HaS-004: Adding another thread

The 2nd short story for Have a Sip: Careful Steps is out now.

This time, it portraits Shiori, a young female office worker who recently moved to the city. Her story resolves a lot more around “younger” themes: finding where you belong (location and people wise), adulthood and love. Shiori also has a cat, Arthur, who is not just her companion, but a character with adventures of his own. Hopefully this particular short story about Shiori feels relaxing/calming, with more fun and exciting arcs coming up to match with her youth.

Writing about someone in their early 20s turned out to be more challenging than I thought, especially as I have forgotten a lot of the details of what happen in my 20s. In fact, it was a lot simpler to write about Martin and Eleanor from The view from here, since that’s my everyday reality.

In retrospect, each story took about 1+ month, which I hope is an acceptable pace. Most of my time recently has been split between actual work and family, so even getting into the habit of writing regularly has been hard. Someday I just wish that the everything in the world stop changing for once, so I can actually maintain this game-making/writing hobby :D

The more I work on HaS, the more apparent it is that lots of deep work goes into creating a good story. At least with the current process, I had to build up the character, think about their looks, backstory, mannerisms, behavior and quirks, etc. These usually won’t show up in the final output, but they have been great in getting everything else going: from the overarching plot, to the flow of a specific scene and even to how to describe/highlight something about a character.

This process is time consuming though. And given my limited headspace, loading/unloading and holding these “context” after work has been quite tricky. Nevertheless, I got a more realistic expectation on how long things take though, especially after talking to people who spent 4+ years making their game (from Vancouver Game Garden). Hopefully all this work will continue to be the foundation that make the later phrases faster.

A small reminder to myself: a deep process != a good product. Public feedback and reception is still the only non-subjective benchmark though.