This is kind of a question for Crate but I’d also like to see how others approach the subject as well.
How do you start plotting out what you want in a story/campaign for a game, such as Grim Dawn? If you take notes, on what medium do you do so and how are they organized?
I myself have two mediums of organization that I’m accustomed to using, but I’ve found mapping either one to campaign creation for GD is not an especially intuitive process. One of my two are using slides on PowerPoint to separate things by along a sort of ‘chapter’ metric, using each slide title as a separate ‘chapter’ and bullet points indicating what I want to have happen therein. The other is the utilization of mindmaps for broader, general scopes of a particular project. But I haven’t been able to well organize my thoughts for a GD-related campaign in either medium.
How do you/will you organize your thoughts, Crate/modders?
Usually start with the larger plot points and work in the details organically, rather than a rigid setup from out the gate. Leave more room to see what fits as the plot is converted into content.
As for outline, I am very spreadsheet oriented, so I tend to organize it all into tables, then also list off other needs such as NPCs, scripts/script complexity, quest rewards and prerequisites.
I personally use SciTE for all my programming and note taking, lie and tell the editor that it is a python file, and then I get code collapsing for each indented section. It allows me to make edits anywhere in the document without scrolling and helps me organize my thoughts that appear randomly into a more structured, sometimes chronological order.
A genius SEO friend uses https://www.mindmup.com/#m:new as a downloaded app, the 27 categories of signals that Google uses to determine popularity and the 16 major categories of content could not be documented well with lesser methods. Since the data was inherently structured, it made sense to use a structured map.
My approach stems from Dungeons & Dragons table top and amateur story writing.
Starting point of inspiration can vary wildly. Some times a picture depicting a scene can be used, or a sentence in a movie/book or anything else for that matter.
In the DnD Dungeon Master books and magazines there have been many informative pieces written and shared. These were regarding creating an adventure, an entire campaign, world design and conveying all this in a story telling way.
Start by drawing a map of a region/world that you want to use. Basically creating the setting. Draw some woods here, a river there and some towns or fisherman villages elsewhere. From this general point you can then zoom in a bit further. Are there trails for merchant convoys…if so this could lead to creating a goblin trading company and other rivaling conglomerates. Which then leads to possible (side)quests.
Villages and regions can be filled with generic NPC’s at first. A Mayor, trapper that knows the outskirts, a healer, some merchants and other key NPC’s. After that you can add a handful of other non-key NPC’s which a short explenation of their personality/backstory. These will function as possible “hooks” for side-quests on which you can expand at another time should you have time and resources too spare on it.
You might not even end up using those non-key NPC’s, because you found inspiration to create new ones with other quest possibilities which you find more interesting.
Start with a cool scene you have in mind. Then zoom out of it. How did that scene come to pass? Who are the characters involved? What possible personality/history do they have? Was there a political/conflicting incident that lead up to the incident. By answering questions you can create broad strokes for a story.
When creating a story I prefer to use a general outline as a foundation. This can be written on a piece of paper containing only a few lines. So a very broad outline depicting key points/locations/situations/opponents that have a big priority in your story.
Then you can once again zoom out and start filling in the blanks between those points/bottle-necks. What key elements do you want to have and gave them shape.
As for organizing everything. I have a folder for the project. In there are sub-folders for “inspiration” divided into music, images, pieces of code, passages of books and what not. Story itself I organize in its own folder with sub-folders such as:
“world” -> “regions” -> “landmarks” - “Villages” etc accompanied by drawings on paper or in photoshop.
“characters” -> “Important NPC” - “Side NPC” etc. These have documents about quirks, personality, short bio and their quest hook possibilities.
“Opponents” -> “Hero monsters” - “mini-bosses” - “Bosses” Similar documents to characters. But these contain possible motivations/alibi’s of their role in the world. It also helps by finding a deeper meaning why they want to do their “evil” deed and what their role is in the larger organisation. Brings the opponents a bit more too alive and maybe create an angle of sympathy from the players. Knowing what the big boss does also helps create a possible time table on which he needs to do certain tactical/manipulation to achieve his goal. Which helps create scenario’s that make sense too effect the world the player partakes in and needs to react too.
“diverse” -> whatever comes to mind, but hasn’t been fleshed out yet or is just a random idea.
In short you always start with general broad outlines of key elements. Then you keep refining/adding it. Stories are written in layers over time, paintings and drawings are done in layers over time and game design is no different. Once the story elements and characters involved gets large in number I occasionally end up using post-its and plaster them on my wall hehe. Once you get closer to actual implementation Zantai’s method comes into play in my opinion. Because using spreadsheets in that way is similar to how you fill in the database. Basically creating your own checklist for what needs to be done/is completed.
So far while at a very high level I’m finding OneNote easier to keep track of concepts and ideas in categorising them.
Mindmaps on the other hand seem to work well when trying to make decisions- i.e. list out the different themes/decisions and then colour code for ‘No’ or ‘Yes’ or ‘Maybe.’ This then feeds into the OneNote (or similar) sections of relevance to detail further.
Once I get to any reasonable detail, spreadsheets and/or docs are probably good - but I’m not there yet! It’s quite easy then to copy/paste out of onenote, given ad-hoc tables can be very quickly created in onenote as needed.
I’m getting by on free options so far - OneNote online, MindMup and soon LibreOffice.
In testing out the concept, I play to take my ‘great ideas’ and build and test them mechanically as rudimentary as possible. No point getting all detailed and arty if it turns out not fun!
For art concepts, I plan to create particular ‘key scenes’ and make sure they fit into the mechanics and story ideas well before developing an entire ‘world.’
