Weekly update #6

Art

This is the June monthly.

"Stacked short"

High resolution

Dev spotlight

The development of Teraurge has mostly consisted of scripting and writing, which applies even for V3. So in this post I'm going to talk a little about how my writing process works

Creating a character for any fiction starts with an idea. For me, it's often a character trait or a body shape that I want to include in the game. For example, Shyni was born purely out of the idea of making a short stack for the game. This sounds shallow, but characters in general are not required to be born fully formed. Another example is Nkaanmykiunsuns, where the idea was simply to have someone who was very lanky and antisocial.

After I have an idea for the character, I often draw them a few times and imagine interactions between them and the PC. The goal is to figure out if I find them interesting to justify taking them further. This usually leads to an interesting scene or scenes that I then fully draft out. After I have figured out a good scene for the character, I go backwards to create an intro for them, and then work towards a situation where the scene can happen.

The hardest part of writing a character for me is filling in all the connective tissue after I've figured out isolated scenes and conversations. The frustrating thing is that they aren't even technically or artistically challenging to create. It's just extremely hard to avoid going on side tangents in dialogue or adding detail exposition when I'm supposed to be constructing a very straightforward scene. This procrastination-esque thing has actually given birth to some of my favorite writing in the game. I don't really know how to feel about it. The tangents are so unstructured and unnecessary it's hard to call it actual work, but in the end I think it has affected the final product in a positive way.