Another week, another post.

I'm back with more fluff that a total of two people will read. This one will be short. Not a huge amount has happened in the last week. It's Christmas.

Narrative Changes

Most of what has changed in the last week is writing related. I wrote A LOT. Basically doubled the word count. I've also thought up a fun direction to take the story. Better than my original plan at the very least. Considering it's set in northern Texas, I thought, hm... What is unique to that part of the world? The answer is: Tornadoes! Yeah, there'll be a tornado in this game. It's really just a device to get all the characters of the game in one room together (a tornado bunker.) It's also another way to make the main character's shitty day just a little shittier. That'll be a recurring joke in the game. No phone reception, car breaks down, love of your life deletes your contact. Enter stage left, a tornado.

Getting a bit more technical, here's a comparison of a dialogue tree from Trail of the Wretched (left) and Goin' Out West (right).

The point of this comparison is to show how the games differ in their presentation. For Trail of the Wretched, I essentially just wrote one very long conversation, then added small branches here and there. That meant you didn't get much variation. For Goin' Out West, I've leaned more toward a question list format, meaning you choose a question or something of that sort, go through that mini-conversation, then loop back to the start (basically most over-world conversations in Disco Elysium, or any CRPG really). I went in this direction because it makes the game flow a lot nicer. You're giving the player the option to read as much or as little as they want. This leads to its own problems, but I think it's worth the effort. I just have to keep track of a boatload of booleans, and make sure that the story hits the same regardless of if you've gone through every single dialogue tree or just the critical path.

Art?

I really don't have much to add here. The only thing that's changed is this van I made for one of the conversations in the game, and a few new character models. I'm still torn on what to do with the character designs. Being a first person game, you can get up close and personal with most characters, so these low detail ones I have at the moment don't really cut it. At the same time, they don't take very long to make, which is very useful for me considering I'm working alone. Decisions will have to be made sooner or later.

I also finished the gas station interior. The lighting is nice.

That's all for this week. I'll probably have the tornado bunker modeled and textured by next week. Maybe. 

Bye for now.