Yo

I just wanted to post a quick update: unfortunately I am really behind in tasks and promises I made to other people, so I haven't been able to do much for this game. I'm also going to need this week to get back on track again. Man, I feel kind of bad just slapping a really quick entry up like this (I guess that's why most people seem to gravitate towards Tumblr), but I'd really like to try and post weekly, to make it a habit. Blurgh. Anyways, I'm really hoping I'll finish everything by Friday, and then maybe this weekend I'll focus more on my prototype.

My Premise is about a Magical plot device

Man, my posts keep getting less timelier and timelier. Hmm, to be honest, I really wanted to have a strong grasp on the major plot points of the narrative by last Sunday, but I was still struggling to have a firm grasp on my premise and my protagonist's personality. I guess it's good I mostly focused on the actual game mechanics instead, because, well, to be honest a structured plot is not an integral part of any game. I mean, I believe that story, even in minimalist games like Tetris, will always be present (I'm not going to delve into that), but it is in my opinion subservient to the rules that make up the game. Anyways, what I am trying to say is that although I wasn't able to come up with a set plot by now, I feel like I was able to be fairly productive. I kind of found it impossible to think about the plot without thinking about how it could be told.

I really should have thought of this earlier, but 'Game Design' should have been the first thing on my list of 'blocks.' Then following that there could be Coding or Writing. Game design really does require a lot of thought, and I always took it for granted until I started tackling design problems at lab and at work.

Well, as of now the premise is as follows:

You are an undecided undergrad student just beginning summer classes following your first year. Thanks to your nonchalant attitude you're in danger of getting booted out due to your atrocious grades, which has netted you an appointment with your adviser this morning. Much to your bewilderment (and relief) the whole campus is suddenly battered with snow and ice, effectively closing it down. Before you can kick back and relax, however, a strange child-like thing approaches you for help. And against your better judgment you find yourself compelled to help this strange child-thing get back home, launching you into a journey that will test your will and wit.

I'll probably just stick with this premise for now. I mean, Super Mario Galaxy had a ridiculous premise, and it ended up being insane-awesome. What I really wish I could do, however, is craft a story that naturally arises from the conflicting interests of the story's characters. I mean, right now I pretty much just have a plot device/ magical person fall from the sky and 'spur the heroine into action.' Which is painfully overdone. When the story is the product of a rich world with rich, multifaceted characters, then even the simplest story from that world can feel extraordinarily immersive and compelling.

One recent game I've played that really brought this aspect to my attention was the HTML5 game 'no-one has to die.' by Stuart Madafiglio. Oh, man: it's so simple, yet the way the narrative reveals itself through the motivations of each of the characters is just thrilling.   It's a game that, counter to what I said earlier, builds itself around the central narrative. The mechanics are there to dictate how the story unfolds before you: you may still have great autonomy, but the game still holds control over the story's pacing and delivery. Everything is insanely simple. But that tightly-woven narrative and its delivery just really make this something else! It doesn't take long to play, so if you haven't played it and have time to kill it's definitely something to check out. ^_^ Many of its fans seem to compare it to 999: I'll have to check that out sometime.

Hmm, anyways, my priority with this game is to first and foremost just get it done. And of the various aspects I could focus on, I would say that creating an interesting, somewhat-novel game mechanic is priority for me. Some of the most memorable games for me (Earthbound, Phoenix Wright, Gregory Weir's the Majesty of Colors) had extraordinary writing, but if I don't have working code then I can't really present a story, no matter how awesomely-well crafted I may think it is. Right now I am working on drawing up a very lengthy list of all the features I'd love to include in a shiny, idealized, unrealistic super-version. After that, I plan on stripping that list down to its absolute bare minimum. I'll then break that minimum down into milestones, and try making just a bunch of little prototypes.

One of the things I've (very quickly!) learned at work is that you should code as stupidly simply as you can. Because you can always just go back and clean up/append to it later. If you try to architect out some perfect framework from the get-go, it can bite you hard later on, because the code has already lost some flexibility. So unlike my first attempt, where I tried to start backwards and make myself an editor, I'll be doing quick and dirty prototypes. My hope is to have at least one working and playable by the end of this week. Oh, also, lab has basically ended for me today, so I'll have more time to spend on prototyping as well.

Blah blah mechanics and Story

Yo, blog! (^_^)/)

Sorry about the lack of a post yesterday. Aha, I admittedly have a slight phobia of cars (which is made all the more ironic by the fact that my brother was practically born a car fanatic), and I spent 3 hours on the highway. Needless to say I was pretty shaken afterwards, and I ended up sleeping for the rest of the day, lol.

Anyways, for the past week I've mostly been ruminating on the character, as well as on game mechanics. Unlike with more traditional, linear formats, I can't just start sitting there visualizing the whole storyline in my head. In fact, there shouldn't really be a single story line. The way you construct the narrative your player experiences needs to be informed to some degree by the way you plan on presenting said narrative. You also need to take into account the fact that you are not the sole storyteller anymore. By giving the player some control over something in your digital creation, you are giving him a voice. Even if your game is a purely linear RPG full of cutscenes, just the duration of time the player takes between each cutscene can color the way he sees the characters and views the narratives. To really make the most of this collaborative aspect of narratives in games, you need to break the story you want to tell into numerous little elements, and then have the game's programming, your direction and the player's choices ultimately bring the narrative together.

With that mind, one of the first things I tackled was how I planned on having most of the narrative play out. How would the protagonist traverse the many possible points in the game's narrative world to ultimately reach her goal? More importantly, how would this mechanic reflect discipline or diplomacy? I really want to stress the intricacies and nuances involved in talking to and getting to know other people a la diplomacy, so the major mechanic I want to stress involves talking to the NPCs around you. By talking to them you then uncover narrative clues and gradually get closer and closer to the end goal. I'm hoping that it will be a mechanic that the player naturally gets. Rather than having a jarring cutscene offer another spoonful of the story, I want the player to feel like they are piecing together all the pieces together themselves from place to place, and I want them to catch onto the idea naturally as well.

I'm hoping to implement a UI system that stresses the importance of the people around you, as well as compels the player to try and interact with them. I also want it to reflect not what a camera mindlessly sees, but us, through the filters of our mind's eye. When we enter a room we don't automatically take in every detail in HD indiscriminately. If we're hungry, our eyes will gravitate and focus on any food in the room. If we enter worrying about an algebra test, numbers will predominantly fill our heads, and only the bare details needed to traverse the room to our seat noted. And if we enter the room interested in what someone in that room might know, we scan faces closely, analyze what kind of person they might be from their body language, have mental markers highlight the ones we are close to. I want the UI to reflect that kind of internal processing. For now I'm considering having tags with the character's profile-pic pop up around a focal area defined by the mouse position. Clicking on the tag will bring up some info on that person based on what our perceptive protagonist was able to pick up by body language alone, and then clicking on it again will open up a dialogue between the protagonist and that character. I actually haven't considered how a group conversation would work, so I need to ruminate on that for a bit.

I guess in a way the game is similar to a visual novel. I feel like in real life, when you move from point a to point b, like from home to school, that space of time between the two don't really get recorded. It's not particularly important to you. I mean, personally that space of time is very important to me, and it's where I get some of my more interesting ideas and thoughts from, but I feel for a more socially-inclined character like the protagonist her life would be structured more along the lines of flitting from person to person. I therefore don't intend on implementing a traditional player control scheme: you know, with the WASD and jumping and traversing tilemaps and whatnot. It will for the most part just be rooms full of people, and then talking one-on-one Fire Emblem style. Moving from location to location would probably just happen via map. In fact, everything could technically just happen via conversation. There could be a chauffeur you spoke with whenever you decided to move somewhere else, for example.

Okay, so I have a game system that involves talking to a string of people. What does this mean for the story? It means that in order for the story to keep moving forward, there need to be a series of questions. A reason for the player to talk to these random people. There's a big giant question, and then smaller ones that lead to small answers and more small questions. And by talking to people and picking up the smaller answers eventually those answers would build up into the ultimate answer. The story's resolution.

This means that in order to jump start the story, there needs to be something questionable that happens. Something that is obviously abnormal, like say, I dunno, a blizzard in the middle of July. I also need to make the protagonist's dedication to solving this abnormality believable. One of the things I'm really set on doing, though, is on making the protagonist transform into a self-disciplined character. Meaning at the beginning she's pretty... not-disciplined. After over-thinking and over-analyzing things like I usually do, I've broken down discipline into 6 smaller aspects:

self-control  ----- willpower
balance --------- consistency
reliability -------- responsibility

Basically, our heroine is lazy, indulgent, low-energy and apathetic. Her life consists of weaseling her way out of as much work as possible and extending her time spent in bed. She doesn't particularly care for anyone, and she doesn't see much point in getting worked up over anything. Life is kind of pointless for her, so she's just going to get as much pleasure out of her short time here on earth as much as possible. How do you get a character like that to get up and do something, much less tackle a problem great enough to spawn an epic worthy of a video game?

I played around with the idea of having her cursed for some time. Maybe be mean and make her start melting when she starts letting herself go by gorging on sweets or ignoring schoolwork. Maybe make her cursed to die within a few days unless she finds the cure, or have everyone she loves encased in ice or something. Something that I want to reach players, above any other stupid preachy messages I have, though, is that all of us, even the most self-destructed, have the capability and power within us to stand up again, to gain the ability to call ourselves even remotely self-disciplined and be proud of ourselves. For now I want a glimmer of the protagonist's potential to become a better her than she could have possibly dreamed of to shine through to the player. So I've decided to give her a redeeming trait; she almost never makes promises and she'll snake her way out of commitments via clever wording, but when she does make a solid promise, she keeps it. And she doesn't break it. She's a bit younger than my original perfect bordering-on-Mary-Sue protagonist, and she's just begun settling into college, thanks to her promise to get a degree to her parents. Once the world freezes over, she'll find herself making yet another promise and inevitably committing to a problem that launches her into the main narrative.

Wow, I did not expect this post to be this long. Not to mention it is probably really boring and dry. I plan on playing around with this set-up a bit more and developing the characters and possible narrative threads a bit more. I feel I have a stronger idea of how all the themes of discipline, diplomacy and ice all converge with both the story and the gameplay, and I actually feel a connection to the protagonist, so I believe this will be the last major change this game will go through. And even if I look back and think that this idea is just retarded and stupid, I intend on finishing this iteration through to the end. That's a promise! (Har har, I'm so clever).

Anyways,  have some exploratory character art! Oh, in the end I just decided to have her be a person. I did explore with making her a robot or a lark or a koala, but in the end I decided to just stick with human.