Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Developer Diaries

Hello, Banjo fans.

Welcome once more to your regularly scheduled trip to a currently very wet and rainy Twycross. Thankfully, we’re safely shielded from the worst the British “summer” can throw at us by the thermostat in our barns. The Banjo team are well and truly in crunch mode at the moment, but that hasn’t stopped our resident editor—he of Scribes—from outlining the creative process behind one of the most beloved aspects of any Banjo game—the script. So without further ado, take it away Mr. Editor.

Life is a rollercoaster, as that 21st-century radical thinker Ronan Keating once said. He even wrote a book about it. Taking on script-handling duties for a Banjo game is an opportunity you just don’t turn down, but it does come bearing the huge weight of expectation in its big, dirty backpack. It’s not enough to make everyone talk like Yoda and do a load of gags about the camp frog and the googly-eyed vegetables. Turns out the text also needs to be informative, consistent, accurate, true to the characters, and sneakily deviant without raising the hackles of the friendly legal and geopolitical people across the pond.

Having not been all that deeply involved with the text of any particular game since the days of Jet Force Gemini, it goes without saying that I jumped at the chance to put words in Boggy’s mouth, turn most of the Jinjos into mentalists and throw in random bits of everything from sea shanties to Cockney rhyming slang. Some of it may even be in the final version, if only because the localisation teams were so confused that they just left it alone. But this scriptwriting lark is not without its challenges.

Far be it from me to make it sound like a rough job, because it’s a great way to make a living for a couple of months. Even better if the designers have already done some of the work and filled many of the remaining gaps with perfectly good placeholders ripe for the scavenging—so all credit to Gregg, Shaun, Steve, Luke, Shelley and the Gavster for the raw material and doing most of the hard bits.

But let us not underestimate the harrowing nature of, say, having to ensure that an intricate vehicle-building tutorial written in Mumbo’s fixed-tense, third-person, broken English makes even the faintest bit of sense. Sometimes it seems like everyone in the Banjo universe has some kind of horrible speech defect. Which is all well and good for characterisation; not so handy for conveying crucial gameplay details. There aren’t many jobs where you breathe a sigh of relief as you finish writing the lines for a sibilant green goblin and move on to the dialogue for a relatively well-spoken jogging aardvark.

Remembering to conform to US English can also cause problems for us Brits. Who knew that in addition to missing the ‘u’ out of everything and not knowing what star jumps or milkfloats are, our American cousins even use certain bits of punctuation differently? As an example, whenever you see double quotes used for emphasis in the game’s dialogue, be aware that we had to use an HTML workaround to get the darn things in there. Feel the dedication. We wouldn’t do it if we didn’t love you crazy dudes.

But the biggest eye-opener for me personally was that less than half the time I spent working on the text involved doing the fun creative stuff. Just like game design in general, it seems that writing a game script isn’t all about spinning idly in your chair all day, chewing pens, banging your desk and shrieking as you come up with a brilliant, world-changing idea then delegating all practical responsibility to someone else. The latter stages of the process have been all about ceaseless bug fixing, localisation queries, error messages and panicky incorporation of last-minute design changes. It’s been weeks since I actually got to amuse myself by writing a rubbish Grunty rhyme or a cheap innuendo for Jolly Dodger (note: this game is 100% free of cheap innuendo; any misreading is down to the soiled mind of the individual).

But that stuff’s over now—I think—and we can just sit back and relive the happy times. Specifically, remembering all the overly British or otherwise rejected terms and references that once stowed away within the game text. I was going to list a few examples here as an insight into what is and what isn’t deemed appropriate for a family-friendly game in this day and age, but they’d get cut again for the same reasons. In fact, they just did.

When all’s said and done, I think the script for Banjo’s latest game has ended up quirky and irreverent enough to be considered pretty faithful to his past exploits. I am, of course, stupidly biased. But being on the receiving end of the site’s e-mail address means I’ll be among the first to know if it went a bit wrong somewhere, and I’ll probably get called a stupid, drooling, butt-faced monkey-boy at the same time. You guys! You’re crazy!

If you would like to call our editor a nasty name or even ask him a sensible question, you can contact him via editor@rareware.com. Now that he’s finished the script (literally just finished), he might even have the time to knock a few of them together for another edition of Scribes. In our next installment, I’m hoping I might be able to invite another team member to shed some light on the creation of the game’s hub world, Showdown Town. However, blogging, like game development, is hardly an exact science and so you may have to put up with more of my own wittering. Until next time, take care of yourselves… and each other.