of her fiction to create close comparisons for card names and flavor texts. For card names, a selection of character names, place names, and item names can show off her imagination. Snippets of dialogue and brief prose descriptions can stand in for flavor text.
Other examples of close comparisons include dialogue from prose or a screenplay for video game cutscene dialogue, technical writing samples for a tabletop role-playing game rules book, and character dossiers for a concept push.
Step 5: Make the Rest
Even if you don’t have relevant published work or useful close comparisons, you can still demonstrate your skills by making your own samples. Here are a few ideas:
- To demonstrate writing a game rules document, describe the rule set for a simple, familiar game, such as tic-tac-toe or checkers, in your own terms.
- To demonstrate branching dialogue, write the paths a conversation could take with software that lets you tell nonlinear stories, such as Twine.
- To demonstrate character profile writing, create an engaging 50-word biography of a well-known (but not controversial) historical figure or public-domain fictional character, such as William the Conqueror or Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
All three of the above examples are similar to actual tests given to the author by game companies. When used judiciously and labeled clearly (“spec script” for screenwriting, “unpublished sample” elsewhere), they can complete a tailored portfolio and give the reader a better view of all you can offer their project.
Step 6: Edit and Send
As with anything you put your name to, your tailored game writing portfolio needs at least one editing pass before submission. This gives you a chance to catch typos as well as larger flaws, such as a sample section that needs reinforcement.
After that, it’s time to send out your portfolio. If it works, great! If not, well, rejection is part of the writing life. Look for the next opportunity and start the cycle again. Your next game writing project could be a tailoring session away.
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John Dale Beety (he/him) is a technical writer for a games retailer and a former coin expert for an auction house. His first game writing client was Wizards of the Coast, using up all of his authorial luck points in a single throw. Due to an incident aired on national television, he holds a lifelong grudge against the long-dead department store magnate Rowland Hussey Macy. More at johndalebeety.com.