Come Home Behind the Scenes: Outlining

Hey everybody. I've been getting some people asking for more behind the scenes looks at how the game is made, and my process in general, so I'm starting this monthly behind the scenes post where I'll get a little more detailed about how I do things and how I make the game. Some of this might be interesting to you, probably a lot of it wont, but here it is, either way! Keep in mind that this is just the way that I do things and not necessarily the BEST way to do things. I've gotten very comfortable in my process and it works well for me, but might not work for everybody. Hopefully, you'll find some use or inspiration or entertainment from it. 

For this first post, I want to talk about Outlining. For me, this is where everything starts. I love outlining and I do it constantly. If I have an idea for a story that I likely won't even get a chance to work on for a while, I'll still sit down and spend some time outlining a bit of it. So what is outlining? 

Step 1: Brainstorm and Summarize

For me, outlining is starting with a small idea of the story and then breaking it down and expanding upon it over and over again. The first step of that is just coming up with ideas and writing them down. They can all be used or discarded later, but you have to write that stuff down first. 

For example, with Come Home. I started off with this original concept: 

This was basically the very first thing I wrote when I started working on Come Home. 

After that, I started breaking down all the story arcs, starting with the main investigation. That looks something like this: 

I do this for all the different storylines in the game, so for me, that was the main investigation story and the 20 different character stories. Here's an example of one of my early Jamie outlines: 

So, you see these start off as pretty vague. Then I begin expanding upon those initial summaries, which for me moves into the next step of outlining. 

Step 2: Progression

The next step for me is sort of just putting things in order and having an progression arc with each of the stories. During the summarize Step, I already did that somewhat, just by summarizing the story I want to tell. This expands upon that and fills in the gaps. For me that looks something like this: 

I do this for every story arc in the game. 21 in my case. These are mostly just summaries of scenes that I want in the game, put in the order that makes sense and progresses the character to their conclusion.

I did all of this before I ever started making the game. I've written all the characters and the main stories progression from beginning to end. As you can see by #10 here (which ended up getting cut/changed), none of this is set in stone and can be altered later, but I need to have some idea of where each of the stories are going.

After I've done that, I can move on to the next step. 

Step 3: Code Outline

This is usually what I do at the beginning of every update. So for Updates 16-20, I haven't done any of this yet and have only outlined up through the progression step. When I start a new update though, I move on to the code outline, which is just how I'm referring to when I take the progression outline, expand on it, and put it into code. 

Honestly, this is probably my favorite part of making the game. It's the part where I get to actually write the story. Sometimes, I get a little caught up in it and do way more than just outline, basically writing the whole scene during this step. Other times, I just write the stuff that I feel like writing and leave blank some other stuff to come back to later. 

The point here is to get the scene written in code and determine how many images and animations I'm going to need and about how much time it's going to take me to complete the update. 

Here's an example of a code outline: 

It might be a little hard to read here, as I don't have a lot of my code outlines saved in an easily accessible way. They tend to get written over with later, during the actual writing phase. 

But, you can see here that I've taken Lisa's scene and set up the code for it and also started breaking it down into images, which in code are denoted by the "scene" code. I describe what the images will look like. Then usually, I'll just write a quick note about what is happening. 

Here's another example from the same scene, the little optional sex scene with Rose in the Library: 

So, you can see that I don't usually write all the dialogue here or any description on the sex scenes. I'm just figuring out how the scene will play out and what images and animations I will need for it. All the dialogue and description usually gets added in the writing phase later. There have been many many times that I get wrapped up in this step though and end up writing the whole scene right here. 

I know that some other devs like writing in word processors first, then transferring that to code. I did that in the first few updates of the game, but eventually, I got to where I just would rather write in code directly. For me, it makes more sense. There's a lot of formatting problems when you try to transfer text from Word/Google docs to a code editor. It's just too much hassle, and I've gotten to the point that I think of the scenes in code anyway. Overall, ren'py code is fairly readable anyways, so might as well save time by doing it all there. 

After I've outlined every scene for the update like this, I move on to the next part, which is the final planning step. 

Step 4: Update Plan

For my update plan, I take all the scenes, the images, the animations, conversations, dates, any new coding, new sets, new clothing, new characters, and anything else that I'm going to have to do for the update and I put all of that into a spreadsheet. 

They look a little like this, but when I first start an update, they obviously don't say finished on the side. They'll say Pose, or Render, or Write, or something like that. This was for update 14. In that update, I had nearly 1000 lines of things that I needed to get done, whether that be creating a set, or writing a scene, or making an image. I like to have my outline broken down like this, because it works like a checklist for me and allows me to see how much I have left to do at any given time. 

I also have it to where it will count everything up, apply a number to it, depending on how long I expect it to take, and estimate how many days it will take me to complete the update. That's how I'm able to give you fairly accurate predictions of when an update will be released. That looks a little like this: 

Once I get everything added into my spreadsheet and I have this checklist, the outlining phase is done for me. That's when I move on to the grind of writing, coding, and making the renders for each of the scenes. 

Having this checklist to look at every day is a HUGE benefit for me. I don't have to worry about what I need to do next, all I have to do is look at the list and move down it and mark things off as I go. This takes a couple of months usually and it's nice to see the percentages go up and the Finished cells turn green and less and less stuff needed until it's finally done. I find that very helpful and motivating and it keeps me focused during production and is probably the main reason I'm able to continuously move forward and release updates consistently. 

Alright, that's it for this month. Next month, I'll go more into the writing. 

I hope this was somewhat informational and entertaining. If there's something else you would like to see more behind the scenes of, let me know. I'll get into the rendering and stuff in a future post, but for me outlining is probably the most important part of telling any story.