While I haven’t worked on it much lately, I’ve been feeling really confident and excited about Tinselfly. I’ve now got a page and a half of bullet points describing scenes I want to have and how they fit into my overall story. Structurally, this is really coming together.

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I’m hesitant to talk about story too much; I don’t want to give away any spoilers. That’s been making me uncomfortable for a while. I want very much to share my thoughts on how to tell a story here and post playable demos; that’s an important part of this process to me. However, one thing I’m really exited about is this series of short vignettes I’ve decided to put in near the beginning of the story proper. Not just because they fit in an interesting way with the story proper, but also because I’d feel comfortable talking about them in detail and posting playable demos of them, without talking about their overall context.

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Given the egalitarian nature of my universe, I’ve been stressing about designing androgynous formal wear that is still recognizable as formal wear, and that isn’t just having one set absorb the other (i.e. putting all the women in tuxedos).

My initial idea was to try mashing up the visual details of men’s & women’s formal wear — a gown with a formal jacket over it; a tuxedo with semitransparent/floral/embroidered details. But that’s kind of a shallow approach.

What I should do instead is get at the logic of formal wear, the different things it’s trying to accomplish for each gender, and mash up the logic. Once the logic is worked out, a costume should become self-evident.

Not that that approach is working to well right now. It’s very abstract, and I’m much more comfortable just doing visual mashups.

Tried to draw up a sketch in Illustrator (left), which isn’t really helping me sort out my thoughts that much.

I think what I need to do is just keep working on my character customization stuff; eventually, I should have a system where I can make an XML file or something that defines not just one costume, but a set of options for a given gaggle of extras. So like, the formal wear XML file might say something like, there’s a 75% chance the character will wear slacks and a 25% chance the character will be wearing a floor-length skirt, and maybe the shirt’s tucked in and maybe it’s not, and I can work with a whole look and (hopefully) see multiple extras generated from my script all at once in a neat little table in my editor.

(That will probably make more sense once the tool is up and running, and I’m sure I’ll babble about it more then.)