Skip to main content

Happy People have no Stories.

OK, following an exchange on Deviant art, I've decided to write a short story:

S7alker117 That sounds really cool. Looks like the kind of setting where you could write some great stories in, a little in the line of 1632, dunno if you know the series?
pickledtezcat I hadn't heard about 1632, but I just looked it up. Sounds interesting.
I actually have got a plan to write some stories in the setting, and possibly open it up to anyone else who wanted to.

I love the alternative history novels of Harry Turtledove, the way he uses ordinary people who can enter and leave the narrative at any time instead of main characters who can't die.
It allows him to really put in the background details while sketching out the overarching themes and history. (1632 sounds somewhat like this from reading the wikipedia article)

The thing I love about his books the most though is that you never know who is going to win. It's not like real history, where we already know who won the second world war. With Alternative history you get a real thrill from hearing the reports of a battle, or watching the ebb and flow of the fortunes of war over time. (I especially like that it's only fiction. No real people suffered and died, it's just imagination).

You don't get burdened with hindsight, you're not constantly thinking "What an idiot! He should have seen that coming!" Characters can make mistakes and it's normal and human of them.

It's something I really enjoyed while reading the Battletech novels too. Though the early BT novels had their share of "super" heroes who never made mistakes and never made bad decisions, the middle period had tons of great characters who acted as best they knew how, but still ended up failing sometimes.

Lots of modern stories, (movies, Video games and novels) fall in to the trap of "the chosen one" trope. The main character is special and unique, can't die, always gets out of every bad situation (often resorting to deus ex machina) and always gets the girl. I'd like to write some stories where the characters are ordinary people with ordinary stories, but living in a time and place we don't have any foreknowledge of.

I want to introduce the setting of Vinland 1936 with a work of fiction which will set the scene. The characters will talk about other places, recent events, current political and social trends and reveal the cultural bias and prejudices of their era and locales.

There will be several main threads, each one told from the POV of an ordinary soldier or civilian. Right now I have Three of the threads planned out with locations and characters. The individual threads will be quite short, and the story will be made up of the threads intertwining.

It will be set before the events of the game, in 1922, the end of a long war between the Holy Roman Empire and the Arab/Turks.

I downloaded some free writing software, chosen almost at random:

I like the way you can organize your scenes, your characters and locations and see an overview which lets you keep it all under control. It's a bit outdated but I'll give it a try and if I like using it I may get something better later.

I suppose this counts as wasting time, but it's something I've wanted to try for a long time. Let's just see how it goes. :)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.
6 comments
Read more

Automating Level imports from Blender to Godot

  Recently I've been making some levels in Blender an importing them into Godot. There are only about 7 or 8 shaders for each level, not counting dynamic objects which will be added later. But to improve rendering performance, it can be a good idea to split the meshes up into sections. At that point you might be faced with a list like this: Or it might be even more chaotic, if you didn't use simple names for the objects in your level. So it can take a long time to sort out all the meshes, make them unique and add textures and so on. Blender imports with simple Blender textures, or with placeholder materials. This is sometimes OK, but if your Godot shaders are very different to those used by Blender, it means applying new materials to every mesh object in the level when you import the scene. I found that during the design process, I was importing and readying a level several times before I was happy with the final layout. So at first I was wasting a lot of time. In Blender, I us
3 comments
Read more

Advice needed on tilesets...

I need some advice on which is the best way to handle building the dungeon. Right now I'm using prefabs for my dungeon, they have a north south east and west section for each "room": The basic tileset. This has several advantages, and also several disadvantages. Firstly I can have curved rooms, I can have tunnels and other interesting shapes. The tilesets can look quite nice with a little work. On the other hand I can't easily get the navigation data before building the map and once the map has been built I can't make changes to the layout, like having active pit traps or believable secret doors. Although the rooms are interesting, they are quite repetitive, and it takes a lot of effort to make even a few different variations. Also rooms are constrained to one size. A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms. To create a tile set is a real headache too. Planning how to lay out the UVs, trying to cra
7 comments
Read more