Hello! I’m Maddie, the writer for As It Is! Today, I wanted to talk about my experience writing for the game, with a specific focus on worldbuilding. Building a World Making a world for a game involves a lot of work on many levels, but I think the most important part of it is creating a fundamental idea to structure everything around. This idea can be a concept, or a mood, or a combination of the two. For As It Is, the idea was a lighthearted non-conflict village of animals. On a writing level, this concept was taken and applied to characters(both player characters and NPCs) and items in the world that these characters interacted with. A good example of this idea being applied to these parts of the game is Hedgehog’s interactions with items in the school. Hedgehog needed to give information to the players about the world without sounding like they were dumping worldbuilding exposition onto the player, and they needed to deliver information about the object in-character. Hedgehog interacting with the clock and bookshelf in the school. Thanks to these interactions, the player knows more about Hedgehog and the world without being overloaded with information. Another important part of worldbuilding is your world’s NPCs. If you’re making a world, no matter its size or scale, it’s essential that you have NPCs that are interesting. By this, I mean NPCs that have distinct mannerisms + personality who exist separately than the player character. If you’ve played our demo, you probably know the characters Pika, Rain Frog, and Rabbit. The primary function of these characters is to introduce the player to Hedgehog’s minigame and its mechanics, but they all approach the concept differently depending on their personalities. Additionally, the flow of the conversation is unique to each character depending on their mannerisms and how comfortable Hedgehog is with talking to the character. Pika is always forgiving of Hedgehog’s verbal stumbles, but Rabbit leaves almost no wiggle room for a mistake in words. Hedgehog talking to each of the animals in every minigame. As you can see, each animal has a different demeanor. Some NPCs can also be a bit more charismatic than others, even in a friendly, open game like As It Is. While Rabbit doesn’t exactly read as friendly unless you play their minigame very carefully, their admonishing is light and they never snap at Hedgehog unprovoked. They aren’t the nicest of characters, but the way they react is in-character for them. The bottom line here is that your player doesn’t need to like your NPCs, they just need to believe in them. Last Words I know it’s a bit of a cliche to say this, but writing for As It Is hardly feels like work. The tone of my writing often creates a similar effect on my mood, so in turn writing for such a cheerful game leaves me feeling a lot of really positive emotions. I’m very fortunate I get to write for a game I’m so passionate about.
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