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Stoked to share that Dead Static Drive is coming out on November 5th! Let’s fucking gooooo!
i'm finding this super useful at the moment & thought I'd share: a fun character development exercise from the lovely folk at Writing Excuses.
if your characters aren't charactering the way you want them to, experiment with the three-pronged character development slider & see what happens.
EG: the scene where samwise gamgee is mean to gollum hits hard because he usually has his sympathy slider way way up so it feels out of character.
what happens when you max one out? or pull one down suddenly? how does adjusting how competent they are impact how sympathetic they are? which sliders impact the others?
George RR Martin really revels in playing in that sympathy space, just when you think you've got someone figured out he'll yoink that sympathy slider in a thrilling way, changing how we feel about the character deaths/motivations.
this episode covers it quickly but they also have follow-on episodes that talk about *how* to adjust character sympathy & other prongs in more detail too: https://writingexcuses.com/writing-excuses-9-13-three-prong-character-development/
I wrote this as a social media thread about a year ago when I was aligning some thoughts about distilling certain terms and how fruitful it’s been every time we’ve had to really drill down into what we mean when we use a certain word in a design context. Mark Fisher’s book “The Weird and the Eerie”
here’s some #devstaticdrive for ya: making a horror-inspired game that isn’t actually a horror game means getting intimately acquainted with the *chasms* between and the nuances of the:
- weird
- eerie
- uncanny
- marvelous
- fantastic
- grotesque
- egress
mark fisher’s book “the weird and the eerie” has been exceptional help doing this work. by distilling these distinctions way down i can make sure we’re hitting the beats we want to hit in certain scenes, and that there’s enough variation to not feel flat.
i’ve learned the weird and the eerie are two (very distinct) modes of the strange. the strange isn’t the horrific, the allure isn’t in enjoying what scares us (we’re not making P.T. or a jump scare simulator) but in a fascination. experiencing apprehension, dread, even morbid attraction.
