(no subject)

Sounds like you shouldn't be trying to write longass epics that require lots of content and set up to be coherent, and instead write short stories that quickly get to the scenarios you want.

-Chelle, third comment under this entry.

Really, though, that's exactly the thing. I didn't have any particular scenarios on mind when I conceived Starbound. That project was born primarily from some nostalgia I was having about Earthbound. I already wrote down everything I liked about that trilogy of games in the first cut in this entry. Those were what I was trying to fulfill, at least as closely as one possibly could without any kind of video game creation skills. I chose to make a Lucky Star fanfic out of it, because I wanted to do something meaningful with the idea of the girls' hair being arranged into beehives. (I did commission for something about that months earlier, but the final product was poorly written and barely did anything beyond the transformations themselves.)

Furthermore, I've already mentioned to both Jake and Chelle that, from the very beginning, I got into the concept of fanfiction for all the wrong reasons, and that is why I suck as an author. However, it remains my hobby of choice, because I like spending time with fictional characters. (That could be because I barely have any real friends, as Dad might infer, but even Chelle told me before that she isn't cut out to have much of a social life in the real world.)

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Anyway, yesterday, I told Jake that I might just be ready to finish up the lemon starting today, and asked if he'd be able to get started with The Original Story (that's what I'm gonna call the Beehive Brigade's story from now on), but he said that he's in the middle of finishing up a major project of his own.

Why I hired him to write it in the first place? It's because he wanted something other than Starbound to work on, and also because he's familiar enough with Earthbound to know what kind of story I'm looking for with this one. In fact, the reason I commissioned him to rewrite Starbound, was because I'm gonna be needing his help (anyone's who's played Earthbound, really) to figure out what goes on for most of the story, and he sorta complained about my own writing style while reading the first chapter himself. (Then again, he did come up with some ideas on how chapter 4 could play out, but that one ended up being something else entirely in the end.)

Get this too, the way Jake's friend Zerodius and my own friend Chelle see the game's plot are complete opposites. Quoting the former's words in this formerly f-locked entry:

Because the guy wanted to tell a story.

This is the shortest explanation but I will elaborate a bit.

With the Mother games, the goal is not for a generic quest. And that stems from two radically different goals. In Dragon Quest, the journey is the point. As in, the whole point is to beat up monsters, level-up, and beat up enemies with bloated stats eventually. 'Save the world' is an excuse to move to the next set of targets. And 'this town has X problem' is the excuse to stop at a town beyond buying equipment.

The Mother games tell a cohesive story with a clear beginning, events linking everything, that eventually lead to the end. With Earthbound, this is noticeable but in Mother 3, it's pretty much blatant that the game's structure is divided more into 'chapters' than in 'stages'. (Earthbound still separate events by location. Mother 3 echew this completely ; it's the game world that changes instead. Though you still move from area to area, the journey actually make you tread a lot less ground than Earthbound)

To summarize...

In Dragon Quest, the point is to beat up bad guys.

In Earthbound, this is Ness's journey.

In contrast, here's what Chelle surmised when I summed the game up during an email exchange:

[...] a lot of the subplots described there are random sidequest stuff that fits in with Earthbound's zany surreal tone. What I'm gathering here is that you don't want subplots related to the main plot, but just random things. That's going to depend on the locations the characters visit, I guess, and how much the world is turned surreal. But I already established I'm no good at this type of surreal humor.

[skipping to another relevant bit]

This isn't really complex from what I can tell. Characters move from point a to point b, learn and advance along the way. You could replace any enemy with rabid noodles, and the helpers with dancing trampolines and it wouldn't make a difference for the outcome. All of this plot is a long sequence of moving on. There may or may not be deep themes and characterization, but the plot itself? Nope. It's really, really simple.

Here's what the flow breaks down into :

1) Onett

- Set up.
-Ness defeats rabid noodles, is praised, earns plot coupon, moves on.
-Ness defeats rabid noodles, is stopped, questioned, defeats trampolines, moves on.

2) Twoson and Happy Happy Village
-Ness is drawn in my damsel in distress, who is threatened by rabid noodles.
-Ness fights rabid noodles who deliver plot relevant information.
-Ness meets useful side character.
-Ness goes somewhere, fights rabid noodles to obtain plot coupon to save damsel. Companion obtained.
-Ness and Paula go places for social interaction.
-Ness and Paula do something nice for dancing trampolines that allows them to move on.

[etc.]

To be fair, what I showed her was a simplified telling of EB's plot, as opposed to this more in-depth walkthrough. Something like this:

( Read more... )

Chelle's aforementioned response is what I showed Jake that night, given how it conflicts with Zerodius's, but as I mentioned in the following day's blog entry, he was already tired of discussing the game's plot at that point.

Furthermore, there's this entry (4/24/13), where I actually explained how certain events throughout the game affects stuff to happen later on. That would obviously support Zerodius's point pretty well.

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So, what I want mainly, is to spend some time with Starbound, but without any ideas to work with, it's going nowhere fast. That's exactly part of the reason why I hired Jake to write The Original Story, since he's better at coming up with ideas than I am (the alternative would be to dig online for people I've never even met, and see if anyone is interested, and there's the obvious risk that they'll lose interest in it along the way). Meanwhile, I do also have plenty of planned spritesheets to work on, but it wasn't that long ago that I was working on a few, during which I couldn't help but think about everything else I wanted at least to enjoy viewing for myself. Voice acting in particular, but also stuff like music and special graphical effects.

My plan in the long run, is to showcase all my spritesheets on GameDev.net, in order to show that I'm capable of anything before I commission people to work on other aspects of the game. One of said aspects would be, you guessed it, the story. I'm pretty sure that the creators of Mother 4 only had to come up with the concept itself and whatever they happened to be capable of before hiring actual storywriters among everyone else involved. However, since GD.net is mostly about game creation, I've decided yesterday to instead call out to anyone on The Fanfiction Forum who would be interested in seeing or helping determine where Starbound goes as the fanfic it currently is.

(Yeah, I remember Chelle objecting to that before, but really, I don't know what else to do at this point, besides continuing with the spritesheets and commissioning for other stuff until something rings a bell (chronologically or otherwise).)

(Having already written all of the above, I actually do recall this subject having come up between me and Chelle more than once. This comment exchange in particular comes to mind.)