Random Mutterings Part 2

In a bit of a continuing history lesson I feel I must continue somewhere with that random spattering of coherent thought that I started yesterday.

For a good while my friend and I put in a fair chunk of work on the project.  Apparently I had all the talent for writing between the two of us (I highly doubt that's evident from this work, but, as usual, I digress) and consequently began work on the bulk of what would be the game proper. 

Initially speaking the project had no dialogue, it was written more as a sort of narration than an actual "story" [in the strictest sense of the word].  We described what the player would see, where the player would go, and what the player was expected to do in terms of interaction with the environment and in any given scenario.  To an extent this worked, I suppose.  It gave a rough sense of a game and freed us from trying to sound impressive vis-à-vis dialogue, but at the same time it was also quite limiting because it was harder to get to know the characters simply because they weren't talking.

We had an extremely large cast of characters for the game.  I believe that inspiration came from Final Fantasy VI (3 for you silly people who didn't bother paying attention to the series) because that game has a MASSIVE cast of characters, but at any given time you only played a handful of them in your party.  Developing that many characters in such a way that each felt unique was a task unto itself and one I'll probably tackle another day.  We're talking story here people!

So with such a large cast of characters we had to develop the initial outline of how we were going to introduce them.  This was where we went back to the whole chapter system that I touched upon yesterday.  We found a good way of dividing up each of the characters into each of the chapters, and I think we had 6 or 7 distinct chapters where we introduced at least 2 characters per chapter.  At some point I'm sure I'll go back and begin revisiting all this because I want to eventually put more of the story here.  If nothing else I want the story to get told in some form.

We had already designed our world map by the time we go around to introducing more than the initial 3 characters.  The map was both the product and the reason for our storyline.  In a sense we built the map based on what we had written as well as written what the map shaped the world to be.  It's extremely useful to have a visual picture of where your characters came from and where they are all going.  It allows you to look ahead and see where you want people to meet up with each other.  I can honestly see now why every fantasy author I read always has a map of their world at the beginning.  You think it's just there as something cool and to be a perk for the reader, but I personally believe the author did it for themselves just so they'd know where the hell everybody is at any given time.

The first chapter was the largest; we introduced 3 characters in it!  The first, of course, was the main character.  After wandering through the desert for a time, and being close to collapse, she would stumble upon a caravan of traders [and the like].  From there you would meet the second character who would join your party.  Essentially she was the medic of the caravan and was the first person the main character would see upon opening her eyes after passing out in the desert.  The caravan, you would later learn, was on its way to a nearby town with goods and supplies.  Along the way you would meet the third person who would join the party: a rather eccentric individual who seemed to know a bit too much about technology for his own good.  Together, the three of them would reach the town with the caravan only to find it burned to the ground and occupied by imperial soldiers on the look out for...something.  That something you would later learn was the main character.  Fleeing for her life, the main character would leave with the medic and scientist and escape, and thus the first chapter would end.

All of the chapters were similar to this, each person who joined would have one reason or another to leave their lives behind and go someplace else.  Eventually all of these characters would meet up and realize they all shared a common foe.  It's stereotypical, I know, but there are only so many contrived devices you can come up with to provide a reason as to why people would want to get together.

At some point two things happened.  First, the project became largely my own.  Up to a certain point the storyline had been largely a cooperative venture between my friend and me, but after we moved to different places the corroboration mostly ceased and I was left to do the majority of the work.  The second thing that happened was that I realized that I needed to start including dialogue in all of this.  I believe it was around the fourth chapter that I decided to start including dialogue.  All of a sudden the page count of my word documents ballooned into a much larger beast and it began to feel like I was writing more of a novel than a video game.

I suppose, at some point, it became more of a novel to me than a video game.  Being that I was largely on my own at this point, it was hard to keep motivated in terms of writing a complete game.  Which is why, for obvious reasons, all progress came to a stop.  I tried to resurrect it later on and started turning it kind of into a novel.  I had the prologue written that covered the escape from this world into another and the death of the main character, but that was it.  My hard drive is littered with failed starts of stories.  It's a failing that, as I said last time, I find it difficult to finish what I start many times.  Perhaps that's because I haven't really found something I truly enjoy, and maybe at some point I will, but for now, I'm hoping that this "project" will encourage me to go back and revisit things and perhaps expand upon it.  For my own part, I've never really envisioned something this large before, and perhaps that's indicative of something important.

As I'm fond of saying it lately: time will tell.