CUPdate 7: In-Depth Story Outline, Game Progression, & Backgrounds

So I don't have a lot to show this time, but that's because I've been working a ton on the story and overall game progression ideas!

I read through/at least skimmed and wrote notes about, the first 100ish Eventures that I've written for The Nays (which, for the whole story at least, comes out to over 1 million words in total—it was at around 1,094,365 words in February of this year). 

So I basically read everything and really in-depth figured out what I wanted to keep and what I could cut or mark as optional. When I wrote my first story outline for this game, it was based on memory and trying to simplify and cut as much as possible. As I progress through development, I am starting to feel like I wanna bring back as many of my favorite moments as I can, so I'm trying to figure out ways to stay true to the original story with it still being a reasonable length that I can finish in my lifetime. There was a lot of rearranging that happened, and it was pretty challenging to figure out how to simplify, but I spent the majority of my time creating this document that lays out main story points after reading them, and how to make those work in a game format (and apply to this whole new game outline!).

And after all of that, I made a very difficult decision to cut most of what I worked on for this week and stick closer to the structure of my original plan. It's hard because I want to keep so many of those moments, but I decided that in order to make this shorter, I have to keep those cuts. I did bring back a few of my favorite scenes because I think they would fit really well with things, but overall, I did make the ultimate decision to cut a lot of this work so that I can keep the original story separate from this game. It'll still be there and if I ever finish writing it, it'll be a story with story beat drawings, or maybe even a comic, who knows! But what I do know is that it's a different project than this game. So in the end, I did end up making some changes to some of the structure, like moving Mr Dude World to later in the story and to be more of its own arc, because that's when most of the time travel stuff starts to happen.

And earlier on, I started to plan out the overall game progression and what the game loop would be. So in a very general sense, it will likely be that there's an introduction to the location, then the player has the option to go on missions, play games/do activities, or social hangout events with the characters. From there, I started to boil it down to what game mechanics will be needed. And I started to break down which tutorials I'll need to create so the player can understand how to play through each of these. I started to split them up by Eventure so the player won't be bombarded with tutorials at any given time, since I know that's something that usually overwhelms me in games.

Then once I had a more solid order, I started to plan out all of the missions. I'm sure there will be more that are less involved and not really as story-related, but these are all of the optional and required ones that I thought up so far.

And along the lines of making more Notion pages, I made one for the "Nays Hangouts", which are basically the social events that happen. I tried to set aside one per Nay per Eventure, some are combined, and then some I know I'll come up with later on. Generally, I'm planning for these to either be flashbacks to flesh out their pasts, or little social events that happen between characters in the present day. These were just ones I knew I wanted to show and had ideas about right now. I still need to go back and read some Eventures that I've already written and add those flashbacks and story moments in too. And I'm sure I'll come up with a lot of them, especially for the main characters, as time progresses.

Another thing on the writing side is that I ended up spending some time learning Google Scripts for Google Docs. So now my conversion from mIRC logs to Google Docs to Ink scripts to RPG Maker MZ message boxes can go much more quickly! Still working on some of the details to make it work even easier, but it's in a good spot for now.

But other than writing, I did do a little bit of drawing and game design, but not a lot. I started this CUPdate off by continuing to draw the interior maps and place them in the game, so I could start to populate this World. The only one I did for this CUPdate was the Braves/Ragger house, which was quite a challenge since it's a big place. Luckily I had references that I made in The Sims to make this go a bit more smoothly.

I made some small updates to my dialogue test, including a new text box (to make the lines cleaner) and text color for when characters are thinking. I also added a custom placeholder animation for the continue button to replace the default arrow at the bottom of the box. And some small updates like the top of the name box shape and resizing character faces for this test. Overall small tweaks, but I think they'll help enhance the look!

I also tested out a few different thought bubble styles initially, based on feedback from last time. I sneaked in some feedback early on from my friends and we all decided that the D one below looks best, and it turns out that's one of the easier ones to implement, so I went with that style.

So again, not a lot to show, but I am making major progress on my story, and it's starting to feel much more involved, which is a plus! I'm planning to figure all of that out to really help me figure out more game mechanics and ways to turn my story into a game, so stay tuned for more visual progress next time!