Week 7: Story and Character (Makiyah Harris)

This week, I spent most of my time working on the game’s story. In addition, I also continued my character design sketches.

Writing

I started this week by brainstorming ideas for the overall plot of the game. With the prologue already outlined, I knew all the basic elements I had to work with. Ultimately, I decided to organize the story into five major acts or encounters. After creating a bulleted list of the main events of each encounter, I moved over to the macro to map out the branches in more detail. Starting with the prologue, I summarized each plot point, switching to a new row every time the player is offered a branching choice. This will make the various paths easier to track later on.

Afterwards, I continued writing the prologue, using the basic prototype excerpt from last week as a starting point. While I was writing, I decided to tweak the main non-player character, Miren: she’s no longer a mage herself and is much less timid than before. At thirteen pages, I would say that the prologue is about 80% done. This length is slightly concerning scope-wise; if each of the other 4 encounters are also around 16 pages long, that leaves 67 to go. At a current rate of around 3 pages per hour, that’s 23 hours of work remaining, more than 3 times longer than my initial 7 hour estimate.

Character Design

After getting feedback on my initial sketches for Miren, I began to refine them, using the third and fourth designs as a base. I created a few more outfit variants, making sure to keep the long robes and sharp Vs of the original. As I previously mentioned, I later changed some aspects of Miren’s background and personality. While these designs are still a good start, I plan to modify them more, as the robes make her look too much like a mage. This was intentional, but now that the character has changed, it no longer fits. 

Tasks and Timekeeping

• Total: 7.5 hours
  • Began refining Miren’s design: 2.25 hours
  • Mapped out prologue on the macro sheet/Created overall plot outline: 2.25 hours
  • Wrote prologue (~80% finished): 3 hours