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Weekly Update - Narrative Themes, Intro Script Sketch, BGM Interactions

3 years ago1,854 words

I refreshed my memory about the story, wrote out some themes I'm intending for the narrative to explore, and wrote a potential script for the intro that I'm still not sure about! I also experimented with a suggested way of integrating music into battles, though I'm not sure about that either since it doesn't work with the existing battle track (included here)!

Some weeks, I'm really productive! This was not one of those weeks! My productivity is tightly tied to my confidence about what I'm doing, which has been low recently as I'm still struggling with indecisiveness about the things I talked about last weekend: how to handle the musical resonars, and how to write the intro.

I've posted a few times on ∞ my Patreon ∞ throughout the week to try and work through some ideas, so most of what I'll be saying here is a summary of what I posted there.

Reminding myself of the story

I started the week by making a planning document (similarish to the one I included with the Steam version of MARDEK) for Atonal Dreams' story. Or rather, I already did that months ago, before I started, but I revisited it and refined a few things. I'm happy with the overall structure! It has some interesting turns and the overall scope shouldn't be unmanageable once I get through these annoying snags and finalise the gameplay mechanics.

I realised while writing this that I want to rename the miasma and monsters, since the former was stolen from FFXII apparently and the latter is too boring for such a key gameplay feature (but then again Pokemon was - and still is - called 'Pocket Monsters' in Japan!). I've been working through a few ideas, but nothing's clicked just yet!

Narrative Themes

While trying to plan why certain events would happen, I thought about the major meanings that will be threaded through the story. While I don't want the story to be preachy or anything, having clear motifs helps things feel more deliberate and less like a bunch of stuff just randomly happening. Plus it helps with my creative decision-making!

I'll just paste the bulk of my Patreon post about that here:

Intro Structure

∞ Last week ∞, I wrote about how in the nightmare intro, Collie attempted to use a skill called 'Salvation' while getting interrupted by The Beast's beatings, eventually leading to Savitr coming to save her.

I didn't like how that made Collie into a helpless victim; it wasn't really fitting for the character or the story I wanted to tell.

So I revised it. Rather than trying to summarise it, I'll just include the sketchy, unrefined script I wrote here:





This would guide my writing rather than be added to the game as-is!

It's meant to show that the Blight Wolves are bandits, stressing the 'wild beasts' angle, so they 'hunt' travelling merchants etc to steal their food... though Mania pointed out that it makes them look like cannibals, which I'd need to clarify isn't the case!

I planned from the beginning for Savitr to be famous in some sense, so Collie would have heard of him before and would be giddy about being paired up with him; there are a bunch of story reasons I want this to be the case. Early on, I had her mention writing about his adventures in a notebook, but I had the idea a while back that maybe she'd have read some comics about the exploits of 'The Splendid Savitr'.

Comics existing in a fantasy setting like this is unconventional, but what they are and the basic meaning behind them are well-understood and in vogue at the moment, plus I felt it could be funny to draw a comic cover starring Savitr in this kind of style:



I imagine they'd have been produced partly as propaganda by the Seraphim, but primarily in the same way that fantasy bards sing songs about wondrous heroes. Savitr doesn't like the depictions of him at all because he's not vain - he's just trying his best to do the right thing despite his deeper insecurities - so I find the discrepancy between Collie's love of them and Savitr's distaste interesting.

Maybe having Collie's life changed around entirely by a comic book seems a bit silly, but I personally love the idea that a narrative could provoke such a huge change, by exposing her to something she'd never even thought about before. It underlines the value that narrative media can potentially have (and makes me feel better about wasting my life making such things myself!!).

This intro is meant to be a dream, so it's a kind of mish-mash of memories from different parts of her life. I'm uncertain whether that's the best start for a story; perhaps it'd be confusing? But haven't a bunch of other stories done similar things? Probably??

I feel this would work better than her just singing for someone else to come and save her... but it's not without potential issues.

I saw ∞ this tweet ∞ from an unfamiliar developer with a large following this morning:



I've had to think a lot recently about how to present tutorial features, especially after the first alpha test showed me how much people can potentially miss if it isn't explicitly introduced to them. Some people didn't realise that taming was a possibility, for example.

It's why starting with the Pierce battle - which introduced attacking, taming, and controlling tamed monsters - seemed an appropriate intro to the gameplay... but then this additional intro before that muddies things a bit, since Collie is physically attacking here. Would this put into players' heads the expectation that this was what the game was about, leading to frustration when things changed up later?

HMM.

I don't know! Maybe I need to revise some things?

Musical Interactions

I also talked last time about concerns I had about how to integrate the musical instruments with the battle background music. A couple of people suggested having the instruments activate additional instrument parts of the BGM, and I was curious to see what that would be like, so I experimented:



I feel... ambivalent about it, I suppose. In some ways it's both less intrusive and more immersive, and I like the interplay between the player and the BGM, but in this case I had to compose additional parts for a piece of music that wasn't written with them in mind. A piece that was driven by the violin - Savitr's instrument - meaning that his additions were drowned out.

There are other issues, too. The instrument bits fade in and out quickly, which is unsatisfying. A couple of people suggested things like having the music play throughout the character's turn, but I can't imagine that'd make much difference since it's the fade out that's the issue... or having methods to build up these tracks so they stay playing, but that's a fundamental shift to the gameplay.

It might work better if the music was specifically composed with this in mind - like if maybe it was purely or at least primarily piano - but it'd take time to compose such a piece, for one thing, and it'd be a shame to lose the two pieces I already have (a battle track, and Pierce's battle music) because I like them a whole lot! Here's the current battle track, for example, which I composed after the alpha test to replace one I already posted months ago (there are a couple of small tweaks compared to a version I posted on Patreon a few weeks ago):



So I don't know. Maybe just going using quick melodies for playing instruments would work best. Also this method took way more work, so that'd be much easier from a development standpoint!



I've written three blog posts this weekend! That's silly! Probably!! There's this one, plus:

∞ A look at a game from my childhood that I replayed, Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus ∞, and

∞ A personal post about some non-game piano music I've been composing lately ∞ that I love but which I don't expect anyone else to be interested in (unfortunately).