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Narrative Connectivity

6 years ago2,020 words

More Sindrel Song writing rambling... The end is so close, yet so eternally far away! JUST LIKE DEATH.

It feels like I've been working on Sindrel Song for an eternity... Every day I work on it for hours, and every day the finish line's still on the horizon. In sight, but still a journey away. It's frustrating, since I know I need to finish this thing before I can move on and do anything else. And it almost is finished, so it's really draining how long it takes to get from 'almost finished' to 'actually finished' compared to, say, going from a sparkle in my eye to a working concept (*that* took less than a week).

Largely it's because of the same old tiredness though. I 'crash' so soon into each day, spend much of my time in bed either sleeping or messing around on my phone. I keep wishing there was something worthwhile I could do with that time - reading books that'd further my understanding of the world, meditating, practising lucid dreaming, even playing other games to familiarise myself with what others are making these days - but I never have the energy to actually push through the inertia and add such a thing to my life, so I end up looking at rubbish online, hating that I'm doing so but feeling too drained to do anything else. Ugh.

I'm sure the fatigue is due to my lifestyle as much as the brain stuff, but I talked about that last time, and I'd only be repeating myself if I did so again here. I'm just trying to do what I can despite it. Not pushing myself, but not falling into complete inactivity either. Resting when I need to, working when I can.



There's something else, though. I've been trying to do the writing for Sindrel Song, as I wrote about previously, but I've felt more than a bit aimless about it all because the game has been quite aimless from the start, for the most part. There's a deeply-planned setting, but no real story. Basically, Glimmer wakes up into the world, and in the first conversation, it's established that she lacks knowledge of the world that other sindrels' symboliotes grant them innately, her symboliote is nasty by nature, she's going to die - like all sindrels do - in six days, but Hearth can help with that, and it's up to her to decide whether or not she wants to live forever. And she can make that decision by singing songs with the others. Or something.

It's overwhelming, unclear, and a generally poor narrative. All telling, no showing, during a point where the player will be unlikely to absorb it all anyway. I like the ideas that are explored, but it feels like a bunch of story elements all dumped in a pile at the start, while the rest of the game is relatively empty, or pointless. There's no goal, nothing to propel players forward other than completing the next stage for gameplay reasons.

So, I've been rethinking it, and I've come up with something that I feel works better. It'll require a bit more work, but not all that much, and I think it'll make the experience into a much more coherent and meaningful whole. More engaging, less confusing. Or at least that's the hope.

I've done this before. Way back with MARDEK 3, I remember being almost ready to release it, but I had this same feeling that it didn't really 'work'. It's ages ago now so I don't remember what I had originally, but I think it involved the character Sslen'ck being mysteriously possessed by multiple elemental crystals for no good reason, without any foreshadowing, and you had to fight him at the end or something? I don't know. It was stupid anyway. I mean, why that character?? He barely had a role at all! I don't remember what role Qualna played in that version, but I do faintly remember adding the Clavis character after having this realisation, and the bit in the throne room at the end too, I think? And the silly bit with the possessed king earlier in the story? Basically I had all the areas and mechanics and things already set up and didn't interfere with those, but I added these connective bits to link these pieces together, which I feel the experience would have been so inferior without. So that's what it feels like I'm doing again here.

I'd describe in detail what I have in mind, but that'd just be spoilers! I do want to write about the gist though, to motivate myself if nothing else.

I'm not introducing anything new as such, it's more that I'm laying out what I've already got differently, stretching it out into an actual story instead of just dumping it all at the start.

Before, for example, the concept of 'six days' was important, mentioned a lot in dialogue. It originated in the other game I half-heartedly barely-worked-on about sindrels, where there were six gameplay days and you had to achieve your life's goals during that time, because winter came after those six days and wiped out all life in Carna. It played a gameplay role by limiting the player's lifespan so then they could be reborn many times, each time as the opposite sex, since the point of that game was to explore both male and female paths through life, their differences, benefits, comparative obstacles. Sindrel Song isn't timed in the same way, because that'd only detract from gameplay rather than adding to it, though the sort-of aim for the narrative was for Glimmer to integrate herself into the group of wintrels during her six days so then she could decide for Hearth to spare her from death, as he had the others, by helping her survive the winter. Since it was untimed, though, completing all six stages would suddenly take you to the end of your six days and to Glimmer's choice to live forever or die... probably? I never actually had an ending at all, which is why I've felt stuck with this for a while.

Now, though, I think it'd be better to more formally base the game around the six days, narratively if not in terms of actual time-based gameplay. There are six characters, and it makes sense to set each song on one of the six days, so it's like Glimmer is spending a whole day with each person. I sort of planned this from the beginning anyway, but I suppose I forgot about it, never did much with it. Each day would be marked by chapter header text dominating the screen, saying "DAY 4 - 3 DAYS REMAIN", or whatever. Chapter separators. That'd give it a much clearer feeling of forward progress towards a goal, I feel.

More importantly, though, the whole point before was about Glimmer having a 'broken mind' which was her own worst enemy, which was meant to be a subtle-as-a-brick-to-the-face metaphor for mental illness, or even just for the inner critic that so many people have. But Glimmer herself barely spoke or had a personality, and the 'nasty comments' of her symboliote were heavy-handed, unnatural, and were unlikely to be enjoyable to engage with as a reader.

Now, I think it'd be better if the game were more clearly Glimmer's story, and that the relationship between her and herself was more clearly and thoroughly explored. So, I'm intending for Glimmer to have a 'home' area, a node on the map where she'd awake into the world at the beginning, and where she'd have to return to at the end of each stage - the end of each day - to rest and regenerate (in lore terms, she'd have to ingest nectar, to eat, essentially, and sindrels don't sleep because their lives are so short, but they do need to rest). During these periods, she'd engage in solitary reflection and contemplation, talking with her own mind in the same way we'd engage with - or be engaged by - our own minds when we're on our own.

Previously, Glimmer herself was meek, and her mind was just unpleasant; it'd say things like "who'd want to be friends with YOU?", and she'd say aloud to her conversation partner "nobody would want to be my friend anyway". It was supposed to be what it's like to have a dark voice inside that makes you think unpleasant things, but that's not exactly how it works, is it? Few of us would actually openly say the kinds of things our minds make us think about ourselves.

A recurring motif in Sindrel Song is night and day, purple and yellow. You can toggle between night and day musical modes (or dark and light; I seem to alternate between one pair of names and the other), purple and yellow are all over the place, Glimmer has purple skin and blonde hair... They're used constantly in dialogue to refer to life and death, which is particularly relevant to sindrels because they're more like plants than mammals: they're cold-blooded (technically they don't have blood at all, they have something more like sap), and they rely on the light to catalyse the nectar they ingest, meaning that (prolonged) darkness literally spells death for them. Their world turns dark during the winters, and light during the six days (with brief periods of semi-darkness to demarcate the six 60-hour 'days'). They also wake up with an adult consciousness, so they remember transitioning from a dark void to the light of life.

So I think it'd be interesting for Glimmer to be cheery by nature, but with a dismal mind which has clashing views. Light and darkness. I don't mean like separate personalities, but it's like how someone in the real world might want, on some conscious level, to be a happy person, they try to be positive and all that, but their mind is a constant critic, getting them down. Glimmer as a character has had the AFJ runes since I came up with her years ago, and she was always meant to be defined by this contrast, where she has some happy-clappy New Agey upbeat "Pollyanna" attitude as a direct result of inner turmoil, thinking that the way to overcome your inner demons is wear a constant forced smile. I thought originally that she'd develop that attitude over the course of this game, with help from some of the other sindrels, but that probably wouldn't work anyway, because it'd require some of them having more important roles than others in order for their philosophies to have that kind of an impact... Plus there's no context for them to share such things that'd feel natural to me.

What I'm planning at the moment is for this dual self-relationship to develop over the course of the six days, from comically benign to full-blown suicidal self-shattering, so then there can be a climax at the end where her choice about whether to naturally die or live forever makes sense to the player, has some emotional weight, and has no obvious answer.

The challenge now is using what I already have to get that to work. I've already got the sindrels and their songs - especially their order - established, and I'm not going to change that because it'd be way too much work. There's no obvious, piercing emotional catalyst that would make death seem appealing to Glimmer though; no failed relationship, crushing rejection, devastating failure. If anything, everyone's supportive of Glimmer, and you have to complete their songs to progress through the game. Still, mental illness isn't sensible, and people can suffer a lot despite externally appearing to have it all...

So I need to brainstorm a bit and come up with something that I feel would actually be worthy of a memorable climax that the whole game would build up to. Obviously that'll take a bit of time, but I'm mostly just assembling pre-made pieces rather than creating entirely new ones, so it shouldn't take too much time.

It's just fighting through the tiredness that's the hard part...