Technical Post - Please Be Happy Early Scene Drafts (Patreon)

Part of the reason it took so long for us to release Please Be Happy is because we started the script over after getting a decent chunk of the way into the story, and reoutlined the plot as a whole. Following up on Heart of the Woods, we wanted the story to have a breezier pace and more focus on dialogue, compared to HotW which was very prose-heavy. At the time, we figured the total length would clock in somewhere around 60-70,000 words, which is roughly the length of First Snow. Obviously, that didn't happen - we've mentioned that the final game ended up being something like 225,000 words - but the snappy style we were aiming for was part of why we expected it to be short.

Unfortunately, it turned out that it just… wasn't the best reading experience. Pulling off big memorable moments was tough without ample time to build up to them to establish the characters' emotional stakes. At the time, adi was assisting with some of the writing too, which helped a lot, but ultimately I requested that we go back and start from the beginning, and that I could write in a style I was more comfortable with. The end result was the game that you've hopefully played. There's a much higher percentage of dialogue compared to narration than in HotW, but there's still a lot of prose, too.

Anyway, now that the game has been out for a bit, we thought it might be fun to share a few of those earlier drafts, so you can see how everything evolved from there. Some parts will be pretty familiar, but a lot of parts didn't make it to the new versions.

We have about 4 chapters' worth of scenes like this, so if this is something you all like seeing, let us know and we'll be sure to share more in the future too. Technically these contain spoilers for PBH, so if you haven't played the game yet, then read at your own discretion.

Scene 1

Scene 2

[I'm not sure why but there's no scene 3 in the folder]

Scene 4

Scene 5

-Josh