Am I procrastinating actually writing the game by writing about the process of writing a game?

Maybe.

While I am writing this blog series in real time, I am not releasing them until my game is safely shipped to avoid spoilers to my Secret Santa. I’m also writing these kind of piecemeal so while it looks like I had a very organized process where I went from one phase to the next with ease…that’s not really true. Things followed a general timeline, but there were lovely chaotic bits where I was brainstorming, writing, and gathering materials at the same time. But I figured splitting up blog posts by topic is far easier than bringing you 100% along my chaotic journey of madness. This time around, let’s focus on general organization!

So…I had settled on my idea. I had a general idea of the flow in my head. I kept getting more ideas which I kept in my head, which…began to get difficult to keep track of. I was talking out the ideas out loud while going about chores. Mentally in my head there was a branching timeline of possibilities and choices to make in the narrative. And suddenly, and I wish I could explain it, the narrative as a whole began to gel. But with all the thoughts going on in my head, it began to get …crowded…and noisy.

It was time to write this thing out. I sat at my keyboard and…

And chickened out. Okay, this didn’t come as a complete surprise to me. It’s been a long time since I’ve started a project of any sort. So it was time for Manda’s Contingency Plan when she starts to falter in her convictions. I decided to tell other people about the idea.

Luckily I have surrounded myself with honest and even often kind friends who will always take the time to hear me out and give me feedback. So I told a few of my friends of my idea, to feel out what they thought of it. I told them of the core of the story, following the relationship of two friends who start a ghost-hunting club and who run experiments to detect the paranormal. I tell them the general flow of where the story will go, what each puzzle will achieve, and how most of the narrative will be delivered through cassette tapes.

Yes, you read that right. Cassette tapes. My grand plan involves shipping a cassette player and cassettes to my Secret Santa and having the ghost hunting sessions actually be on tape. I’m….way in over my head on this one.

Before I get too far ahead of myself though, it’s time to actually write this stuff out. I try to write things out prose style but this time around things are still vague enough and there are so many details running through my head it’s not really working. So I opt to write out my very basic flow in point form to start so I can at least organize my thoughts. Since the narrative is largely being delivered through conversations on tape, the easiest thing to do is to organize the flow by those tapes. I started with point form…

And then expanded to more prose from the player’s point of view. This would also end up being the basis for my remote playtesting:

Once I had the puzzles, I also began making a list of the items I would need to make:

And a basic timeline of my due dates. I…mostly was able to stick to them:

I also had to script out the actual tapes. When I write scripts, I don’t tend to make a plan for better and for worse. In fact, the rough outline I had just written out was the most pre-planning I had ever done for any scripted material. I find that as I am writing dialogue I work out the characters through that process, then go back and refine as I see fit.

This time though, I had puzzles to factor in. I decided pretty early on not to worry too much about this in my writing and that getting the emotional throughline of the story was important first (more on that in a future post. For my script, I used writer duet, an online program that helps with script writing. And wouldn’t you know it, it has an audio/podcasting format! It made doing things like adding sound effects super easy. It also made it easier when I ended up changing one of the character names:

Since each tape session was just 2-3 minutes long, it was not difficult to finish. What WAS challenging was making sure the story still had an impact despite the short length and the amount of years passing in between each tape (again…more on that later).

How did it work out? Eventually, and admittedly, everything kind of went back into my head again but overall it did help immensely to get things written down and organized early on to help push me along. Spreadsheets, people. They help. They really do.