Dev Log #3 Production

Recently, we encountered significant difficulties in our development. Due to the outbreak of the spring flu, I have inevitably lost one to two team members each week and we have been without our most crucial narrative designer for three weeks now.

Our development phase has essentially completed the functional development, requiring us to fill as much content as possible within the existing framework. However, due to the loss of the narrative designer, I, as the project manager, had to set aside my art tasks and devote all my energy to writing the story to ensure we have enough content for testing during game trials.

In the process of writing NPC stories, I developed two new methods for writing dialogues. One method is to generate random story trees and specific NPC keywords using GPT, and then fill in relevant dialogues at different nodes. The advantage of this method is that it can produce content as efficiently as possible, but the quality of the content may be compromised, and the flexibility of the story may also be affected. The other method is to brainstorm as many NPC ideas as possible, outlining the NPCs with "a one-sentence description," "story length," "story starts," "ordinary filler," and "story ending." After establishing a large number of NPC outlines, I find as many friends as possible to let them choose an NPC for role-playing, while I play the role of the player, responding to the NPC's dialogues. During the dialogue, the content is divided into different option branches and recorded. With the help of others, I can easily gain a lot of inspiration through discussion, which can greatly speed up our process of writing NPC stories.

Despite the numerous challenges, we have still managed to complete the entire build successfully and are able to proceed with the game tests today.