The Beauty of Poppies
tl;dr
I was a writer on this project, but there was a lot more to it than simply putting together a script. Because of how grounded this project is in the realities of recent history, the process involved:
Researching the history and culture of Afghanistan.
Reading accounts of US soldiers.
Developing character treatments to create a varied and interesting cast.
Writing branching scenes featuring multiple PoV characters on different sides of the conflict.
The Beauty of Poppies is a game that examines the American approach to war in the middle east and forces players to confront harsh truths behind the narratives created by American patriotism. I was brought on to the project by Brandon Sichling, the project lead, whose personal site currently has a link to a playable demo of the game.
This game lives and dies not on accuracy, per se, but on honesty. While we were not trying to portray a specific set of events that occurred in Afghanistan, it was important to our team that the fictional events that we created resonated with the realities of the war.
Because of this, I spent most of my time doing research while working on this project. I consulted both factual and fictional sources to familiarize myself with Afghan and US military culture. Surprisingly enough, I had more difficulty with the latter (the group which the game revolves most around). The accounts that I found detailing the effects on the citizens of Afghanistan were much easier to draw from than the patriotic, highly structured lives of US soldiers.
This is the project that I would say taught me the most about writing. Finding ways to write characters that operate within the military structure gave me more confidence as a writer and made me feel much more comfortable tackling difficult subjects such as the ones covered in the game.