I just wanted to muse a bit on the process of story writing.

Originally, the concept for the game was a parody of the popular vampire genre of books and movies (this was about four or five years ago). My friend and I created a draft for a background legend revolving a vampire named Malahyde. It was naturally a little hokey, and meant to poke fun at what the genre had become in recent years. Having said that, I will mention I am a big fan of Diary of Vampire and classic Romero Zombie movies, in contrast to the modern 2000+ mainstream horror "classics". But I digress.

As I fleshed out this draft, adding the existing story on top of it and using it as a basis and inspiration for the story that occurred afterwards, something weird happened. I found myself finding it difficult to write a parody. I started to care about the characters and wanted to write characters that were realistic and convincing.

Samantha, naturally, is based largely around myself. Obviously, I am not female, but her personality, and her personality traits, are largely how I view myself. She's a bit unsure of herself, is slow to take action, but when it's crunch time, gets stuff done. And while she can be insecure at times, she knows what she's capable of and has realistic expectations of her limits and abilities. I tried to make Samantha as well rounded as possible, and not once in the story, I am proud to say, do I objectify her, or put her in a position that would be deemed "damsel in distress". I will say now, I absolutely loathe the treatment of female characters in contemporary video games, and I wanted Samantha to be a quiet and understated slap in the face to all the shallow, stereotyped and objectified female video game characters of today and beyond. But I digress, again.

The first draft of the script was pure dialogue. I think most game scripts, especially dialogue rich JRPGs, are drafted this way. There were light sprinkles of character actions here and there, and I would note where I wanted a dungeon to be placed, when the player was free to explore and so on.

The script was read over, abridged, edited, altered and reviewed two more times. Luckily, I was quite happy with the end result, and began integrating the dialogue into the game engine almost immediately afterwards. I zipped around quite a bit, creating scenes that I felt were compelling first, or creating ones that were more vivid in my mind (so I could move and animate the characters).

Looking back at it now, I am happy with the end result. The storyline has enough hidden meaning that for those interested, I feel there is a big payoff to explore and really investigate the meaning of certain events, characters and symbols that appear throughout. At the same time, however (and obviously it's too late to change large proponents of the story), one thing that was needed even more was compressing certain characters and elements together. For example, in the game, both the Zodiac warriors and Queen Nova sacrifice themselves to save the Dark Realm. This happens every one hundred years in the mythos of the game world. Both these characters essentially serve a similar purpose. I could have worked the story out better so that they served different, complimentary purposes, or were simply the same character. This is just a small example, and fortunately, the storyline is quite streamlined, but not bare or missing depth.

Thanks for reading, hopefully this insight has been interesting.
Dorian T.