The Day of the Robbery

This one isn't an exercise per se, but I wanted to show it off anyway. It's a kind of companion to the Rambling Old Man, an example I cooked  up for use in explaining a few principals in games writing. For example:

• Speakers generally don't say what their listeners already know ("It's me, your brother!"), so try and find a more subtextual way to clue the reader about relationships. ("If Mom could see us now, she'd disown us again.") Consider also that the visual similarity between the player avatar and Joey's sprite conveys affiliation.
• Avoiding repetition includes "repetition of effect," where the same information is hammered home repeatedly despite the reader already knowing it. In a digital game, it's important to note that there are multiple channels of information – graphics and dialogue, for example – and it can feel repetitive to have a character say "here are the guns!" when the guns are already visible on the table.
• There are reasons to narrate ("tell") rather than show, but in a digital game, story beats generally hit harder when they are playable. Instead of Joey describing the steps of the plan, what if the game smash-cut to a brief moment from that step? Alternately, a smart subversion could be to have Joey describe what the successful plan would look like, then cut to the moment after the plan goes horribly wrong. (Thirty Flights of Loving does this to great effect.)

To make this into an exercise, you might play through the scene and think about how you might make it harder-hitting.

In honesty I hoisted myself with this one, as my students ended up liking Joey the Sneak too much. I did too, which is why I'm posting this despite it not exactly fitting the format.