WORLD BUILDING – HOW WE DO IT (Patreon)

Hello!  🎃✨

I’m EvilHairBrush, the writer for AstralShift, and today I’m going to lay out how I’m tackling the world building of Little Good Two Shoes. As you may suspect, nothing I’ll be explaining in this post will be innovative or unique by any means, it’s simply how I’ve been going on about it and my plans for the game!

Contrary to Pocket Mirror, Little Goody Two Shoes will take place in a way more realistic setting – more specifically, in the village of Kieferberg – which means it needs to be a lot more fleshed out than the world of Pocket Mirror. 

Comparatively to what I’m aiming to achieve with Little Goody Two Shoes, the world of Pocket Mirror was rather simplistic when it came to the world building mainly thanks to its progressive narrative, by which I mean the constant progression of going from one map to the other and spending relatively short periods of time in each of the game’s areas.

The key to keeping it cohesive, however, were these guys:

🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🥧🎃🎃

Despite not having a proper role in the story, sprinkling the pumpkins along the various areas helped us to not only bring them all together in a common realm of existence, but to give them depth as well. 

It’s through the pumpkins that the player gets to know bits and pieces about how things work in Egliette’s kingdom and how abusive Fleta’s behavior is towards her servants. In Harpae’s area they tend to not mention Harpae at all, much less comment on her circumstances, which reflects the way Harpae chose to tackle her struggles.

I’m sure most of you will agree when I say that if it weren’t for the pumpkins the world of Pocket Mirror would’ve felt empty and gloomy as heck, hence why we didn’t include many of them in Lisette’s area. By excluding the pumpkins from the most bizarre part of the game, we aimed to have the player lose the familiarity they’d established previously.

While the pumpkins were established as a link between the worlds of Pocket Mirror, the same doesn’t apply to Little Goody Two Shoe’s setting. 

This time, the story will be taking place in something I like to call a "closed circuit", or an ecosystem of sorts, where there is a relatively fixed number of characters coexisting in the same village where everyone’s actions affect not only the community, but also specific households, certain individuals and, more importantly, Elise herself.

To achieve this, there are a number of things I like to keep in mind while putting the scripts together:

👉 Organization

👉 Mastery

👉 Fluidity

👉 Progression

1. Organization

It’s a pain, but without it I wouldn’t know left from right in Little Goody Two Shoes’ world.

Putting together character catalogues containing their names, households, plus their inner workings and locations within Kieferberg’s map, hierarchies, occupations, relationships, routines, etc., is an absolute must. All of these factors are decisive when putting together a tight network of people who are supposed to be family, neighbors and friends.

Despite the importance of organization, though, I don’t particularly like to depend on overly detailed character profiles to keep myself organized. Instead, I put together the character profiles for the four main characters only and choose to freestyle all the NPCs – of course, I do catalog them properly after they’re established in the village. 

Instead of brainstorming 30+ characters in one afternoon in hopes of keeping everything cohesive and believable, I personally choose to create them as they’re needed and adjust everything else later.

2. Mastery = Creative Freedom

As obvious as it is, organization is the basis for mastery.

It’s imperative that I know every single villager of Kieferberg by heart which I know may seem a bit too metal, but it’s the most cost effective way I personally take to keep myself acquainted with the world I’m building.

I figure this method keeps things simple and easy for me seeing as I don’t have to spend literal hours browsing through endless character profiles to decide which ones are more fitting to take part in a particular scene. I also believe it keeps things feeling fresh while I’m writing since I can cut loose and let my creativity handle the script for a while without having to worry about external factors all the time.

I also happen to love what I do, so this isn’t really as much of a chore as it is something I enjoy doing. 

Think about it like memorizing all Pokemon in existence, as well as all of their traits, and being able to put together a strategy to take down a certain opponent without having to spend too much time checking the wiki. 

Same thing, but with cute girls, old people and cattle. 🐐

3. Fluidity

Once I’m acquainted with everyone in the village I can freely make them interact however I please which is pretty rewarding to say the least

It’s important to keep their interactions feeling organic, but also to take care to shuffle the villagers as I write. By this I mean keeping in mind that this is a small village I’m dealing with which means that:

Everyone knows everyone 💬

No need to explain certain aspects of their lives to each other seeing as they all know what goes on at the village. It’s best to have them chat about pre-established events in a natural, organic way even if it makes the scene hard to understand at first, and leave the explanation for Elise to find about later on either by asking them in more detail, or through a later conversation with a third party.

It’s also important to make the various villagers interact with different villagers each time, although there’s no need to take it to the extreme of never having two villagers interact with each other twice, as it’d defeat the purpose.

There’s an imperative need to create friend circles, work circles and family circles that will not only coexist with each other, but also intertwine themselves with various other circles, if not with all circles simultaneously.

Not everyone knows everything 👁️‍🗨️

Having all villagers know everything about each other isn’t very realistic as people usually keep secrets, lie and hold grudges against each other, especially if they live together in a limited environment. 

Even if these seem to be contradictory to the previous point, it is important for the overall progression of Little Goody Two Shoes to keep the villagers feeling human, which comes with both the good and the bad.

Nuances 💭

Not everyone has the same beliefs, nor does everyone like everyone. As simple as this seems, it’s important to try and mimic the behaviors of a close network of people which can be inspired from contexts we’ve all experienced in our lives such as our class at school, our group of coworkers, or even our personal family and friend circles. 

Opinions differ and so do stances regarding certain events and aspects of life which is an important thing to keep in mind when creating a genuine feeling reaction to a certain event that’ll affect the village as a whole. Fear, curiosity, denial, happiness, anger, etc. - no two people express their feelings quite the same and, most importantly, in a socially appropriate manner. 🔪⚰️☠️

4. Progression

In Little Goody Two Shoe’s case, the narrative will take place in the village of Kieferberg from start to finish which calls for a gradual progression of the story. What I mean by this is that it’s important to establish the village as a believable location where believable people live in and do believable things in their believable day-to-day lives.

The more familiar the player becomes with Kieferberg, the better they’ll understand the villagers’ reactions to certain events and how to deal with their surroundings. To achieve this level of mastery this early on, we have to give the player a good feeling of how the village as a whole behaves on the daily and only then submit them to the narrative’s progression to give off the feeling that things are changing throughout the game.

Holding onto past events is also important when it comes the story progression of Little Goody Two Shoes. Remembering loved ones that have passed away, not conveniently forgetting about traumatic events that take place to make room for the next big traumatic event, holding on to both grudges and good deeds, etc. 

All of these are important to keep the villagers of Kieferberg from feeling anonymous. We want them to feel like they could be real people and give them all sorts of dialogue options so that they don’t infinitely say the same thing over and over again and end up feeling empty.

As the story goes on, these villagers will need to change their stance regarding their beliefs, both in a religious and superstitious sense, their behavior and unity as a community will need to shift and change, which includes acting on their feelings and potentially messing up, or emerging as natural leaders, – this could lead them to being unreasonable, stubborn, mean, kind, etc. – and, most importantly of all, change their approach when it comes to Elise’s behavior.

Although it may have been vague, or plain boring, this pretty much sums up the outlines of how I’m going on about the world building of Little Goody Two Shoes! It’s definitely a challenge, but I hope everyone will get to enjoy the atmosphere we’re working hard to bring to life in its best form!

Thank you so much for reading through! 💖

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask and, better yet, if you have anything you’d like me to ramble on about regarding the writing of either Pocket Mirror or Little Goody Two Shoes please do let me know! ✨