Interim report

LITTLE DETAILS

After finishing the mindmap, and finally starting off the story, I realized that not only do I want to write the story at a detailed level to make sure there is plenty of aspects for immersion of the player, but I also want to add in little details such as the main character initially calling Sakura’s arm (The girl with accessibility issues) as a hunk of metal, vs the end when he starts to appreciate the arm, and respect her for her, and ignoring the metal totally, and just seeing it as any other arm.

There is a bit of inspiration to this because in “A Silent Voice” The main character used to see X’s on everyone’s face, and the X’s slowly started falling off as he started to accept himself, and others around him.

I have decided to add another small detail while making the story, the story is written in past tense all the way until he travels back in time, to which I am switching to present tense to write the story. I think this gives the story a nice slight touch that makes the player question which one is the reality of the world the character lives in.

Originally I wanted to do something similar to a depression quest where each frame of the story where a choice is provided, there is a selection of which you are unable to press on, it portrays the difference between the choices people would make if they didn’t have depression vs the people suffering from depression. This was a cool concept, but I didn’t think it was a very good fit for my type of story, although I still utilized this in one frame, it did not really serve the purpose that I wanted it to serve, so I bailed on this idea for the rest of the story.

NAMING

I also thought about giving my main character a name, normally in storytelling, the main character’s name is the most important thing for the player and the story. But in my story, I feel that the main character did most of his actions to be “Cool” in school, and to be seen as a person with power, he did things for attention, and because of this, he did not have his own identity. I wanted to express this by not giving him a name. But this changes in the end; he found himself and his own identity. In the last frame of the story, his name will be given out. It was really really hard to write the whole story with people talking to the main character but not actually calling him by his name aha!

I really enjoyed thinking about what names to give these characters in the game, and how to incorporate them. In the story, I never wrote a sentence like “his name is Shuji” because I think that this type of character introduction defeats the immersion aspect the game is supposed to have. But instead, I introduced it by having another character call out to them using their names and other methods that don’t break the immersion to the player.

I chose to pay homage to the anime Tokyo revengers as I ultimately gave names to everyone in the story, as the story is about high school students that eventually became violent gang members.

I’M GOING TO WATCH THE END CREDITS AFTER EVERY MOVIE NOW

As I wrote the story, as I didn’t use Twine or any applications that had a system where it could keep track of which one comes before another, I had to write everything down as I finished each frame, using letters and even numbers after letters to represent the branches. This made me realize how much work it is to write even a short story like this one. My respect for people who write stories and who do production has just gone way way way up!