Goodbye Alexis :(

Last night, while I was working on Memories, I came to the realization that the character Alexis wasn’t needed.

Alexis

Alexis was the daughter of Albert (the butler), and Adalyn (or Lyn, the housekeeper), as well as the sister of Alea (the cook).  I used one of the pre-made characters within RPG Maker for her (as well as Albert and Alea; Lyn was made using RPG Maker VX Ace’s character generator).  Her character was created when I was trying to round out the number of servants within the house, and at the time it made sense for her to be related to the servant family.

But when I was really thinking about Memories yesterday (and specifically what character from the servants should be in the final cutscene), I realized that there’s no real reason for Alexis to be in the game at all.  She served as someone that you brought an item to partway through the game, but that was all she actually did; that function could very easily go to someone else, and probably should, as the other characters do far more for the story.  I was sad about this; I had just figured out her character and how she would speak over the last few days (and I liked her – she  was upbeat and friendly).  But she had to go in service to the overall story and game.

Removing her actually helped me with another character too (her mother, Lyn), who just disappears through most the game. I always assumed Lyn was offscreen in one of the areas you unlock later, which works but seems kind of weak.  Having Lyn take over for Alexis makes her far more present within the game.

Thankfully removing Alexis from Memories was relatively easy.  All I had to do was change up a few bits of dialogue, and a spot where Lyn appeared in the kitchen, which ended up easier than I expected (I just used Alea for that part instead, which also strengthens the cook’s role within the game). And done!  That further cemented that removing Alexis from the game was the right thing to do; the other characters (and the game itself) are now stronger as a result.

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#WriteMonday Aug 27th

So today I decided to change #WriteFriday into #WriteMonday.  I think Monday will be a better day for me to consistently write an update post here (especially since that’s the day I’m updating Sustainably North).

Oh, and I also finally figured out how to make this blog a menu link on my Shauna Kosoris website! I’ve been wanting to do that for awhile now but had a hard time figuring it out; I’ve been looking for how to do it in a very complicated manner.  I was reading Austin Kleon‘s Show Your Work! 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered, and it kind of inspired me to stop putting this off and figure it out.  It turned out to be super easy (you just make a custom menu – this WordPress Support article explains how).

I also changed the Samples page on shaunakosoris.com to better split up the sample scenes and character bios.  That was in preparation for adding the sample romantic scene I started working on to the page soon (I was hoping to get it edited and up a few weeks ago, but that failed to happen).  I also wanted to show that the bios that are on the site were for different genres (one set are science fiction, the other fantasy).

In really good news, today I actually did edit the sample romantic scene I wrote and post it on shaunakosoris.com! The scene is a short conversation that takes place in an unnamed restaurant, mainly between the female player character and a love interest. I added in a couple of branches in the dialogue because it’s good practice – writing branches can be a bit tough!  If you’d like to read it the sample, you can find it here. 🙂

In terms of Sustainably North, over the last few weeks I’ve written four posts: my second round up of interesting articles I’ve found on sustainability related topics, a quick post on a visit to a friend’s camp, a post about writing letters to Members of Parliament regarding Canada’s decision to purchase the Trans-Mountain Pipeline, and one that’s still forthcoming on a TED Talk a friend told me to watch (that’ll be up next Monday). The letter writing one was rather interesting to write because I’ve never written letters to politicians before; I had to research what to do (and then I actually wrote the letters).  I’m interested to see what kind of replies I will get (if any).

So how has your week been?

Working on Samples

Over the last month or so, I’ve had a couple of different people ask me for game writing samples.  I directed them to my main website, shaunakosoris.com, so they could see what I had readily available.  Unfortunately in both cases, my available samples did not meet their needs (one person requested samples with romantic dialogue, while the other was looking for non-fantasy samples). Currently on my website, I have three samples: two are character biographies that were developed for different games, and the other is made up of actual scenes from a game (mainly dialogue with a bit of branching narrative).

I have written a couple of pieces over the years that I think would have better met what these people were looking for. Unfortunately I am unable to showcase them as samples.  So I decided to set to work remedying this.  Two nights ago I went looking for writing prompts to use as a starting point.  I was specifically looking for more of a real-world idea, but ended up finding a fun romantic dialogue prompt instead.  I was going to write the sample in Chat Mapper, with the intention of exporting it as a .rtf (I was really hoping to see what the output would look like with branching dialogue).  Unfortunately I don’t currently have access to that capability, so I had to use a different program instead.  Last night I played around with TyranoBuilder a bit, thinking I could build it there, but I don’t think there’s a way to export the dialogue (and I wasn’t planning on writing an entire Visual Novel, although that might be something to try in the future).  So I ended up writing the first draft of the sample in Word. I had a lot of fun writing it (it’s currently over 900 words!) I’m hoping to get it edited and up on the site over the weekend. 🙂