Here's the scale of the problem, stated plainly: film and TV writing convention holds that one script page equals roughly one minute of screen time. The Calling Dark, as I envisioned it, was never a 90-minute story — it was a 20+ hour game. Run that math against the "page a minute" rule and you get somewhere north of 1,200 pages of material for a full playthrough. I had 90.

That gap is the entire reason this script had to be written differently from anything I'd been taught.

Game narrative writing isn't really taught at the university level - certainly not in the way screenwriting or prose fiction is. There's no standard format handed to you, no established rulebook for how to represent branching choices, environmental storytelling, or systemic mechanics on the page. So I had to build my own approach, largely through trial and error, deciding scene by scene what actually needed scripting versus what could be implied, gestured at, or left to design documentation instead.

The decision that shaped everything: I leaned into a cutscene-heavy structure. Rather than trying to script every possible player action across 20+ hours - an impossible task in 90 pages, and arguably not even the right use of a narrative script - I treated the cutscenes as the narrative's spine, and used the game's main ending choices as load-bearing points to convey the story on a linear scale. That meant the script isn't a literal moment-by-moment playthrough transcript; it's closer to a narrative skeleton - the story's key emotional and plot beats, written to the depth a script can actually hold, with gameplay and player choice woven in at the points where they'd matter most rather than exhaustively at every point where they could exist.

Writing gameplay moments into a script format at all was its own experiment. Stealth sequences, combat, Spirit Sight usage - these needed just enough scripted direction to convey intent and stakes to a reader, without pretending a screenplay page could fully replace a design document or a level layout. I found myself constantly asking: is this beat about story, or is this beat about systems? And when it was genuinely both, I had to invent my own shorthand for representing that on the page.

I won't pretend the result is a fully realized 20-hour game narrative - it isn't, and given the format, it couldn't be. What it is: proof that I can take an entirely unscaffolded writing problem, with no established convention to lean on, and build something coherent, structured, and emotionally complete within the boundaries I was actually given.

The full script follows below.