As mentioned in last week’s blog post, I’m currently working on the script for the first “Confrontation Phase” in GENBA no Kizuna.
Here, our investigators face our suspects and confront them with the clues and evidence they have uncovered thus far.
As such, the entire chapter is basically one long discussion that addresses some of the mysteries and aims to unravel them.
Keiichi will not only have to argue with the four members of Raptor Pack Productions, however, because even some of his own teammates might occasionally present theories of their own, which he will need to debunk.
Yesterday, I’ve posted a tiny sneak peek of Himatsu‘s deductive reasoning on my private Twitter account, if you’re curious!
Right now, I’m still busy going through the first half of the discussion, revising and rearranging some of parts of it.
It’s actually not as easy as it may sound to write something like this, because there sure is a lot of stuff to pay close attention to.
Despite having a detailed outline to guide me, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of the flow of logic and to present things in a manner that’s easy to follow and understand. Depending on the complexity of the issue at hand, it can therefore be very difficult to figure out how to tackle it and in which order to cover its various aspects.
On that note, I’m also spending a lot of time just thinking about all the possible angles to look at things. I don’t want players to go through this chapter and think things like “Wait, why isn’t anyone bringing up X?” after all. I personally hate it myself when I play a mystery game and I’m noticing something that’s either never brought up or at a very late point, so I’m trying my best to avoid this.
Failing to consider and mention something important isn’t my only worry, though. In some cases, the literal opposite happens and I let characters bring up something that the player shouldn’t have any knowledge of yet. That’s because, as the author, I already know everything about the story and the solutions to its mysteries and, with a script as huge as this and past edits and revisions resulting in plot points and topics getting shifted around… my mind doesn’t always correctly remember what was already said and what wasn’t, so there is a lot of double-checking involved in this regard, too.
Then there’s the interactivity, of course. The discussion needs to be written in a way where choices and prompts to present evidence can regularly show up in a natural way. Of course, this also means that I’ve got a number of alternate dialogues to write in case you present the wrong evidence or you give an incorrect answer. So yeah, despite this chapter certainly being much shorter in word count, it still requires quite a bit of work. And, as frustrating as it can sometimes get, I’m also having a lot of fun with it, as you can probably tell from the sneak peek linked above, haha.
Anyway, it’s time for me to get back to work, so please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care! :3
