Being a writer and game designer, I\u2019m always coming up with ideas for different projects.\u00a0 The majority, I discard for one reason or another.\u00a0 Maybe they\u2019re too generic, fail to hold my attention, lack that special spark, or just plain aren\u2019t good.\u00a0 It\u2019s fairly typical for creative types. Talk to any serious writer, designer, artist, song writer, etc. and they\u2019re bound to have a huge collection of ideas that just weren\u2019t good enough to finish.\u00a0 But there\u2019s the occasional idea that catches on and really sticks in my head.\u00a0 At which point I\u2019ll spend the following hours, days, or weeks mulling over it and further developing it before deciding what I want to do with it.\u00a0 Aurora\u2019s Nightmare was the same\u2026<\/p>\n
I tend to remember when I came up with most of what I consider my best ideas.\u00a0 The basic story of Aurora\u2019s Nightmare first began developing either shortly before or shortly after I first moved to Arizona for college (which would put it in late 2004 or early 2005).\u00a0 Like a couple other stories ideas of mine, it came from a dream.\u00a0 I remember two scenes from the dream.\u00a0 One is an interaction between Ars and Aurora, which really defined his relationships with both her and Tia.\u00a0 It\u2019s still in the game all these years later, and pretty much unchanged.\u00a0 The other scenes, which is just as vital, is a conversation between Ars and a certain cat (yes, a conversation with a cat, I\u2019ll talk more about said cat in a future post) which contained a lot of the critical backstory for the world of Lucerna and some of its greatest mysteries.\u00a0 It too has survived mostly unchanged.\u00a0 I have a feeling a Nightmare showed up somewhere in the dream as well, since I had their basic appearance in mind pretty much from the beginning, but I can\u2019t remember any details about that so I\u2019m not entirely sure.<\/p>\n
So anyway, I woke up with a couple of very intriguing scenes replaying in my mind.\u00a0 Over the course of the day (during which I remember shopping for a cellphone), I was working to put the pieces together.\u00a0 How exactly were those two scenes connected?\u00a0 What did the world look like (I only glimpsed a couple of areas in my dream)?\u00a0 Where did the story go after that?<\/p>\n
By the end of the day, I had a rough outline planned out for an entire novel which would tell the story of Ars, Tia, Aurora, and the cat.\u00a0 It was a rather cool storyline though, in many ways, very different from the types of things I normally wrote.\u00a0 Since I was already in the middle of writing another novel at the time, I kept the story of Aurora\u2019s Nightmare in mind, but shelved it for later.\u00a0 I do that a lot since, if I switched projects every time I came up with a cool idea, I\u2019d never finish anything.<\/p>\n
Over the years I thought about Aurora\u2019s Nightmare occasionally but whenever it was time to pick a new project to work on, I always pushed it down the list since it wasn\u2019t part of the series I was working on, or I wasn\u2019t sure about doing something in that style, or I wanted to focus more on video games than novels.\u00a0 But then\u2026then I had an idea\u2026<\/p>\n
Fast forward to spring of 2011.\u00a0 I was between jobs (having recently returned from my second stint of teaching in Japan) and the game I was working on, Car Washer: Summer of the Ninja, was stalled due to my programmer getting a new fulltime job.\u00a0 I was looking to start developing a new game but, since Car Washer had suffered so many delays due to lost programmers, I wanted to make a game where, if necessary, I could do all the work myself, without relying on contractors. \u00a0At the same time, I was on a big visual novel kick.\u00a0 I first discovered and fell in love with the genre a couple years before, shortly after my first stay in Japan, thanks to Type Moon\u2019s amazing Fate\/Stay Night.\u00a0 And, while back in Japan in 2011, I made sure to track down quite a lot of other visual novels I\u2019d been wanting.<\/p>\n
With my writing background, a visual novel sounded like the perfect project for me.\u00a0 Even better, I wouldn\u2019t need a programmer and, if necessary, could handle the art and sound on my own (in the end though, I did hire people who are much more skilled in those areas than I am).\u00a0 I thought about creating an entirely new story for my visual novel but decided to review my current collection of ideas first and see if any of them would be a good fit.\u00a0 In the end, I had two stories that I thought could make good visual novels, Aurora\u2019s Nightmare being one of them.\u00a0 It won out for a couple of reasons.\u00a0 First, it was the shorter and less complex of the two.\u00a0 Second, I\u2019d already written the other story as a regular novel (it isn\u2019t currently available, but will likely be published sometime in the future) and, while I think it could be adapted into a good visual novel, it would be even better as an action RPG.<\/p>\n
Since I originally planned Aurora\u2019s Nightmare as a traditional novel, I needed to make a number of changes to the story in order to convert it into a visual novel.\u00a0 Namely, there wasn\u2019t enough of it.\u00a0 An unchanging linear story is all well and good for a novel, but a visual novel needs lots of places where the player can make choices and those choices have to change things.\u00a0 Some of that is pretty easy to do.\u00a0 Make the right choice and the story continues, make the wrong choice and it\u2019s game over.\u00a0 In other cases, I took what might have normally been a single conversation and broke it apart into several different topics so the player can decide which one to pursue.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s all relatively minor.\u00a0 To make a good visual novel, you need decisions that drastically change the story.\u00a0 Aurora\u2019s Nightmare now has three distinct story paths (each containing a number of smaller decisions).\u00a0 The first follows the plot of the original novel pretty closely but the others take things in very different directions.\u00a0 Planning them out involved a lot more than just thinking where the story could changes.\u00a0 Tia, for example, had a relatively small role in the original story, despite her importance.\u00a0 So I made sure to give her a much larger one in the other story paths.\u00a0 Of course, giving her a larger role meant that I needed to spend a lot more time developing her as a character (personality, motivations, etc.) as well.\u00a0 It meant more work, but she\u2019s a stronger character because of it.<\/p>\n
Tia isn\u2019t the only character who got a major increase in screen time and two entirely new characters were created as well.\u00a0 Then there\u2019s the world building.\u00a0 While the original story revealed the mysteries of Lucerna, it only covered the basics.\u00a0 Having additional story paths allowed me to dig much deeper into the truth behind the world and characters, adding a number of additional twists and elements which will be progressively revealed as players progress through the game.\u00a0 While completing a single story path will leave you with a \u201ccomplete\u201d story with a satisfying conclusion, you\u2019ll need to play through all three routes to truly understand the world and characters.\u00a0 I wish I could give an example, but I\u2019m trying to avoid heavy spoilers in this blog.<\/p>\n
In the end, converting Aurora\u2019s Nightmare into a visual novel hasn\u2019t been an easy process, but it\u2019s allowed me to greatly expand the story, creating a far deeper and more engaging experience than I could have done with a regular book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Being a writer and game designer, I\u2019m always coming up with ideas for different projects.\u00a0 The majority, I discard for one reason or another.\u00a0 Maybe they\u2019re too generic, fail to hold my attention, lack that special spark, or just plain aren\u2019t good.\u00a0 It\u2019s fairly typical for creative types. Talk to any serious writer, designer, artist, … Continue reading Repost – The Creation of Aurora\u2019s Nightmare<\/span>