oogwah! my sixth dev log!!!!
my devlogs are getting less beautiful by absolutely huge margins. My next devlog will be a png of a pile of dirt.

Main thing we did: Why prototype

What is is:

• A really simple, single day narrative prototype aimed at testing whether or not our new “why” angle is worth pursuing
• The “why” we’re testing: Blueberry had a trauma in his childhood where he fell from a great height and broke his legs. This event caused a shift in his mind, where he suddenly felt like he had gained a fundamental understanding of life and the world. Now, he is pushing others from great heights to attempt to get them to understand as well.
• How we’re testing it: Basically, we’re having a bunch of kids spread rumors about Blueberry that allude to the result of the trauma, but not the traumatic event itself. At the end of the day, a small group of kids sneaks into the school and sees what they understand as something horrible that Blueberry has done, similar in fashion to the events that have already unfolded. At the end, a big forum post by a witness divulges this traumatic moment in detail, ideally locking the player into this understanding of events.

Results:

• This is immensely useful in some ways, and not all that useful at all in others. It’s a great way to test pure narrative intrigue. Is the question of “why” compelling? Can we create an explanation that is compelling and can be fed to the player in an interesting way? Ultimately, the answer to these questions was yes.
• However, the nature of this being a narrative prototype meant that we had to do a bunch of stuff that we would never actually do in the game. One part of this is the sheer density of rumors, and how often and specifically kids are talking about the events. More so than that, though, is how much the prototype leans on forum posts. The prototype opens with two different blog posts, one that implies Strawberry’s death, and another that explicitly talks about Blueberry’s mom’s death, and directly suggests/raises the question of his involvement. And, of course, the prototype ends with a huge forum post that basically gives away the whole deal in eloquent detail.
• But pretty much none of the forum post stuff would actually be in the game. It basically defeats the purpose of interacting with the other kids at all, and squashes your role as a kid. If you can just wait for a deluge of information in between says, why engage with the kids that don’t know anything?
• So it’s a nice test of how interesting our game could be, but we’re basically cheating our way there. I do think we’ll be able to do it even without the forum posts, especially the onboarding stuff, but there’ll certainly be trial and error to come.

Next Steps

• Because this was a pretty successful prototype, we’ve now entered into a big content push. For me, that means writing a draft of the script for the first three days of the game, ideally. I’ve divided that up into Onboarding/Buildup, and the Turning point.
• The first two days would be onboarding and buildup, basically establishing the groundwork. On the first day, that means catching the player up on what has happened. Two people have died, and Blueberry was there both times. On the second day, and at the end of the first day, rumors would start spreading that could fuel any of the three core “why” explanations that we’ve decided on.
• Day three, the turning point, would consist of more variation than the first two days, as the player would start to be funneled into one particular belief. Rumors would point more at one explanation than the other (the player choosing which to believe), and after-school “canon” events would be directly oriented at reinforcing one belief in a dramatic fashion, and by the end of the day, the player should be more or less “locked in” to one belief, and at the very least should be able to clearly distinguish one explanation, even if they’re not convinced of it.
• Day three is also where the player would become “best friends” with one of the other kids. This means that by the end of the day, they would be able to receive DMs from them. Right now, I imagine that this would be after the dramatic canon event, where the NPC can then push the player even further towards the belief that it pointed at. Ideally this “push” wouldn’t be surprising, as this character would have already been influencing the player’s beliefs.
• After a few days of locking in on writing, and art on Jib’s side, we’ll move on quite quickly to implementation. We’re hoping to reach out to external advisors soon, so we want to have content to show them.

Decisions

• The prerequisite to our big content push was actually to make some concrete (ish) design & writing decisions. Some of these decisions were “we’ll do it like this for now, and see how that goes,” and others were “for this version, we’ll hold off on this,” while still others were more final.
• The three “why” explanations
• We decided on three psychological explanations for why the community might think that blueberry has done this. In making this decision, we actually decided to have the trauma in our prototype be the root of all of these explanations, as it would unify them and create a mystery “weenie” so to speak, without actually needing them to be all that similar.
• “Trying to get people to understand,” as in our prototype
• Revenge, a hatred resurfacing. (the root trauma was explicitly caused by somebody (or somebodies) who he is now seeking revenge on)
• Believing himself to be an “angel of judgement” (a sort of skewed moral arising from the trauma, “if you don’t survive, you weren’t meant to”)
• These three felt nicely distinct without being too different that they’d be too divisive, or couldn’t coexist early on (like: an adult manipulated him to do it, or he’s attempting an occult ritual). They also all rely on slight distinctions among versions of the initial trauma as well as what exactly happened atop the lighthouse with Strawberry, which would make nice “nails in the coffin” to really lock someone into a belief, still without being technically mutually exclusive.
• Forum Posts
• As I’ve alluded to, forum posts in the way that they exist in the prototype simply wouldn’t work in the final game. We do still want to keep them in the game in some way, as they offer a nice glimpse into what is happening out there in the big world of adults that is sort of necessary to even feel like a kid at all.
• We haven’t decided how exactly we’ll limit these posts. One promising suggestion was that the player would only be able to read post titles, but not the body (except maybe a single preview line), themed as some sort of age restriction.
• The Detective
• We do still want a detective character there, and we still want her to have an opposed belief to the people in the town. For our current build, she will just be walking around doing her job, and she’ll appear in “canon” events, but won’t talk.
• We also loosely decided that the detective won’t share her perspective until later on in the story, late enough that the player won’t believe it. It would serve more to set up the second loop.
• Lastly, we decided that the detective would be visibly frustrated and stumped.
• Adults Talking
• We want to keep the idea that adults speak incomprehensibly, but we’ve also decided that when they speak directly to kids, like a parent or a teacher would, they speak in sentence fragments with stickers.
• Status Changes
• As the story changes and becomes less fragmented (no longer six different whodunnit possibilities), we decided to do away with the “close friends” status. This will keep the player in the dark for a bit longer, and will also make unlocking DMs with a character more powerful.
• Second Loop
• We’re gonna hold off on decisions about a second loop for now.

Long term writing plan

• I think in order for this story to feel rich and believable, there needs to be much more worldbuilding of the community. My broad plan/hope for the writing process would be to write this initial draft without that, then before revising it, change my focus to building the community of the town, what happened leading up to these events and far before, and how the community at large, and specific members, are reacting to these events. From there, the first three days can be rewritten/revised along with feedback from advisors and testers!

That’s all for now. I hope to dream of a warm spring day where I have absolutely nothing at all to do, so I sit on a park bench and listen to the birds chirp while eating some sort of soft pastry.