- Jul 7, 2017
- 3,426
- 7,773
DPC response from the Q&A Session - February 2021 fits perfectly with your post.I don't think DPC would have shown her letter of resignation in Burkes office, Rusty crying in her arms, and her meeting the new employers for nothing, unless it was a seemingly weird one-time incident like with Steve where we can be a DIK or a Chick (and that guy still has his Bio for whatever reasons). And, well, there are consequences everywhere in that game already, minor or major ones, the Cathy/Bella one isn't a myth, for one. Or, to me, soon-to-be consequences, like for Mona, if she comes back (like implied by Sage/Quinn talking about a girl who was thinking about coming back at their Halloween planification thing, strong Mona implications there), could be the downfall of Quinns prostitution ring, hopefully of Stephen Burke and his whole legacy, will affect Jade, will affect Tybalt's future, and surely affect Sage role as HOTs president... I'm extrapolating, but something will happen around that fucked up family.
Just to end my thinking for Cathy, well, maybe it won't affect the MC directly, but I could see it affect Rusty and the DIKs for sure.
Or maybe not.
Just having fun speculating, honestly
How do you balance developing and telling a cohesive storytelling structure with a narrative game's branching elements? Do you prioritize taking the plot and characters arc from A to B with somewhat limited branching, or you plan strongly defined diverging paths that can go from A to B, C, D, E...?
When you develop a game like Being a DIK and need many branches, the most important part is to have a backbone story. No matter what choices the player makes, which girl the player goes for, the main story is always there to carry the game forward. That way, branching becomes manageable, and you can plan whatever structure you want for the branches. It’s not necessarily just an arc going from A to B; you can have multiple outcomes for it, as long as you plan to take care of the outcomes when you’re done with the branch.
One good way to end branching is to store its outcome as a variable and use it later to affect the story. It’s an easy way to introduce a system where choice matters, and it allows you to kill branches without making the player feel they did something for nothing, as the choice is respected later on in the game.
The balance of it comes naturally to me; I try to include characters in the story, even if the player has no romantic interest in them.
DPC has already written about a timeline in the Q&A Session - February 2021, as I just read. This fits very well with the above topic because this timeline can be implemented with breaking and later re-inserting variables.
How do you go about the actual writing of your stories? How do you keep track of all the variables/routes?
I write and code the story all at once using Atom editor and Ren'Py. I make notes of ideas and details in a text file and use graphic software to manage the story's timeline. I keep my variables neatly defined in header files that I constantly revisit during development.
