After some more planning and light writing we’ve begun to play around with the currently finished chapter to make it align with the new design and loop. Can’t say it works for sure quite yet, for I haven’t playtested yet, but the iteration has been quick thanks to the tools.

I’m still getting used, honestly. Like, so much work suddenly disappeared that we don’t know what to do with so much freedom, which is where self-control and moderation must be applied. We’ll take all the time we saved taking these key decisions and invest them towards the combat, so that’s likely the aspect that will see the most tweaks in the future. After that we can decide what to add.

Meanwhile I can work at peace knowing how much I have to write for any given chapter. I was writing the game, as many people who check these logs know, as if it was a movie script. Then we adapt that into a playable level.

The problem is that writing this way makes it really hard to gauge how much dialogue is needed. Sure, I can write a whole chapter taking gameplay into account in the screenplay itself, but it eventually becomes very abstract and dialogue that works on paper comes out really cringey during gameplay.

What I’m doing now is taking the dialogue from those screenplays, then make an interactive flowchart using Twine. It allows me to visualize the game without prototyping and succesfully identify where writing is needed. This method wouldn’t work with our previous game loop (I’ll talk about that once the game ships).

This might sound like common sense to seasoned developers (thinking in flowcharts insead of traditional screenwriting), but this is the first time we make a game that has like full gameplay sections between the story, so a lot of this is new for everyone. Making games is hard, especially when 2D Visual Novels/narrative thingies are what I’m used to.

I’ve also been working on new UI elements and character design. Tomorrow I hope I can playtest stuff to start tweaking what needs to be tweaked, wrap up some much needed features and generally just make the game feel really good now that we don’t have to work on so much shit.