Exteriors Devlog Week 7

Collectively, a large portion of the team also decided on the day of our scrum meeting that we would confront our project lead about the script for the game (that she had written). We agreed that the metaphor of the house and garden had been lost and the message was far too on the nose. Additionally, the Sexual assault and harrassment themes made unanimously everyone who read it incredibly uncomfortable, which means that it could prove incredibly triggering to anyone with related trauma playing the game.

Following this, me and the project lead got on a call together to rework the script in line with the advice we had given. I feel that after this the script and story improved- we tweaked the NPC dialogue to be more relevant to the House and Tasks and trimmed down the Narrator to an inner monologue that would offer essential information infrequently.

The Story of Exteriors has some emergent elements, as the player is put in the shoes of a (mostly) silent protagonist who they know little about, and its strength lies in not showing its hand to the player, getting them to interpret the story for themself. The previous draft of the script stripped away the subtlety of this concept and the core strength of this type of non-conventional story, as the Project Lead seems wary to put trust in the player to figure things out themselves. However, the story absolutely won’t work well and will feel too on-the-nose if the player is directly told the connotations of its metaphors.

I spent the rest of the week helping the art team unwrap some of their models and create UV mappings for them. Our two artists are quite inexperienced with 3D modelling software (less so than some of the Designers) so we spent a lot of time helping them out.