This week was a bit of a strange week with the restructuring of the narrative department, however, the narrative department still got a lot done! After the proof of concept presentation to the stakeholders and investors last week I set up a meeting with the design lead who knew YarnSpinner and set up a time where a tutorial video could be recorded and sent to my narrative writers so that the writing we have been working on could be implemented on a rolling basis.

This week I worked on revamping a bit of the items and item descriptions to more accurately reflect our character Grace's thoughts and feeling towards said items. My favorite part about this sprint was actually coming up with the idea for collectible journal entries that the player could find throughout the abyss. The plan is to make a bunch of journal entries from a mysterious person who traversed the abyss before Grace did. This mysterious person would ultimately die but they would leave behind tips and explain more of what the abyss is and how it functions. The kick is that these journal entries won't be found in order but in the inventory menu they will show up in a collectibles section and in the correct order. This is so players know that they found entry #7 but are still missing #4 and #6 instead of having them all jumbled. This serves as to not to confuse the player but also not to make it too easy.

Looking back at the work I've done this week I'm a bit deflated a the prospect of my first attempts at Grace's thoughts (talked about last week) weren't as great as I wanted them to be. They're going to get better with time and as I can flesh out the story more, but I'm finding it difficult to tell a story or specific amount of lore through only a few words. My goal isn't to confuse the player but I do want them asking questions about what these thoughts mean. The other thing is that looking back at the beginning items they aren't hitting the mark for me because they were made back when the vision of The Whispering Abyss wasn't so clear.

For the next steps, I've assigned myself and the other writers to go back through the first two pages of the items doc and add alternate descriptions for the earlier items. This is to add more variety so we can pick which one we like the most vs having to stick with just one. This is also a great writing exercise because it forces the writers to think critically about different approaches to take when writing alternate descriptions. Should it be funny, sad, horrifying, neutral, or should it attempt to add lore? For me more specifically, however, I'll be doing more research into how games use thoughts to convey story to hopefully hit the mark this week with Grace's thoughts. The YarnSpinner tutorial is supposed to be out by Thursday and the second it does I'm getting all of my writers on it so we can start implementation.