- May 10, 2023
- 281
- 398
A lot of the writing problems with this game are not necessarily that the dev didn't know where the story was going to go when they started writing it, as much as they didn't care enough about the story they started writing to stick to it. All long form stories are written piecemeal by necessity, so the story being incomplete before implementation doesn't really explain the inconsistencies here. The dev seemed to have a strong vision for the kind of game they wanted to create before deciding to try and get it on Steam. The game went through one name change and two story overhauls and tonal shifts as the dev made changes hoping for the game to be accepted onto the Steam store. If you go by a two or three sentence summary, it's essentially the same game. But the first time I played Goodbye Eternity I didn't know about the name change yet and my initial thought was that someone had stolen the art and setup from the original game, because it felt so different to play. But there are echoes of both of the previous versions of the story still in the game, which is what is causing a lot of the inconsistencies. The dev was initially quite forthcoming with their plans for the game until they got a lot of backlash for dropping/changing "promised" and existing story elements while Steam cleaning the game, so it was clear they had a strong plan from the start, even implying (if not stating) that most or all of the story was already planned for both the main paths. Abandoning their vision is why the story doesn't make sense anymore.
I think trying to write a game that seems like it sticks to the summary of what the game is about without using the story they already wrote is proving too difficult. The person it's the hardest to stop stealing story ideas from is yourself. There are probably a fair number of instances where they get stuck realising they accidentally just rewrote something from their old story and just try to polish it up enough that it seems like it could fit into the new one. At least, that's the only reasoning I've been able to come up with for how often it seems to come so close in tone and content to the original game but by accident. Sometimes it seems like they gave themself a writing prompt of their old story premise, but they have to write an entirely new story based on that prompt, but the original story is still swimming around in the back of their mind and keeps spilling out onto the pages despite their best efforts
