Yep, that’s right, this week has been fully dedicated to script work again! I didn’t even have much of a choice, since last Saturday, just a couple hours after posting the update, my pc monitor actually died on me, so… until I have a new one (which should be on its way), I can’t really do any art-related work, as all of that is tied to my desktop pc.
Definitely a rather frustrating (and costly) incident, but welp… at least I made some more progress with the script!
Things started out a bit sluggishly, but during the last couple of days, I managed to pick up the pace and am, overall, rather satisfied with the results. Unfortunately, I can’t really share any of them with you, so I thought I might as well use the opportunity to finally talk about some of the writing-related adjustments I’ve recently decided to make.
As mentioned in a previous blog post, I’ve decided to throw in some actual narration into GENBA, although it’s going to be much, much less than what you might be used to from SHINRAI.
Originally, GENBA was supposed to be a much shorter, much faster paced game and a lot more like Ace Attorney, which is why I decided to mostly tell the story through dialogues, basically not using any narration at all. However, the more the script and story evolved, the more problematic this approach became. Although I was able to find some workarounds at first, eventually, I got to a point where not using narration made the writing process a lot more difficult than it needed to be.
If you want to tell a story solely through dialogues, you always need to find some artificial and sometimes even clumsy ways to highlight the characters’ actions. For instance, if you can’t write “he took the hammer and simply left with it”, because you don’t want to use narrative segments, then you’d have to use dialogues to make clear what happens. For instance, by having a character say something like: “Hey, that’s my hammer! You can’t just take it and leave with it!!”
Like I said, every now and then, it’s possible to find workarounds to avoid narration, but GENBA has evolved to a point where doing so is much more detrimental than beneficial to it. Thus, there will now be actual narrative segments like in SHINRAI. But again, I’m limiting them to moments where they are absolutely necessary to explain what’s happening, or when I want to build some tension, for example. Like when Keiichi is about to take his first real look at the body, after it has been recovered from the T-Rex jaws.
Needless to say, I’ll have to go back now and adjust the earlier script parts accordingly, but this should mostly be a question of rephrasing things, rather than completely rewriting or even adding new paragraphs.
Anyway, I’m definitely happy with the results. I am a narration guy after all and always kinda regretted not using it in GENBA. But back in the early planning stages, it really seemed like a much better idea to stick more to the Ace Attorney style of writing.
I might elaborate on this topic a bit further in the future and provide some actual script examples, but for now, I guess I’ll have to come to a close, so… as always, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care! :3
