Challenges and Solutions. (Patreon)

It's been a hectic week and I only have time for a quick post today.

But I thought I would give some insight into what causes these slowdowns and challenges in getting and working with written content. The issue is one of time and complexity along with familiarity with the process.

Standard tools like RPG maker already have thousands of hours put into custom tools with a large community of tutorials. Most of the tools I've had to build myself and they aren't as user friendly as I would like.

Templates are a strategy for speeding the process up but still take a long time to produce and have to be carefully edited. I'm finding that the size of the project and the complexity of what's needed is overwhelming for most writers. Especially not familiar with games writing. Which is totally understandable. Largely the issue at the moment isn't obviously one of money so much as time and training.

Contractors typically don't have the kind of time to train up on something so specific and the complexity of understanding what templates are and how they work is an issue. This is especially a problem with when events have like animations and walking around involved.

Right so it's a big problem. Sorta one I've had since day one. So my new solution is sort of a hybrid approach. I'm in the process of creating a meta template. This is designed to be one large file that contains the "mind" of a character.

Rather than providing a template of an action like a diaper change. The idea is to provide a meta template with dialogue components that would indicate. "This is a statement made before a change". Then when I build out an event like a diaper change it can pull from the master document what that character could say. The idea would be to turn this "meta" file into something that is a single editable "thing" that doesn't require training or much explanation.

It would in theory allow a writer to design a character and be given direct instructions on what how to write. Along with this I'm updating it to remove a bunch of the little things. Like it's on the writer to split the dialogue into small enough chunks for the text at the bottom. I'm setting up a new system that will auto split dialogue to further help with that process.

I know this is all a little slow but this is the best way I know how to approach the problem. I have a good idea on how to build this so that's what I'm going to commit myself to doing.