Digimancy Team Member Profile: Interview with Narrative Lead Annie VanderMeer

Image credit: Annie VanderMeer

Annie VanderMeer is a Lead Narrative Designer, and co-host of the FrieNDA podcast/show (which features discussions about game development topics with other devs).

1. How did you discover writing as a passion for yourself?

I always wrote - honestly I can't remember a time when I didn't. Even when I was a kid, and I didn't have a computer of my own until age 10, I would bang out stories on an electric typewriter. I'd draw pictures and tell myself tales about what was happening in them, and I drew screenshots of games I wanted to make (not that I had any idea how, but the dream was there!) I was lucky too that I grew up with friends who liked to write: we'd have silly group stories we'd pass around in order and write a bit at a time, and a good friend of mine was also a serious writer, so we'd call each other and read our stuff constantly. And if we weren't reading our latest works, we were yammering about fantasy worlds, epic battles, magic... and a lot of the X-Men. A LOT OF X-MEN. We were big fans. (And yes, I'm not too big to admit - I wrote fanfic)

2. How / when did you realize you could take that passion and apply it to a career?

 For writing, I had kind of raised and then dismissed the idea of writing as a career, largely due to professors telling me not to get a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) because publishers didn't really care about degrees, and I had no clue whatsoever about how to break into a more formalized industry... I'd written novel-length stuff before, but didn't really want to do that. I graduated college kind of counting on becoming a professor, mostly falling into that kind of path. It was a weird coincidence that while I was working on getting into grad school, I started working at a GameStop... that happened to be at the Crossroads in Irvine, California, smack in the middle of an inordinate number of game developers! So I'd be getting this lunch rush of devs from Blizzard, Point of View, Interplay, and so on - and talking to them about games made me realize hey, I could actually do that as a job, maybe even (gasp) write for videogames?

3.  Could you please share your design process with us? And what are some things you do to keep yourself growing and evolving as a designer?

Honestly, it wholly depends on the game and what role I have on it! Is it to brainstorm systems, or craft content, or worldbuild, or write? Knowing what I have to do focuses my approach a great deal, but I can say that the first thing I do is try and learn everything I can about the project: I swarm through the documents, dive into the inspirations, run down rabbit holes of thought. I want to be certain that when I work on the project, my instincts are aligned with the vision of the game - and if I'm the one crafting that, I want to make sure I can explain it properly and give good examples to everyone else working on it as well. 

From there, I do the very annoying and less-glamorous thing of setting up my resources - usually an insane amount of browser tabs (I currently have two different browsers with over 6 tabs open on each, and that's for a Friday afternoon when I'm about to end work for the week!) - and try to lay out tasks. This is less of a JIRA or bug tracking kind of thing and more instinct on how stuff will need to fit together. This is especially important for systems, where I find that jumping in on a larger aspect rapidly leads to a series of important questions. We want advancement in this game, so there's levels, so there's a system of earning experience. What gets you experience? What does it mean when you level? - and so on. 

With writing, I often do a lot of scratch work - stuff that's just behind-the-scenes, conversations and scattered thoughts about a character, preliminary dialogue work to make their tone and voice distinctive and consistent - and when it comes to conversations with a character, I try and organize the flow of the conversation in very clear and directed points before I get into actually writing anything. Every conversation in a game (and I could probably extrapolate this into everything) has a purpose, whether it's getting a plot point across or just what the player expectations are in interacting with a character, and establishing that first is incredibly important. I've been in a situation where I let a character sort of chatter on through node after node, and finally stopped myself with the cold truth: "Annie, nobody is going to give a crap about any of this." It's fine to have that kind of chatter in your scratchdoc, but when you're thinking what a player wants to engage with, it's purpose-first.

To keep myself evolving as a designer... I do always try to lean into new things. Working with a new genre, learning a new program, picking up a new project, etc. I also really love talking to fellow game developers (insert promotional chirp for my show/podcast FrieNDA here!), and find that incredibly inspiring. And of course, I play a ton of games, and I can't turn off my designer brain when I do so - I'm lucky if I can be 90% player and 10% designer when I'm playing a game, so I can spend more effort enjoying something rather than picking it apart (no matter how fascinating a process that might be).

4. One of your first game credits is as a designer for the legendary Neverwinter Nights 2.  What was it like working on this iconic computer role-playing game?

Working on Neverwinter Nights 2 was kind of a bewildering experience at first: I'd actually joined Obsidian to work on another game (the ill-fated "Project New Jersey"), but about two months after I started, that one got canned, and I was shuffled onto Neverwinter Nights 2. Which is a common practice, and I was excited about the project, but it wasn't exactly a clean onboarding process! That team had to suddenly figure out what I (and several other devs who weren't moved into pre-production on Alpha Protocol) were going to do, and in addition to that, the toolset itself was actively being worked on, so it was like trying to drive a car that was still being built!

Thankfully, the person responsible for helping me join the team was none other than Kevin Saunders, who gave me the responsibility of wrangling all of the items... of which I think there were probably a thousand? Seriously: it contained every spell scroll, item of loot, armor, weapon, animal part, crafting recipe, etc. - not only from the previous Neverwinter Nights, but every single one of its expansions, not to mention a whole new bunch for the sequel! It was a daunting amount of stuff, but knowing that Kevin saw me as up to the challenge of handling all that was pretty flattering, especially to a "production design assistant" eagerly longing for a formal game design role. It was a unique kind of challenge, especially when I was the one putting together the actual appearance of the weapons and armor! The toolset had kind of a "paper doll" model for armor that let you choose different parts (premade by artists), tint them, and save it as a set - and a similar thing for weapons, whose swappable parts where like the pommel, hilt, and blade of a sword. I really enjoyed getting a chance to be involved in an artistic element of the game as well, and told myself I was lucky to do so, but it would probably never happen again (I was incredibly wrong: not only did I do this again for Mask of the Betrayer and Storm of Zehir, but also helped with composites for Guild Wars 2, character designs for Dead State, and a lot of other things that a professional artist should probably handled but it fell to me instead. Yay? I say thee YAY.)

Apart from that... I remember working closely with Matt MacLean, who was hired around the same time I was and had the burden of placing all the stuff I was dealing with somewhere in the actual game, and the bewildering nature of dealing with so many items and finding sensible ways to put them all around the world (you don't want a kobold having a +5 Flaming Greatsword. That's more than a bit unbalanced). I also recall realizing near our ship date that we had an inordinate amount of hat models, and being bothered that there really weren't any items that took advantage of this (there's a flaw I discovered in the original Neverwinter Nights - a stark lack of hat items). I asked for permission from Josh Sawyer to put in some more, barely ahead of the item lock deadline, and was elated when he approved it. I hesitated before going back to my desk and asked "Is it okay if I call one a 'chapeau'?" Josh gave the green light, and Finch's Fine Chapeau - the item that would lead me to later creating the character of the same name, and George Zeits kindly suggesting I put him in as an actual character in Storm of Zehir.

Image credit: GameBanshee

5.  Loved the story of how Finch's Fine Chapeau appeared in Neverwinter Nights 2! You then moved on to work at  ArenaNet on one of the most beloved MMORPGs out there, Guild Wars 2. 

The situation with ArenaNet was interesting. Back in 2008, before I moved up to Seattle, I was on a panel for Women in Gaming at the Penny Arcade Expo there, and I ended up meeting Linsey Murdock (who is an absolutely incredible designer and amazing person). She and I instantly had a mutual "she's cool, I want to work with her someday" vibe, and nearly a year later when I applied at ArenaNet, she remembered me, and pulled me in for an interview. She admitted later that she knew the role (for the original Guild Wars) was already taken, but wanted the staff to meet me - two weeks later I got called back for a role on Guild Wars 2, which was a fantastic surprise. Usually when a place says "we'll call you back when something opens up" you expect they're just being polite, but  that was for real!

Working on Guild Wars 2 was a great experience - they said to me from the beginning "We want to put the RPG back in MMORPG," and showed me the idea for this sprawling Personal Story that would take you throughout the entire game, from tutorial to the final dungeon. It actually was different depending on your choice of race, and decisions made in both character creation and in branches throughout the game, which was hugely surprising to me - branches are expensive and risky, and I couldn't think of any other MMO that had done that kind of thing before. It was a great experience to help tell this massive story, and I also had a unique opportunity to shape the lore of some of the player races. I instantly gravitated to the charr - huge catlike creatures that were actually the villains in previous games - and how their culture transitioned from a caste-based society ruled by zealots to overthrowing that and establishing themselves as a military state. I leaned hard into ancient Rome when writing for them, using thematic Roman words like "Sicaea" (from "sica," a short dagger typically used for assassinations, for a spy from the Ash Legion) and "Ballista" (a spear-throwing siege weapon, for a member of the engineering-heavy Iron Legion). I also was lucky enough to invent how they curse (which anybody who knows me is well aware is a cultural thing I'm kind of obsessed with!), and hearing Steve Blum (as Rytlock Brimstone) growl "Burn me!" as a replacement for something a bit harsher than "dang it" was fantastic - the subtext of the curse sings through the words. 

Image credit: ArenaNet

(See? Very much my weird personal obsession.)

The Personal Story built on a lot of my existing strengths, but it was the content I worked on post-shipping Guild Wars 2 that actually started testing me, as we began to conceptualize what would become the first season of the "Living World" content, another thing very few games were doing at the time (and now is commonplace with things like Fortnite and Destiny 2!) Instead of being sheltered within instanced areas, storytelling had to find a way to live in actual open-world content, and we had to figure out ways to roll out stories in real time, with events that changed the world around players. I learned how to build content to avoid griefers, to refine environmental storytelling, and really break out of the need to rely on text to get a tale across. That was an incredibly hectic time, and while there were many bumps in the road, and I ended up leaving ArenaNet before the first season was over, that was knowledge I have carried with me in my career and refined on multiple projects (starting with Destiny, as I headed to Bungie directly from ArenaNet)

6.  Could you share with us how your responsibilities increased across Mask of the Betrayer and Storm of Zehir and how you supported the development of each of these now classic expansions for Neverwinter Nights 2? 

My time on Mask of the Betrayer was an interesting story! After Neverwinter Nights 2 shipped, I moved onto Alpha Protocol, but soon after production started, Kevin Saunders asked if I could help out in any spare time and make epic level items for MotB (apparently I knew the item system better than anyone, so that was a nice edge to have!) So my day would end for Alpha Protocol, and I'd pull up the 4 pdfs of books I was using (this was entirely legal, by the way - Wizards of the Coast would send them to us) - the Epic Level Handbook, Lost Empires, Unapproachable East, and Weapons of Legacy - and get to work on the checklist of needed items. I had a ton of fun making legendary stuff - including Myr Styah'be'eh, which has its own story...

Image credit: GameBanshee

In summer 2006, Atari made the last minute decision (based partly on my nonstop suggestions that it would be a good idea to show Neverwinter Nights 2 there) to send myself and a producer up to Bellevue, Washington for the Penny Arcade Expo (there was only the one back then, and it was just getting started!). However, due to the last minute nature of the jaunt, we had very little in the way of prep time, and I found myself alone on the show floor, half a day from the doors to the expo hall opening, with multiple sealed boxes and no knife in sight. Along came Porkfry (Greg Hjertager) - who I had met at E3 that same year - and I begged for his help. He used his knife - the notorious little blade he'd named "Mr. Stabby" - and opened the boxes and such in a flash, and I promised that if I had the chance, I'd name a weapon in a game after his knife in tribute. And so... when Mask of the Betrayer came around, I knew I couldn't very well name a dagger that exact thing, but the "fantasy version" of it, with a backstory based on the poor kobolds, and their rumored draconic ancestry. (Thus fitting into my strong belief that 'Easter Eggs' in games should be something that even people who aren't in on the joke can find funny, but those who are find it even funnier)

Getting to design items, weapons, and armor for MotB was a lot of fun, but I ended up contributing to other elements of the game as well: I provided spell chants for enemies, and even 2 out of the 3 voices for One-of-Many - the Hag and the Child. It was an unfortunate coincidence that all the water coolers were empty and water bottles were out the day I did the Hag's voice, because I scratched seven shades of heck along of my throat doing it, and found myself raspy the rest of the day, hunting down lozenges since the tap water back at the old Obsidian offices was considered too gross to drink!

Storm of Zehir was another unexpected twist for me - I had been on Alpha Protocol, and at the end of December 2007, after about 90% of the writing and 70% of the VO were complete, there was a choice to change the direction of the game, and I was spontaneously moved onto the "NX2" project. I spent the winter holiday reading up exhaustively on yuan-ti, Samarach, Chult, everything relevant I could pull out of any of the documents or books on hand, and taking exhaustive notes. When I returned, I got hit with a double-whammy of design calls: one, there would be no companions, and two, we were going to have a system where party members could speak up with special responses depending on things like their class and race. I had a lot of problems with the scope of this "Party Conversation System," and worked hard to make it function smoothly - my biggest fear was that it would reduce characters to just the stats on a sheet, not an actual personality - and scoped dialogues to run 'wide, not deep,' giving a lot of variety and reactivity to conversations while keeping them shorter and more to the point where possible. 

I absolutely was not going to be put off in having companions be cut, however (and not just because the quality bar of Mask of the Betrayer was so high that I was afraid people would be angry if we didn't even try to meet it!) I pushed for a scaled-down version of companions, more like henchmen, with their own personalities and quests. There was fear that the term "companions" would bring up false expectations, and I countered with the suggestion of the D&D term "cohorts," which seemed to satisfy the concerns of the leads and Wizards of the Coast. Though their quests didn't make it in, and I wish very much that I'd optimized their stats more before being moved off of the project (onto the Aliens RPG, less than a month before I left the company), I still love the cohorts, and if I had the chance, I would absolutely add their backstory quests!

Other than doing all the writing and editing for Storm of Zehir, I also did the modules for the Beach Shipwreck, Stone Knives cave, Lantanese Lumber Camp, Samargol, West Harbor, and the Lizardman Caves; plus revamping the loot and crafting systems; making some new items and equipment; and probably at least one other thing I'm forgetting. (OH RIGHT, doing Chir Darkflame's voice and several other characters, that too) It was a wonder what we got done in only 9 months with a skeleton crew of folks, and it was very much the kind of thing you can only really do when you're 27 and don't worry too much about doing most of the work in an exhausted fugue state. I DO NOT RECOMMEND THAT TO ANYONE, THOUGH. I look back on that game with fondness, and can't help but react with glee to things like the clever overworld map, the intricate clockroach, the Moroccan-style patterns in the Openpalm Bazaar, and all the behind-the-scenes scripting and programming and cleverness that made it all work.

(But I definitely would edit a lot of my lines down. I had way too many run-on sentences in that game, for sure.)

7. Could you share with us your experience working on Dead State? How did your experience at companies like Obsidian and ArenaNet prepare you for this production? 

Image credit: DoubleBear Productions

Actually, while the comic The Walking Dead was certainly one of the inspirations for Dead State, its production predated the show! Dead State basically had its origin at the same time as DoubleBear was founded, back in March 2009, well before the zombie craze had hit its peak. A lot of the game's core development - as far as systems like combat, morale, skills, stats, and many of the bigger characters - was concepted between the project lead and I from March 2009 until around fall of that same year, when I joined ArenaNet full-time.

It's hard to relate larger scale AA and AAA development to indie projects, but I was incredibly fortunate in my time at both Obsidian and ArenaNet to be able to work on stuff adjacent but not directly related to my department (like armors for Neverwinter Nights 2 and composites and lore for Guild Wars 2). Many indie developers often like to say that it requires you to "wear many hats," and it definitely requires being assertive when it comes to tackling tasks, because very often if you don't do the thing, nobody will.

I didn't end up working full-time at DoubleBear until after I'd left Bungie in April 2014, and it was a very different environment: Bungie is a huge studio, both in terms of having a massive open office and a lot of employees, and going from that to working at home with only one other person is a significant change (even more so than in 2020, believe it or not!) Interestingly enough, having worked on very small teams within big studios - Obsidian (Storm of Zehir), ArenaNet (Guild Wars 2 Personal Story and Living World teams), and Bungie (Public Events team) - had pushed me to coordinate a lot more closely with other departments and disciplines than people often get to in other large studios. Many times in big studios, you're siloed off with your department, and don't get to talk to other ones much... sometimes even separated into subdepartments, like Content Designers not having much interaction with Systems Designers! 

Other than that, there was a significant difference between my roles at DoubleBear and anywhere else, and was kind of an extension of the inclination I'd always had to get as involved as possible in all areas of game development: if not directly, than gaining a better understanding of how things worked. No sensible AAA studio would have the same person writing a quarter of the characters in the game, but also making the concept turnarounds for every character and coordinating with the 2D and 3D character artists on them, and also distributing and balancing loot, and creating and assigning character perks, and building levels... it made the kind of bonkers amount of work I did on Storm of Zehir look positively modest in comparison. 

...Seriously though, this isn't meant to be a brag, but more a cautionary tale! It was a lot to jump into, and with only 8 months to ship from the point I joined full-time, it was pretty insane.

I learned definitely from that how awful crunch can be, and that when indies do it, it's often out of a sense of frantic desperation - but that such a thing is all the more inexcusable in a big company with a lot more roles and (one would hope) better planning. I've gone through a lot of crunch in my career, and by now I know how severe its consequences can be, both to the game you're working on and to your own health. When you're in your 20s you think you're invincible, but even then you can get absolutely mentally burned out if not physically harmed. I can't lay my bad back at the feet of any crunch time in particular, but I definitely can point to some bad habits and burnout times that were. Be safe, fellow game developers, especially you kids - just say NO to crunch (I mean, where you can help it. I should probably be yelling at your bosses instead)

(Not to be a downer or anything.)

8. Are there any outstanding goals or milestones you want to achieve or experience in this industry (or even outside of it)?

Honestly, I think the more remarkable things that have happened to me in this industry have come not from striving for a big goal but just aiming to make each project stand out and do the best that I can for it. I think going into a project dreaming of what it could do on some grand scale is asking for trouble. It's odd that for as long as I've been doing this, I still think of "The Player" as an abstract concept, and get a bit tongue-tied when I meet someone who's actually played (and hopefully enjoyed) something I've done, because even as an abstract concept, the player and the experiences I want to craft for them are things very close to my heart. Awards are cool and all (and I recognize it is a kind of jackass thing to say this, I really don't mean to sound Too Cool For School) but it means the most to me to be able to create something that's just worthy of notice and appreciation, and maybe think of something they've never considered before or in a new light.

I have been lucky enough do to some mentoring, and would love to do more of that: to help people trying to make it or break into this very tough industry, and amplify unique (and often marginalized) voices. Being able to see things a new way or realize the importance of a new perspective is incredibly valuable, and it's sad that it's such a tough sell for so many people. I suppose if you could count it as a milestone, I'd want to help bring more experiences like that to reality, and show how amazing they are.

(...Oh, and to get the "Press A" crowd who skips through all the dialogues to actually care about story. That's a big wishlist item right there.)