The importance of story writing
In the early stages of development we made a decision that the core mechanic of running the shop was the most important thing about the game. The second most important thing was the story. We have a story to tell and Stouthollow Tales is the medium through which we're telling it.
The process
The first stage of the story writing process is to open our big ol' google doc and write every single plot point out as a list or small description. This is super high level and just serves as a guide point. Items that appear in this doc are things like "Player inherits the shop." "Player repairs the mine."
This method is a more recent addition but has been vital to the story writing process. We have a big flow chart with every quest in the game. Quests typically drive all content in the game, including the story. We're able to look at this flow chart and figure where everything falls into place. Which quest comes before and after another. It's really just a great way to organize your information and I highly recommend it.
We implement the ideas into the game as quests and introduce new mechanics or use existing mechanics to support the new quest idea. An example of adding a new feature from story ideas was when we introduced the ability to plant and grow trees.
The forest had always been an important place for us. The wood you got from chopping up logs is used in almost all crafting. In adding the carpenter's quest line, we added the forest management feature which really gave the carpenter's character a lot more depth.
As a side note another google doc is created for the actual scripts, the lines the characters will actually say in either dialog conversation or cutscene conversation. We do this for spellchecking reasons :P
Cutscene conversation adding depth to the plot.
We've been working on bringing a lot of the story together and trying to figure out where the plot goes, sot his is about as visual as we can get on an update for the game!