Alora Fane

I've made good progress on writing out the script! Here's a sample!

Feels like I've been quieter than usual for a while! I keep thinking of blog post ideas, but I've been so busy doing a bunch of creative stuff that I've not found the time. I've been playing around a lot with stuff like my old music compositions, compiling a collection of pieces I can actually play on the piano (not many!), working on a couple of other personal projects, and it's left me feeling good for the first time in I don't know how long! Feels so fragile, though; I know I'm going to fall into another pit of depression soon. I'm just trying to enjoy it and use it as best I can while it lasts.

I think a big part of the pleasant feelings comes from generally avoiding all the promotion research side of things; I've barely even looked on Twitter recently, and I certainly haven't done more research! I know I'll need to eventually, but I know it'll ruin my mood so I'm not exactly eagerly diving into that.

I haven't got back to Undertale yet either! I've almost finished Crown Tundra though, after playing it for a short while each day.

In last week's post, we talked a bit about cinematic techniques, like camera panning. Someone said I should pay attention to how this was done in Pokemon Sword, and I did, was was surprised to see that it used panning constantly in dialogue scenes! I found this interesting because I thought I'd paid attention before and noticed that it didn't, but I must have been mistaken.

What it did was set a camera angle, then gradually ease over a time period to a second, slightly different position, with the ease speed and curve apparently different for each shot. It also had a cut every other line, though; shots didn't pan from one to the other, but rather each cut was 'softened' or given dynamic energy by having it move slightly afterwards; eg it might cut to a side-on shot at 200% zoom then ease to 210% zoom over 5 seconds. A lot of (most?) shots were extreme close-ups on faces, and the character emotes and general dialogue were very over-the-top to give an energetic, cartoony/anime feeling. There also weren't many lines of dialogue in total.

I feel that worked well for that game, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort for mine! Because it would be quite a bit of effort for not much gain. I have to think about the cost/benefit of everything I do since I'm trying to do it all myself, so in this case I think I'll just leave it as it is and see if people are okay with it once they can actually play the game.

The biggest thing I've done this week is starting on writing out the script in its entirety!

I was planning to make a revised version of the Pierce intro scene/battle to show how things have improved since last week, but it's a lot of effort and I'm not completely happy with what I've got for that scene yet and don't want to have to redo it again because I'll surely edit this later, so I'll just show you the text version:

I probably gave the impression before that Collie was going to be some libidinous pervert, constantly making sex jokes, but from writing what I have of her so far, she only ever really hints at it, and only rarely. There's more about her association with the Blight Wolves, with her admiration of Savitr, and the dog angle, though I imagine I'll continue cleaning up everything I already have as I go on. There's a pervy (and not particularly funny) line here that's crossed out because I don't like it and need to come back to it later.

I do like what I'm doing with Pierce though! He reminds me of Undertale's Papyrus, in the sense that he's a boastful-but-lonely eccentric, though his speech patterns are more similar to MARDEK's Muriance, who he's based on (both come from my mind, after all). I liked some of Muriance's dialogue in chapter 3 (the chapter 2 stuff is mostly just 'generic villain'), maybe around the Earth Temple, I think? So if you liked that, then hopefully you'll like this too. If you don't like it, then that's a shame, because I like it quite a bit myself. I keep reading back over it and laughing more than I expect to each time! (Some of his lines here would be from offscreen while the camera's focused on Savitr and Collie; they're not marked or anything though.)

Oh, and monsters 'talk' in the form of these often-stupidly-grotesque and distinctly-worded quips (in purple here), which often are completely at odds with how (cute) they look. It's because monsters are essentially thoughtforms, so they're voicing a (distorted) thought rather than expressing any mental activity of their own. My aim is to have many of them express things that are subtly relevant to the story and characters - the sorts of things you'd understand on a second playthrough - but which might also be familiar to people who are used to being berated by an inner critic. Savitr is prone to guilt because of 'past sins', so he gets a 'PANG' (essentially PTSD) here when this exaggerated, accusing thought pops up.

Also, lore note: I've decided that miasma is a result of Alora Fane's fracturing, so it could be said it's the 'world's blood', which is what Savitr's getting at there. The fracturing left the world with several 'drealmscars', literal wounds between the formed reality and the drealm beyond, through which drealmstuff seeps. That's miasma.

Overall, I'm not entirely happy with what I've got for this specific scene so far - some bits make me embarrassed to show it and afraid of not-undeserved-but-still-discouraging criticism - but I'd say I have a good, rough idea of what I'm doing with the characters. More than I did a week ago!

I started with a plan for all the plot scenes that I wanted to include, so I knew what was going to happen at every stage of the story before turning any of it into the dialogue. I'm in the process now of going through each of these scenes and turning them into actual character dialogue. With each one, I get to know the characters better, and can go back to the previous ones and edit things if I feel they aren't adequately foreshadowed, no longer make sense, or I just have some better ideas that day. I'm intending to write out the whole thing, then do a couple of passes like this to refine everything as much as I can, so chances are this beginning bit will be cleaned up a bit when I do.

I'm just trying to get things down at this point without caring about getting them perfect; the polishing will come later!

I noticed when seeing some (amateur) artists drawing a few years ago that some of them started finely rendering specific details of their drawings before drawing the rest, so they might have a detailed, coloured eye floating in a void because they'd yet to draw the rest of the face. This isn't a a sensible way to do it! Instead, it's best to roughly sketch out the entirety of the piece first and work on it as a whole, refining details gradually across the piece rather than hyper-focusing on one bit.
I've talked about this before, and I think I included a video of a digital portrait process last time? Here's another video of a similar thing (not by me):

Writing and drawing are quite different, but the general idea is the same. I'm still in the process of roughly filling in the canvas, and I'll refine all the details later.

All this is very different to MARDEK, where I wrote everything as I went along, without even really fully knowing what was coming next. I did have plans, like the ones in the documents included with the Steam extras, but from what I remember, I'd write conversations as I needed them, and pretty much never went back to edit old ones once they were done. Unwise!

I feel this approach is much better. Also, it's not taking as long as I thought to write! I originally had 33 conversations planned (though this has since changed a bit), and I wondered whether I'd be able to get through one a day and I'd take a whole month. It was tough to get started because I had to get into the right state of mind, but once I did, I was able to rough out maybe a third of the scenes in this first week? Something like that? I got more comfortable and confident about it the more I wrote and the more sure I felt about the characters and story, too, so it began flowing out more easily and quickly. It's looking likely that I could get a full draft done either next week, or the week after... though I'm hesitant to say for sure because I don't exactly have a good track record when it comes to predictions! (Oh hey, there's a road map thing, isn't there.)

I don't know how long it'll take to plan and then refine the whole script, but it definitely feels like the best thing to be focusing on at this point! Once I've got all the scenes planned out in detail, a lot of indecisiveness about what to do next should be completely eliminated.

Another thing I talked about last week was how I'd revised the structure of the game: at first I planned one big island for the overworld, then I changed that to a series of islands you travelled across the sea between, then I revised that again to be one big island again.

From writing these scenes, what I'm planning now is for the overworld to be made up of four islands: a tutorial island, an island that contains ruins of a Blight Wolves settlement (which provides a great opportunity to explore all the stuff relating to that), an island where Pierce lives (with his Mumsie), and an island that contains the monastery. Maybe there'd be a fifth with optional pure gameplay stuff if there's time and interest later.

Each would also have its own catacombs, like a little dungeon, maybe, which you'd pass by - but couldn't enter - on your first run around, then you'd have to go into them after getting some kind of key at the monastery.

They'll be an archipelago, connected via either artificial or natural bridges of some kind. I don't want to get too bogged down with worrying about adding new mechanics like some kind of boat or mount creature (though I might model one anyway just to stand around on the beach you arrive at, to explain how Savitr and Collie got there... Hmm, how did Ossoum get there though? I never even thought about that before! Wouldn't be fair on the creature if he'd left a mount - a 'paroat' - hanging around on the beach by itself for ages... unless it and Savitr's are friendly with each other and there's a little bit with them and-... I'll have to think about that later!)

What this means is that I could still use the first tutorial island as the demo. It might be around the same length as the ruins in Undertale, maybe? So I'll be thinking about that.

I'm going to keep working away at this script! It's making me quite excited about the game, since these character interactions are something I enjoy probably more than most of the stuff I've done so far (except maybe the music).

As I said, though, this is very much the first rough draft, the sketchy outline, so keep that in mind!!

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