Weekly update #34

Art

I was thinking about changing some aspects of Amnukhel's design, but I don't know, it's a weird fucking design.

Dev spotlight

Character workshop, part 4, episode 2: Revenge of the Prose

It would be too easy and maybe a bit lazy to describe my inability to write as procrastination, but I feel it's also terribly non-descriptive. In my case I often have too little material of the character inside my head in the beginning to proceed, but that material is also developed while writing them. Eh, better get to writing I guess.

Just creating the scripting is easy enough. This fairly short piece of scripting essentially describes 90% of all sex scenes in the game, if you ignore the prose.

Different PC sexes have separate sex scene scripting, this one's for male PC. The middle part is basically on autopilot if there are no player choices inside the scene.

But at what point the sex scenes become a rote repeating thing and what makes them worthwile to actually click through? Can I just repeat the same thing over and over again and just change the pictures? The obvious answer is the contex. Context changes what the sex scene actually feels to our thirsty rat brains. Creating that context is the thing that rattles my poor writing brain, and the context consists of the cool characters and the cool situations, before, during, and after the sex scenes happen.

Huge pet peeve tangent, because writing is hard

It's reasonable and normal to offer the player an option to completely rebuff the situation through dialogue, if the situation allows it as a realistic possibility. This can be a situation where a NPC asks the player to go on an adventure with them to find treasure, and the player character going "Eh seems dangerous, I'll stay here." It's easy to just end the "quest" there and do nothing, but this seemingly natural and reasonable interaction PC has taken means that the player has deleted a chunk off the content from the game.

Rejecting Amnukhel here just cuts out the whole interaction with her. Does this actually make sense in terms of an interesting narrative vs providing sensible options for the player? Furthermore, what would even the rejection cause that would be compelling and reasonable for an alternative narrative?

...Or that's how it's often described by other game creators. There's a simple fix to this thinking. Make the decision of not acting, into a branch in the narrative. If the player doesn't go on the treasure hunt with the NPC, then the world reacts to player inaction and continues to a new point without the player. The NPC doesn't stand there eternally with a question mark above their head and reheat the "quest" with an obnoxious, "Did you change your mind?"

This strange approach to "questing" also means that the "quests" cannot be important to the overall structure of the game, because you cannot facilitate the importance of the quest if you cannot make player to cooperate with it in the first place. You cannot rely on the plot if the player doesn't participate in it and do the plot points. Teraurge is from the very beginning written as not having a "main quest" or a traditional plot structure that the player needs to be shepherded through, as it is just supposed to be a collection of interactions. This sounds like a lazy approach of writing anything, but it also frees the player from the expectation of performing the part of the main character to advance the plot, and it provides flexibility to the branching narratives of separate stories.