DevLog #2 - The Story

Before we started working on gameplay mechanics in depth, I wanted to figure out and flesh out the story first. The story is a major part of the game, so I wanted to make sure it won't feel like it was haphazardly slapped together to fill in the blanks between gameplay. 

Theme

Our first step was to find a theme that would work with the horror genre. The first iteration of the game was set in the future in space, but after working on it for some time, we realized that it grew too much to fit the criteria of "fairly simple, not too complicated, fast to make". After some thinking, we've decided to put that project on a shelf for now and go back to it once we have more experience, time and funds.

After scrapping that idea, we were back to the drawing board, brainstorming new ideas. Funny enough, our biggest struggle at this stage wasn't really coming up with any idea, but trying to keep it simple. Both me and Boba2 are avid readers and gamers, so coming up with a story wasn't a big deal. However, after years of reading everything from Lovecraft to isekai novels it was a bit hard to not go overboard with plot twists and secrets. 

And don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with grandiose stories with epic battles and Michael Bay amount of explosions. There's, however, a time and a place for them and stories like that require a good amount of skill to make them not shi... bad.

The reason I'm so stubborn about keeping it simple is that it's our first commercial project. Whenever you're starting something new, it's really important to see it through to the end. There are countless stories about abandoned projects and games that never came to be, because of the scale and how ambitious they were. 

"A smart person learns from their mistakes, but a wise person learns from mistakes of others". 

Back to the topic. After doing some research and discussing all the possibilities, we decided to go with modern day supernatural mystery. To make it easier for myself (or so I thought) I wanted to set the game in an abandoned village deep in the forest. My reasoning was that building a natural environment would be much easier to handle and, thanks to the Megascans library, I wouldn't have to worry about models and props (Spoiler: It wasn't :|). 

Drafting concepts and characters

With having a theme decided, our next task was to build a backstory for events in game. One of the rules I usually follow whenever I have to come up with a story or design is to first work out the most broad concepts and only then go into detail on each of them. Just like an illustrator blocking out simple shapes of their drawings, we created a mind map of keywords and key ideas we wanted to have. 

From there we went to work on characters significant to the story. At this point it's important to mention that we have decided to not include any friendly NPCs in our game. There were multiple reasons behind it, but the most important one was how time and cost consuming it would be to make non-derpy characters. Horror games rely heavily on atmosphere and having Oblivion NPCs would be an easy way to turn it into comedy instead. There is a charm to that derpiness, but for this game I wanted to make something more serious.

Another reason to not include NPCs was lack of money for VA. Just like with animation and model quality, cheaping out on voice acting is an easy way to end up with a meme game. I believe that if you're doing something, then either do it well or don't do it at all. It was also a way of challenging myself to figure out a way to tell the story indirectly.

NPCs not physically present in the game doesn't mean that they can't be present at all. Games like " What Remains of Edith Finch" and "Firewatch" proved that it's possible to have compelling characters with interesting stories even when you can't see or interact with them. 

The drafting part is made with the free version of FigJam, which is simply an online whiteboard. You can create diagrams, flowcharts, timelines, family trees, you name it. Useful when you want to work on ideas without overflowing your home with sticky notes or spending half of your income on printer ink and paper. You can also collaborate with others online. You can also export your white board as .png or .jpg and few others.

For writing proper documentation we're using Obsidian.md. It's not your typical alternative to Word, but it works great when you want to build a personal database or if you have to work on big number of files. There's also a good amount of plugins to customize it even further. All that for a hefty sum of 0 USD  ☜(ﾟヮﾟ☜).

It's not a sponsored post btw. I just wanted to include those two as both apps have been really useful for us. 

Outro

Fleshing out the story and events made it a lot easier for us in the next step, which was figuring out the layout of the map and the flow of events in game. This part is still WIP, but having a solid basis is allowing us to focus on finding a good spot for the pieces and not having to work on both coming up with them and fitting them all together.