For those who only want to see updates, here's a quick rundown of what I've been working on: editing for the Chapter 1 true route, first drafts for the final two alt routes, BGM/sound design edits, art drafts and design finalization. I'll try my best to make a Christmas Miracle happen and have something significant to show off or announce within the next few days. Feel free to ignore the rest of this post.
Something that's been tormenting me since I started writing Chapter 1 one is the quality of said writing---not in terms of my skill (or at least I hope not) but rather in how I'm limiting myself to a certain style. Chapter 1's protagonist is canonically not very good with the language arts and has a stilted, awkward way of communicating, so I'm not sure it would be "in character" to write anything particularly poetic or beautiful from her point of view. Of course, good prosaic styles exist (Hemingway and whatnot), but I'm not talking those forms of prose when I say this character is bad at communicating. If you were to read an essay she produced for a school project or something like that, you'd quickly clock it as a result of the nationwide budget cuts to education. If you've ever come across American teachers complaining about No Child Left Behind in response to their students' papers, then you should have a decent idea of what her work is like.
That's all well and good, and I think it's fine to cast shitty writers as protagonists, but what would this entail for her in-game narration?
This is the opening chapter of the game. This is going to be everyone's first experience with the game, and it's inevitably going to color their expectations for the rest of it. What does it say about BFD and its writer if the writing blows major dick and is awful to read in the very first chapter?
I've been holding back when working on the Chapter 1 drafts in the name of "verisimilitude", or for maintaining a semblance of realism in the narration. Limiting my normal writing style to this extent has been quite eye-opening in terms of both my own skill and my conception of what "good writing" looks like, but at the same time, it's also been painful. Granted, I haven't written seriously in a long time, which dulls the pain a little. But still, it feels like I'm half-assing a very important part of the very first chapter of my very first game. I'm often left wondering if I should slacken this commitment to realism in favor of literary artifice; this includes things like more poetic descriptions and following standard English grammar rules, stuff that the Chapter 1 protagonist would almost never use if she was actually in charge of writing from her own perspective.
Of course, this isn't a unique phenomenon. The issue of accurately translating thoughts and conceptions into something tangible has plagued artists since the dawn of time. It's like nothing ever comes out as good as you imagine it, and you'll never be satisfied with your work no matter how much time you spend polishing it. In the words of the legendary Leonardohen Skynyrd DiCaprio, "Art is never finished, only abandoned."
These issues in BFD's writing come in couple different forms. I don't feel like going into all of them, but I'll highlight an example that should make my point clearer.
In writing circles, there are occasional debates about how much character dialogues should take from conversations in real life. Real speech is inundated with meaningless filler, which some argue should be eschewed in literary speech; this refers to things like "uh", "um", "like", or basically anything used to pad out statements when one is trying to put their thoughts into words. If you make a character say something like "Uh I um went to the store and uh I bought some uh milk and uh...", they'll come off as nervous, confused, or zonked. Even if real people talk like that regardless of personality or mood, they'll be interpreted in a specific light by readers because these types of filler words have been encoded as temperament signifiers in the sphere of language arts. They also tend to make sentences really annoying to read. However, if used in the right contexts, filler words can make dialogue sound more natural while also being easy on the eyes. The "right contexts" in question come about through the actual behaviors and feelings of the characters, and in certain mediums, they can come through the technical requirements and/or properties of a given medium. For visual novels with voice acting, filler words are often included liberally since the script being read by the audience is the same script used by the voice actors. Their inclusion can make the game's narration easier to follow since minimizing the differences between the written and spoken words can make the reading experience smoother (this is also likely why moans, screams, and various onomatopoeias are spelled out in H-scene dialogues).
In BFD, you'll see characters spouting filler words a lot. I chose to model the dialogue after the standard in other visual novels, which involves liberal filler word usage as described above. BFD doesn't have voice acting, but most other visual novels without voice acting use this same style. Maybe this is just my personal preference, but I feel that this style works well in the visual novel format; the on-screen depiction of characters' expressions supplements the filler in a way that wouldn't work in a purely textual medium. Plus, it allows me to convey emotions and moods in a more subtle way, expanding the potential circumstances in which many sprite and CG assets are used.
Again, this is not the only issue I've been dealing with in Chapter 1, and it is not representative of the issues with Chapter 1's writing as a whole. If anything, I made this post to organize some of my thoughts on imitating nature and art and which one I should prioritize in certain situations.
