Well, I missed a few weeks, but that's not to say progress has stalled! I've been hard at work building level 4, which is going very well. I was worried about this level going in because it's very intricate and nonlinear, with a lot of moving parts that need to integrate successfully with each other, which means there's a lot of room for bugs to crop up. But to my surprise it's been relatively smooth sailing! It's taken a while (there's a lot to cover), but the current version is almost ready for a first round of playtesting, which is exciting. If all goes well, I might even have a full draft of the game's "part 2" by the end of the month.
That's not what I want to talk about this week. Instead, I want to talk about what I didn't do (nearly enough of) over the past three weeks: writing.
I have had very bad writers' block for the past few weeks. It's one of the reasons I haven't been writing these devlogs. Worse, it's affecting the other parts of dev -- when I try to design levels, build mechanics, or solve problems, it goes just like it normally does. But when I sit down to try and write, I'll end up doing nothing at all.
What's going on? It's not every form of writing that does it -- the minor NPCs are as pleasant to create as ever. The scripted "main story" sequences haven't been too bad, either. Mostly, it's the computer terminals. These are optional, scattered around the exploration sequences, and are intended both to add lore, and to subtly play into the overarching narrative and themes in ways that aren't necessarily obvious to the first-time player.
As a result, writing them is a tightrope walk. For each one, I can't assume any prior context or understanding on the part of the player; any one of them could be their first one found. The player might not have the slightest clue who the fuck these people are and what relevance they have to the world of the game. So each one needs to hold up on its own, as an individual self-contained piece of writing; otherwise players will be bored and confused (the bad kind of confused) and not bother to read any of the others. On the other hand, I also need to write for the players who happen to be visiting this terminal LAST, after finding all the others. So each one also needs to be meaningfully unique, to avoid a sense of repetition over time.
Well, this is the same challenge anyone who puts collectible lore in their game has to deal with. But in my case, there are even more constraints to think about. These characters have some opaque relationship to the world the experienced in gameplay. But the nature of that relationship is kind of mysterious at first. I want this mystery to unravel over time; when the player finally 'figures it out', I want there to be a real sense of surprise and insight. So I'm not just trying to write a story that can be read in any order: I'm trying to write a mystery that can be read in any order. That's way harder!
In fact, it'd probably be too hard, if I wasn't cheating a little. The "most important" terminals, representing significant turning points or meaningful revelations, are placed in ultra-obvious locations right at gameplay chokepoints I can generally expect the player to find at some point. So, it's not entirely nonlinear.
Balancing the overarching structure may be part of what's got me blocked, but it isn't the whole thing. Wrangling the prose is nearly as frustrating. These characters are just very challenging to write. The two of them - TT and TG - I would like to be sympathetic, even as they spiral into some rather unpleasant depths. They should feel "balanced" with each other, entertaining to read, and with enough depth to be worth spending a thousand words on even when they're not talking about anything directly gameplay-relevant. There is the factor of their being repurposed Homestuck characters, which you'd think would make them a little bit easier to write. But by game's end, the end-stage TT and TG should feel almost nothing like their namesakes. Writing an unoriginal character is pretty easy. Trying to find a point in an arc where a character is, say, 2/3rds original and 1/3rd not, is less so.
But all this is just kvetching. I'm frustrated that these terminals have taken so long to write, and I'm currently behind on them relative to my progress on everything else, but when they actually appear in-game the response has convinced me they're worth it. Right now 7 are done out of a projected ~16, with two more half-finished. What I'm hoping is that this writer's block is more about needing my brain to churn on these characters some more, and so I can keep making intermittent progress while working on other things. When I try to force myself to write them, it doesn't seem to work, so if giving them time doesn't help I might need to scale down. Which would be a shame, since I see them as central to the project.
Anyway, to avoid losing another three weeks to procrastination, next week I am committing to talking about progress on level 4 even if I don't make any!! If I do nothing for the next seven days I will have to write a thousand words about all the nothing I did. Mark my words!