Prepare to variate

I’m working on coming up with an application in full for the position of variant writer. The plan is to ask applicants to prove their skills by doing, so I need to present the basics of what a variant writer would need to know to work within MVOL. Here’s my explanation so far– not for the application process, but for what would be involved in the work of variant writing.

Feedback is welcome, of course. This is something of a rough draft, and some of the data is actually outdated, since I’m not on my main computer right now, but the goal is to drive home the fundaments of the job as quickly as possible in an easy-to-understand way, while also serving as a quick reference for when actually doing the job, whether in the application process or after. It may be a little more readable after I apply some formatting with headers and bold and the like, of course.

Clockwork in the darkness

I enjoy stealth-based video games. I like the feeling both of sliding unseen through a network of security measures, skillfully accomplishing my goals without being detected, and also that of systematically removing these “measures,” often people, one by one until a bustling inner sanctum has been reduced to a graveyard in the literal and figurative sense, the lights snuffed and the bodies stuffed in every closet and dark corner available. There is a satisfying peace derived from chaos in both cases. In this sense, I suppose that my enjoyment of stealth games derives largely from my aforementioned perception of the world in systems. I see the level as a system, and I either navigate it or dismantle it with care to prove my superiority to it.

So maybe this answers some of my questions about stealth design in my own case, but I don’t know that this is the same answer others would give. I’ve been playing a stealth game recently, and it’s brought to mind a few issues. When you’re engaging with a situation in stealth, what is it that’s important? That your “targets” act for the most part consistently, patrolling the same sections endlessly so that they can be dispatched in due time, or that they are realistic, that they wander at random and especially change their behavior if they have any reason for suspicion of their surroundings? Especially when you engage in save abusing to get through difficult areas, questions of truly consistent and predictable behavior come up often. Should these people be defined as static puzzle pieces, or should they be “people?”