quinnk

An Outcry. 2021 Update #1: The Instance of Narration

Added 2021-06-27 17:58:05 +0000 UTC

Hey, Quinn here.

At John M's request (thank you!), for this, our first major 2021 update on An Outcry, we are looking at the game's narrative- how it is written, how the team stays coordinated about it, what narrative documentation there is - all that fun stuff! :>

(Fun for John and I, at least. Us writers have strange pleasures.)

Firstly:

For a good while, An Outcry's development efforts were only minimally coordinated; the narrative wasn't found anywhere except within the confines of my thick skull, and I was so inexperienced with video game development that, at some messed-up point of my life, I felt that was how it should be.

Well, thankfully, as time went on, I learnt more about how to actually make a game rather than just dream about it- and, in the process, realised a game design document would become a necessity; not just for the sake of anyone working on this gamewreck with me, but my own as well.

Ideas are fleeting figures, and it's best to catch them while they show themselves- and these are the ways I do it.

So, the GDD:

Here it is!

Or, well. A picture of it, with some sensitive info removed.

As copied from the developers of Kentucky Route Zero, this GDD also doubles as a developer wiki. Its structure allows readers to quickly jump to any bits they might find interesting or need to consult (when they, ya know, have a task on their hands they need the info for and have no energy to spare for a long dig).

While there are small minutiae of the GDD that are still in flux, most of it is finalised and will not budge; the interesting part, now, is how to solidify the words on the page into a game!

As guidance for myself and the other devs, we mark up the General Summaries of the Routes (which is what we call the two major changes in the game's story caused by the choice at the end of the prologue) upon their realisation in the game itself. Green stands for "complete", yellow for "could use polish", etc.

Like so.

If you've played the demo, you'll find that a good chunk of what you read here is just a smidgeon different from how it is in the game, right? This is because the story goes through two more textual processes before it's in the game:

Writing Dialogue Scripts:

Dialogue scripts are the way I most commonly write the game's narration and character dialogue. Just having a summary as-is in the game would surely be nice for those who are into heavy abstraction or conceptual art, but not anyone else- so we gotta get concrete in here.

Typically, these are .txt files on my computer. I channel a lot of my old experience writing stage play scripts into these, so they read a little bit like a stage play.

Rarely, if I'm simultaneously focusing on a Discord call, but don't want to lose a particularly juicy phrase, I might also write down entire scripts on Discord, in the developer server:

Sometimes, my team reacts to those with emojis, because they are a bunch of sweethearts!

Before these scripts can be implemented - especially if implementation should fall on somebody that isn't myself - it's important they go through another step, though:

Editing, Formatting and Playtesting:

All of this is extremely important. Sometimes I mess up on something research-related, or find a better phrasing, or just accidentally get my foot caught in my mouth. The team and sometimes friends I show my progress to will point this out, or I will realise it myself, and it'll get corrected.

Next up is formatting; RPG Maker 2003 has a simultaneously very powerful and very limited text engine. It maxes out at 256 characters (of which only about 200 can be printed on-screen), but allows for a myriad of style formatting options.

Part of these are pauses, beats, colours, waiting for player-input etc.

Sometimes, text will need to be centered, which is one of those obvious things nowadays that was just too advanced for 2003. When that happens, I need only consult ALESSA BAKER'S TRAUMA HELPER

It's called "Trauma" Helper because Alessa pities my foolishness (also featuring art by Kitet). She made this in an afternoon in exchange for some pizza.

So, from here, I'm formatting the dialogue, for either myself or the wonderful Parsely to implement it.

A scene with Eisen that is now already in the game.

While I am able to intuit most of the text timing and spacing by now, every so often, stuff will fall off the wagon and need to be corrected after the fact during playtesting; errare humanum est, and all that.