Alora Fane

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!!!

8 COMMENTS

Tama_Yoshi82~4Y

As for porting your API, that might be *that* hard actually. Since they're tools they could simply be executable that live separate from everything else. I'm not sure how one would integrate external character models efficiently, but you should know about JSON.

JSON is basically the simplest possible technology in terms of sending information between APIs; it's very popular nowadays and we've used it extensively at my job. Essentially, all "information" is converted in a javascript object - meaning it's all a text file. If a field of information isn't important to the client, then they can just ignore it. It's a nice way to make away with platform and technology quirks. Any semi-popular technology should have libraries to consume and produce JSON.

As for the suicidal loneliness... I hope you're still looking for professional help!

Tobias 1115~4Y

I do know how I could make it more portable using something like that or XML to save data rather than a MySQL database like I'm using currently, but it'd require recoding essentially everything, which is non-trivial. It's why I'm thinking about it for the future, but can't do it in an afternoon on a whim.

I've not looked into professional help. I've talked before about how limited its usefulness feels - and has been in the past - for my circumstances, plus the covid situation adds a ton of hurdles. I don't even talk to my cancer doctor in person; it's all phone calls now, and talking to a therapist over the phone is an idea I find viscerally repellent for a whole bunch of reasons. I'd rather just endure it for now and think about that when the world returns to normal (if it even ever does!). I need to see a dentist too, which also isn't an option.

(I bet therapists will be swamped once people can freely see them again considering how this has been affecting so many people!)

mount201046~4Y

Yeah, as a fellow mentally ill person I also question the usefulness of therapists since they can only give you advice to improve your life which is pretty hard if you didn't have that motivation in the first place due to environmental factors or whatnot; it's annoying, really. That's not to say you can't try, though.

Perhaps try to look into the environmental factors yourself? I know the stereotypical advice of things like "get more rest" (note: rest isn't lying in bed browsing Reddit - I know that because I do that) and "drink more water" seem like things said by people who don't actually care for you but I find that if I do drink more water and get more rest I do feel a little bit better even if my life's problems aren't solved. But at least I can approach them with a clearer head? I don't know - I get the idea that these are "small things you can control". Things that make you feel worse (apart from the large unresolved issues in your life) can be as silly as how bright your computer screen's monitor is or the overhead lighting or something. But yeah.

Perhaps try to look into the environmental factors yourself? I know the stereotypical advice of things like "get more rest" (note: rest isn't lying in bed browsing Reddit - I know that because I do that) and "drink more water" seem like things said by people who don't actually care for you but I find that if I do drink more water and get more rest I do feel a little bit better even if my life's problems aren't solved. But at least I can approach them with a clearer head? I don't know - I get the idea that these are "small things you can control". Things that make you feel worse (apart from the large unresolved issues in your life) can be as silly as how bright your computer screen's monitor is or the overhead lighting or something. But yeah.

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Tobias 1115~4Y

That to me just sounds like a lot of stress with no gains! Being known for web dev is something I'd consider a burden rather than anything positive... at least for the moment. Maybe I'll feel differently in the future.

The way I've revised things, I've already written a motivation for why Pierce came up with his imaginary girlfriend (or rather, the motivation actually preceded the idea). Maybe he could have a mother somewhere, but she'd be relegated to a background NPC rather than someone he often mentions!

LotBlind53~4Y

Call it "insta-Enlighten".

Tinderwood13931~4Y

I can most certainly connect with the idea of feeling trapped. There are times where I feel like I have no control of my life, like someone else is controlling it, and I become physically unable to do things. I've tried to reach out and get help, but it doesn't seem to have done much, since nobody seems to understand that my brain isn't allowing me to do things. It's... difficult to explain to people, so I can see why you have trouble reaching out.

I'm interested in seeing where you take the script when you finish writing it. On an unrelated note, have you considered releasing your game on more than one platform? People have mentioned Steam, but what about the Virtual Console? That would increase sales further, I feel, and would help your game reach a broader audience. The only problem I see there being is all the hurdles you might have to jump through.

Anyway, I hope you can cheer up and wish you the best of luck!

Verdusk21~4Y

I don't know enough about the lore to know if it would even work, but I wonder if Collie could threaten it the Blight Wolf way in a slip of the tongue, because she used to be a Blight Wolf and may not be used to the Seraph way yet, and it's probably easier to make a violent sounding threat using a Blight Wolf reference.