The universe is a big place: Questions of scope
August 7, 2016, by Alayna
With four days aboard the Life Raft written, and many narrative threads planned, we decided it was time to begin thinking about the overall scope of Constellations. The script is already 20,000 words long, filled with challenging branches and variables, and the more days that need to be written, the more difficult this project would be for everyone involved.
There are several factors involved when deciding on the scope of a project, and these factors are different for each person on the team.
For me, the first priority is ensuring the scope of a project is large enough to tell a valuable story, while not being so large that it limits my ability to do so. Constellations is a project that is being worked on alongside many others, both related to games and not, and it is important that the time requirements of Constellations are realistic. Still, there is no point creating a game with a subpar story; as a writer, it is important that any words associated with my name are words that I am proud of.
At first, the approximate number of days onboard the Life Raft was going to be 26: one 'tutorial' day, one final day, and 24 inbetween. This was the golden number because 24 is divisible both by the number of NPCs aboard the ship (six) and skills the player is able to train while travelling (four). However, as progress continued, it became apparent that, while this number of days was possible, the game would take more time to complete than ideal and would potentially contain more 'filler' content than is necessary for the storylines I had planned.
As such, we have reduced the scope now to 14 days aboard the Life Raft: one 'tutorial' day, one final day, and 12 inbetween. 12 days is still divisible by both six and four—which probably has less significance for the overarching story than my writer-brain would like to believe—but allows me to condense key storylines into a shorter space of time, ensuring the player is never without plenty of action and interesting plots to investigate.
Of course, only a third of those days have been written so far, so there is plenty of opportunity for the final number of days to change again, but for now, this is what we are working towards. If my current pace continues, I will hopefully have a first draft of the Constellations script ready in the next few months. Meanwhile, Pontus is working on save features for the game so that the player can pause their experience; 20,000 words is a lot to get through in one sitting (as we have discovered each time we attempt to playtest a new section).