I wrote lots of incidental dialogue for driving action game Hot Wheels: Battle Force 5, based on the toys & cartoon of the same name. That’s the stuff the characters say during the game as they drive around. (I didn’t work on the story aspects of the game and so dialogue where characters talk about their objectives for the level etc. wasn’t written by me.)

We developed the game in tandem with the TV show development, reviewing storyboards and draft episode scripts, submitting story and dialogue for approvals. I’m told some of my dialogue was received so well they put it in the show’s bible, which is pretty neat.

The challenge with this kind of work is packing as much character delineation as possible into a tiny piece of communication. The voice artists bring their skills to make the words come alive, but even as raw dialogue in a spreadsheet, you want every character to say “oh no I’m losing!” and “hurray I’m winning!” in their own unique way.

Here’s some playthrough: