mrhands

Sexy game(s) maker

  • he/him

I do UI programming for AAA games and I have opinions about adult games


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mrhands31

I just finished episode 403 of Scriptnotes, and I feel creatively unblocked. It was exactly what I needed to hear. And it's very telling that when I Googled "scriptnotes 403 transcript," someone did exactly that!

I've been stuck on the stupid story for my stupid porn game for such a long time, and I could just kiss Mr. Craig Mazin on the mouth. Here's what he says in the podcast on how to structure a story:

Structure isn’t the dog. It’s the tail. Structure is a symptom. It’s a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic argument.

This is exactly what's been bothering me!! I've been struggling to adapt advice designed for writing screenplays to writing a porn game because the structures don't map cleanly. But Mr. Mazin goes into the why of storytelling. You don't need to follow a template; you need to understand the basic building blocks. He says a story is composed of scenes, and you should apply the Hegelian dialectic:

You take a thesis. That’s a statement. Something is true. And then you apply to that an antithesis. No, that’s not true and here’s why. Those things collide and in theory what results from that is a new thesis called the synthesis. And that starts the whole process over again. That synthesis becomes a thesis. There’s an antithesis. A new synthesis. That becomes a thesis. Constant changing. Every scene begins with a truth, something happens inside of that scene. There is a new truth at the end and you begin, and you begin, and you begin.

That's fucking genius!! That's exactly why I've struggled to create compelling conflicts in my story!! But now, all I need to do is compose a thesis and an antithesis and have characters collide on those. And I can do this!!

He then follows up with exactly why a structure tends to form around a strong theme, which is that a good screenplay has a character embody an antithesis and is stuck in a kind of stasis, then something occurs to take them out of that false peace, they desperately want to retreat to the starting point, they do things that reinforce the anti-theme, then something happens to shatter their entire belief system, and now they are ready to prove (through action) that they accept the real thesis of your story.

And that's a Hero's Journey, but built from the ground up instead of after the fact! Aaahhh!! I'm really excited about applying this to my game!!


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