Story

Long story short – I’ve decided to change the story – to change the setting and most of all simplify it.

Long story long – early in the week I was scripting a cutscene. The cutscene would trigger right after the player exited a gate, in front of the player was a planet and a space station was in orbit. So far so good. Now comes the cutscene – we see two different sets of ships near the gate. Then the dialog portion starts – two factions were discussing the player’s fate – the factions would take turns attacking ships that would come through the gate. So after this riveting dialog, a cutscene would play, where one of the faction’s ships would fly off and the other faction attacks the player.

Sounds ok eh? Well from seeing it and playing it was incredibly bad, but worse it was incredibly horrible setting it up. I hated it – for various reasons – mostly since it was very tedious scripting and not coding (which I enjoy). Now there are things that I don’t enjoy in terms of this project and I can slog through since I have the end point in mind, but when I dislike something and the end result is bad – well that’s a recipie for disaster.

So I left the computer for the night and sometime between that time and morning I decided to simplify the story.

The setting will change, requiring less explanation and allowing for more action, and a quicker entry into the full range of features of the game – space sim and RTS.

And so far I’m very happy – there’s a lot more action, a lot less need to explain what is going on. Meaning less writing – which should result in overall better writing because – lets face it I’m no Shakespere.