I’ve made pretty massive progress. The story is all but complete, but I’m having trouble connecting some parts in the middle, which is a traditionally difficult area of scripts.

I realized that the problem I’m having is mainly with the subplot, and that the reason there’s a problem is that my subplot really sucks.

Weak Subplot

(Spoilers Follow.)

Since the game is about love, the subplot explores love. In its current form the subplot is this: Kōtiro is betrothed to a man she doesn’t like. She has a lover that she wants to be with. The tension is between Kōtiro’s duty to her people to honor the betrothal versus her commitment to love and her lover. The idea is that her struggle with this personal problem will inform her quest to achieve the story goal.

This is an acceptable subplot for a lot of stories, but it makes no sense in the context of the world ending. The overall story goal is to stop the universe from being crushed, so a question about betrothal is utterly moot. Questions about the way things are done, which is kind of what the subplot is for, have one answer: stop the world from ending at all costs.

So the subplot is unacceptably weak.

A better Subplot

The changes I’m considering now bring in a plausible alternative point of view.

Ingo, the man Kōtiro is betrothed to, functioned as the the skeptic and contagonist, which means it was his job to deflect Kōtiro from the story goal. In this iteration, Ingo deflects Kōtiro by being a whiny pain in the ass. He just flapped his jaws a bit, and Kōtiro ignored him every time. It’s weak because he never takes any action and his point of view isn’t believable. There is no plausible alternative to saving the world, jaw flapping or not.

Meanwhile, Aroha is Kōtiro’s lover, and she functioned as the reason and love interest, but she was too weak also. She could never really be plausibly present with Kōtiro to influence her, and it didn’t make sense for her to be the “reason” archetype.

The answer is to flip things around.

• Ingo is still the skeptic, but he’s also reason now, and he’s no longer betrothed to Kōtiro. He might be her brother or other relative. He will support Kōtiro but express disbelief at her plans (think of Han Solo in Star Wars).
• The contagonist is Aroha, who now represents the emotion archetype, and remains the love interest. Remember, the contagonist isn’t opposed to the story goal per se, like the antagonist is. The contagonist is a source of temptation, luring the protagonist away from the story goal for their own reasons. In this case, Aroha has an opportunity to present the only plausible alternative viewpoint.

1. I’ll emphasize a thread that I’ve had all along, which is that Kōtiro is an outcast among her people. Tolerated, but not liked by most.
2. I will make Aroha an extremely likable and well-drawn character, the type you root for in the movie.
3. I will then kill her brutally and senselessly, and with Kōtiro present for all its wretched pathos.
4. Some time later Kōtiro will find herself in the underworld, and she will find Aroha there. The world ending will kill all life, but will leave the underworld basically untouched.

   There Aroha will beg for Kōtiro to stay with her. Why does she fight for all these people who don’t even like her? Why doesn’t she just stay with Aroha, for ever and ever, in the underworld, and let come what may in the upper world? Why make it her problem, when she can just ignore what’s going on above and live in peace and happiness down below?

That is a plausible temptation for Kōtiro. She really could make that choice, even with the world ending. So that’s what I’ll weave.

Site Improvements

I needed a couple new tools for writing that I built into the site.

Intensity Meter

If you look on the main storyline page, you’ll notice red bars under each scene. That bar represents the intensity of the scene (in my case, the intensity of the gameplay action, not necessarily the emotional intensity). When the scenes are complete and fleshed out, and each has an intensity assigned, I’ll make the data into a pretty graph. This way I’ll be able to tell if it follows an appropriate pattern of cycling through intense/less intense scenes and escalating until the end.

All in One Story Page

It’s extremely useful to have each scene on its own page so that I can focus on it and rearrange it when I need to, and keep track of meta data about it. However, when you’re trying to read the story all the way through, and really understand the context of the scene, it would be nice to have a view of the script that’s complete from top to bottom.

That’s why I built this page: All in One Story Page. That page has the latest script from top to bottom, so you can read it all the way through.

Moving Forward

Here’s the plan moving forward:

1. Complete the first draft. I don’t know how long it’ll take. It depends on how well the new subplot meshes, but I suspect it’ll go well.
2. Duplicate the draft pages. I want to leave the first draft as it is. In fact, I already don’t like how much history has been erased in terms of the evolution of the characters and script. I think it’s hugely valuable not only for the creative process but also for students who come later and want to see how something like this is created. So I’ll duplicate the pages in the first draft, to create a second draft that I can work on without disturbing what used to be there.
3. Write second draft. Everything in a first draft is a structural element. It’s like building the frame of a house. The put the beams and brick in place, but don’t worry about finishing the floors or anything, because that’s what the second draft is for. You get to hang the drywall, and put in light fixtures. You make the house livable. I’ll be adorning the script with the appropriate depth and detail that’ll be hung on the structure of the first draft.
4. Tweak the scene graph. After the second draft, all the scenes of the game will be pretty much fleshed out, and that’s when I’ll look at the intensity graph to make sure the pacing is going to be about right. I’ll make whatever tweaks are necessary to fit the plot into a nice rhythm. It’s worth mentioning that most of this careful planning will go right out the window when I’m faced with the reality of the working game. It’s worth at least understanding what I’m shooting for, even if it’s not where I end up.
5. Storyboard. Each scene will be completely fleshed out by this point, so I can begin the process of storyboarding all the shots and interesting gameplay moments. This will help me later when I need to build the art assets and animations. It’ll also help bring the script to life in a serious way, and maybe earn some attention, which is one of my goals for this project.

At that point I’ll have a complete storyline to build from. I don’t expect to do all of that before moving on to other elements of the game though. The story doesn’t have to be completely done to build many of the assets I know I need, including character art and environmental pieces. Still, it helps to have a direction and know how all the moving parts work together, which is why all this work and planning are worth it!

(Warning, there is tasteful nudity in this post).

After waxing poetic about sexualized heroines in games, and extolling the virtues of courage in storytelling, I find myself backed into a corner.

Whatever I do, I will be an asshole. Here’s the story:

I wanted to create a good female character. Someone who was respectable, strong, competent, yet feminine. I endowed my creation with a strong trunk, breasts of normal size and shape, strong legs, feminine hips.

Well, first it turns out that athletic women are pretty skinny, especially from the side, which happens to the primary angle of this game:
(more…)

I’m in the concept phase of designing my game’s female main character, Kō. Of course, when designing characters the goal is to make them distinctive and memorable, which means a distinctive silhouette among other things.

Let’s be perfectly clear here: most games solve this problem for women by giving them inflated boobs and tiny waists. It may have worked for Lara Croft, but in a field rife with bodacious tahtahs, exaggerated sexual anatomy doesn’t make a distinctive character anymore.
(more…)

Are you ignorant? Would you know if you were?

One reason I have a continuing passion for games is that they combine many of my interests. Digital and oil painting. Graphic design, information theory and architecture. Software development. Human-Computer interaction. Fiction and non-fiction writing. Math. Ancient cultures and philosophy. Music.

What does a person with such wide varied interests do? Why, make games of course!

But the same diversity that pulls me in, can also be overwhelming. Studies say that 10,000 hours of concentrated practice in a field is required before a person can become an expert. This rings true to my experience. There are certain fields in which I am an expert, and others that I only dabble in.

Levels of Knowledge

1. Total Ignorance. You might not even be aware of this body of knowledge, or if you are, only in a vague sense. My article on Text Fonts was an attempt to lift people from this state about typography.
2. Ignorant Incompetence. You know enough about the field to believe you are competent, but not enough about it to realize how far you have to go. It’s a wise policy to always assume you’re in this state, and always try to be getting out of this state.
3. Knowledgeable Incompetence. You know enough now to know what you don’t know. You know the right questions to ask experts, and you know when you should let someone else do the work. You can now recognize an expert when you see one.
4. Competence. You are good enough to tackle most tasks in the field. You often need guidance, but you understand the guideance in context once it’s provided. Your work is generally of acceptable quality.
5. Expertise. You know the field intuitively, can provide thoughtful advice to others about it. Your work in the field stands as an example to others.

Achieve Incompetence

When you tackle a field like games, which is actually a combination of many fields of knowledge, it becomes imperative that you at least be aware of your level of knowledge on a given subject. You don’t need to be an expert at everything. You do need to be aware of your strengths and weaknesses so you can form a realistic sense of the quality of your game’s various aspects.

The really dangerous area of knowledge is total ignorance. If you don’t realize there is even knowledge to be had, then you will undoubtedly muck up whatever you’re working on. If you are responsible for the user interface of your game, but you don’t know what a grid system is, you are somewhere between Totally Ignorant and Ignorantly Incompetent. The goal is to reach the level of knowledge in which you realize how bad you are, and can recognize good work.

Some areas are trickier than others. People are readily aware of sucking at art, but how many people are sure they can recognize good art when they see it? Aware that they suck, they may ask for help and get help… that also sucks. Knowledgeably Incompetent people have it better, able to ask for the right help from the right people.

If a particular field doesn’t grab you, you’re unlikely to breach this level. To become competent requires around 5,000 hours of practice. That’s 3 to 5 years of continual effort. Only passion can drag you through this territory because this phase in particular is quite painful: you are aware of how much you suck and how sub par your work is, and yet you keep trying for years until finally you hit something you like more often than not. It’s quite the challenge.

To be a great game director, you must be at least Knowledgeably Incompetent in every discipline required to produce your game. When you achieve that you will not have the requisite knowledge to actually produce a top-notch game, but you will know the contour of the relevant knowledge, so you can ask the right questions of the right people to make your game sparkle.

Self Assessment

So ask yourself, as you work on your game, how much you really know. If you find yourself tackling projects thinking, “Bah, how hard could it be?” then you probably have a lot to learn to achieve Knowledgeable Ignorance, and that’s your cue to stop what you’re doing and start asking questions.

The most difficult areas are those that you never think of, so be on the look out for critiques you don’t understand. If it never occurred to you to pay attention to the type face you use, start asking questions about type. If you never read about what makes an interface successful, start asking questions about information architecture and human-computer interaction. If you don’t know squat about music except what you like, don’t just cruise the web for free midis! Ask someone who knows what they are doing to help you!

Never get too comfortable because when you scale one mountain of knowledge, you often just find the next range that you couldn’t even see before. Good luck!

Edit: A reader reminded me of a great paper by Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University called “Unskilled and Unaware of It.” It’s closely related to this article, and quite eye opening. I recommend it!

Read “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”

In my reading I’ve hit something I mentioned in a previous post about the killer vagina. In many Maori legends women are raped. What’s confusing to my western sensibilities is that no one makes a fuss about it, including the women.

In the story of Suki, goddess of rebirth, Tuna-roa, father of eels, rapes her while she’s doing chores near the swamp where he lives. Apparently she doesn’t mind because she continues about her chores, and only decides to mention it to her husband the next day, when it happens again, in the same way, at the same place. I guess she was annoyed at that point?

So, I guess I need to wrap my mind around a cultural concept that rape isn’t that big of a deal. Suki’s husband was pretty pissed, but the act itself didn’t seem to be a big issue.

It’s easy to shirk topics like this one, especially in video games, but I think that’s a mistake. I feel like I have a responsibility to the Maori culture and to the medium to tackle these topics. To understand the beliefs, and to use them to give some emotional depth to the story.

Maybe embrcing these subjects will bring games from their pulp status into the light of literary merit.

With regard to the previous post about respecting culture, an interesting discovery has brought a question to mind. There is a story in which the hero Maui tries to obtain immortality by passing through the body of the goddess of the underworld. Her body essentially is the underworld, and by passing through it unscathed, he hopes to defeat death permanently. Tradition has it that Maui tried to enter through her vagina (planning to leave through her mouth), but she woke up while he was only part way inside her. She squeezed herself closed, cutting Maui in half, and killing him.

Now, that’s the story – I have read a couple different versions of it now, and that’s the rough consensus. This is interesting because there is a cultural divide about what makes an appropriate story. In western culture, it’s definitely not appropriate to talk about a man who tries to “enter” a woman while she sleeps, and ends up being cut in half by her (obviously formidable) genitalia.

For a game’s storyline it’s really tempting to use the underworld as a story location, and it makes sense to include reference to this story. What will I do? Sanitize the narrative for a modern audience? Ignore the legend entirely? Use it regardless of western taboos?

I don’t know yet.

Mythological settings are double edged sword. I’ve always loved mythology and I know a lot about Roman and Greek mythology in particular. When dealing with those ancient mythologies, or maybe others like Egyptian or Norse, you get essentially a cast of characters and some story arcs for free.

The difference between those and Maori mythology is that no one except some modern fringe groups believes in them. The Maori, still alive and well, form much of their culture around these origin stories. I have a responsibility to be respectful toward this culture, which means carefully crafting whatever storyline develops.

I see my choice of Maori culture for the basis of my game as a form of respect and admiration for its richness. I want to tell their story to a modern audience. The last thing I want is to mock their traditions by misrepresenting their stories or culture. I don’t want to vilify the wrong tribal ancestor, or debase a sacred creature. It’s a fine line between entertainment and education, art and mockery.

It’s pretty overwhelming to start a new project. As a one person team I have everything about this game floating through my mind all at once. The visuals, the storyline, the gameplay mechanics. My approach is very holistic – I think ideas start as vague and disjointed, and I try to develop them all together so they grow to fit snugly.

I feel like if I decide on gameplay, then build a storyline, then build visuals, I’ll end up with something that’s “plastic.” Instead, I have everything building on each other all at once, growing and interacting with each other in my mind. As I compile Maori mythology and form a picture in my head of the universe they lived in, I get a sense of what that world could have looked like, and what people or mythological creatures there would have acted like. That informs my ideas about gameplay, and about how things should appear. It also forms a basis for the emotional content of the story – how the main character feels and interacts with the world, and her motivations for moving forward.

I’m simultaneously figuring out what resolutions and sprite sizes will work, wrestling with the main character artwork, and learning everything I can about legendary Maori history, and that of New Zealand itself. It’s a ride, and I love it.