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I've seen this question proposed before, and even asked directly to me a couple times: What's the most important thing when writing a story?
The first answer always is: Write down
everything you think of.
Maybe you're like me and assume you'll remember all the ideas you think of and they'll be waiting in the back of your mind until you're ready to use them. This has caused me to lose many (I'm sure awesome) ideas that I'll never think of again. If I'm at my computer, I'll open a notepad and jot it down real quick and organize it later. If I'm away, I can pull up my phone and make a note or text. It doesn't matter where it's written as long as you can go back and reference it later.
However, I operate a bit differently when it comes to major plot elements. These are things I think about often over and over, replaying the scene in my head until I find a variation I like. I normally don't make many, if any, notes of these outside of a chapter title.
So how do I organize my notes? It's really nothing fancy: just a couple Google Docs.
I have one spreadsheet for a timeline to list all major events day by day. This makes sure the spacing between events remains correct and let's me quickly see if there's enough time to fit other events in.
Besides that I have a text document where my dialogue ideas are sorted by what episode I think they'll be used. There's also a couple extra sections for random jokes I think of, or a few story ideas I could potentially include later on.
Currently this is sufficient for the size of the project, but I know there is software out there that could probably organize this in a better way. I don't
think TaH will become too complex where I'll need that, so for the time being I'm using this simple method.
So enough about boring organization stuff. How does the story go from my head to the final release?
There hasn't been one defined approached I've used, but it roughly goes like this: write First Draft, write a Revised Draft, begin posing and rendering scenes, update the Revised Draft as I render, and then do several playthroughs while crafting the Final Draft.
But if I was to be more accurate: the dialogue is very fluid and is
always changing.
Beginning with a First Draft is important because it's required to fill out the story with details that I haven't thought of yet. This is very much a brainstorming session where I write whatever comes to mind. This is a concept I struggled with throughout most of my life due to my tendency of perfectionism. I naturally want to write a polished piece of work that's close to finished in the first try... not spend time doing numerous revisions.
Because the First Draft is so raw, it's good to go back through and clean up spelling, repeated words, order of sentences, and expand where necessary. This is the Revised Draft.
At this point I can start constructing the scenes, and... well... everything changes. A lot.
Now that I have visuals in front of me, I see limitations where I can't make the scene look how I envisioned it. Or I notice something else I could do that was better than I planned. Sometimes my imagination takes things farther and creates a whole other branch in the story (there's more than one character that exists now because of it). These reasons are why the dialogue size increases 50% from my First Drafts.
My workflow allows me to be very dynamic and creative during the entire process since I can make changes on-the-fly, but it comes with a couple of drawbacks.
The first drawback is it's hard to work ahead on renders. Since it's very common for me to edit things as I go, I usually have to create one render at a time to match the constantly updating dialogue. This means: posing, rendering, and coding together one step at a time. It's not an efficient process, but it's an
effective one for me.
The second drawback isn't an immediate concern, but may be one long-term. My process makes it almost impossible to get help from anyone else in creating the game. Without a finalized script there really is no way to have anyone else create the scenes or render images because they have to be made simultaneously with the story.
Side Note: Now, there are still two things where it could make sense to get extra help: coding additional features in the game, and animations. But that's so far into the future before I could even think about getting help so it's not worth talking about now.
But getting back to the writing steps, we now get to the Final Draft. When everything is rendered and coded, it's time to just play the game...
very slowly and several times. I spend extra effort thinking about the dialogue sounding more organic and real. I might only be able to go through 10,000-15,000 words per day (what people can easily read in one hour, it takes me 10x longer to proofread and finalize it).
I have never considered myself a particularly great writer, and in fact, it was my least favorite thing to do in school. That doesn't mean I was bad at writing, but it was tedious to me.
Some days I still find it tedious, but more often than not I find a purpose in it now. Writing to get a school grade brought no fulfillment to me. But writing because there are people that are finding enjoyment out of it? Now
that's rewarding.
-ckr
