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Atonal Dreams Weekly Update 22 - Story's Finalised!

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago1,254 words

More work on the script - and the tool I made for organising/writing it - this week! I've sorted out all the scenes, though I still need to script them! Pierce might have an 'imaginary' girlfriend rather than a Mumsie now...

Productivity has been frustratingly spotty this week... again. Ugh, this keeps happening, and I've been unable to focus nearly as much as I'd like. I'm probably getting about 3 days of work done in a week, for a bunch of minor life distractions like SUICIDAL LONELINESS (that's calmed down now, but it was affecting me badly for a couple of days last week). Hopefully it's just a passing thing, but who knows. This stage has been taking a lot longer than it really should have because of it! I wish my life was more in order and less dominated by mental and physical illness!

Oh well... I got some stuff done at least.

Last week, I mentioned and showed this tool I'd started building for myself for organising all the lore I've come up with. It looked like this then, after a few hours of building:





As I worked with it, I continued tweaking it as new needs arose; something I couldn't do with some premade tool or program! Now it looks like this:




I combined the scene descriptions and scripts to one page, and instead of having the threads as long coloured rows - which was hard to keep track of and didn't help me understand the connections between things - now I can mark individual script lines with these thread tags.

This works better for a few reasons! Most importantly, I'm motivated to actually write the scripts rather than just descriptive notes, even if they're just placeholders, which gives an easier place to start writing from. I also like including lines that tie to concepts or mean something in the grand scale of things - rather than just being filler or detached comedy or something - so marking the ones that do that is enjoyable for me! Plus I could add this page:




This compiles all the lines tagged with each thread as a linear stream, so I can see how often they're used and how well the thread flows ("Are things brought up in the right order?"). The lines are divided by scene, though nonconsecutive lines from a scene aren't separated, so what you can see here doesn't exactly flow well. But it seems to work at helping me understand things better, which was the whole point of this tool!

I'm unsure how much of the script I should be revealing/spoiling at this point, so I've blurred this screenshot. There's no way you can tell what most of the 'Collie is a dog' lines say! (There aren't really any spoilers here anyway even if you were to decipher it, but still.)

I took some time building this tool - and learning new things in the process, like how to do procedural pie charts in CSS - but it does feel like it was worth it, not just for this project but hopefully for future ones too.



I didn't have the mental energy to respond to comments last week (which I'm annoyed at myself about), but I did read them all. Astreon asked if I'd considered selling this tool, and I had wondered that! I've built a few tools like this, and have thought a few times that it might be interesting to do something with them since I find them so useful myself.

It's not simple to do, though. They're all built as web apps which are probably using mostly outdated technology, so the best way to release them would be as part of a website. Putting them in an app store didn't even occur to me, since they're not really 'portable', and I've never used those kinds of app stores before. Would there be any money in it, or just a lot of effort for no gain? I'm not sure, and haven't looked into it!

Something to think about though.



Regarding actual story stuff, I've written around half of the script so far, though it's just a first draft. More importantly, this week I was able to think my way around a few annoying barriers that had been preventing progress. I knew the big story beats, but there were some specific events which weren't falling into place properly, so now I've revised them and I think everything does!

It's led to a major revision though: previously - and in the script still, as you can see in that screenshot - Pierce mentioned his 'Mumsie', who he still lived with at age 40, to show that he's quite pathetic (and I say this as a 32-year-old man who still lives with his mum) and trapped, naive about the wider world. This imprisonment motif runs throughout the game and is at the heart of several characters' worldviews (Cywren in the Divine Dreams plans is another); maybe it's because I feel trapped in my own life? Could be!

To get a mid-point bit working though, I revised Pierce to have a girlfriend... or so he claims. His dream girl! She's real, he swears! They talk in his dreams! In a world where the imagined manifests physically, an idea like this has a lot more intriguing potential than just living with his mum.

There are a couple of funny lines ("MUMSIE SAID I RUINED *HER* LIFE!") that'd be a shame to lose, but sometimes we have to ∞ kill our darlings ∞!

I could do both, where he lives with his Mumsie and has this dream girlfriend, but it feels redundant. Consider the line right at the beginning, where Collie insults his baldness and he says "Mumsie said my bold head looks very handsome!". If he has this 'imaginary' girlfriend, then he could say that she is the one who thinks his bald head looks handsome... though I also feel it's less obvious what the intended effect of that is to be, since having a girlfriend isn't unusual, so it might just be weirdly awkward instead of comically pathetic. Considerations!

Also, I've revised the line where Collie threatens and insults Pierce, so instead of saying he'd chop his head off, she makes reference to a powerful signature spell that Savitr is renowned for, which is called Enlighten. It's something that I have a lot of ideas for, which I think will be interesting when you see them, though since its name is a familiar word, rather than a distinct name or something explicitly suggesting violence or a weapon, I feel like that line would just be confusing to people new to the game and world. So the word 'magically' is added to clarify it a bit, but then it just sounds really unwieldy. More considerations!

Lots of things like this need to be thought about during the writing process, and will hopefully be cleaned up in further drafts.



I think that's it for this week! I should be able to finish the rest of the first draft of the script over the next week... but I should have already finished it a couple of weeks ago, and haven't due to external factors. So I'll be trying my best, but we'll just have to see how it goes!

Thanks for reading, if you're still keeping up with this! Hopefully it'll all pay off one day!!!