Hi! Welcome to another devlog for The Wandering. First things first, the entries will now be written in English, since our aim is to have everything published in English for better visibility. Having said that...

Today I want to talk about the writing for the game. About the characters, the game structure and other things.

Since writing is one of the things I wanted to focus on during this project, it has also been one of the aspects I've had to change a lot during development. The actual dialogues are being written as of now, however, I spent some time first checking out options to write them properly. Originally they were going to be written in a database in Excel, but, come on, it was way easier said than done. I tried using Twine and then importing to Unity, but the plug-in we're using in Unity for the dialogue system is somewhat outdated and doesn't receive Twine files. So, what was the solution?

Well...

The dialogues are being written directly into Unity. Which I'm not really a fan of because that makes them very very susceptible to being lost or damaged in a way. Also, I didn't want to open Unity every time I wanted or needed to write something, but time was passing us quickly so it had to be done that way.

As of the structure, the game was originally planned as a 5 act "story". The player would get a chance to pick some dialogues in the prologue that would set them in the mood a la Firewatch, where the options don't really matter, yet, they set the background and makes the player feel closer to the whole experience. Then, the game would have 5 levels / acts / sections where, after having picked up a Diary (which is one of the game's main things) they would see a question written at the top, a question which can only be answered by using the NPC's dialogues. How? Players approach the characters, and while talking to them, they get to "write in diary" absolutely everything.

Players then get to decided when they want to proceed and that's it! A level! This would have gone on for another 4 times, and then the game would ask the player if they want to leave, stay or repeat everything. The thing is, almost everything is still intact, however, because of time constraints, we've decided to only keep it at 3 acts. Players are going to get to answer 3 different questions about life, using the dialogues from 5 characters in total. 7 characters were originally designed, but right now we're aiming to have 5 well developed, modeled and animated characters instead.

Who knows? Maybe in the future a non-student, deluxe edition may feature all 5 acts with the 2 extra characters, but we're trying to be realistic here. Anyways, I really don't want to show any dialogues right now. Maybe in a future devlog I can record a tiny segment to show how it's being implemented inside the game, but for now, it's better that I leave and keep on writing!