This week the “character notes” document reached 31,000 words and 78 pages. But I was really reluctant to spend even more time delving into NPC backstories. It felt like – well, not a waste of time, but definitely a lot of time. Honestly, I’m glad Merrix pushed me to keep at it, because now we have a full document of all 30-ish characters and their backstories, relationships, and what they think of each other.
(I do feel a little bad that I’m now making Merrix read through all of it, though… but I do need a second set of eyes and ideas on it.)
I’m hoping this will help me write more interesting storylines. It’s certainly been fun. And I’ve found a lot of little details that will definitely be fun to weave into the game here and there.
While I was typing that endless document and talking to characters in my head, Merrix tackled the beginnings of our save/load system. It’s been really cool to see. This is probably obvious to present company, but there are a lot of interconnected systems in a game, and I’m often laughing at myself for not thinking of them. Like… a save/load system. Yeah, we kinda need that.
Finally, I’ll share what I found myself working on after work one day: a quick comic vignette about the relationship between Granny and the teahouse’s Barista:
Just quick pencil roughs, but I enjoyed it. And getting to where I truly enjoy working with characters is a good thing!
And, actually, I wound up doing the math, and there’s a good reason I wound up with 31k-word document: A town of 29 people has over 400 possible connections between sets of two individual people, so if most people know each other…yeah, maybe I should just be grateful the document isn’t longer.
That’s about all for this week. Thanks for following along! We’ll be back next week with more, so be sure to check in then!
-Peri