Fun fact: the main narrative for our Verical Slice was originally longer. But then we recieved some feedback from the team where they said such horrible, awful stuff as, “We haven’t played the ‘game’ part of this game in 20 minutes, and somehow you’ve written something worse than the dredge beneath my shoe.” And so we shortened it.

This monumental anecdote, despite its absolutely grand and epic nature, is not the focus of this week’s blog. It IS important context, though, to this week’s actual topic: the narrative moments!

Devised because the writers wanted more work to do, narrative moments allow for Astraia and Belles to chat about basically anything outside the confines of the main story!

Just pop a squat at any of these bright spots on the floor and let the girls do their talking. Family matters, the factory itself, personalities, baldness, and more are all topics of conversation just waiting to be heard by you!

Believe it or not, I lied in the first sentence, two paragraphs ago. Our Vertical Slice takes a very, very small chunk of the planned early-game of Zakumba: Astraia. Because of this, as I brought up in the blog for the User Interface, there is hardly any room to work with to tell a story without making reading the primary form of gameplay. But story and characters are both crucial aspects of this project and, thus, are important to show off, so how do we go about conveying that with these restrictions in mind?

Simple: we make a lot of it optional.

If these extra pieces of dialogue and worldbuilding are optional, then it’s a win-win: story-orientied players get more story, while gameplay-oriented players can focus on their gameplay. Unfortunately, the optional nature of these scenes also presented a unique challenge when drafting them: what exactly should be optional?

In some cases, this was easy to determine: that punk Jamal’s baldness isn’t exactly a crucial plot point (although the story is subject to change), but is the abandoned factory’s history not important? Or how about Belles’ family? Or the FOOFS?!

It’s difficult to discuss our process in detail without overstepping into the story of writing the main narrative, so I’ll keep it short: if information was crucial to the context of the Vertical Slice’s narrative and the small character arcs present within, it was kept in said narrative. The rest became contenders for narrative moments. This sounds simple, but, man, we like the characters, so all of it felt necessary. Killing your darlings is a crucial part of the writing process, though, so I hope we pulled off the assassination effectively.

But, in the process of writing these moments, we decided they shouldn’t just cover the characters. We also wanted to sprinkle in bits and pieces about the entire WORLD of Zakumba: Astraia, just to emphasize that, despite the apparent smaller scope of Astraia’s story, every region, person, and culture is crucial. Thus, we tried our best to integrate these aspects into the girls’ conversations.

And that’s the beauty of the narrative moments as a whole: they allow us to show EVERY side of these characters, and not just the ones that are relevant to the main narrative.

But don’t think we took this too seriously or anything.

Narrative Moments: Writing Writing When Writing Shouldn’t be Written