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[nathy after dark]

Current Info

• A free, 5-episode browser-based adventure game
• Funded through Patreon
• Made in HTML5 using Phaser and Fractive
• Set in a Utopian/Dystopian alternate reality 2017 2018 on Planet U.T.A.H.
• Coming-of-age story of the Space Bard, a shapeshifting, genderfluid aspiring musician
• Poetic, autobiographical sci-fi focused on mental health and queerness
• Everything is a metaphor
• Each episode featuring a different local Utah band
• Printed companion zine with each episode?? idk maybe???
• There will be a special Halloween episode even if we have to release it in January June.

Episode 1 To-Do List

Plan for localization

• Extend Fractive to allow for localized markdown files
• Design a workflow that helps me write game dialogue in clear, accessible, and translatable English

Player choices and consequences system

• Design/implement a 3-dimensional representation of the player's mental/emotional health (The Vibe)
• Design/implement an evocative but unobtrusive visualization of the Vibe
• Implement a simple system for tracking and responding to events and choices that have taken place
• Dialogue utilizes 6 different emojis which automatically adjust the Vibe when they appear in dialogue
• Define special conditions of the vibe such as "depressed," "panic attack," "creative mania"

Save files

• Local autosave/load through localStorage:
  
  • Serialize the Vibe
  • event flags
  • player's location
  • player's phone history
• Implement some form of cloud storage/save-file export so player data isn't tied exclusively to one browser/machine

Writing

• Detailed bio on each character to appear in episode 1
• Finalize relevant details of the world-building
• Outline the rough story progression
• Write out a full script
• Implement a prototype/demo using placeholder art

Art

• Find an animator with personal experience and enthusiasm for the project & subject matter
• Crowdfund, save & scrounge so I can pay said artist before I ask them to do anything
• Keep researching the copyright legality of a collage art style
• Put together a storyboard/art bible document of all episode 1 locations, props, and characters with reference images and descriptions
• Work closely to get the final assets just right

Shapeshifting system
Social media/texting system
Dialogue system
Inventory system
Point-and-click exploration system

(I'll have to expand on these to-do list sections later--they're some of the more complicated parts.)


(Original first post--See how much has changed!)
Welcome to U.T.A.H.

That is, the realm of Space where we'll be celebrating real-life Utah culture in an alternate universe with less mormons and homophobia!



What the hell?

This is a sci-fi game about a washed-up musician, inspired by BoJack Horseman, Rick and Morty, and life. We're working on our first prototype, but already have so many ideas and aspirations that it's hard to know what to put in the first post! Here's a peek at our Trello board:



Technical Info

This is my first game in Unity. I've been using frameworks like XNA, LibGDX, and SDL to build custom engines until now... And wow. It feels awesome to be working in C# again (my favorite language) and to have development moving so fast.

Right now the placeholder art is from sets licensed from Oryx (oryxdesignlab.com). Hopefully we'll find it in the budget to give the game its own visual identity, but for now, it's all about the audio and the gameplay!

Stay tuned...  

[nathy after dark]

Space Bard: Origins

I conceived of this game almost 2 years ago (November 16, 2015) when a silly pun popped into my head.



It ended up buried in one of my many Trello lists of wacky & stupid ideas, most of which come to nothing. I originally was envisioning a simple one-button BIT.TRIP Runner type rhythm platformer in space to get the experience of making a rhythm game. Maybe a game jam type thing. I definitely rolled it around in my head as something I could do on PICO-8 and make a bit of music myself. Composing game music is something that's been on my list forever and I still haven't done much to learn it.

The title Spacebard stuck in my head enough that several months ago when my musician friend Gavin Clements approached me and said "Let's make a game" it grew into a big vision. Usually when people with less gamedev experience approach me with ideas, or wanting to collaborate, I'm reticent and mostly send them off with a few pointers on getting started by themselves. This time, though, I kept mulling it over, and realized two things: I've been yearning to work on more collaborative projects for a long time since my main dev partner went to Berkeley, and working with a real musician I know personally is an amazing opportunity.

So my mind went Rhythm game -> That old Spacebard idea -> Space opera -> The first rhythm game that's actually a musical¹ (meaning theatrical and story-focused) -> Rick and Morty/BoJack Horseman inspiration -> The main character is an alcoholic -> It's a story about recovery on a 12-step plan -> 12 levels -> 12-song original LP soundtrack.

We had our friend Ely Kauffman draw up some quick character concepts for the Bard (who I began to envision as a genderless or gender-fluid alien inspired by my own experience) and a few band members:






And that's the idea we first fell in love with. It changed dramatically from then till now, but I think we love it more and more.

I've got a lot to write about from the time since my original post, so I'm breaking it up into little chunks that won't divert my attention too far away from actual development. Subjects to come:

• How queerness became a core part of our story and the Bard's character
• Designing mechanics for the player to experience the Bard's gender fluidity
• Why we abandoned making an OST, and how this helped the game find its identity
• Networking in the Utah indie music community
• Is it a rhythm game, or an adventure game?
• Visual style?
• Episodic release
• Angling to be the Utah music game
• Pivot to mobile?

Till next time.


¹Eventually I discovered that we wouldn't be the first game musical like I had thought. There's already Dominique Pamplemousse which became an early inspiration for some of our themes after I played it.

[TheWanderingBen]

Following for all the cool updates, like you always give man! Much luck with this one!

[nathy after dark]

Let me explain the Vibe

One of the earliest ideas we had when we decided to go for a melancholy/comedic tone for the story was that character interactions would be tied to a Mood system instead of a Morality system. Somehow, we wanted to tie this system to the rhythm gameplay also, letting the player make choices during songs that would affect the mood of the music AND the way NPCs react to you. (More later on how the first part of that equation will have to adapt now that we're using existing songs by local bands instead of original music.)

What we came up with is the Vibe. In the name of meaningfully representing life with mental illness, it will exist not only on a spectrum of happy/sad. We want it more complicated than that! In the name of scope control, though, I hope to limit its aspects to 4-5 emotions, possibly Strength (resilience), Joy (friendship, humor, dancing, etc), Depression, and anxiety. I want to make sure these elements are not fully under the player's control and easily "gamed" like a traditional morality system. Particularly, the latter 2 are often meaningless and randomly occurring, and I won't flinch from that in writing a humanistic narrative.


(Reference image source)

I have a concept in my head of the Vibe being displayed on the HUD sort of like the player character's face in DOOM or (more relevantly) like the Spiritual Barometer from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream:



Character portraits brighten when you lead them to brave acts and moral redemption:



But we would be programatically splicing together 4 different Drama masks (also reflecting the theatricality of our vision) based on the current Vibe values. Maybe even coding the 4 masks (in 4 different colors) to swirl together like Rorschach's mask the way they visualized it in the Watchmen movie:



Another significance of using drama masks is the thematic question of finding self vs. changing masks. If I had to choose a single core mechanic (and I probably should), it would be the Vibe.

[space]

i'm still reading thru this but just wanted to post that post-apocalyptic HR Gieger shred shed is very very good. 

[nathy after dark]

Thanks for checking it out! Yeah, the Shred Shed was a much-loved venue in Salt Lake that closed down a few years back. We want to make a fitting tribute. 

[nathy after dark]

Major life events!

I got to go the Pride parade in Salt Lake City (my hometown & central inspiration for this game). SLC Pride was a great time, mostly because I was there with great friends, so it didn't matter that the parade itself is now overrun by pandering politicians, religious groups celebrating how great they are at being allies, and companies like Comcast for some reason advertising their trash.

I went to New York for 5 days and it was WORDSCANNOTDESCRIBEHOWAMAZING



Coincidentally NYC Pride was happening during my visit. It wasn't any better than SLC Pride...

But I got to go to the Gamedevs of Color Expo where I played some incredible games, talked with other Visual Novel devs, and listened to tons of new perspectives broadening my worldview and cementing my desire to make sure Utah's people of color are well-represented in Space Bard. The afterparty at Babycastles was brilliant, where I got to make even more friends, play and admire the wonderful game/art exhibit hosted there, and discovered some great musicians.

Take a look at a few of the wonderful people I met:

Catt Small
Alex A.K.
Sammus

I've been listening to Sammus's podcast which is great both for creative motivation, and learning more about music and writing (the heart and soul of this project).

I came out as trans/genderqueer/genderfluid to all of my family, friends, and the internet at large. It went inconceivably better than you might expect, bringing in an overwhelming amount of love and support, including Patreon pledges almost quadrupling my stable gamedev income! The experience of now being able to express myself more fully in public has made me much more confident about writing a game that celebrates queerness. I don't want the Bard's character to be 100% a surrogate for myself, but expanding my own personal experiences will absolutely bring more color and life to the writing.

[nathy after dark]

Less talk more rokk

I came back from New York painfully aware that I've been doing so much brainstorming and hype-building (in myself and others) for Space Bard, but putting dismally little actual time into development. Into gamedev in general, actually. There was a last-minute opening for a speaker at the local Indie Game Night, and I decided to wrap all of my lessons and new enthusiasm from New York into a talk, and start a new project to force myself to do gamedev every day.

I'll post the talk soon enough, but I still need to annotate the video with links and explanations, and it might be longer if I decide to give my Patreon supporters early access to it.

The thesis of my talk was: design like a crazy person, eviscerate your creative self-doubts, and remove every obstacle to developing quickly and releasing a lot of games. To put my money where my mouth is, I started a daily episodic Twine game: Stream of Pretentiousness, a slice-of-life type thing. I'm posting about it on an itch.io dev log, and also Glorious Trainwrecks which I hope will be another good online community to indulge in my new ethos of pumping out wacky junk.

As for Space Bard, I decided to hell with the placeholder Oryx pixel art which wasn't great for putting me in the mood of rampant self-expression central to the project.

I found a box of colored pencils (crayons having been my first choice) and drew up a couple of dank spritesheets and a new logo:





7 styles for the Bard to experiment with. I think the Bard will be some kind of shape-shifter or skilled illusionist, who can try on any appearance or identity at will. (And yes, that will include masculine styles as well, although I've only drawn one here.) This makes the Bard an excellent cover musician, which is how we explain the player playing music from so many different bands as the same character.



Some icons for the four aspects of the Vibe that I listed in the last post.

It's all extremely temporary programmer art... or IS IT?!?

I coded up a quick system in Unity to track the 4 Vibe values (Joy, Resolve, Depression, Anxiety) where increasing one of them subtracts from the others, implying a balance or a push and pull between different feelings. By writing this system, I was forced to consider its edge cases and limitations, so I think I've come up with a better one. More on that later!



Learning Twine for Stream of Pretentiousness turned out to be a huge boon for Space Bard, because the dialogue system will almost certainly be Twine-based thanks to a Unity asset recommended by TheWanderingBen (thanks!!) in his dev log for A Case of Distrust.

Oh and I'm streaming again now! I've tried gamedev streaming on Twitch for various projects in the past, and always lost steam. This time feels different, though! So hop on over and follow my channel if you feel like it. I'm actually streaming RIGHT NOW, so!

Nat Quayle Nelson on Twitch

[nathy after dark]

Mental health day

Today I felt more depressed and exhausted than I have since school ended for the summer. It was awful getting up in the morning and having only the energy to force myself through books when I had planned a lot more for my day. But (and thank the stars I realized this as early as I did!) it was either gonna be a mental health day or a mental collapse day, and I chose the first one. (Featuring: Authority by Jeff VanderMeer, literally cuddling with a giant teddy bear, burning incense and polishing off Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Art of the Animated Series.)

And guess what? I feel way, way better now, good enough that I was able to do my daily Twine and I'm gonna go out for a movie after this.

Aside from sharing an experience with my mental illness to perhaps prepare you for the kind of themes to expect in Ballad of the Space Bard, I thought it would be worthwhile sharing what was running through my head while I studied the production process behind Avatar, one of my all-time favorite works from any artistic medium.

Today on Stream of Pretentiousness: The Inspiration Paradox



What is this, a crossover episode? To go along with this part you might want to play today's entry in my daily Twine game/story: Go to 7/20/17: The Inspiration Paradox.

I set excruciatingly high expectations for myself. This is a weakness, not a strength, and I'm working on it. When I have an original idea like Space Bard it can grow into an infinitely complex/abstract/expanding plethora of visions for what the project will be, what it will express, and how it will change the world. (They laughed at co-working when I said "I will consider the game a success only if it converts at least one person to atheism with a positive attitude.") Part of these visions for Space Bard is that the game be visually stimulating and present players with a frenetically fun environment full of zany characters,¹ dancing,² and musical energy.³ Meanwhile I'm here making my own doodles in colored pencil. At some point I've gotta face it: I don't have the budget, skill, or teammates I need to even approach what's going on in my head. Instead, I need to get crafty.

Something that hit home reading about Avatar is how big of a crew it takes to stuff a scene with original, expressive character designs. Lately I've been taking selfies and pictures of my friends' outfits that I think would make cool styles for the Bard... so I thought, why not take this all the way? The Bard's many forms will all be adapted from my friends in real life, characters in other great media, etc... And in many ways I like this approach even better than the ambitious "let's draw our own fantastic dancing aliens" one, because Space Bard is about a young creative person entering the world of very talented people and trying to find her own place in all that. Just like me! And the honest truth of that journey is that it starts with a whole lot of emulation & imitation of others. Hell, this is only my first step into original story and worldbuilding: my first real game was an adaptation! Baby steps are called for.

Reference materials
¹ Spirited Away, Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman, Avatar: The Last Airbender...
² Myself letting go in concerts, parties, zumba classes...
³ Baby Driver, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, La La Land...

[nathy after dark]

Whew! Amazing day of work on SpaceBard. I'm calling it quits so as to feed myself before heading to the Salt Lake City Jazz Festival.

This sh*t writes itself!

The most major form of progress is I finally sat down and started writing episode 1 in Twine. At least, the Twine-only demo of episode 1 which I'll be showing to all the bands/musicians who've agreed to feature in the episode.



I can't share much of the writing itself, because it's all dialogue and that would be spoiling the game's content! But here you can see the shape of the episode so far (it's very linear. I may go back and add more branches later, or leave the intro as one of the more static parts of the game).



The amazing thing about writing SpaceBard is that since it's so much more based in my own experiences than my last visual novel, plot elements, characters and dialogue actually just flow into my head while I go about daily life. At lunch with my family today, I had to scribble down ideas on the paper wrapper from my chopsticks, and later cut it in pieces to stick in my notebook. (I love finding reasons to use scissors, scotch tape, and colored pencils for gamedev. Makes me feel like what I'm doing is special/childlike/personalized/off-the-cuff).

The hard part, of course, is organizing these ideas into a coherent story, cohesive dialogue, and making sure it all contributes to the central themes. Also pushing past the anxiety that comes with writing so much stuff that's so rooted in my own embarrassing reality.

Fillow tha geme on Twotter
^ See what I did there?

@SpaceBardBallad is where I'll be tweeting an excessive amount of fake band names and other miscellany. I'm excited to try new and imaginative things for PR/marketing/networking. You have NO idea.

When I needed a banner for the Twitter account, this photo I took last week because it was hilarious came in handy:



(It's a PBR truck blocking your view of my childhood church. Thought it was funny, and also the imagery in the mural might come in handy as a reference for SpaceBard's visual zaniness. )

I almost got screwed by the character limits Twitter puts on account names and @handles. The full title, Ballad of the Space Bard, didn't fit as either of those, so I had to condense.

Responses from the local community

I shared the last devlog with the mental health channel of my local gamedev Slack community, and my friend Joshua Hedges had a great response I thought I'd share with his permission:



When it comes to man-power, good thing I have other people working on the project with me, because I have 0 of it personally. (Transgirl joke!)

'Til next time.

[Josh Bossie]

So how many references to Stevo and Heroin Bob can we expect?

[nathy after dark]

I can safely say: a non-zero amount.

[nathy after dark]

So how many references to Stevo and Heroin Bob can we expect?

This question reminds me to talk about my inspirations! It's a reference to the film SLC Punk! which is a total cult classic out here, and certainly one I should watch again soon and take extensive notes on themes.

Inspiration! How does it work??

Every single one of my ideas for the game, even the ones I can't even explain to myself how I came up with, has to come from somewhere. I tend to think of what I do as a collage made from mental images, sights, sounds, dreams (which come from conscious experience, right??), conversations, etc. In other words, if I didn't fill my life with enough memorable events, passionate emotions, and worthwhile media, my brain would stop spitting out the stylized constructions of language and design most people would call my creations. My job (as long as I want to keep doing this) is to keep the brain tank full, and take excellent care of my body and mind, because things like joy, focus, and energy are what does all the background work to formulate great ideas.

Long, long ago I watched this talk and came to find its wisdom extremely useful: the part of your brain that thinks without thinking is way, way smarter than your active, logical mind.





So read a lot, play games you find fun, games you don't, games you would never play, games with your real-life friends, outdoor games, watch movies, read more, and just engage with life. Be healthy, work your day job. Then, when ideas start popping up, grab your notebook and write everything down. All of it. Then use your notes when you're sitting down later, with nowhere to start and feeling like you can't be creative at all. Just do the things you've written down, and see where it goes. Of course, once you believe that and start structuring your process around intuitive inspiration, you're going to have to re-balance yourself and sometimes suck it up and do work when you're not in the zone the way I describe.

Tomorrow, if I get to it, I'll tell you some of what I watched and read throughout July, and what I learned from it.

[nathy after dark]

Good morning! The detailed inspirations post I promised is still forthcoming, but in the meantime Would You Kindly...

Pause your brief, tortured existence and support trans rights by buying music!

Bandcamp is giving their whole share of music sales to the Transgender Law Center today, and to commemorate that, I started a Twitter thread doing album recommendations:

Click on it!


And if it suits you, retweet and/or buy some music.    

[nathy after dark]

Building the engine live in 30 minutes

The reason for my silence on updates is the opposite of the usual "I've been swamped and getting nothing done on the game." I've been swamped and getting LOADS of Space Bard work done. Tune in for more today:

Twitch channel

[nathy after dark]

Sometimes gamedev is a long, hard kick in the urethra

Yesterday a lot of things went wrong and I ended the day with more frustration than progress. These things happen.  I made sure to get to bed early, burn incense and drink water and relax and not carry the disappointment forward to this morning.

It didn't totally work but I'm sure I'm a lot better right now than I would be if I had let myself get dehydrated and stayed up late binge watching Casual like I was very tempted to.

Things learned from streaming yesterday:

- Mac OS does not want you to stream desktop audio in any fashion. It will fight back against whatever software solution you try using to change this.
- My Mac likely doesn't have the performance to handle Unity while streaming. I've had much better luck streaming Twine work.
- Everything is so much slower while streaming, even/especially internet searches. Are their obvious optimizations I need to make?
- Always add an hour to the time you say you'll start your stream. Do all the prep like opening Unity, downloading the assets you'll need, writing out the architecture for what you plan on implementing. Because the performative aspect of the stream seriously messes with your thought processes sometimes. (If I had put less work into publicizing, this likely would have been a smaller problem.)
- Gamedev streaming could be a cheaper form of coworking, where I don't have to buy expensive coffee once a week or drive 40 minutes to the nearest available dev basement.
- Unity suuuuucks

I'm very much leaning towards using Windows for future dev streams. Also, yeah, I had a Unity tantrum and I'm actually asking myself whether to ditch it entirely and somehow implement the full game in Twine. This is probably an overreaction.

[Samaras-Sama]

Good luck on this.

Haha some of the designs remind me of Daft Punk!

I'll be following it.

I Have No Mouth Yet I Must Scream is literally my favorite game of all time!
You have my support, both gamedev wise and LGBTQ!

I'm excited to see what you come up with,

Keep up the great work and stay focused.

[nathy after dark]

Oekaki-Sama thank you very much! Always nice meeting other IHNMAIMS aficionados, we need to stick together to survive the darkness 

generica22 I'll send you a free copy of every episode as we launch them! I think playing the game will answer that question and maybe even bring you some joy!

[nathy after dark]

I'm still here

So! I moved back to college for another year. I'm living in the LGBT Alliance House at my university, where my housemates are amazing and I fit in immeasurably better than with my roommates last year. It's actually amazing.

Two weeks into my classes, and I'm finally finding the groove that lets me have breathing room in my life. My basic plan for time management is to prioritize homework Monday-Thursday(using Habitica to track my assignments and incentivize myself with collecting colorful pets and armor) but make sure to do at least one thing per day for the purpose of pure enjoyment. Friday is for finishing up any school stuff that still needs to be done, but I'll try to do a gamedev stream or co-working with local friends. Saturday and Sunday are for just gamedev, writing, parties, and relaxation.

I've never taken such a structured approach to the school/creative balance problem, so I'll keep you all in the loop on how it works.

Episode 1 delayed for all the right reasons

I had somehow gotten it in my head that I could ship Episode 1 by the end of September. I don't know what I was thinking (figuratively speaking--I do know what I was thinking, it was just stupid), but it's not gonna happen. I came to the realization that mad crunchtime wouldn't be true to the spirit of Space Bard, even if I had it in me.

If this means pushing the Halloween special till January (or longer!) I'm totally fine with that.

But yeah, I haven't really touched the main repo since moving to school. But I have been doing more writing/planning, plus seeking and considering as much feedback on the Episode 1 prototype as possible. So there is plenty of material I've been meaning to share in the log, and I'll try to keep making little posts filling you in on the details until I'm caught up.

For the rest of the month, I'm putting a lot of my priority on an update for my horror VN in time for the Steam Halloween sale, so there's that too. Sorry if it takes me a long time to get back on SpaceBard in earnest.

Reworking the Vibe; or, a Glimpse of my Happily Tortured Mind

I realized while prototyping my original concept of the Vibe (4 emotions, always balanced to add to 100) had a lot of redundancy and contradiction in it, and I'm toying with a new Vibe with 3 independent sliders, each having a positive side and a negative side.

Exhaustion <----> Energy
Anger <----> Humor
Fear <----> Confidence

I found an excellent way of "playtesting" constructions of the Vibe without having to write code for each one: plotting profound emotional experiences to see if they fit with the system.



R&M stands for Rick and Morty.

[nathy after dark]

Stream of Consciousness on special states of the Vibe

Just now I found myself having a very productive train of thought about the Vibe and its implications at a time when I can actually share it with you in near real time. I thought it would make for a cool log post, something of a burst of thoughts as I have them.

Warning! Below I speak candidly about suicide (but ultimately with a positive outlook)

So—if you clicked on the paper notes I shared in the last post you might have been puzzled/disturbed by the part where I wrote "Philly (Suicidal)" without context. That's referring to the worst week of my life, one of the only times I would describe my mood as Scared, Angry, and Exhausted/Apathetic all at the same time to an extreme degree. In that state (corresponding to the most negative state possible in the Vibe) I literally saw no good reasons to exist, and it only got better after I talked to my parents and we took urgent steps to get me in a better place. So, the Vibe system would probably be incomplete if entering very extreme/specific states didn't cause special effects to happen. If the Vibe only affected dialogue options, there would be no gravitas to wanting a better vibe.

So should an absolutely negative (suicidal) Vibe be something of a GAME OVER state for the game? It's a narrative game and I definitely hadn't planned to include a fail state. But, without one, what's to stop the player from making terrible choice after terrible choice and maintaining a low Vibe the whole time? My first thought about that (playing a perma-sad Bard) is that it's unrealistic. "Life finds a way" and somehow, no matter how sad you are, something will get better, and people recover their grip on happiness to varying degrees.

Then again, maybe if I hadn't decided to intervene in my worst moment, I could have lived in a constant state of Sacred, Angry, and Apathetic, just feeding into that more and more. I don't necessarily know people like that, but I do think they can exist. So should that be a form of valid player expression in Space Bard? The biggest reason I can think of to counter that, is that the game fundamentally is about hope, and the Bard as a character (like myself) would make a lot of bad choices, but never to embrace constant negativity. It's outside the scope of the character I'm exploring.

So, if the suicidal Vibe is a game over condition, what does that look like? I didn't (and wouldn't have) actually committed suicide. I never literally considered it. So I don't think that should ever happen in the game. The Bard is honest and open enough that she would probably do what I did, and tell someone. Maybe the story stops and you go home or to rehab for a long recovery? Or maybe you call a hotline and get a boost from it, continuing in the story so there's no "Game Over." Something I've been planning on for a long time is including posters for real-life mental health resources as ingame background decoration. So this could be a cool example of that! I would research things the hotline folks really say to help people back on their feet. Another space for realistic representation of the mentally ill experience!

A much less extreme possibility for a special Vibe event is minor anxiety attacks. When Fear tips to a very high value, player control could be interrupted by a visual/auditory simulation of nausea, with QTEs as you have to breathe through it. (That's where this whole train of thought technically started. I had a wave of nausea walking home from Dance, which got me thinking about other physical consequences of mood shifts. Although, a flaw I can see in this is that my anxiety almost always occurs randomly, having nothing to do with my "Vibe." So isn't that how it should be in the game? The problem is it might be seen as annoying/confusing to players. Is that a problem, though?)

I think that's about the extent of this brainstorm. I'm finding that a big strength I have as a writer is organic brainstorms. They usually happen during things like exercise or when I'm highly productive/outgoing/energetic. TAKEAWAY: LIVING A HEALTHIER LIFE MAKES YOUR CREATIVE WORK BETTER!!