I think you create an atmosphere in your game/story that is so beautiful and specific and I was wondering if you have tips on how to accomplish that? And also how to stick with it - I find myself constantly shifting gears when it comes to how I want to tell a story. x
Aww thank you!! Strange County’s been an easy child so far to be honest. I indulge in fooling around with it only when I feel like it, keeping it as far away as possible from feeling like a chore. I just took Strangetown and sprinkled my favorite things on top of it. Leone westerns, paranormal stuff, horror, sad heroines, attempts at portraying human complexities… and then started playing, doing makeovers of the sims and lots. Giving premades roles in a setting is pretty easy: they have existing personalities you can look at for answers on how they’d behave in a given situation, but not too much so there’s some free space for imagination.
Concrete tip #1 I can come up with is get yourself in the mood you want to put out with music and moodboards! With Strange County setting the desired visual’s been pretty effortless: I make all the sims look tired of each others’ bullshit with cc, take most of the pictures at night, dusk or dawn, and when editing the images in photoshop I put a low opacity warm yellow tint on them as a finishing touch. It’s a really simple trick but it gives all the images uniform color scheme without losing too much distinction between them. I hope. The end goal is a series of portraits of a town suspended in a gloomy stagnant state right before a storm. A sandstorm? Well the moment right before shit, hitting, fan, all that. Everyone’s got their agendas and conflicts that are about to collide and implode at the slightest nudge of a catalyst.
As for the rest of the atmosphere, I have my music playlist in the background which really gets me in the right mood for the themes I want in there, whether I’m playing, building, writing or making related cc. My main keywords are usually isolation and melancholy with everything. Cheerful gal, simple zest for life, basically.
For me the thing that gets me to stick to a theme is simply to have elements I love and don’t get tired of, rather than a clear vision or outline how things should go. I don’t feel forced to follow a certain aesthetic, I love being able to just play around and see where things lead. As a story or just the process of worldbuilding progresses, it’s obviously going to evolve, even in directions that don’t at first look fit. I say let the story go where it wants and see what you can make of it within the frame of whatever atmosphere you want there to be! :)