waver | alt. narrative

[Tempus]

Waver is a kinetic novel that follows the life of a young woman, a machine operator at an open-cut mine in Australia. Over the course of two days details about her work, social and home life are explored. One of the central themes is how we can presume to know someone (in waver, the main character) based on islands of information only to encounter new details which reveal the conclusions we’ve reached about them as false. It sort of taps into sonder, the idea that each person in our day to day lives has a history of their own wrought in shades of grey.

While the story as a whole is fictional, it is a synthesis of my own experience working at an open-cut mine in Australia and my life around that time, as well as the observation of how small bits of information about the lives of my friends / family can totally change my view of them and placed everything I already knew about them in a broader context. The early part of the KN will probably contain a fair bit of coarse language and maybe crude humour, since its set in the work place.

Narrative Form
An alternate narrative structure, kishotenketsu, is used to convey the story. As opposed to the dominant western notion that conflict is necessary to tell a story, kishotenketsu is driven by contrast and juxtaposition rather than conflict. Discovering this was a great relief for me, since it felt so artificial shoehorning in conflict where there was none. This doesn't mean waver contains no conflict at all, simply that it's incidental and not driving the story. The form can be seen as four acts:

1. An idea is introduced.
2. The idea is developed.
3. A new element is switched to. This can be described as a kind of non-sequitur.
4. The conclusion ties together the two ideas from the previous three acts by revealing their relevance to each other.

Stylistic Choices
There's a few things that many VNs do that I won't be doing. The first is identifying the characters. None of the main characters will be named. I'm also toying with the idea of making the main character's gender and orientation ambiguous. Additionally, there won't be any character art. Originally this was because I can't make character art, but then I decided I liked the idea of not using it. The backgrounds will likely be edited photographs unless I really feel like making them myself. If I did make them myself it'd obviously be after the writing is finalised. And they won't be anime styled either way. So. If there's no names and no character art, how do you know who's speaking?

Introducing my all-new patented s- shut up! This is how. Each character occupies a particular place on the screen. The narration always goes in the center slot, while the main character's dialogue always goes in slot #1 just above and to the left of it. Other central characters besides the lead go in slot #2; none of them are ever present at the same time, so this is fine. Additional characters use the additional slots unless slot #2 is unoccupied. On top of this, the context and nuances in the character's dialogue will allow the player to figure out who's speaking. Hopefully. (Those boxes won't be there by the way; they're just there to illustrate the dialogue positioning.)

Inspiration
This is more a curiosity than anything, but I thought it might be nice to point out some parts of other media that've inspired me. Still in the process of updating:

• No Country For Old Men (movie)
  One thing I noticed when I recently watch this movie is that there's no music. At all. Only the sounds of the environment. And it never detracts from the movie; if anything it emphasises the emptiness on roads in the middle of nowhere and increases the tension in particular scenes. Very good choice, in my opinion.
• Heat (movie by Michael Mann)
  I really liked the visuals of this movie. Lots of cool colours. I also loved that the characters all had their own lives outside of the central plot and that it wasn't focused on big and explosions / shooting all the time.
• Rabbit, Run (book by John Updike)
• Hemingway, Elmore Leonard (authors)
  Brevity of writing and focus on dialogue.
• The Second Sex (book by Simone de Beauvoir)
• Games People Play (book by Eric Berne)
• A Book Like This (song by Angus and Julia Stone)
  The line "and I stand on the ocean shore like an old black and white movie" in particular.
• Evening Strains To Be Time's Vast (music by Jacaszek)
  I used to live not too far from a trainyard and in the middle of the night you could hear the cars being shunted. It was eerie during the early hours of the morning when I'd go for a walk sometimes. It'd be very dark except for the occasional white street light which made everything it lit look as though it were monochrome. The trains shunting sounded like the distant dull clanking of metal; it was as though the planet were echoing. That's what this music reminds me of.
• Papers, Please (game by Lucas Pope)

Current Progress
Here's the opening narration:

• "One hundred thousand electric stars line the streets, bolted down by cast steel anchors.
  Porch lamps guide home late returns and moths alike.
  Slanted rain last night left the street's wood fences wet on one side and dry on the other.
  For each thing sheltered, another is weathered in its place."

This is the main menu I've got set up in Ren'Py:

This is some music I've created for it so far. The tracks are short, but I've made them so they loop. It's still early work so some things will probably changed / extended. Here they are:

• Waver (title screen music)
• Impermanence
• No Quarter (this is a cover of a reworking of Led Zeppelin's song of the same name by Jimmy Page; it won't be in the final version)
• Evening Horizon

Here's some dialogue from part of final scene from act 2 between the main character (who I call "girl 1" in the script!), her friend (girl 2) and a taxi driver:

• Narration: "Looking up from a piece of paper, the driver lowers the window."
  Girl 1: "You free?"
  Driver: "Hop in. Where're you girls headed tonight?"
  Girl 2: "Home!"
  Narration: "Pushing a button on the meter, the driver pulls out into the street."
  Narration: "Addresses are volunteered loosely to a stranger."
  Narration: "The city fades away." with longDissolve
  Narration: "…"
  Narration: "Oases of white light bleach the surrounds outside."
  Narration: "Bound to inevitable orbits, celestial bodies shine faintly from the past."
  Narration: "Fingers draw on the fogged windows inside."
  Narration: "Protecting them from each other, the glass divides worlds."
  Narration: "…"
  Girl 2: "I feel so -"
  Girl 1: "God, would you stop talking about how drunk you are?" with fastDissolve
  Girl 2: "..."
  Girl 2: "Hey can I tell you something?"
  Girl 1: "...What?"
  Girl 2: "You're a good friend."
  Girl 2: "And..."
  Girl 2: "I'm drunk."
  Narration: "…"
  Narration: "Her stop is first."
  Girl 2: "What do I owe?"
  Girl 1: "Don't worry about it."
  Girl 1: "I'll be rich soon."
  Girl 1: "Get some sleep woman."
  Girl 1: "And drink something."
  Girl 2: "I already -"
  Girl 1: "Water."
  Girl 2: "I'll call!"
  [sfx of car door shutting]
  Narration: "…"
  Girl 1: "Do you mind if the window is down a bit?"
  Narration: "The driver glances over but says nothing."
  Narration: "It’s cold outside."
  Narration: "A gentle pause at an intersection, but there’s no need."
  Narration: "The ferryman goes on down the still river of asphalt."

Criticism Received
This lists the criticism received on the content so far. I've summarised them below:

• Menu (and game) font. Quite a few people have commented the font, while good for the logo, is hard to read for normal UI elements. This is due to the kerning (too high) and short ascenders / descenders, making letters look very samey and thus decreasing readability.
• Narration ellipses. Apparently they suck and confuse people. I’m not sure I agree just yet, since they haven’t been seen by others in context yet. If people are still confused / annoyed by them in context, I'll try to think of an alternative.
• SFX shouldn’t be relied on to convey important information. Some people have sound effects and / or music disabled.

----------

Lastly, this is a solo project; I'll be doing all the writing, art, music, programming, etc. Oh, and it's non-commercial. I'll be updating this thread with more info when I get around to it -- I know it's missing some plot and character details. I just wanted to get it up so I have a place to post to. If you have some feedback / thoughts / criticism on what I've posted so far I welcome it.

If you want to follow along or chat or something, I have Twitter now and there's a #waver IRC channel on the Rizon server. Come one, come all! The first ten people to fulfil some arbitrary criteria get money! And by money I mean nothing.

[quilty]

This doesn't just sound interesting- it's fresh. Especially since I've never worked with machines or been to Australia, but even if it didn't involve those elements the idea of waver is enough for me to want to play.
-Anonymous characters are cool, just make sure the user doesn't get confused though.
-The graphics are neat and clean which gives it quite a modern touch.

Just a few questions:

-- Is the 'v' in waver a different colour because of artistic purposes or for something else in the game?
(silly question, sorry)

-- What sort of event does the game start of with?

Good luck on the game

[Haze]

I must say, I really like how your UI looks so far! Very nice and clean-cut.

The idea of using photographs sounds like it'll work well, but I'm not so sure about the narration. Would you possibly be able to post a video or something showing it in action?

[Tempus]

This doesn't just sound interesting- it's fresh. Especially since I've never worked with machines or been to Australia, but even if it didn't involve those elements the idea of waver is enough for me to want to play.
-Anonymous characters are cool, just make sure the user doesn't get confused though.
-The graphics are neat and clean which gives it quite a modern touch.

What's funny is that even though I've lived in Australia all my life, I'd never seen anything like what I saw working in the mine. It was surprisingly rainforest-like; raining all the time, foggy, high altitude, and cold. The machines were huge; you could stand inside the rim of the truck's wheels if you wanted. Definitely a great experience to have, but I didn't appreciate it at the time (roughly three years ago now).

What you say about the characters is something I'm concerned about too. I have had a friend comment saying they weren't sure who was speaking sometimes in an early build I made. So I'll work hard to make sure there's not confusion. As for the graphics, the idea is to keep things simple and intuitive. The different colour of "v" in "waver" is purely stylistic right now. Maybe I'll think of a meaning for it later!

Right now the story starts off with the drive to work. In real life it took me around 3 hours to get to work.... so it's condensed a little The journey in is on a windy road before dawn. Trucks also use it and they (and car drivers) use two way radios to let each other know where they are on the road so that they don't crash into each other on blind corners or anything. After they finished their block, a lot of workers would literally speed out of there and it could get a little crazy.

Thanks for the reply!

I must say, I really like how your UI looks so far! Very nice and clean-cut.

The idea of using photographs sounds like it'll work well, but I'm not so sure about the narration. Would you possibly be able to post a video or something showing it in action?

Thanks, I'm glad you like the design. I'll likely try to take some of my own photographs for most BGs since the story is set in a city very similar to my own.

I might make a video showing off the test build I have soon. I'd prefer to make it available for download, but the game menu is broken at the moment. That's one thing I didn't say: once I have some character bios up and some more of act 1 written I'd like to release regular builds. I'm not a big fan of waiting until the entire thing is done and then releasing; I prefer more immediate feedback.

[Anne]

Won't the text changing position look distracting? Why don't you just let the reader get the idea of who's speaking from the text itself? (like if you make the example of the dialogue you have just plain text the impression should be pretty much the same, probably even less confusing than with the text skipping around the screen). It'll make even less sense to make it a VN then though. But at this point (without characters and choices) I already feel that the VN format is completely unnecessary and a plain novel would be better.
Anyway, I'm really interested (and your post was already an interesting thing to read).

[Tempus]

Won't the text changing position look distracting? Why don't you just let the reader get the idea of who's speaking from the text itself? (like if you make the example of the dialogue you have just plain text the impression should be pretty much the same, probably even less confusing than with the text skipping around the screen). It'll make even less sense to make it a VN then though. But at this point (without characters and choices) I already feel that the VN format is completely unnecessary and a plain novel would be better. Anyway, I'm really interested (and your post was already an interesting thing to read).

Perhaps the text changing position will be distracting, perhaps not. I think as long as it's kept simple and consistent, it'll work. But that may be wrong, and it may not work on the first try. The reason the spoken dialogue is positioned differently for each character is that sometimes the same character will have consecutive lines. Which would be confusing if you thought the same character was speaking every second line. But it's not like the same character will be moving about as they're speaking or between lines.

Novels as a medium don't offer want I want, namely visuals and sound for environmental context and music for emotional context. It's difficult because I know what I want to make but I'm not aware of any examples that already exist. The closest parallel I can think of is cartoons and comics where character's eyes or text dialogue is shown on a black backdrop and you guess who's who from what previously happened, shape of eyes, or position (and content) of text. That's an imperfect analogy though.

I'm glad to hear you're interested! And thank you for you feedback.

-----------------

I've updated the original post a bit. Firstly, I've included a criticism section where I summarise the criticisms received so far to allow people to know and comment on them. Second, I added some music that's been written so far under "current progress". Lastly, I embellished the "influences" section a little.

[quilty]

What's funny is that even though I've lived in Australia all my life, I'd never seen anything like what I saw working in the mine. It was surprisingly rainforest-like; raining all the time, foggy, high altitude, and cold. The machines were huge; you could stand inside the rim of the truck's wheels if you wanted. Definitely a great experience to have, but I didn't appreciate it at the time (roughly three years ago now).

That is actually pretty surprising, I always thought Australia was quite a dry place. The climate must have been really frustrating for you, this all sounds so fascinating to me especially because of my inexperience of life.

What you say about the characters is something I'm concerned about too. I have had a friend comment saying they weren't sure who was speaking sometimes in an early build I made. So I'll work hard to make sure there's not confusion.

There is a possibility that you allow users to name the characters, although that would probably be very confusing to execute. But I'm sure there are others ways of avoiding confusion that are much simpler.

Right now the story starts off with the drive to work. In real life it took me around 3 hours to get to work.... so it's condensed a little The journey in is on a windy road before dawn. Trucks also use it and they (and car drivers) use two way radios to let each other know where they are on the road so that they don't crash into each other on blind corners or anything. After they finished their block, a lot of workers would literally speed out of there and it could get a little crazy.

Ooh, I love little details like this, they make the story more interesting compared to stories with blurry details.

[Mad_Scientist]

Very interesting stylistic choices you are going. I'd like to be able to offer more comment than "interesting", but when I try to imagine just how everything will fit together and work out in practice, I have a hard time. I can see it coming together really well and giving a unique feel to the game, but I can also see it falling apart and just being confusing and hard to follow.

Well, I'm rooting for you to pull something nifty off. Will be very interested to see videos/demos when they become available.

[Sheridan]

I love floating textboxes and didn't think you could even do them in Ren'Py, so please show me your secrets!

Aside from helping you keep track of who's speaking, I think the movement of text on the screen helps keep the reader's attention when there's no voice acting and minimal visuals.

And whoever told you narration ellipses suck is just plain wrong =P Although I suppose you could show a short pause in non-textual ways, like pausing text advancement and changing the background lighting, or something, if people really find ellipses that distracting.