Posted April 08, 2023 by Pallas Raven
#Afterword #Religion #Faith #Game Jam
Another year and another NaNoRenO have come and gone which always brings a tear to my eye. These game jams are joy to participate in and they perfectly capture the diversity and inventiveness of the western visual novel scene. Our medium is truly a showcase of why video games are such a powerful means of communicating emotions and ideas in ways which resonate strongly with the player. My own journey to a complete game over the course of the jam was a surprisingly challenging and rewarding. The Flight Of The Exorcist in front of you is not the story I had originally planned on telling this year and is instead the product of a complete rewrite and a realisation that there was a more interesting story to tell with the same themes. Allow me to guide you through the thoughts and limitations which birthed my visual novel into the world.
When it came to defining the core themes of my project there was little doubt in my mind as to what issues I wanted to present to the player and while the actually implementation of them changed over time, their core form did not. These ideas were twofold, the Problem of Suffering and the Trail of Faith. These formed the bedrock of the narrative and I want to go over some overarching thoughts on them and how they relate to the game.
How does on reconcile the idea of a compassionate and loving god with the harsh and uncaring world and the suffering innocent people undergo? This has long been an issue that many religions have grappled with and even to this day it does not have a solid answer despite the many great theological thinkers who have tackled it. Flight of the Exorcist is not an attempt to answer this dilemma, but instead to present in an emotional manner a subject which is far too often stripped down to the abstract. The problem of suffering is a very live issue for so many people. Their pain is a real consideration and puts into sharp focus this apparent contradiction between God’s love and the suffering these people endure. How can they be expected to have faith in God when God seems to care so little for them? It is one thing for theologians in their comfy armchairs to proclaim their faith and for someone actually undergoing the realities of suffering to do the same. By presenting a narrative closer to the visceral nature of the issue (albeit in a fantastical shell), I hope that this complicated and abstract argument feels more understandable and it is clear why grappling with the ideas presented is important for even those who do not believe. It is about our role in the world as much as it is about God’s and resolving this might be an eternal task, but one worth engaging with.
What is faith worth if it is never tested? It is easy to hold blind faith in something because it it a part of your culture or family and never really think about the implications of a divine being or what your faith means in practice. Following authority is something we have ingrained in us from an early age and it can be difficult to see beyond the world-view we are fed by the people above us. However, is there any real value in such blinded faith? It is not true belief and instead a sort of ritual torpor where each movement lack understanding. What god would want believers who only worship them out of habit? Perhaps the only way to truly believe in something is to have that belief tested and it is this which Flight of the Exorcist wrestles with to find an answer. Our protagonist, Charlotte, undergoes the classic trail of faith which can be found in many religious works. For example testing one’s belief is a standard trait of the Judaeo-Christian lineage with the Book of Job just being one long series of trails to demonstrate to the devil the strength of God’s faithful and even Jesus faced a trail in desert to demonstrate his faith in his father.
So I formed the narrative around this idea of a trail, using the aforementioned problem of suffering as the may poll to dance around. But I also wanted to explore the other outcomes of a crisis of faith, namely when the individual finds they no longer believe in their god and instead set out to spread the answer they found as a counter truth to their old beliefs. These are the ones around which new religions form, the Muhammad's of the world so to speak. As a result the idea of the Throne of God being empty was born to provide a line of logic down which Charlotte could tread to this path and present the thought processes which might lead one to choose this course of action. One the flip-side, Alexander acts as a more human centric answer to this conundrum with his conclusion being for humanity to assume the roles left by God in our world. Through contrasting these angle on the same idea I hope that the reasoning behind each argument has been made clear so you too can consider what this means in our everyday lives.
Time contrasts are one of the best ways of fostering innovation and creativity as limitations force people to come up with new ideas and prevents unnecessary bloat. However, this is a double edge sword as I found out this year with other things constantly demanded my attention which coupled with a mild case of writers block led to me led to the project barely being completed in time. The consequences of this was a lack of the polish and testing I would normally go through. In the end this did not negatively impact the game in any ways noticeable to the player, but there are many points where more or less content would have been beneficial. Rebalancing a visual novel’s narrative is important to avoid pacing issues and make sure the right section of the story catch the player’s attention at the right moment. My inability to achieve this in time is a major source of disappointment for me and reminds me that I still have a long way to go to be able to properly understand the time commitment involved in each stage of the visual novel development process.
The primary reason for this delay was the aforementioned writers block which led to a complete shift in focus from the game I originally planned on making onto what would become Flight of the Exorcist. At first this was going to be the story of an enthusiastic new exorcist during his first day on the job and being confronted with the realities of demonic possession. This would shake his faith and cause a similar introspection as is present in the final product. However, I soon realised that I was not happy with how the narrative was forming, the ignorance of the protagonist made it difficult to address the ideas I wanted in a manner which did not devolve into an exposition dump. So I changed around the characters making the mentor character the protagonist, but this did not solve the underlying need to explain things to other characters so I scrapped the entire base plot and decided to explore the mentor’s past. In doing so I found the basis for the tale which would become Flight of the Exorcist in their own crisis of faith and together these elements would slowly merge into Charlotte’s tale. This messy process took far longer than it should have but I learned some valuable lessons about converting old material into something usable in the new form of the game.
Having now written all my thoughts down in an organised form, I realise that I have learnt far more about my own style and processing than in any other year participating in NaNoRenO. Through the time constrains and dramatic shift in focus for the narrative, the final product has come out far better than I could ever have hoped. Its presentation of the ideas of a trial of faith and what the different outcomes of it can be is engaging enough that I hope it can trigger people to give this complicated issue proper consideration. While this might be all for this year’s NaNoRenO I hope that you will join me in whatever magical story I place in front of you next. Until then, I bid you farewell.