: Writing without a contract About 8 months ago a small game development company approached me to write dialogue for quests. They loved my writing and I quickly became the narrative designer for

About 8 months ago a small game development company approached me to write dialogue for quests. They loved my writing and I quickly became the narrative designer for the game. I had to use characters they had premade and they had only made about 30 pages of dialogue content.

Over the next 8 months I wrote hundreds of pages of quest dialogue and remade the game. I also did many other things as well and spent hundreds of hours working without pay. Their developer kept telling me he would get funding and even made contracts we never got to sign.

I am tired of working and making this game with little help for no pay.

If I leave, will they be able to take all my content and use it since I wrote with their characters?

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@BetL639

Generally speaking, any work/time/materials you are going to create for a company should be contract signed first. Signing them "later" should be a clear sign that something may not be right. Being that this is for a game, most of the time you would have needed to sign things such as a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). They wouldn't want you to take their ideas and run off to a competitor who could complete it say better or faster and screw them out of their creation. Make sure you have all of your hours documented and logged as well as all of the material you created for them. Save all email exchanges between you and this company especially in regards to your work and pay.

Like others have said this is something you will need to take a serious look at with a lawyer. As RobtA pointed out too... if they have actually already implemented anything you have done in the product as a demo/marketing commercials/released to beta and they have made money off of it, that's basically Intellectual property (IP) of yours that they took without proper compensation.

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: Writing without a contract About 8 months ago a small game development company approached me to write dialogue for quests. They loved my writing and I quickly became the narrative designer for

More posts by @Carla500

: How much of a character's past/background should I let on? I've been starting something really interesting lately, which is writing each of my main character's back story before writing the main

: Flashback or Framing, does either work After reading up on flashbacks, both on this site and others, I learned that flashbacks should be used sparingly since most readers enjoy a story from

: Redeeming a Good Character Who Does a Bad Thing Is it possible to redeem a character who is supposed to be good, but does something inexplicably bad? Let me give you an example so you can

: Larger structure - followup to Sense of Style by Steven Pinker I have read Steven Pinker's Sense of Style, which is a great book. In chapter 4, he talks about how to form lucid coherent

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