Proof of Life #124: progress report #12. Creating a world that feels alive.

Hey everyone, N_Taii here! You know the drill, I will now upload one of my long-awaited(?) Monday PoL post to let you know about current progress, ideas, and plans I have for/about the game.

I am now finished with the "princess part" of the prologue, where our protagonist meets and interacts for the first time with HC3's main heroine. It's a bit hard to estimate the current playtime, but I'd stay it stands at about 1 hour. If you find her a bit annoying at the start, don't worry, it's meant to be that way. As I said in the previous PoL (123), character development is only possible when the characters themselves have something to develop on to start with.

Now, onto what I wrote in the title, a world that "feels alive". What do I mean by that? Well, since we are now dealing with one district part of a far bigger city, it would be more realistic to have quite a lot of different NPCs on different time frames, right? Either locals or people visiting from another district. That's why I've dedicated quite a lot of time this past week to imrpove my custom-made character generator and hand out more commissions for NPCs, such as outfits, haircuts, weapons (for the guards), etc... I don't want the NPCs to feel too similar, which is why I want as many options as possible. Above, you may see a sample of the ones I have created so far. I'll do the men later. I currently lack children and elderly, but I'll see to that later too.

I also like to add colours to differentiate ranks and the likes. Maids with a green dress are currently in training, while the one wearing a red dress is a head maid, in charge of all the other maids. Royal guards wear black armors, while normal city guards wear red ones, etc...

I'm also planning on potentially having the NPCs move around on the map (I'll make it so that the MC can walk through them in order to avoid them blocking the way^^).

Last but not least, I wish to add some "mini side-stories" around the city. Small enough to not take away from the main storyline, but noticeable enough that they feel like that world doesn't revolve around the MC, but is also progressing on its own.

A small example (spoiler-ish maybe?): there's this street musician playing guitar every Fridath morning. He has a fan, a cute girl, that comes to see him everytime, and they've been eyeing each other for a while now. As the story progresses, there's this other dude that shows up to the guitarist's performances to seduce the girl, hits it off with her a little more every time the MC completes main quests, until the girl stops showing up to listen to the guitar guy, and you can spot her nearby (in an alley or behind a window) having sex with that other guy. The guitarist stops playing happy songs and now plays sad songs. The end. All of this would happen without a single line of dialogue, and would be understood mainly from the context.

This is just an idea of mine. Whether I'll add or not remains to be decided. If you have your own ideas for other such mini side-stories to add to the world, you can always let me know. I won't say yes or no, and there's a high chance I might not use your idea(for various reasons such as feasability), but I'll gladly read it! 

That's it for this PoL!

Thank you for reading, and have a wonderful week!

N_Taii