I had some social engagements the past couple weeks, which cramped my time. But I did come up with some good stuff that will increase my productivity in the future.
Writing has been tough for me, and I have been at least semi-consciously avoiding it. I realized finally that what I needed was a tool to help me write. So I applied some skills I learned from my other projects to create a webapp that allows me to write in a non-linear fashion.
The thing about writing conversations is that if you want players to have choices, then you can't really just write it straight through. Things have to branch, and to save space and complexity, they have to loop, or close branches. Writing in a linear form makes it difficult to see if branches have been adequately tied off or prevents them from branching at all.
The webapp is very custom designed for my application, and allows for tracking and organization of all "contexts" which are points in a conversation with a similar information load or temporal flow.
Purple and yellow arrows indicate the flow of the conversation.
With this tool I am much more capable of writing in the non-linear way I need to, and it's making me a bit more ambitious with the amount I can write. I admit I haven't even worked all that long this week, but I am already about half done with the kill quest intro dialogue.
A longer, more refined and organized conversation I wrote.
Next week I can finish up the conversations and plug these into the quests, and hopefully I can get an update out next week which will contain the new kill quest type. Remember to email any questions, comments, and prayer requests you have to [email protected], or just leave them in the comments below.