About the writing

I wanted to tell a simple story (originally much simpler than it ended up being) The basic idea was to have two people talking and that's how we get to know them and they get to know each other. Honestly, that was the hardest part of the project. I felt it was too personal all the time. I've rewritten the whole thing at least 6 times and I'm still not happy with it. (Probably most of the time was spent on it.)

The fact that I struggled so much with the writing is due to several reasons. I guess writing dialogue is not my forte. Another reason is that I wanted to include very personal thoughts, which I then got scared of, and rewrote it, but by then it was all too superficial. Then I rewrote it again... I went back and forth between the too general and the very personal versions. Even now I don't know whether this requires more routine or more courage. The third reason why writing was difficult was that I wanted to create a tree of dialogue without plans, without outlines. After a while it became opaque to me where I was in the story. As I am not an experienced story writer, it was very difficult to follow what I was doing. 

Perhaps this was the part of the game that I had expanded too much from the original idea. I should have stuck to the original idea to keep the project as simple as possible. Of course it's still not complicated, but that's relative. Since a dialogue is the basis of the game's plot, I wrote down my own dilemmas, disguised as a dialogue. Basically, my moody side is talking to my lighter side.  Anyway, that's what I was afraid of, how much sense it would make to make a game with such a sad mood. But I think I've got the atmosphere right, so I'm not worried about that anymore. 

When I started writing the game I was coming out of a period of depression. It's actually a reflection of my thoughts and mood at the time. Looking at it that way, I think I managed to convey something of what I originally wanted.

As I mentioned above, the story has a tree structure. The point is that the player always has the possibility to change the thread of the conversation a little bit 

In the elsp half of the game it's more about what topics you want to talk about. Later on, however, it has an impact on the style of conversation you have with Teo and ultimately affects how the game ends. It was also a dilemma as to when the point comes when you are irreversibly moving towards one of the endings. I eventually resolved this by having one of the conversations in the last stage settle on a net. If we are on the negative side of the "net", it is still possible to move to the positive side by making 2-3 appropriate choices. So, in fact, which ending we get (negative or positive) can be decided in the last scene, but it is also possible that someone gives such "good" answers all the way through that they have a straight path to the positive ending.