It is well past July 7th, gang. Don’t worry! We’re hard at work. Due to illness and life, stuff got delayed longer than expected. My brother got sick, and I’ve been dealing with the worst fibromyalgia flare up I’ve had in… a year? Two? I’m also learning to calibrate estimates while working with a team, so this is also a bit on me. Our current goal is to have the game out at the end of September, but worst comes to worst it’ll be out by October. That’s a guarantee at this point. Wahoo! The best news that comes with the delay is that we’ve got time to implement a couple extras into the game — namely, chibi CGs, achievements, and a couple extra animations and sprite variants! I’m so excited to add these little touches with my wonderful artists. 

Speaking of artists, I’ve also brought my friend Elias “Grandquest” on board for the aforementioned Chibi art! It’s kind of insane to have him working with me, as we met through the very Pokémon fanworks — their art and my writing — that led to Frey Nel and DelirIAM in the first place. Please picture me luring them out of a cave with a line of fruit gummies, thank you. The moral of the story is through the power of yuri, anything is possible. Unbreakable bonds are forged in the trenches of ao3 filtered to F/F. 

Anyways, what am I doing? Well, when the painkillers are working, I’ve been doing a whole lot. Mostly implementing aaaaaaaaaaaall the additional and revised flavor text I’ve written for DelirIAM and making sure all the finicky bits of plugin code is where its supposed to be and I haven’t missed anything. On top of that I’ve been getting the final tilesets in place and making sure everything looks okay, matches up, and the collision boxes all work as expected. Lots of fiddly, technical stuff. 

The biggest part, of course, is rewriting. During the initial drafting, I was rushing to get it done in time for a game jam. That didn’t end up happening due to a variety of factors, but it did help it get done at all. In the process of trying to get it done at all, I did end up rushing the writing of two important scenes: the reveal of “what happens tomorrow” and the final confrontation. And the intended moth through line was admittedly clumsy. While I’m still not done with the moth stuff, I have revised and expanded the other two major scenes and I think they’re a lot more emotionally impactful. 

MOST importantly, between the initial push and now I have figured out a way to format all my game writing in my word processor so I don’t have to do it directly in engine. “But Madeline,” you say to me, “Why would you write everything directly into RPG Maker and have it all scattered across a multitude of events? That’s stupid! That’s madness!” Yes, yes it is. I am quite good at doing things stupid, hard, and inefficient. Teaching myself how to use RPG Maker and make games at all was a steep learning curve and I wasn’t focusing on what I already knew how to do at the time, so I just wrote directly in the engine as a went. It worked okay, but I discovered it’s hard to actually get a sense of your overall writing and pacing when it’s scattered throughout hundreds of individual events and broken up by code. And trying to rewrite? To proof read? Hilariously time consuming and an exercise in insanity, honestly. But I’ve learned! By doing it bad, I did it, and by doing it, I’m now better. These are the things I’ve learned over the past couple years, and this is my advice to you: do it bad, do it scared, do it stupid. It might be crap, you might need to redo it all, but having something, anything at all, is worth it. 

Anyways, how do I draft scenes and write flavor text in my word processor? I’m so glad you asked, hypothetical reader. The answer is actually quite simple: I use my dramatic writing degree. Well, not the degree itself, my fancy piece of paper that lists my two (2) different writing-based degrees is somewhere in my closet (or maybe it’s under my bed?). I don’t know why I didn’t start by scripting stuff out playwright style, to be honest. Dialogue has always been my strength and most of game writing is dialogue or dialogue adjacent, especially in my games. Here is a snippet from Frey Nel:

MS: How are you holding up?

R: Dead, I think. 

MS: That is how you end up here. 

R: Unless I’m dreaming. 

MS: What is the difference between death and dreaming?

R: A lot?

MS: I suppose. 

R: Why are you in my dreams?

MS: Should I not be?

R: Should you be?

MS: Touché. 

To save time and space, I only use initials in my scripting — in this case R is for Rosemary and MS is for Mrs Spider. This is a pretty simple dialogue exchange with no variables or other coding or blocking to notate. Now let me show you some of my flavor text scripting for DelirIAM:

Bedside: 

    H: The big storybooks go in this room, because Saffron’s the baby and gets whatever they want. 

    H: At least that’s what they think. 

    H: Really they just always fall asleep during story time so it’s more convenient for everyone. 

        H: The big storybooks go in this room. 

Bed: 

    H: Saffron’s bed is really low to the ground because it’s a toddler bed. 

    H: Mommy’s gonna turn it into a big kid bed soon I think. 

        H: Saffron’s had that teddy bear since before I met them. 

        H: I’m glad it was able to be fixed. 

Here, I notate what object the flavor text is attached to. You can also see I use indentations to show that what appears changes after the initial interaction with the object/event. The first time Hopper (H) looks at the Bedside he goes into more detail, and if you have him look at it again it will be different and less. I use a similar indentation for the Bed flavor text, but in that particular case which flavor text you get switches between the two every time you interact with it. I don’t have separate formatting for these two similar but different coding scenarios because I’m able to infer what past-Madeline intended based on the context the writing provides. Will this come back to bite me one day? Remains to be seen! Lets look at another example:

N: …!

R: …?

    [Run]

        There’s nowhere to go. 

    [Stay] 

        You stare at the girl. The ghost. 

N: You came! 

R: Ah!

Brackets my beloved… I use brackets to signify choices or things that use the choice interface. That, combined with my trusty indentations shows me where things branch and converge in a scene. Sometimes, there’s a single option for a choice, or what you choose doesn’t matter. I will still put these in brackets so I know what to do when I’m putting it in the engine. Like so:

H: [Why do you want to keep me?]

R: Eh?

H: [I’m too much trouble.]

H: [I’m not worth it.]

R: Nuh uh. 

Here I have Hopper’s dialogue as single choices for the sake of emotional impact. That, combined with the choices showing up within the textbox is wholesale borrowed from insertdisc5’s game In Stars and Time. Thank you Adrienne for giving me a fun new tool to devastate my players! 

Anywho, that’s about all I’ve got to share with you all right now! Have a Hopper Chibi by Grandquest, on the house!