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Weekly Update - Satisfying Length??

3 years ago1,198 words

Does this Mementome introducing the imaginary version of Savitr seem too long to you? And how long do you prefer RPGs to be??

Bleh... I have another brain scan on Monday, so it's been difficult to focus all week with that hanging over me. It's just another routine checkup to see if the cancer's regrowing, and all the previous scans I've had have come back okay... but there's always a chance that this'll be the one where I'm told my life's essentially over, which never stops being a difficult thought to deal with. Plus I've been digestively ill this week on top of that, which has been worrying me since I'll have to sit in a car and then an MRI machine for hours with no escape should that flare up (they do give you a button to press if you need to get out immediately, but I've never had to use it and would be embarrassed about the hassle it'll cause if I did). I may have to postpone the appointment depending on how I feel on Monday... Ugh, I just want to get it out of the way, though.

So because of all that, I didn't do nearly as much as I'd like this week. I did do a couple of things, though.




Since zero people shared their thoughts on last week's post about how I could write the dream version of Savitr such that he seemed like a generic JRPG protagonist, I used my own judgement to come up with the content of this first Mementome, which Collie gets from defeating the Preyloot. When you open the chest, this UI book appears, which you can progress through the pages of (and go backwards if you want).






I was difficult to know exactly what to do with this. The general concept is that of a 'transformative narrative' - something that introduces Collie to new ideas that inspire her to change her life around, to show that narrative works can be more than just distracting entertainment - combined with JRPG tropes that should be familiar to most people who'd choose to play this game.

So I wanted it to sound like a somewhat silly but still interesting super-short story (or at least the beginning of one). But I don't exactly consider myself a writer, so I leaned towards making it 'deliberately bad', kind of (the first line references two cliches, for example)... but then I wonder whether it just comes across as actually bad. Hmm.

I'll need to tweak it anyway; it's very much a first draft! While including these screenshots, I see stuff I could do differently, like having Blight the Betrayer appear directly instead of the weird declaration that it was his work.



In some ways it's similar to the beginning of MARDEK 1, in that it plays with overused tropes in a dream setting before moving onto something hopefully more interesting...

That precedes the gameplay in MARDEK, while Atonal Dreams starts with a short conversation between Collie and The Beast hinting at her story (it is her dream, after all) -



- which is followed by Collie killing the Preyloot - to involve the player in the dark past she's trying to move away from - and only then is this mementome acquired.

As I write this, I'm wondering whether the content of that mementome should just be a MARDEK-style intro instead, with accompanying visuals... but I've already changed everything around several times! And the start with Collie, The Beast, and then her killing the Preyloot makes more sense for her story...

Ehhhh.

One thing I'm concerned about with what I do have there is the length. Someone mentioned on a previous post (or on Patreon, I forget) that reading books like this felt like a chore, compared to the Dreamstones in MARDEK which engaged the mind differently as they felt more like conversations. I can understand that, and I know some players are averse to reading in general (though I wonder why they play genres like RPGs then).

Do you think it's too long? Not long enough?? There's not much text at all per page, but I feel there are definitely bits I could just prune entirely without losing anything too valuable.



I also spent some time refreshing my memory about the plot I've planned, and revising some minor details. The story and setting have been mostly the same since I started planning Atonal Dreams, though for the first time I decided to do a concept sketch of the setting as a whole:



It's a small group of islands called Crescent Rift, where one of Bronzeal's six elemental Sanctrees (the Destruction one) can be found. At the top of the Sanctree, there's a tear in reality, the Drealmscar, through which the Drealm can be seen. I wrote more about it on ∞ my Patreon ∞.

I wonder whether this makes you think "is that it?"... Whether you expected some world-spanning epic or something?

Atonal Dreams has been intended from the start to be a short prequel-of-sorts for the longer Divine Dreams, which would be an adaptation of MARDEK's plot. I originally thought I'd finish it in around six months! Which turned out to be laughably naive.

But keeping the scope manageable has been a key part of the plan from the start. Making something enormous is just impractical, and honestly I'd rather explore a small area in detail than a huge one sketchily.

There'll still be a decent amount of content, I hope. It's looking like I'll have 11 dungeons in total, or 9 unique ones since two are visited twice (different parts of them though). That's more than MARDEK 1+2 had for sure, and I'm not sure how many MARDEK 3 had.

I'm unsure how long each one would take to play through. Half an hour? An hour? Less?? More?!? Obviously it'll be subjective anyway; some people take 50 hours finishing an RPG others finish in around 6.

I saw a poll recently that I annoyingly didn't screenshot and can't find again; I think it was on a Reddit community about JRPGs or something? It asked how long people would prefer RPGs to be... and the lowest-scoring was the 0 to like 30 hours option, with subsequent ones scoring higher and higher. People like long RPGs, apparently.

That's how I used to feel too, as a teenager. I remember games where I'd get to what seemed like a final boss, only to realise that after 30 hours, I was only half way. How exciting!! These days, though, it all just feels so exhausting... I've been playing Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories for maybe around 10 hours now? And while I've been enjoying it, I'm also feeling impatient, like I just want to be done with it. I have other stuff to play! (I'm probably like half way though, if my memory's accurate, which it might not be.)

So I'm curious: