I'm writing the narrative + dialogue for my team's game for the Mystery Game Jam, and it's finally getting to the point where I'm having a lot of fun.
I've done a shitload of game jams before, but always as an audio person, and always on those shorter weekend-long jams. This is my first time doing a month-long jam, and my first time taking on a narrative + project management role. I specifically chose that role because I want more experience doing these things (Amadeus is my only experience doing these things, and I literally just wrote a long sappy devlog last month about how much it has helped me to have done a lot of other random fun stuff for experience).
Up until pretty much yesterday I was regretting this. Writing is harder for me than audio because I have significantly less experience in it, and I've spent over a year working on a single huge narrative that I will be working on for the next ~5 years, so I don't really know what my own process is for starting from scratch. I was trying to force myself to plan out all of the pieces of the big puzzle before writing actual dialogue, but that task was so daunting and hard to whittle down into something concrete that I procrastinated on it so hard this week I ended up almost finishing my Ghost Trick ROMhack instead of working on it.
But yesterday I decided to write the intro scene at least, and that turned into also writing the tutorial scene, and that turned into also writing the parts of the finale scene that I can write with what's been decided so far, and then at the end of it I had banged out 12 hours of dialogue and narrative text, and I was having SO MUCH fun.
So I got exactly what I wanted out of this game jam! I learned about my own narrative process.
I am not a writer who can map out all the pieces of a mystery puzzle meticulously and then flesh out the dialogue after the fact. I am the kind of writer who needs to really understand the characters I'm working with who are engaging with the mystery, and use those as the driving forces of the mystery. That kind of writing flows easily for me and is much more fun. I still have to come back to the mystery puzzle, but it's easier to finish the puzzle once I have all the characters as the biggest pieces.
I still need to write the meat of the investigation portion, but it's going so much more smoothly now that I have characters and not placeholder [WITNESS 1] cardboard cut-outs. I'm having a ton of fun writing this and getting invested. I didn't really expect to become invested! Certain dynamics between characters emerged as I was writing and now these feel like characters I care about and am rooting for. That actually shocked me. I didn't set out to write a game I was invested in, I set out to write a silly game jam mystery. But now I'm like, oh dang, I'm accidentally putting real emotions into our game. Whoops!
It's definitely not a Serious Game. It is a pretty silly game. But I am also putting a lot more actual heart into it than I expected to given our concept? It's very Ace Attorney vibes I think.
(Ace Attorney but written in a month so set your expectations accordingly.)
