I went through three iterations for the premise of a game I’m writing.

In the first two iterations, I had massive blocks with writing the actual story. I was really excited about the premise of the game–so much novelty!–but when it came to the actual story, I was lost.

In the third iteration, I could finally get somewhere with the story. The premise of the game sounds the most “boring,” but the story was finally able to get rolling.

This “interesting premise, nonexistent story” and “boring premise, developed story” dichotomy is pretty interesting, so I thought it would be interesting to discuss.

First, to discuss the three iterations for my game’s premise:

• First iteration: You’re a shopkeeper who sells old belongings. Customers donate their old stuff and ask for stuff around the store. You manage this inventory of items. Your ending is determined by how you exchange the customers’ items between each other.

• Second iteration: You’re friends with a ghost who doesn’t remember who they are. You help the ghost remember by showing them items around the store. Your ending is determined by which items you show the ghost.

• Third iteration: You walk around the store doing favors for a certain character.

The first iteration is great for telling a multi-POV story, but I'm not big on multi-POV. I like getting in the head of one or at most two characters and really fleshing them out. With multi-POV, it's easy for the POV characters to be underdeveloped until you merge them.

For the second iteration, my vision was that it’d be a story about grief. I designated five endings, each corresponding to one of the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

You tell the ghost two very different stories about themselves based on which items you show them, as well as which items you choose not to show them. The narrative that you craft for the ghost would fall under one of the five buckets Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

At a high level, I wanted the player to arrive at this point: you don’t want to hide the ghost from their source of grief; that gets you the Denial ending. You also don’t want to paint the ghost’s source of grief as the villain and only the villain; that gets you the Anger ending. You need the ghost to know and approach their source of grief with understanding in order to get the Acceptance ending.

This idea was all fine and dandy, except one massive gaping hole.

I didn’t write the ghost’s source of grief! Poof. Nothing.

Although it’s a story about a ghost and their grief, I’m not the person equipped to write a story about a ghost and grief. This is a story that I’d have no problem writing when I was a tween, though not for the right reasons.

A Change in How I Start a Story

I think it comes from two changes in how I start a story, from when I was a tween to now.

(1) Starting from observation instead of imagination. I used to pull my story starters from imagination, and the story would write itself from there. For example, I imagine a little boy, and naturally, he does this and that. I imagine a few other things like his friend and a big difficult beast, they do this and that, and boom the story is done.

These days, I have trouble building from imagination and only imagination. I imagine a little boy, nothing happens, and I go back to my real life tasks.

I notice though, I can write freely from observations. I can write about things I observe, things I’ve done, and things that've happened to me. From there, I sprinkle in a bit of imagination, to answer questions like, “Why do you think it’s this way?” My imagination is in service of my observations, rather than the driver of the story.

These days, my story starters come from a question about an observation, and if the question is interesting enough, then the story writes itself.

(2) Starting from the end instead of the beginning. This goes hand-in-hand with my starting from imagination vs observation.

When I pulled my story starters from imagination, I started from the beginning. I imagined a beginning, then I imagined my way to an ending. My imagination magically carried me to the ending, without me knowing anything about the ending.

Now, when I pull my story starters from observation, I start from the ending. Not the specifics of the ending, but the key question I want my ending to answer. I still write the story from beginning to end, but figuratively, I already have the "why?" of the ending.

Back to the Ghost and Grief

So, going back to the second iteration of the game, about a ghost and grief, and why I can't write a story with this premise?

It's a premise I like very much, just not a premise I can bring my personal observations and personal experiences into. If I took the approach I did as a tween, I could imagine my way to a story about a ghost and grief, but it wouldn’t be an authentic story about a ghost and grief.

I also have no reservations with sharing this idea openly, since it's a game I want to play, even if not created by me.

At the end of the day, I see the premise of "showing a ghost items to help them reconstruct their past" as a tool for delivering a story, and it's the story that carries value.

If someone can tell the story authentically, then I'll learn a lot from their creation, and I'll also have done them a favor by donating them a tool for telling their story. It's also not too late for me to tell my own story using the same tool, when I've gathered enough personal experiences for such a story.

Now, the third iteration of the game: "You walk around the store doing favors for a certain character."

On paper, it sounds the blandest, doesn't it? But actually, its simplicity is what lets me develop the story.

When the only hard requirement I set for myself is of a person in a store doing things for another character, I remember all the times I went to a store for a purpose. These memories provide a wealth of material, which often interact in unexpected ways to spark new ideas.

For example, I notice that a store item or a person at this store used to be XYZ way, and on this day, it's no longer XYZ. I imagine reasons why, and this reminds me of observations from a previous store visit. The key is that when I run into a question like "Why is this thing no longer XYZ?", I have a wealth of observations to draw from to help me answer this question. My imagination stitches my observations together to create the final story.

In the first two iterations, I fenced myself into writing about experiences that I didn't have personal experience with. For the third, I loosened the premise and finally unblocked myself.

No matter how much I adore a premise for its novelty, my best match is the premise for which I'm equipped for, aka whether I have personal experience with the premise. And sometimes, it's the simple premises that fit this description, rather than the most novel.

Updates

12.01.2024. First demo! Proof-of-concept for the bare minimum mechanics. Uploaded the photos that inspired the work.

I just remembered the saying, one can judge the nerdiness level of a programming language based off the ratio of games-to-game-engines it has. This saying rings true; I learned a lot about game engines when I was working with C++ (writing my own game engine in SDL2) and Rust (used Bevy game engine in Dec 2023-Feb 2024 and looked briefly at Bevy codebase), but my productivity with developing games went up when I switched to Javascript. By sticking to a minimal rendering library, I could truly think about the game. This tool vs idea dichotomy is really interesting and can be discussed in the future!

12.04.2024. The demo now loads before you can say "one!" Previously, you could count "One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand..." at the black screen.

Also no more waiting in transitions between scenes! It should render instantaneously.

After this makeover, I notice my code is a little React-esque... I can sort of picture how React would look in vanilla Javascript now. Pretty cool!

Those are the visible parts of my makeover, at least. The non-visible part of the makeover is that my inner Marie Kondo can sleep.