[1.19] Storyboard started

Hi guys! Last week I started the storyboard for the new episode. This is where I convert the beat sheet into slides with description and dialogue, i.e. go from this:

To this:

We create these in Google Slides, using a template designed to give me roughly the right amount of text per screen (I don’t think people like reading big walls of text).

Why not just do this in the engine?
Some people have asked what the point of the storyboard phase is – couldn’t we just skip it, and make these screens directly in the game engine?

The answer is: collaboration. It’s so much easier for contributors to flip through a slide deck instead of playing through the game, and going back and forth to make sure they see all the content. This is especially important for our illustrator lovely Victoria, who needs to make sure she’s drawn all the art assets needed for every branch and contingency. As the storyboard develops, she pastes in art concepts over the mannequin:

Contributor feedback on the storyboards is really part of the ‘secret sauce’ of Female Agent. For instance: the very popular “mamasan scene”, where the heroine is sized up in Thai by Miss Nin and Miss Lu, was written by The Lost Engineer after seeing an empty space for it in the storyboard – that scene came out way better than it would have done if I’d written it. In the last episode, the option for the heroine to report her sexual encounters during Girls’ Night Out was suggested by XGrotesq, which was a big improvement on the storyboard version (where she automatically concealed it). Etc, etc – basically all the contributors help tone down my bad ideas and bring out sexy new ones that I hadn’t considered.

Storyboard progress
I had a solid week, building out 68 storyboard slides. One dialogue scene was especially challenging to write, requiring several drafts to make it feel real: it’s ten lines in the beat sheet, but it took a lot of work to get right.

I ended up creating a kind of dialogue flowchart to help me organise and direct the scene, which was actually very useful. I’ll use this technique again in future.

Okay, that’s it for this report, because I want to get back to work! Have a great week, guys, and I’ll report on progress Soon™! 🦀❤️