Weekly progress log #14

Hey everyone,

I am sorry about the delay with the progress log - I had a slightly unpleasant distraction keeping my mind occupied for a few days, but it should be all good now. This time around I'd like to discuss exposition and some of my struggles with it - I will keep it fairly brief (if nothing else than to exercise brevity relevant to the topic itself). It might not be a very interesting topic, but hopefully someone will enjoy it nonetheless.

When it comes to exposition, I have definitely overindulged in expository dialogue in the past, and while I certainly can't say it will not happen in the future, I am trying to be at least a little conscious of it and keep it contained. Making important information part of the unavoidable dialogue and then throw in optional questions on the topic felt like a good compromise (something I used primarily in the convo with Amaya in her camp last episode). Unfortunately, after revising dialogue from the new episode it turns out that it's not a foolproof solution - the "unavoidable" dialogue felt too barren while the optional dialogue was way too long. Someone might feel like this is not a problem for them because they enjoy reading the lore, but to me it felt as though making the optional dialogue too extensive broke the organic flow of the convo; if the middle of the dialogue is filled with 15 minutes of exposition, it disconnects the introduction of the key story elements at the start from the relevant conclusion characters make at the end.

I think I've solved the issue adequately by shrinking things down in the optional department and being a little more generous in the mandatory side of things while keeping everything reasonably short and not indulge too much in irrelevant trivia - and I am sure I will get a better sense of the balance as time goes on.

And for anyone wanting to catch up with the lore after having skipped it, there will always be the codex. I've decided by now that I'm not going to be doing anything fancy with it - the codex will always be the same, unlocking relevant information permanently at a certain time and regardless of whether you actually "clicked" the optional exposition option. And canonically, I will approach optional dialogue (at least when it primarily concerns exposition and trivia) as always having been explored by the players if the option was there. I can keep track of whether or not the MC should have access to the information (i.e. whether or not he is on friendly terms with the character who gives the info), but I'm not going to have the narrative acknowledge whether he actually asked about it - since it would lead to nothing other than having to repeat the exposition so the MC can "canonically" know it.

In conclusion, handling exposition correctly is pretty tough; I want to share tons of info about the world, but I don't want the characters to feel like they are reading a wikipedia page. I will try my best to make the lore digestible to the players, but it's hard to balance that when everyone might place the line of "too long/too expository" somewhere else. Regardless, I am confident that I will get more proficient with delivering exposition as time goes on - and I will always be thankful for your feedback in that regard.

And that's it for this week - I won't be doing anything to reset the schedule this time around, so you can expect the next progress log to arrive a week from now (before sunday at least).

Love you all,

Worlaix