- Aug 23, 2018
- 1,323
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Ah okay. I see what you mean now. It's interesting you brought that up because as I'm looking through the code/scripts right now, I'm noticing things I didn't notice before about the actual writing. On a technical level, the grammar is sometimes questionable and on a quality level, it doesn't feel like this is a game that made this guy rich.I'll explain what I mean.
A good storyteller and a good writer are not always the same thing. A script is roughly speaking a story on the basis of which a game is created. And gameplay is the way the narrative is told.
If we take the script out of the game and read it, we will immediately realize how boring and poorly written it is. But we don't notice it because DPC is skillfully controlling the attention and manipulating the players. The game has good music, freeroams which are corridor mini-levels with elements of sandbox, good dialog, interesting characters, mini-games, there are elements of trade, player base where he rests between levels, elements of social interaction, high variability, replayability, etc. All of this allows us to overlook the obvious plot bloopers. If there weren't such long pauses between games, no one would pay so much attention to obvious plot errors like Maya's loan or Jill's picnic.
Narrative design, level design, world design, content design, etc. is done at a good level that keeps the player's attention for the maximum amount of time. But the scripting is pretty poorly written.
To illustrate, I'll give examples of games that have both a good story and a good narrative and games that have a good story but a bad narrative.
An example of a perfect balance is City of Broken Dreamers. An example of a good plot but poor storytelling is The Order of Genesis. It has an intricate and interesting plot, but boring characters and boring dialog.
You're right to point out that he can't link A to C. A problem I also mentioned a long time ago. DPC works according to a flowchart and working on this principle it is much easier to make a mistake than to work according to a ready written script. DPC is really a master of mise-en-scene (if you can apply this term to the game). He has an excellent written and staged scene of the meeting with Zoey, which allows you to feel a wide range of emotions. But in the same episode there is a weird storyline with Sage where MC feels guilty whether he fucked Jade or not.
The upshot is pretty simple. DPC needs to abandon the flowchart and come to a traditional way of writing. It will save him time and the plot will be more meaningful.
And YES. 100% agree. He really is the best at using what you can do in a VN to its fullest advantage. There are others that may do it better but the problem is that I usually find major caveats with them whereas BADIK at least seems to the best overall. Some may outshine it in specific categories like writing, render quality, animations, better world building, etc but BADIK always tends to be the best all-rounder.
I think that term is more than applicable here. Scene direction is yet another thing that devs should have in their skill set. In a sense, it really does feel like someone trying to stage a scene or direct a flim. In fact, most of the VNs I like have that kind of touch to the scenes where it feels like they were more carefully crafted.
It's like I've said before, BADIK is kind of like a fireworks show. It comes out with a big "BAM", is bright, and spectacular. But it only works if the next one shoots up in a timely manner. In an actual show, a matter of seconds. In this case, less than a year but even 6 to 8 months gets people flared up over the glaring inconsistencies in the writing. I never realized that was how he was doing things. I thought he was just trying to keep things somewhat vague.
This was actually a pretty interesting conversation. It seems like if he's going to stay with these long dev cycles, it's the writing method that needs to be changed rather than just simply tacking on more effects that results in a diminishing marginal return with the more he adds on (60 fps animations and in-phone music features in this case). I just hope he never hires a writer. Just look at what happened to one of the other college-themed VNs with multiple writers all being equally bad.