Narrative: thoughts on allegories

When planning this game it was important for me to pick the key themes that will favour hentai, not prevent it. I didn’t want player to be distracted by combat with enemies and even less wanted to lumber player with lore. On one hand, lore is not the most important thing in hentai, but on the other – world without lore looks shallow.

When you don’t have time to work on sundries, write down history and think over characters; when there is no need in such filling, well-known allegories will help to add more volume to the game world. 

In the game I mention an Elven Empire, years of war and show Rodinka playing tyrant. Nothing more, no details. But those are all allegories. The Great War – allegory of WW2, Elven Empire – of the Third Reich and Alfas – of Adolf Hitler.

Thanks to that I don’t have to lumber players with further explanations – they already know that. About the cruelty of war, about the strength of the empire, about leadership skills of the ruler. Players project their knowledge of real world on the virtual finishing the picture, and that allows me to concentrate on other aspects of the game.

The Elven language is the same allegory as in-game it is shown as Japanese. Each language reflects history and culture of people. Thinking through the language from the start is difficult and timeconsuming and most important – meaningless (in my case). Fictional Elven language won’t tell anything to a player, it will be odd, difficult and will require studying.

Japanese as an allegory helps you to understand right away that Elven is very different from human language represented by Slavic and German groups of languages. Japanese is very unusual and distinct compare to them. It gives you the context of and isolated, militaristic far-away nation. It highlights how much the elves differ from the humans and their desire to cross the line of similarity.

The elves are no Japanese, Germans, Russians, Frenchmen, Englishmen or anyone else. They combine lots of aspects of the real world that allows players to have a perception of an Elven nation, have some feelings towards them and an attitude. 

To make the world deeper and my job easier I task myself with the following objectives: 

1) To keep slowly introducing allegories into the game;
2) To make allegories more clear and selective;
3) Avoid the information that is not connected with the key themes of the game.

That’s all for now, my next post about my vision of narrative will be dedicated to side quests.