More Story!

Today me and LVUER agreed on some terms (his terms for working for free), which is pretty great :)
LVUER is more used to drawing moe and "bright" themed pictures rather than the dark theme of Amodos and especially Yrja's Torment. I'm hoping he'll use the time working on the concept arts for me to practice making darker characters. It's ok for him to use the concept arts as practice for doing something he's not used to, because concept art is after all never "final", if it can be compared to anything it's "guidelines". It gives us a rough or good idea of what things are supposed to look like in the game. I imagine the concept arts will also serve well as placeholders, and they will be priceless as part of design documents. (Seriously, working with images and working with images is just... worlds apart. It's like "Dead vs Undead")

I got sidetracked quite fast from making templates into detailing Yrja's story, these flow chart things in Articy are so fun to work with, i could do this all day! I see now that without this tool, making a SFW and NSFW version of this game would've probably been a near impossible task, but with this it's easy for me to plot SFW and NSFW routes and decide how exactly to censor content in the SFW version. (As i've said before though, the SFW version will still contain a lot of mature content, it's just that instead of detailed sex scenes there will just be implied ones and some added content like for example, violence to keep the feel of the story despite skipping the sex scenes.)

I progressed a lot with the story in Yrja's Torment today, and let me tell you, chapter 1 is incredibly complicated, i'm really relieved that i didn't start working on it past the very start of it without using this flowchart tool. All of these story branches...

Right now there's start -> 2 choices -> linear -> 2 choices -> 2 Scenes depending on first choice

After this it gets even more complicated, one scene will offer you to get back on the other path, whereas that other path is linear. If you don't go on that path you get a different scene which also happens to be a bit milder.

And i'm only just getting started!! I truly would've been in over my head if i hadn't bought this tool! i can see that clearly now.

The color control is great, it allows me to put various colors on the flow fragments so i know the nature of the fragment to keep track of the flow. For example extreme/abuse scenes can be colored red, sad scenes are purple, heart-warming scenes can be green. Neutral scenes (equal parts good and bad, or whatever) can be blue.. i'm just coloring it off the top of my head, and it comes quite naturally. The richer the color, the more extreme the emotional flow.

And as a writer pointed out to me, it's important not to jump too much between tension. You must build up to it rather than slamming it into the player's face. Imagine if i started the game with a hardcore loli rape scene... there'd only be 3 kinds of reactions to that i think.

1) Fap & quit.
2) Fap & continue.
3) Never try to play this again.

That is, one would be turned on, the third would just be pure offended, and the rare number 2 would occasionally come along. I assure you i'd be either 1 or 3 depending on my mood. i need to avoid that. Another thing i need to do is keep the story relatively consistent, i can't just jump from a super dark theme to a super bright theme. I can't jump from depressing right into happy, sure... this has been done (Rainbow: Nisha Rokubou no Shichinin for a great example) and a lot of people can accept it too, i have no problem with it. But certain people hate it if the plot takes sudden emotional dives. A trick some authors use to get away with it is time jumps. I will have several time jumps in my story for Yrja, but none of them will massively change the atmosphere, one goes from enslaved to active slave, the other from active slave, then the other jumps will just be to skip over parts of the story (like, do i really need to explain every little detail that happens over Yrja's 6 years of slavery? or just the key events? i think this is pretty obvious, key events are enough so the player can picture the rest if they even want to.)

I seem to know what i'm doing, i really do. Probably to you and definitely to myself, but this is the first time i really try to write a story of a scale larger than 1 page. (ok when i was 13 i tried, but nobody ever even got to read it and then i certainly didn't have any idea what i was doing, the reason i stopped was that my hard drive was formatted by the police because i had porn on it. Not even illegal porn, the most illegal thing on it was fantasy rape, and they just purged my hard drive and everything on it and re-installed my OS because i was a minor. I still remember what it was about though. It was a sci-fi fantasy mix, i also had another story i had canceled which was just a fantasy, but then i realized that it was too much like most anime these days (2 little lovebird protagonists that nothing ever happens between, ring a bell?) ironically enough, at the time i didn't even know what anime was and had never seen anything of the sort. And i knew at the time i couldn't write a proper love story if my life depended on it, i might have a chance now though to bring something new to the love story genre if i tried, but sadly that's not my goal, most love stories i'll write will be lesbian ones, and probably inspired by Kuttsukiboshi... speaking of which i need to add that on my list of inspirations!).

The speed at which i'm progresisng with Yrja's Torment when i just put my mind to it a little bit made me reach a conclusion. It's easier to write a visual novel than create a universe with all the systems and rules required for an RPG to take place in it, sure enough i could get away with not doing that. At least not with as much detail as i am aiming for (i could just add stuff when i think it's needed instead) but my goal is to create a living breathing game, i want to create an experience like morrowind, old everquest, wizardry, elder scrolls arena and the like.

And i'm not taking any shortcut with the stories i write either, i have a lot of knowledge and experiences so i have an extreme (inhuman even) amounts of stuff i can write that others might only dream of, i even have a lot of knowledge and experiences that you simply can't find lying around on the internet or just gain over the course of 2 or 3 years. It's truly amazing how much nonsense has been crammed into my tiny little brain, but there are inveitably times when i need to add content which i have little experiences with (for example, what the hell a woman feels when she has sex, or what emotional effects it has on her to be raped, as for a male... a male in the same situations i can easily relate with, i have more than just the imagination for it too, i have experiences with it, don't tell anyone i said that.)

The reason i didn't just find myself a writer on the Ren'py forums and bring him on board is because the experiences i intend to deliver for my games come from my heart, not theirs. It'll be easier to deliver what i have in mind if i write it myself, and luckily i seem to have a talent for writing (to my big surprise, but i guess it shouldn't be a surprise since i write walls of text like you'll find in this blog at least once per day.)

I've come to know that my strongest point though is design, rather than writing or programming. And i am flirting with the idea since this is a relatively big project to get a programmer to work with me too at a later development stage, i have a lot of friends that could do it, i have one in particular in mind but his ego might be a bit too big to work "for" me. We'll see when the time comes (It most likely will. I also suspect i might be able to convince some great programmers from the Ren'Py forums like nyaatrap which is one of my inspirations to work with me if i wave my design documents into their faces, but i doubt i'll be able to get any programmer to work for me for free, so i'll probably code alone for 2 or 3 games.)

There was one tempting story branch i thought of today though. I'm kind of sad i have to pass on it... or do i? No i can make that work out, just long as it ends badly (since Yrja's status in the main game doesn't allow it) I'll have to consider it though. But the reason i want to make it is because i think it's important the player gets a choice here... Wow, i can't even imagine doing this without articy (it's complicated enough in articy, and thanks to articy it's as simple as it could possibly get.)

This story is indeed pretty complicated though, especially this first part of it. I'm writing the order of events and brief descriptions of the events (high level) and Layer 1: Game (I'll have all games in the same design document, Articy makes it easy. really (as long as all the games happen in the same universe).

so yeah
Layer 1: Game (and timeline)
Layer 2: Chapters
Layer 3: Chapter Overview (High-Level list of events)
Layer 4: Events (Stuff that happens over this part of the story and in what order),
Layer 5: Scenes (More detail about the scenes that happen in relation to the event, sometimes it's just one scene, sometimes it's 5, it depends on how many time the location changes and whatnot)
Layer 6: Dialogue & other Details (Deeper explanations in the form of notes about what's going down, and the character dialogue)

See all these layers? i'm mostly going to layers 3 & 4 right now. 5 & 6 won't be done until later.

In some cases i can skip layer 5 because level 4 has enough information on some simple/short scenes. (Most of the prologue is like that)

What i've come up with though for most of chapter 1 looks pretty interesting, ironically and quite sadly this first part of the game is going to be the hardest to write, both keeping the narrative right, and the fact that it's just raw mental "torment" to do some of the scenes.

One really convenient deal is that i can use a so called presentation system, and experience the game from the players perspective (sort of) by going through my "flowcharts" one node(or fragment) at a time, this will be particularly useful to keep track of how the game "feels" to the player, for example looking at the dialogues and in what order events happen. I'll get to experience the game on my own to better finalize the dialogues and narrative.

I've seriously been giving it some thought... and i kind of wanted to convert this game to a third person perspectiv e rather than you playing as yrja, you just get to observe her and influence her... but the amount of choices in the story kind of rule out the possibility of doing so. That is... i can't justify all the choices you're going to make for her if you aren't really playing as her. Why would you get to decide


I spoke a bit with my artist today, seems we have some massive cultural differences, not weird because we're pretty much worlds apart (distance-wise) but seems like an interesting fellow, he actually told me why you can't buy happiness with money... or made me realize what stops it from happening, i mean what REALLY stops it. You'll never stop and think "i have enough money".

But by cultural differences i mean he lives in one house with a huge family (many people) i live in the rather big double garage of my mothers house alone, but inside the house there are only 4 other people. I almost feel guilty for this luxury i've got here, and how ironic that people think living in a garage or basement is somehow "low" or just bad somehow, they think it's degrading? when i think about it in this context, i finally know i'm NOT crazy for liking my life. The people who are in the same situation as me and are depressed, THEY are the crazy ones... :)