Think ECM hasn't been busy?

[Victrix]

arrrrgh

stupid forum deleted my responses

Opaque: Yap, PM me an address

Strider: Brady (and the other big guide publishers) all have an internal design staff. Basically the way it works is that I take the screenshots and mark up the text with callouts for design (eg, this screenshot goes here, this art goes there, this table goes here, that hint box goes there, etcetc), and then they make a customized layout for that specific game (eg, more techy and futuristic for Steel Batallion, more lighthearted for Pokemon, and so on). They keep getting better at it as time goes by, some of the guides look really nice now. Pretty cool stuff.

So if the screenshots or text sucks, blame me (or my editor ), if the content sucks... don't blame me There are uh... interesting working conditions that make doing guides the way I would want them to be in a perfect world essentially impossible, so I just sort of muddle along doing the best that I can with the restrictions I have.

[ssbomberman]

The question is, how did you score such a job? what background led you to this path? I have teh professional writing background, but can't make any headway into strat guides...

ssb

[Victrix]

ignored my mother, played a lot of video games, worked with friends on a 'game company', won a daikatana championship (but lost in the final match), talked to lots of people online, got lucky

I think thats even in chronological order

Really though, just mail them (brady/prima/sybex/blahblah) your resume/samples of writing/blah blah. They do go through them (eventually). Otherwise, its basically blind luck and who you know - lots of recruiting 'in the family'. eg, I've given projects to friends I know, or had them help me with work in some cases, others did the same, eventually they get asked to work on a project solo. The other route is straight in, and lots of persistence, same as anything else really.

Honestly, I don't think the writing background matters but so much (well... ok, I've seen some pretty godawful examples in some cases :P), as long as you can write a sentence without causing your editor to go mad. It's mostly just about being able to meet insane deadlines, finish incomplete buggy beta builds under said insane deadlines, and write a full manuscript and take all the screenshots under said insane deadlines. Cake!

[station82o]

can i ask a practical question - how do you take screens? What kind of equipment do you need to hook that up to your pc? Or do you just have a monitor with a tv out?

[Mzo]

You can get a screen capture card for your PC, then hook the system up to it.

I've been thinking about doing that myself, they're not that expensive.

[Victrix]

Yup. There are also some external USB capture boxes, and digital camcorders work quite well. Honestly, vid capping is a huge pain in the ass on pcs, something I really detest. Digital camera is probably the easiest method, doing screencaps via firewire after you've taped the game (the right program will let you go back and forth from the software, without ever touching the camcorder controls, which is nice). They all have ups and downs, ease of use, quality of picture, etcetcetc.

I often wonder how worthwhile the effort was (I've wasted a lot of time trying to get 'perfect' shots for some games), and they wind up getting shrunk down to postage stamp size for the guide anyway

[Dipstick]

Tangental note: For people with typical PCs using a consumer-level video capture card, you might want to try the HuffYUV codec. Lossless codec for AVIs (~3:1 compression ratio) and relatively CPU inexpensive, its main use is to cut down the MB/s write rate requirements for recording. I can record videos at 320x240x30fps with this thing on some random TV tuner, which is good enough to use as streamable media online. I do not know if that is suitable for print, though (the really low resolution does not look good, but most of these shots get shrunk to nothing anyway).

Victrix: Is writing a FAQ for a game at all comparable to writing these strategy guides? Just curious, since I wrote a few when I was younger and I wonder how comparable the experience is.

-Dippy

[Victrix]

At the heart of it, pretty similar - you're just organizing and presenting information. On a practical level, not similar at all. Writing a faq means you can take your time, fiddle around with it, add bits, verify information with outside sources, discuss it with other people, add more information, hack around with the game, and basically make it as perfect as you want it to be, on no particular schedule, any time before or after the game comes out.

Writing a guide means you're operating under a brutal deadline (frequently with an early build of the game), and you've got one shot to get your text set for release. If you've ever wondered 'omg how could they miss something so obvious' chances are, they didn't

[Shin Johnpv]

any interest in selling me a tales of symphonia guide drop me a PM

[AstroBlue]

can i ask a practical question - how do you take screens? What kind of equipment do you need to hook that up to your pc? Or do you just have a monitor with a tv out?

Apart from what Mzo said, professionaly they use Adobe Premiere to record huge amounts of video to select good screenshots from afterwards.