Behind the Scenes: My Crazy Walls

My writing and brainstorming process usually involves a lot of pacing about in my living room. I'll have my laptop in case I need to reference something, and I use a large dry erase board to write down ideas when I need to organize my thoughts visually. The white board used to be for D&D night back when my group met up to play at my place, but we don't play here anymore, so the board is just used for brainstorming.  It's a little disorganized but the only person it needs to make sense to is myself. What I write on the board is mostly just a reminder of what's already in my head or written down in the game's script.

The first version of the story didn't start with a scavenger hunt. Originally, you and Jaques were battling trainers in the park (the player had his own pokemon to use while Exeggutor was in the hospital) and you'd run into Marnie while battling strangers. She would beat you, and you'd both slink off while Jaques grumbles and acts like a sore loser. Jaques would mention later that Marnie dropped an earring while she was in the park, which he found, and the player would go back to the park to try to find her to return it. While at the park in the evening, you'd come upon Celebi fighting a terrible monster!

Yeah, the principle antagonist was originally going to be Eternatus. I hadn't quite figured out how it wound up in the park, but the idea was that Gloria had sent it to Professor Sycamore to be studied but someone stole its poke ball on the way to the lab. The missing master ball mentioned early in the story was going to be involved too. I had a rough idea that the main villain would be some kind of master thief who's trying to get a job with Team Rocket, but he accidentally sets Eternatus loose and it goes on a rampage through the city.

Rather than having Marnie and the player be trapped in a time loop along with Celebi, in this version of the story the time loop was instigated by Celebi itself, who is trying to stop Eternatus from causing a huge disaster. The player would mistakenly believe Marnie had something to do with Eternatus being there (he sees her in the park and he thinks she is its trainer) but after going back to the park once time had looped, you'd talk to her and get to know her enough to realize she has nothing to do with the monster. But she knows about Eternatus from that time it got loose during the story of Sword and Shield, and she's just as interested in stopping Eternatus as you and Celebi are. From there, you team up and...

That's all I could come up with. I got stuck writing any further than that. The story was shaping up to be some kind of action/mystery thing where you and Marnie would battle Eternatus and probably other enemies, and that just wasn't really what I wanted to write. The story also had zero choices or interactivity up to that point, and I wanted to make something less like a linear story and more like... a game. I posted the above screenshot in a July 2023 devlog for Olivine Lights, so if any of you saw that and are wondering what the hell happened to Eternatus... that's what happened. It got cut from the story because I didn't like what I had written.

...anyway, I was writing this devlog to talk about my crazy walls.

I had to redo the intro. Since this was supposed to be "A Marnie Game" I decided I needed to have the player join up with Marnie right at the start. I liked the cold open I had written (where Celebi crashes into your window and lands by your pool) but everything else had to change. So I came up with the scavenger hunt! It was a chance for me to learn some new (and frankly basic) things with Ren'Py, like how to have a player input text to solve puzzles. If I had wanted, I think the scavenger hunt in the park could have been an entire game by itself. But since the whole thing was just to introduce Marnie and set up your relationship, I tried to keep it on the short and simple side. So if you're wondering why the "puzzles" in the scavenger hunt are so basic... that's why. The scavenger hunt was always just an introduction to a larger thing.

After the scavenger hunt, the game was supposed to "open up." I knew early on I wanted to use something like the city map from Olivine Lights, since someone told me it was novel to see something like that in a VN. It was around this time that I first learned the term, "scope creep." 

You know when a TV show or a book series starts out with fairly small stakes, like "save the village" or "find the missing person," but as the plot progresses, the scale of the story gets bigger and bigger until the characters are fighting to save the world? That's scope creep. Usually it's pretty dangerous because it can turn a simple story into a bloated mess that never gets properly finished. I'm sure we can all think of games and TV shows that've had this happen. But for this game, I deliberately planned to have a controlled amount of scope creep. The story goes from "solve a scavenger hunt in the park" to "we're trapped in a groundhog's day time loop, and we're running all over the city trying to figure out why." To remind myself of this (and to keep the creep under control) I wrote it in giant letters at the top of the board and kept it there.

I'm not sure why I wrote SHINE in giant letters and circled it. It was something along the lines of, "everything in the story should be there to make Marnie shine," I think.

As you might be able to tell already, I make these stories up as I'm going with only a vague idea of where it's going. I had written a bunch of places where you and Marnie would go and do things, but I hadn't actually figured out how to escape from the time loop. The game didn't have an ending. There were a lot of options, but trying to pick just one was... hard. I knew that whatever method I picked to escape the time loop would basically set up the ending for the whole game, and I intended to write a few different endings, but I was stuck with too many different possibilities.

Eventually I settled on four endings, with the game deciding which one you get based on Marnie's confidence level and whether or not you helped Onion inside the time rifts. I intended to write all four endings, but I was really running out of ideas for ways to make them unique, and I could never come up with a way to execute two of them. So four got condensed into two, but then I added a third one back in once I decided the first two I wrote both felt like they weren't good enough to be the "true" ending. I'll probably write another devlog about things I wrote and didn't use, if anyone is interested.

Anyway, this has been a glimpse into my psyche and my writing process. These crazy walls were sitting in plain view of my roommates for... over a year, I think? So I'm sure that I looked like a crazy person. Olivine Lights had some crazy walls too, by the way, but they weren't as interesting because Olivine Lights didn't undergo such a complicated brainstorming and rewriting process as Marnie's Moment did. I can post them somewhere if there's interest.