Narrative

Translating the Narrative

I tried to highlight the entirety of Erik’s story using a Key.

This key helped clearly define what is important in the story as well as consider alternative progressions. One ending I wanted was a super quick one where Tyler is completely solo, he doesn’t speak to them and ventures alone in the woods. Suddenly the terrain becomes just forest (even if you go back) and you are softlocked there until the bear finds you.

The other two scenes processed but wern’t made due to time constraints

Erik wrote the story understandably and I could easily parse the information as well as use the purple highlights to elaborate on the story my own way.

With that being said I should’ve recognised that his story was quite ambitious for a two month project. At the start everything felt possible and outlining the story made it seem even more so. But I failed to consider things like item descriptions and sprites for the game which ended up making the workload tougher than anticipated.

Writing the Intro and Improving it

The core problem of the game is that you lost the trust of the people you depend on. You need them to cooperate. It’s important to define the purpose of you playing the game at the start.

However, Erik also mentioned a lot of the pre-story. There was context of how the characters behave, and the purposes of them going to hike. I didn’t want to skip over that so I made (what i thought was) a brief description of what the story was about.

1. Showcasing Tyler’s honest thoughts about Marcus and Sierra, as well as his preference to independency
2. Contrasting that, we can see the silly risks he takes, falling into a river. Tyler finds himself running with Marcus and Sierra, hinting how important they are for him, just like they will continue to be
3. Problem of the story – Sierra and Marcus collapse
4. Tyler assess the situation

END OF INTRO (but still more dialogue)

1. Contrast between Tyler and Sierra’s personality
2. Tyler being uncooperative and ignoring Sierra
   • 2a – The player intentionally has to click “Ignore” as though they really are ignoring Sierra
3. Tyler asks for help as though he didn’t put everyone in this situation
4. A side problem : Sierra loses her braclet
5. Another situation assessment
   • 5a – Hint of Marcus being a survival expert
   • 5b – Hint of Tyler being full of himself

This sounded good. The real result: too much! It was a huge mistake. The play-test on the 19th of March concluded that everyone thought the intro was too long-winded and just wanted to play the game:
Feedback

In addition, the Intro was extended because of the usage of AI to add more context. Read more here:
Team communications and AI use.

The new intro

After the feedback, I decided that less is clearly more. I minimised the starting dialouge and
and had to fit all the context that is needed throughout the gameplay and first interactions with Marcus and Sierra. Every line counted, which mad a more intentional telling of the story:

This was just a hook into talking to Sierra. I wanted the audience to question what is happening for some intrigue. I limited myself at the start to 3 lines and then the transitional 2 into the game.

I knew Sierra would explain the context of their situation when they stopped running, so I limited myself to 5 lines of explanation, each having their own purpose. Whilst when you talk with Marcus, you should be able to guess he’s good at foraging.

1. Hooks the player, ‘what have I done? D:’
2. Outlined the problem (narratively and in bold)
3. Outlines the threat and the problem of losing supplies
4. Another problem
5. You owe her / reason why they can’t help
6. Tyler is apathetic
7. Final problem of her braclet missing
   • I didn’t really want to add this as it could’ve been mentioned later.

1. Clear understanding of foraging and acceptance of the situation. He points out to stay away from huckleberries because bears are known to enjoy them.
2. Tyler makes himself known
3. Marcus is reluctant to reply, Tyler points out a problem with Marcus – offers to help
4. The player get a choice to inform them that a big mechanic to the story is to make the right ones. That being said, both choices are indifferent.
   • a – More reluctancy
   • b – Both Tyler helping and lack of knowledge
   • c – Sierra talks over Marcus – They both are reluctant to talk to him in their own ways

In total, there was much less dialogue, yet it was more engaging whilst letting you play the game earlier. Feedback

Character Dialouge

Chemistry

According to Eriks GDD, confronting their own flaws and forgiving eachother would be the main way the problem is resolved in the narrative. Generally, the flaw of our characters came by because of a lack of communication. Tyler, being the main character, has the biggest flaw: overly independent and doesn’t ask for help. Sierra’s and Marcus’ flaws are secondary (Sierra admits to lying to Tyler and Macus actually speaks up for himself). So at the start of the game, Tyler is treated roughly not only because of the bear, but also because he acts only for his needs. As he proves that he wants their survival too, Sierra starts feeling guilty that Tyler is capable to admit his mistakes, whilst she keeps her lie with her. As Marcus watches Tyler become more friendly (but still clueless) he becomes more confident to help him out, overcoming his fear of speaking up.
Tyler will help both Sierra’s and Marcus’ resolve. The correct way to treat Sierra would be to forgive her when she admits her flaw, relieving her from her anxiety. The correct way to treat Marcus’ would be not to speak over him, which happened many times over the intro, making him feel like he has no position to be there. Once he becomes comfortable, he becomes to intellect of the team.

Behavioural change to show progression

It is important to not solely use the reputation bar as a gauge to how the characters behave towards you. The characters should change their dialogue towards you so you know you’re going on the right track. This is most noticable in the reuptation system where they behave certain ways towards you depending on your ‘rep’. Everytime you start talking to the characters, they’ll say a one liner to reflect their feelings towards you. They become less dismissive towards the player as their rep increases. There will be a new choice given to you from both Sierra and Marcus at 20 rep to show you’ve gained a degree of trust.

In the Feedback, Jess said it was satisfying to see the change of the characters and intuitive to know how to make them happier.

Character definition

Covering the names in your the script shouldn’t stop you understanding on who’s speaking. Defining my characters by how they speak meant emphasising their key personality traits. Sierra is expressive, Tyler is overly calm / apathetic and Marcus is reserved. This is the default way of which the characters will talk.

Here I have removed all name mentions. Even so, the characters or at least the tones are still easily distinguishable.

Although the writing alone should convey who is speaking, I have changed the formatting of the writing to suit all the characters better. Namely, Sierra is the only one who ever spoke in capitals and Marcus is so reserved that sometimes he doesn’t speak with capital letters where it would’ve been gramatically correct to do so.

Blood mushroom

The Devils tooth blood mushroom was important for the first scene to both lighthen Marcus up as well as release some of Sierras tension. If Tyler gives it to Marcus, he starts to understand how knowledgable Marcus really is compared to him. He reflects that understanding to Sierra, slowly coming to terms that he should stop being so solo.

Tyler’s resolve to Sierra

Tyler has a revalation with Sierra when he admits he doesn’t know what he is doing. This conversation happens after Tyler consults to Marcus about the blood mushroom he found. Sierra finds out that Tyler is talking to expert Marcus on how to survive and is put in a little more ease. This because Tyler is finally not doing things on his own and acting less spomtanously. This is relieving when as they depend on Tyler for their survival.

1. Tyler grounds himself closer to reality
2. Sierra is relieved
3. Tyler thinks it’s easy to admit to flaws, Sierra is silent.
   • Sierra isn’t finding it as easy to admit to Tyler that she ignores publishing his work, even though Tyler is waiting for her approval.
4. Sierra internalises her guilt and moves on
   • This is one step closer to her admitting her mistakes to Tyler, of which you would’ve had the choice to forgive her or be upset

Additional details used to enrich the narrative

• Emphasising how out of breathe Tyler was by making the player click through the choices. This simulates how taxing it was for Tyler to talk in that moment.

• There are choices made depending on the order of which you’ve spoken to the characters. For example, you collected a “blood mushroom”, you show it to Marcus and he tells you about it then you hand it to him. If you then speak to Sierra, she accusses you of murder because your hands are bloody from the mushroom.
  If you choose to talk to Sierra first, she would simply be freaked out from the mushroom and dismiss you.

• If there was a reputation bar, I would have played with the visuals. I added code that decreased the reputation of Sierra one line at a time, hoping the bar decreases visually bit by bit for added emphasis. This was an alternative to just giving the player -4 reputation after finishing the conversation.

Missed opportunities

Note all my Research for Foraging in the Pacfic Northwest was included because it wouldn’t have affected the story much. Even if I managed to add every berry I have written about, it was also additional workload for my team. I wanted to be concious and know what I was adding is important enought to be everyones problem.
Aside from not being able to finish the story, there were smaller things I wanted to add the the story to help the player understand the situation and characters more:

• Giving moutain huckelberries to marcus would alert him
  • Giving them to sierra would increase reputation more
• Marcus likes the tang of red huckleberries

Occasionally and when Sierra is angry, there wouldve been “choices” you can click which would have disappeared almost instantly as though Sierra cut you off from your decision. It further emphasises the type of character Sierra is.

In scene 2, Sierra and Marcus have already sprayed themselves with wolf repellent, which can give the player a speculation that they don’t want Tyler to survive. This didn’t make too much sense however, but the drama is fun.

I wish there was more emphasis of Tyler being a poet and Sierra being a publisher. There was one moment where Tyler reaches in close proximity to the abandoned campsite, he instantly gets an idea to continue his developing story and mentions that Sierra would have loved it. Of course, that file got corrupted as inkle does that. Using Twine and Inkle

Sierra is physcially very strong (she pulled Tyler out of the ditch) but I dismissed a good reason why she is useful for the team. It is obvious why Tyler may need Marcus, but because I wrote that Sierra damaged her wrist, she couldn’t have helped out as much. Because the story is a bit spiritual, there could’ve been some healing plant Tyler finds and Marcus Identifies for Sierra perhaps.

Evaluation

All together, enjoyed writing. My proudest step I took was to scrap the intro idea. I think my writing becae a lot more effective since it was rooted in the dialouge. I think I fell into the trap where everything of the characters should be mentioned, but tthat either creates a long narrtive or unnatural exposition. I liked setting myself limits to keep speech shorter, as it forced me to densen my dialouge with context creatively. Not only I liked it, but people continued playing the game because my writing became more intergrated in it.