Progress Report 2022.03.21 aka Writing Exposition Hurts My Brain

Hi friends,

I’m not quite sure where to start with this one. Episode 2 is continuing to kick me in the butt and March’s progress has been quite a struggle. At this point I’m writing anywhere between 1500 and 3500 words a day and the mental energy it takes to keep focused, fill in the gaps in the dialogue trees, and keep progressing is very draining. So, forgive me if this update this a little more… rambly? Rambling?... than usual.

I think, even though there are a lot of parts I’m happy with, the end of Episode 2 has been significantly more difficult to create compared to Episode 1. This is when the player really starts to get into the thick of it: lore needs to be established, basic world mechanics need to be explained (to the player—the main character already knows this information, so that’s another thing that requires delicate balance—more thoughts on that in a bit), major characters need introductions, and relationships and dynamics need to be introduced. There’s a lot of long-term set up involved in this final stretch of the episode and, to be honest, it’s not the most fun thing to write.

Exposition is always difficult, regardless of the medium. It’s also hard to do—conveying new information to the audience in a way that feels both engaging and natural is hard. Even professional writers who have been writing for a really long time struggle with it. There’s lots of “don’ts” about how to do exposition, but there’s not a lot of “dos”. There’s no magic formula that automatically works for each and every project. You have to spend the time to figure it out based on your story’s worldbuilding, characters, point in the narrative, a dozens of other factors and small moving pieces.

Narrative design makes delivering exposition even more challenging than normal because now you have the question of how to keep exposition interactive. Some games don’t—exposition is delivered through narrated openers, in cutscenes, in dialogue sessions where the player asks question after question and an NPC gives them important information piece by piece. Some games cut out exposition entirely and put their worldbuilding in codex entries or hidden away in item descriptions.

But interactive fiction is not entirely a game—or, at least, its roots are as much in prose and novel-writing as they are in gaming. You need to figure out the best of both worlds in order to make it work in IF. One common criticism of interactive novels is when there’s too much text in-between choices. And while some moments do require the player to take the backseat and just read (kind of like sitting back and watching a cutscene in traditional video gaming), not all of your exposition sequences should be like this. Dumping information on the player just to get it out and catch them up drags the game to a halt.

When I’m drafting new content for Wayfarer, I’m always mindful of where the player is situated and how to keep them an active participant in the game. What questions are they asking and when? To who? How do they see things unfold? How do you deliver all of this information in a way that is engaging and fun to play through, and not something that just becomes a click-fest where the player is clicking through to get to the end of it as quickly as possible?

I have a few solutions that I am very happy with. I think this section will ultimately be fun to play. But I’ve had to pay extreme care to how all of this lore is established and how it all unfolds. And that has taken a significant amount of work that has set my timelines back by several weeks, if not a month.

So while I am happy with the content, I’m frustrated that I’m not further along. I can feel March coming to a close and I don’t think I’m going to have all the scenes finished by then, let alone edited, proofread, and coded. Because I’m establishing a lot of important lore in this sequence, I have to go back and edit some previous passages from Episode 1 to adjust for lore changes that happened during the writing process (thought one thing earlier, changed my mind later because I found something that just works better).

As it is, the next update of Episode 2 currently contains 80,000 total words and I still have a lot of work to do (I am expecting to lose a significant part of that word count in edits). I am through the major dialogue tree, but I am still wrapping up the bits and pieces that come after it before I can move on to Scene 5 and the actual end end of the episode. To make a comparison to Episode 1, Scene 4 is the “boss fight” of the chapter, except instead of an actions sequence, it’s all political intrigue, lore, and character dynamics, whereas Scene 5 is more akin to the boat scenes.

(Does that make sense? I don’t know. 😅)

I did not want to be still writing Episode 2 by the end of March, but here we are. Decisions were made, writing’s hard, writing interactive fiction is even harder, and hopefully it will be worth it in the end.

I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not to update the alpha build when I’m done Scene 4. I’m of two minds on this: on one hand, you would get to experience the new content a lot sooner and I would be a lot less stressed about getting an update out ASAP. But on the other hand, knowing the scope of the episode as a whole, it will be a significantly better experience for you as players to play Scenes 4 and 5 together. There’s a few extremely impactful narrative moments that would be disrupted if you played them separately for the first time.

I’m going to keep working on getting this finished, but as I am very bad at estimations, I’m not sure when the new material will be done. I think I need to wait and see where I’m at next Monday before I can have a better idea of how close or far away an update will be.

As always, thank you all so much for your support! 💕

P.S. For Patrons with access to bonus content, this month’s Twine tutorial should be up later this week once I finish editing it and checking to make sure my code is correct. 🤣