We got a lot done this month, and the focus this time around was working on the doctors notes. Let me give you some context as to why they're important.
There is 68 characters in Castorfield, the majority of them you won't meet in the game because they're long dead, but their life and the things that happened to them is an important part of the story, and figuring out the mystery. (And more characters might be added, this was just the minimum to make the town feel real)
Of those 68 characters, 30 have a birth certificate, because they were born in Castorfield. For the doctors office to work as a kind of list of all characters, we need to find ways to mention the other characters. So we have a bunch of minor medical injury reports that double as telling about an important event, the blizzard, the mine collapse, that also make sure each character is mentioned at least once. Some of the more minor characters will only have one or two entries, and the more important characters will have several.
The way that it is ordered also needs tracking, because it's alphabetical by patient added, and then all the patients notes are collected together. So if something happened in 1888 people that didn't have notes before that show up at that time, but people that had a birth certificate before then, will have those notes next to their other notes. This makes both reading it in chronological order tell a kind of story, but also if you are just searching for a specific event you might miss little nuggets. The idea is to reward someone for exploring through the lore.
A big part of making this work is planning, most of the time spent at this stage is planning what things are going to be, most specifically so we can have art prepared, but more to make sure the narrative of the game remains consistent with its complexity. If each character is to be mentioned in the doctors files at least once, and we already have 30 birth certificates, then we need at least 38 more to be made.
We're currently at 55 planned, 41 written and implemented, and notes on historical events that will need files made. In doing this we also realised that some important world-wide historical events might need mentioning for added context such as the great blizzard of 1888, the Great War, or the invention of the hand-held camera (the main three we have impacting the games story right now) might need mentioning in the game too, so we're planning out a few newspaper headline files that you can access when visiting the library.
We haven't only been focusing on events that happen in the games past! We've given two of these characters jobs; the Librarian and the Doctor, who function as a kind of tutorial to the kinds of documents their location contains, and gives the sheriff the ability to ask them questions about whatever through line they're pursuing at the time. As we've got these 68 characters they need jobs after all right?
We've also mapped out the first set of mid-game scenes, which happens in four stages and has different outcomes based on how many days into the game you've progressed. No spoilers on this one, but I'm very excited about how it will come together.
The current guess is to have somewhere about 90 doctors files on the characters, based on how in-depth some of them need to get. Being at 41 completed already, makes me feel proud of the progress we're making with this game so far.
We've managed to fill out a lot of notes for what's going to be coming ahead in future updates, so I'm looking forwards to how this game will progress in the next few months.
Hope this is something to keep you as excited about this project as I am.