Just a little something as we move closer to the next release.

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Let's get that one infamous quote from John Carmack done from the top:

"Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important". 

I love this quote for as many reasons as I dislike it, since a lot of people have used it as somekind of weaponized truth. In the context of both the original DOOM-games it's kind of perfect to describe where the focus lies; namley the gameplay. While Tom Hall wrote the original game design document, referred to as the "DOOM Bible", which featured a bunch of great lore, character and location descriptions, etc, in the end it would sadly mostly be overlooked, but it benefitted the gameplay itself greatly.

Since that quote, Carmack has stated that: "[...] there are undeniably lots of games where the story is the entire point, and they can be done well. I do still hold that the most important games have been all about the play, not the story." This statement is one that I agree with to a greater extent. While some stories are more or less interactive movies/visual novels/walking simulators - whatever you want to call it - the definition of what a "game" is often comes up in question. To me, a game per se should have some sort of "fail state" and interactivity that requires input and perhaps some skill from at least one player. E.g. I wouldn't really classify gambling or purley luck based games as "games" per definition. Some of them lack doesn't demand input and skill from a player, sometimes they just require a button press and away we go, crossing our fingers that we win. I got sidetracked - anyway...

When it came to how I wanted to present the story of REVEREND in-game I bounced around a few ideas. Cutscenes were of course the first idea, and while that is possible for sure, I required me to learn a few things which I had set aside from the offset. The idea was to focus on what I knew how to do, pull it all together, and make a game out of that. While I have learned a lot since the start of the project, I still fail at making working scripts at an alluring rate. There's just some basics I just haven't grasped yet - sorry! Still, the idea with cutscenes was to only give a taste of what really was going on in the world. A lot of the story was to be told via environmental storytelling, and this I would say I kind of succeeded in doing quite o.k. If done well, perhaps players would want to know a bit more. For that I  once again took heavy inspiration from the days of techinical limitations, by deciding to use an old-school style manual to further explore and delve into the world, lore, locations and characters.

But I still wanted to feature something more in-game. Some way to tell the player where they were and what was going on, with some hopefully cool albeit cringy flavor text. While I'm not wholly satisfied with my solution - it just works (Thanks Todd). Having a DOOM-inspired map between levels, with a few notes from the protagonist, doesn't only give the player a way to place/navigate themselves in the world, but also gives them a tiny peek into who the protagonist (the Reverend so to speak, or rather ex-reverend, if you care enough about the plot) is. While it's risky and something I didn't want to do at first, to give the protagonist a resemblance of a specific personality, it's such a feature of the older Build Engine-games that basically inspired the enitre style and attitude of the project. I had to give him something.

TLDR;

While most of the story will be expanded upon in the digital manual, most of the worldbuilding happens during gameplay, with short snippets of scibbles from the protagonist (along with a basic map) inbetween the levels themselves will tell the story in-game.

/E