Hello all! I’m DTown, and this is my first time participating in Devtober. I’m a game design student in Toronto focused on game writing and narrative design.
I decided that for this year’s Devtober, I would tackle one of my dream projects and work on a world-hopping RPG game I’ve had in my mind for years. It would be a massive project, so my plan is not to finish it by the end of the month. My goal for Devtober 2022 is to improve my writing and design skills while cooking up a few things I could add to my portfolio.
Since there’s a lot that would need to go into this game, I’ll be focusing on the following this month:
- High-level design: Determine the vision, gameplay loop(s), etc.
- Story outline: Lay out the major plotlines for the game
- Worldbuilding: Write 1-page overviews for the main worlds the party will visit
- Character bios: Create profiles for each of the eight main party characters (w/ combat barks)
- Dialogue system: Design the dialogue system and program some test conversations
Knowing how I work, these goals will likely change as the month progresses. If I can complete at least 2/3 of the things listed above, I will consider this month a success. I’d love to hear people’s feedback along the way!
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Day 1
A bit more about this game concept: it’s a story of heroes travelling across different dimensions that must learn to overcome their differences to save each of their worlds. As I said above, I’ve had the idea for this game for years. Of course, with my brain, what this means is lots of neat ideas floating around but no solid base to keep it all together.
Before diving into the rest of the project, I thought doing some mind mapping and settling on the basic gameplay loop would be a good idea. From there, I could determine a few core mechanics to nail down how this game is played. I used the word “Spectrum” as a starting point for brainstorming, chosen to represent the central theme of difference and acceptance. From there, I found three other words and did three separate brain dumps to create the pillars of my game’s vision.
The last part was determining the gameplay loop. It was easy to decide on the core loop since most RPG’s follow this basic premise: Explore World -> Fight Things -> Collect Loot -> Repeat. I had some challenges narrowing down the game elements that fit within each part of the loop since I wanted to cement the core gameplay and mechanics I had in mind. But I reminded myself that this is just the initial brainstorm, and things will likely change as the game gets made.
Overall, solid start! Tomorrow I’m going to be pretty busy with family stuff, so I’ll be focusing on writing just the beginning parts of the story outline.
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Day 2
A very brief update for today: I began working on outlining the story for this game and wrote a few introductory paragraphs for the first chapter. I plan to revisit them a few times until I settle on a final draft. Here’s a short sneak peek at what I wrote today:
Depending on how my day goes tomorrow with classes and assignments, I will finish the layout for the overarching story. If I get lucky, I’ll try and wrap up the introduction, but I’ll more likely get to that on Tuesday.
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Day 3
I was able to get a rough draft of the overall story completed. I’m feeling the itch to move on to other parts like character bios and fleshing out their arcs, but I might put a pin in that for now and start a second draft of the plot outline.
Something I will say, it’s harder to outline a plot than I expected! It’s one thing to have cool ideas but another to get them all flowing together. Something that’s really helped is having a clear vision of what I want this game to be. I had one idea for the ending, but when writing the outline, I stopped and said, “Hang on, does this fit with the main themes of the game?” before eventually scrapping it. Making sure everything fits the vision helps ensure everything ties together neatly into a nice little package.
Tomorrow will be a hectic day, so I’m not sure how much energy I’ll have to do more serious writing. I might toy around with programming the dialogue system instead. I have rough dialogue drafts I could use to make something small or just whip something up on the spot. Either way, let’s have a little fun tomorrow!
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Day 4
I attempted to mess around with Unity and learn some programming. I planned to create some test dialogue boxes to use in the game. It’s a few steps ahead of the process, but I wanted to take a break from writing. Unfortunately, my attempts did not go as planned, and C# started to make my brain hurt. This is why I’m not a programmer!
I finished the night with a little bit of writing to make at least a bit of progress. At first, I felt disheartened at the lack of progress, but I looked back at my goals and reminded myself that it’s only Day 4, and what I’ve done so far is pretty substantial! I take it as a lesson learned; try to learn the basics before jumping into the deep end.
Tomorrow I will revisit my story outline draft and begin working on a second draft. So far, I’ve been overestimating my time with my daily tasks, so I will try to keep it light this time. I’m aiming for 250-500 words at least.
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Day 5
I returned to the plot outline I had begun writing on day 2. I liked what I made then, but something felt… off. Certain plot points weren’t quite gelling together; it felt like things were going all over the place storywise. I took another look at my 3 act structure and landed on something that just clicked. It was this amazing moment where all the pieces started to fall together very neatly. The plot finally feels like it has a clear beginning, middle, and ending.
With that said, I have a bit of a way to go and a hectic week with courses and other commitments. I’ll focus on refining the story outline and begin plotting the major character arcs/events for the rest of the week. Next week I can hopefully start working on the worldbuilding, followed up by character bios. My updates will probably be shorter for the rest of the week, but I’ll be closer to finishing this project!