Story making

Making the story has let me grow so much on how to approach writing narrative games.

When me and Jordi first set out to do the narrative experience of the vertical slice, what the player would encounter and what we wanted to achieve. I tried just making interesting scenes I would want to play in a topdown JRPG game, I wanted the unexpected, twists conventions, spoke visually, full of expressful character but also wanted to balance the line of not being to confusing so it turned into a frustrating experience for the player.

Going into a dancefloor with bunch of interesting characters and suddenly one of them by random start fighting you in a battle or trying to interact with what seemed to be a harmless ATM machine turns into a crazy robot danceoff.

Throughout developing other games I tend to notice that my best ideas come during development, so for Everhood we left a lot of concepts and end goals quite open in hoping we will close them when making the game. The setting Everhod takes place in is sort of abstract, bigger than life and we are able to twist the story and timeline. but we still have a clear setting and mood we don’t want to break throughout the game

The development style has surely had its good and bad moments.
Right now I feel we are getting spectacular, unique and expected amount of content. I am looking forward to seeing gameplay videos and reactions, I hope we are able to get all the cool stuff, but we are trying to be cautious. The longer we take on the development the bigger chance it won’t be finished, so we are very strict with our planning and will absolutely not go over the schedule. We are prepared to cut out content to finish for our set deadlines.

How we have structured up the plot is similar to how Hayao Miyazaki the movie maker(spirited away, howls moving castle, princess mononoke etc) says he has wrote his stories. He does not have a ending in plans when he starts his movies, he just follows the flow through the story and sees where he ends up. I personally really enjoy his movies but I thought the endings were not that satisfying as the beginnings were. When we started production for Everhood the full game we had no ending planned, but I can most surely tell we have ending(s?) now and we are aiming for and it excites me to get me working on it.

The bad part of it was maybe the Miyazaki himself were I got the idea of not having a ending in mind bugged me, I wanted stuff to make sense and have some sort of resolution but I couldn’t know what was going to be truly relevant in the game if I didn’t know how the story would end.

But then we figured it out, it is for you to only wait and see.

Also best Ghibli movie is Pom poko, the best miyazaki movie is to hard to me to decide thou

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