In the last few days, I have been working to finalize the details of my Tinselfly story. For the most part, it’s going well. I have many more concrete plans for scenes and puzzles and environments than I had before, and am generally feeling good about the story as a whole.

However, I’m having trouble with the beginning. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense, thematically.

* * *

In programming, a regression issue is where you update one part of your program, only to find out that your update broke something that was working previously.

It happens all the time, sadly. Most recently, an attempt I made to streamline the object interaction UI resulted in a broken action menu on certain objects.

Tinselfly’s story has some regression issues.

* * *

In an old version of the story, space-dwelling aliens lay eggs in the main star in humanity’s civilization. When the eggs hatch centuries later, the star collapses, giving up all its energy to millions upon millions of baby aliens who will live thousands of years each, growing up to build planet-sized megastructures humans could only dream of. To the aliens, humans are little more than bugs in a nest. The humans flee to another star system upon realizing what’s going to happen, and everything the humans built is lost.

At least, I think that’s how it went; that version of the story is well over a decade old.

The artwork I produced during this period was all meant to evoke a feeling of nostalgia and fragility and profound loss.

The player would start in the ruins of the old world, picking up some items of personal significance before the story proper–told in flashback–started.

The story changed, but the designs remained the same, and I was still planning on starting the player in floating ruins.

I just forgot why I was doing it.

* * *

Spoiler alert: human civilization isn’t demolished in the new story. It’s just not that bleak anymore. Sure, there’s a little bit of destruction. But it’s not exactly on a huge scale.

In many ways this is a good thing, which is probably why I changed the story in the first place: damaging something small of great personal significance to the protagonist will be far more affecting than obliterating whole planets.

So… I think I can keep the ruins. I think, thematically, it can still work and set the mood; there’s still a theme of loss going on here–a sort of loss of innocence, expressed via the loss of just a handful of structures in this world.

I think I just need to be more specific about what specifically is getting reduced to ruins here.

Chances are, I will not be writing the dialogue for Tinselfly, or any of my other games, for that matter. My wife, dialogue-writer-extraordinaire, will be fielding that.

Still, I think it behooves me to learn about dialogue writing, if only to figure out what I’d want, ideally. And I think what I want is dialogue like this one Doctor Who scene.

So if I want dialogue like this, I need to tear it apart and figure out what makes it tick.

Structure

The most obvious thing is… there is nothing naturalistic about it. It’s very carefully paced and structured, and it’s as much about the repetition of certain words and phrases as it is about the meaning of the words themselves.

In songs and poetry, we talk about rhyming schemes and structures, like, this song has an ABABCB structure where A is the verse, B is the chorus, and C is a bridge.

• Consider the first six lines: the words ‘box’ and ‘sulk’ form a sort of A-B-C-C-A-A structure: box-time-sulk-sulk-box-box.
• The exchange from Okay, that is a first to another first is also highly structured and repetitive: first is of course used twice, ship three times in rapid succession, and the Is it magic? Is it a machine?… It’s a ship bit is almost like It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Superman! in its rhythm.

Double Meanings

• When the Doctor says That’s no more a box than you are a governess, he’s pretty much explicity saying there’s more to Clara than she’s letting on, just as the Tardis is small on the outside and bigger on the inside.
• Back to Clara saying I’m not sweet on the inside, and I’m certainly not little: the line is also as much about the Tardis as it is about Clara.
• Previous watchers of the show will know when Clara says the word souffle, that single word is packed with meaning.

Odd Transitions / Subverting Expectations

Jumping from subject to subject keeps the audience on their toes.

• When Clara walks in the Tardis, she doesn’t ask what’s going on. The dialogue just goes straight from Clara protesting I’m not sweet on the inside, and I’m certainly not little to the Doctor interjecting It’s called the Tardis. Makes the exchange punchier, I think. The what is this? question is implied.
• Anyone familiar with Doctor Who will expect Clara to say it’s bigger on the inside, just as the Doctor himself expects her to say it. But instead, she flips that common phrase around to it’s smaller on the outside.
• When Clara asks about the kitchen, it’s quite unexpected — but it’s doesn’t lead to a discussion of souffles. As soon as the Doctor realizes something is wrong, the conversation switches to Clara asking why she’s been led here.

Not Answering Questions

Questions are rarely answered directly.

• The Doctor doesn’t say if there’s a kitchen.
• Clara doesn’t respond when the Doctor questions her about souffles.
• When Clara asks why are you showing me all this?, the Doctor turns the question back on Clara.
• When Clara asks about the ladder, the Doctor answers a different question.
• When Clara asks what the Doctor’s key is for, the Doctor responds by talking about himself.

Overall

Overall, I think I’d say that this style of dialogue is all about favoring thematic flow over conversational flow. Every unanswered question and every odd transition makes sense if you look at the themes of the answer in relation to the themes of the question. It’s like subtext? But it’s not about what the characters are thinking so much as the narrative intent.

Of my lead character in Tinselfly, I have often said, well, she’s basically me.

And while that is still true in many ways, it’s time to start thinking about how she’s not me. It’s said that you can only understand things in opposition to other, similar things; in this case, I will gain a better understanding of my character by asking myself how she and I are different.

And as long as I’ve been defining the character as me, it’s been too easy to blithely ignore any criticism that I might not treating the character with respect, saying, or thinking, of course I understand her experience; her experience is my experience!

And that’s just not true.

It’s time to remove that safety net.

* * *

I thought it would be useful to express this as a handy-dandy Venn diagram:

* * *

Well, that was fun.

So what does this get me?

Anything in the blue Robin-only section is stuff I’ll have to be extra-careful about. They range from behaviors I simply don’t engage in, to mindsets I find outright alien.

So, moving forward, what I should probably do here is start thinking, not about how Robin’s individual behaviors are different than mine but about Robin’s overall mindset and how it’s informing those behaviors.

As I type this, the following example comes to mind:

So… from my point of view, the first two behaviors listed here seem contradictory at first glance, despite my gut feeling that both belonged in the list. But I know many people who exhibit those behaviors, and thinking about it some more, it makes perfect sense — one you get to the single root cause of those behaviors.

Similarly:

Et cetera, et cetera.

Well, I think this has been a useful exercise. Looking forward to doing more of it, but hopefully you get the idea. 🙂

At work-work, we’ve started experimenting with something called Test Driven Development.   It’s where you start a new program by writing some tests for it. Since your program proper hasn’t been written yet, your tests will fail.

After failing, you then write your program, and run your tests again. And hopefully some or all or the tests will pass. And you keep working on your program until all your tests pass.

It sounds a little backwards, and I wasn’t really sold on the whole idea at first, but it’s growing on me.

* * *

So I was gonna enter this co-op board game contest.

And then I didn’t.

I could write up a whole postmortem, but mostly what it comes down to is, I chose not to devote a lot of time to this project.  I’m still going to work on the game design. It’s deeply flawed, but I think there’s potential here. In many ways, failing this first test has been a good way to start.

* * *

Video games are filled with tests. Boss battles especially are very test-like. After grinding for hours and hours, you’ll suddenly find yourself in a situation where you have to use all the new equipment you’ve gained and defeat a screen-filling monster in an intensely concentrated test of your skills as a player.

For Tinselfly, I want tests, but more character driven. You can’t progress if you don’t get the characters you’re playing. Their assorted emotional baggage, their strengths, what things make them totally freak out for no rational reason. The story won’t continue if it thinks you’ve missed some of it.

* * *

It’s getting harder and harder to avoid working on actual playable levels for Tinselfly. I’ve done lots of setup, written lots of outlines; the visuals so far are nice… but a decade into this, I still haven’t figured out the details of where to begin, with this whole character-and-story-through-game-mechanics thing.

But it occurs to me that the answer lies in Test Driven Development. In an odd sort of way, a great many conventional stories are test driven.

You start with a hero. The hero is presented with a test in one of the first scenes of the story, and they fail the test. The exact way the hero fails should tell you a lot about them as a person. And then the hero gains new skills, has various emotional epiphanies, improves as a person, and finally passes the test they were originally confronted with. Roll credits.

Lots and lots of action movies follow this sort of template.

So without knowing the details of my first level, I can write the test for it, and just make it up as I go along, which is nice because I hate planning this sort of stuff.  And then I can build the rest of the level around that test, making sure the player has ways to gain the items and area unlocks they need to complete the test, and I can keep iterating until the test is actually completable.

A while ago, I downloaded this app that lets me see how much time I’m spending playing games. I seem to get about an hour or two a week in. The most I’ve spent with any one game is Star Trek Online; I’ve played it for a total of 25 hours over the last 2 years.

Those felt like pretty big numbers to me. I showed the stats to my wife, and she was appalled that I’d given a full day of my life to this one game.

I showed those numbers to some people in the local game dev group, and later on to some other friends, and they were appalled at how low those numbers were.

It’s becoming quite clear that I don’t really have a grasp of how people who are really into this stuff engage with it.

* * *

So I started playing Mass Effect. As with most big, popular video games, I wouldn’t necessarily say I like it. But the act of playing and trying to figure out what it’s trying to do, who it’s trying to appeal to… that, I find fascinating.

It seems a lot of it is about world building. I’m really, really not at all into world building normally. Whenever people start gushing about the richness of this or that built world, it actually makes me angry. I feel like it’s a waste of time, concentrating on emotionally inert minutiae that has no real value outside the context of a narrative.

But if I’m playing this game to figure out the mindset of its target audience, a big part of that is figuring out the appeal of world building, really figuring it out without being dismissive of it.

* * *

So what is this whole world building thing about, anyway? Here are some guesses:

• Historical context. Can add more layers of meaning to dialogue and events.
• Suggesting unwritten scenes. I’m a big fan of this in general. Suggesting an unwritten scene can be used to gloss over something that would be boring if you actually saw it; it can create comedic how-did-they-get-here moments, or efficiently hint at where a relationship has been going. I can see something here where the more world you’ve got, the more you can suggest using the costume, iconography, etc of your world.
• Sandbox. Fantasy/sci-fi worlds frequently exist just so the author can explore a what-if sort of scenario, and I suppose a good, robust world will also invite the audience to pose what-ifs of their own. At its worst, this can descend into self-indulgent wallowing in one’s favorite bits of a fantasy world, but I’ll admit there is real value in encouraging people to explore these kinds of things.
• Suspension of disbelief. Some people will just get annoyed if you present them with an artificial feeling world. I don’t want to pander to those people just to get them to buy my stuff… but to look at it another way: while I’m not going to be taken out of a mass-market period movie because the costuming is inaccurate, many people will, and saying that it’s ok to be lazy about costume research because the masses as a whole aren’t that picky is making your work more insular, not less.

* * *

It has always been my intention to make Tinselfly appealing to people who didn’t normally play games, or only played casual stuff. But it occurred to me the other day that the last thing I want to do is be too opinionated about what sort of audience I want to reach.

It’s about depth. Being appealing to a casual audience shouldn’t be about finding that lowest-common-denominator, simplistic presentation of Stuff That Common People Like.

I think it should be more about the union, rather than the intersection, of appealing things. It’s about having most everything that’s appealing about your product in most every scene, but also letting those things stand on their own and shine once in a while.

So if you’ve got one person who’s just into the visuals (say, me 😉 ) and one person who’s just into the snappy dialogue (totally not me), you’ve got a good chance of getting both of those people. But that’s not the important part. The important thing is that any audience member has a variety of things to latch onto at any given moment, and can experience the work on multiple levels simultaneously, if they so desire.

* * *

This new, vignette-filled structure I’ve hit upon for Tinselfly opens up some opportunities for world-building. I was gonna pepper my main plot with these little, tangential, fairy-tale style stories set in little fairy-tale style universes, but I could just as easily package these up as little bits of history, set a hundred or a thousand years before the story proper.

If there’s an organic opportunity to give world-building fans something to play with, I should probably do it.  I would do well to go ahead and put real effort into those dimensions  of my product that I’m not the biggest fan of, like the dialogue and the world building; as long as it doesn’t interfere with the visuals and the story structure that I want, it can only make this better.