Chris Krubeck is a creative person who craft quality work regardless of whether it’s for a game script, ad, book, business or creative venture.
Chris works on game writing, screenplays and creative-driven copy-writing for more than 6 years. He also consult and do developmental editing for other writers of any skill or experience level.
Chris graduated from Falmouth University with a degree in film production in 2011. He went to Tokyo, Japan and started working as a game producer and scriptwriter in Boonmachine K.K. in 2014. While living in Tokyo, he met the lovely founders of Cherrymochi and collaborated a horror game Tokyo Dark which published by Square Enix Collective.
Interview with Chris Krubeck in Game Writer:
How would you describe what you do every day as a Creative Writer?
It’s hard to pin down. Writing can mean different things for different industries, and what I do as a game writer, say, versus what I do when I’m writing a novella or script are very different. Fundamentally, of course, it’s all about telling a story – and making sure you’re telling the right story for the medium. But to more directly answer your question, a lot of the day to day of a creative writer is throwing stuff out – writing drafts then deleting them; coming up with ideas that don’t go anywhere; all in the process of finding the right path forward. Behind the stuff that people do see are a lot of ideas and words that aren’t used.
How did you get your job as a Game Writer?
Honestly, I kind of fell into it. I was working more in TV and video production, but did a lot of writing on the side. When I lived in Tokyo, Japan I had a regular board game meet up with some other creative guys – one of them was developing an alpha demo/proof of concept for a game. I offered to edit the scripts and provide feedback on the writing. He was suitably impressed with that work, I wrote another sample, and we decided to work together – that game eventually became Tokyo Dark.
What is your favourite part of the job?
The collaboration is great – sometimes it can get easy to be stuck in place when you work alone. Game writing by necessity requires a lot of coordination between different teams. It can be very inspiring. Also, working in games provides a lot of roadblocks (limited art assets, budgets, etc) – and finding the perfect solution to get around these is a wonderful feeling.
What aspect of the job would be surprising to people looking in from the outside?
I think there’s an image among some people that the Game Writer is a lot like the script writer – coming up with the skeleton of a story that turns into a fully realized world. In fact, many great games are born out of a gameplay concept or from systems that the writer then has to work with. Also, some people seem to think that writing games is just writing dialogue for cutscenes – but it’s so much more.
Every game is different obviously, but a lot of the game writer’s job is to interpret the gameplay through a narrative lens, not the other way around. If you go in to game writing wanting to write your Magnum Opus/epic science fiction or fantasy story – you should write a book or a screenplay instead. To be a great game writer, you need to write in a way that serves the game itself. You also need to be flexible enough to change your style to suit different genres.
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