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Evaluation & screenwritingFebruary is over, so a quick final look at the task board…

Both of the last two columns can be considered as "finished". The sole task "in progress" is the open-ended "schedule NPC timelines for the café" and the rest (besides some greyboxing) are bug fixes or desired tooling that can safely be migrated to the next board; I just needed to jot them down somewhere in the meantime.
So I think this worked out well. The scheduling task
is finished in the sense that I did as much as I could within the time limit, but I didn't get far before I realised that I can't wing it completely.
This leads us to the next task, which won't need a board...
Detailed scriptAll the writing I've done so far is very high-level. I know where characters are when, and roughly what they need to say and do, but until now I haven't scripted any conversation or interaction in detail. This is what I want to do now, since it's much faster to iterate on paper than in the actual game
ScreenplaySince the game is basically like a big 360 movie when you explore the past, my conclusion was to simply write scenes just like a film script. Since I'm focussing on the café now, it's all just one long interior scene.

Since I have all that language stuff I decided to try and write the dialogue as they would actually speak it in order to keep things within their own cultural and linguistic framework. Helps me get some work done on that as well. But I'm okay with doing it in a clumsy or incomplete way so that it doesn't hamper progress, adding notes to insert missing words or names later if I can't immediately think of them.
SoftwareI've played with
Celtx in the past but apparently that became paid and more limited (including web only) since then and I just wanted a desktop application to save local files. In the end I found
WriterSolo, which is what you see in the above screenshot. Working well so far!
PlanI'm only a few days in but it's been fun so far!

Cool to finally figure these things out and come up with details I haven't previously been at a low enough level to fully consider. I've also found minor timeline mismatches and patched them up. Trying to weave some of the background that I outlined in
the character update into the conversations but I still want to make sure that almost everything they say is actually relevant to something. Going back and forth to fine-tune~
So I'll be working on this until further notice.