Making Quarter Lie
I'm working on a narrative game about a fake exorcist on a demon-ridden ship. Once again, starting a small angsty blog near the end of the development.
Well, at least I hope it's nearing the end. I've been struggling to finish this game for a very long time; since fall last year I keep thinking "in the next few months it will be done for sure", and then it just doesn't happen. The design is pretty much done (although time will tell if it actually withstands the test of becoming real), the art is pretty much done, the music is getting there. What's left, apart from polish and playtesting and stuff, is WRITING THE THING. I deliberately came up with a heavily narrative game to force myself to learn to write since I'm very bad at it. Turns out—doesn't lead to a quick and easy development process.
The struggle really is very simple at its core: I'm having trouble forcing myself to write. If only I sit down and write something for some amount of hours, the game will soon be done and I will be free to move on. So I guess this blog will mostly be about (overcoming) that struggle, more so than about the game's design; but we'll see.
I want to have all texts done (but not necessarily super finalized) by the end of July.
There's nine characters in the game, each with 4–6 separate dialogues, plus some narrative scaffolding around. So fifty dialogues, give or take. How many are done? None! There's not even one dialogue draft that can be considered finished. I have the structure figured out and I have the characters outlines, but I do not have any text.
So... yeah. The goal for tomorrow is to make first simple drafts for the Doctor's dialogues (at least a few). I'm starting today by outlining thoroughly what happens inside, before jumping into actual text. Let's see how it goes.
I wrote something! Was actually pretty enjoyable once I got into flow. Managed to draft two of the doctor's dialogues, 2000 words in total.
I have no idea currently if any of it is good at all. There's some fun things in there and I hit the beats I wanted to hit, but it's all still too fresh for me to judge. Either way, I'm happy with the progress. Two is more than zero.
The main thing I'm left thinking about is branching. When I play narrative games, I generally do not care about having a lot of choices, or my choices "mattering". I like to have a way to express myself, but I don't want every word choice to sprawl into a completely different world. I also never replay narrative games.
So I went and did the opposite of what I like for the second dialogue. Four completely different branches, each with its own tone, resources to gain, side of the character to show. That's just the natural direction the process led me; I imagine that's how something like Disco Elysium was written ("what if he does that? okay, and then what if..." forever).
And that just isn't working for me.
- I don't have enough resourses to write a bunch of texts that most players will just not ever see. I have to be frugal with my writing.
- With all the resource management happening in the game, the breadth of choices will get too complicated to manage. I want to believe my elegant little system will allow for a lot of variance, but realistically, it won't; I'll have to direct it in some way.
- It's very difficult to keep consistent tone within the dialogue. If the setup for the exchange leads to something dramatic, I want it to be dramatic; and if it leads to something funny and lighthearted, I want it to be that. But then I can't branch these two back into the main line without writing a bunch of extra text or messing up the tone.
- Each exchange happened to reveal a different side of the character, which is great and is what I wanted. The thing is... all of these sides are important, and I want the player to learn most of them. The way it is, the player will only know 30% of the character by the time I'm trying to cash that character in.
So I need to figure out a different way. What I should probably do is make each interaction its own day. You get to choose what happens on a specific meeting, but you will eventually hit all the beats. It still leads to extra complexity (I have to manage all the possible orders of operations), but at least it's somewhat frugal. So more (or not) total dialogues, but each is somewhat shorter.
The project's scope isn't that big in terms of the word count, but it still grew into something that I'm terrified to tackle properly.
Every structural decision is very difficult to verify, since there needs to be a lot of text to properly understand it. Well, that's not really true. I can, and probably should, write a solid structural outline with a bunch of placeholders. But then I have to actually commit to making a structure, which I am, once again, terrified to tackle.
The text itself is complicated to write with all the limitations the gameplay forces on it (you need to lie often, and lies need to always give you something, and it all needs to be somewhat priesty).
Anyway, this can't go on like that, or the game's never going to be finished, and I'll be stuck with it forever and not release anything else in my life.
Made a proper build for the first time in a long while. Generally optimistic (I feel like I can finish the thing) but a lot to do.
The structure doesn't quite work. There's not enough hooks, and the player doesn't really feel the pressure or the direction of the game's systems. I need to pace the introduction a little better; introduce characters one by one, establish a very specific goal and a very specific deadlines. Then other characters can come in with their own little systemic things, but not all at once.
The lying system doesn't quite work. There's just not enough places (or places different enough) to use your lies, so you don't really have to consider them strongly. This I can only tackle by slowly finding patterns to use and inserting them into texts. I'm still hesitant to make lies for avoiding losing trust—loss aversion and all that. Should just try and see, really.
The item system doesn't quite work. It doesn't feel useful or important to use items, but that's likely a problem at a different level, there just isn't any pressure to deal with "optimally" to begin with.
The texts don't quite work. They're not interesting enough, there's not enough choices, a lot of sequences are too short to be impactful, the game's themes are barely ever used. But all that's fine, I'm still only drafting.
Overall, it's okay. I'll figure it out.