(4) MANUALS AND STRATEGY GUIDES

WHAT IS A GAME MADE OF? >
MANUALS AND STRATEGY GUIDES

Games need to have a manual, and if the game is considered a potential hit, then no doubt a strategy guide will be produced for the title.

MANUAL
How the manual gets written varies from publisher to publisher and from game to game. The most common method is to use an experienced contract manual writer. This person receives a copy of the game about four to six months before release and interacts with a member of the development team while writing to create the most accurate manual possible before a game ships. Another common method is for developers to create the manual given that they are the most familiar with the game’s functionality. The biggest challenge in creating a manual is that rarely does one have the luxury of waiting until all features have been frozen and all stats in the game have been balanced. This results in almost all manuals being vague in some areas and fairly narrow in the scope of just providing use of the controls of the game, rather than how to play the game. Now enters the strategy guide.

STRATEGY GUIDE

The strategy guide fills a niche role in the game industry, providing detailed stats, walk-throughs, strategy, and tactics to complete a game. Writers of strategy guides have various stories, but it is not as simple a job as playing your favorite game and writing up all the nifty hints and secrets. What really happens is that the publisher of the game and the publisher of the guide work together to get builds of the game to the strategy guide author as early as practical in the project. Essentially, the guide author is a beta tester too; this makes the job of writing the definitive guide more challenging as the stats, missions, puzzles, and various parts of the game are still in flux. For instance, even the ultra-high-profile game Gran Turismo 3 (GT3) for the PS2 contains many discrepancies in the pricing of various upgrades between the U.S. version of the game and the U.S. strategy guide. GT3 shipped in Japan well ahead of the U.S. version and as such there was a little more time to produce an accurate guide. Despite this there were still discrepancies.

For our own Starfleet Command: Orion Pirates, the strategy guide writer of SFC2, Dennis Green, returned to write the most thorough guide possible. His project came under stress when we at Taldren overlooked some of his requests for information during the final push. Unfortunately, after we were able to catch up and provide him with the information he needed, several strong chapters of the book had to be cut to reduce paper costs for the guide. It is a tough market to make money when work already created has to be cut.

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