One thing we learned the hard way while writing on @CryingSuns with @IanReiley is how important it is to playtest your narrative onboarding. Here is a small story about the infamous “Missing Cargo” ⤵️

#narrativedesign #IndieGameDev #whatwentsouth Crying Suns starts with the main protagonist, a clone of a famous fleet admiral, being unfrozen by a strange AI. To sum it up roughly, he learns that he is in a super secret facility on a remote planet and that an AI awoke him because they didn’t receive their usual shipment.

@CryingSuns is a text heavy roguelite that required us to write a lot of events (>300) to breathe life into this interplanetary travel. It required a lot of back and forth between the amazing @IanReiley and myself, so we came up with our own format⤵️
#narrativedesign The game engine was not really ready to test events when we started to write (which is a bad idea btw) but the planning needed us to start anyway. Also most events had a length constraint to avoid disrupting the flow, so we didn't need too much branching within dialog