#plot design

Anything relating to Karma Houdini, where someone doesn’t pay or suffer / get an actual redemption arc for what they’ve done. Actions ave consquences and unless you’re writing a story where someone not paying for their actions is a plot point, I’ll be peeved. To be fair, minor stuff getting dropped or stuff that is not comparatively as bad as other issues int he series can be dropped (ex: in Naruto I don’t mind Neji not confronting any Cloud ninja over his dad’s death because by the time he could they were allies in a war to stop the end of the world, priorities). Conversely, Laser Guided Karma is a favorite trope of mine.

I also don’t like any form of double standards. There are a lot of those to go around these days and they annoy me.

Adults Are Useless also bugs me. I don’t mind when kids solve an issue themselves or there’s a good reason adults don’t get involved, but making the adults blanket idiots or obscenely obvious gets on my nerves. Sometimes it works, like in Phineas and Ferb it’s a running gag, but a lot of the time the writer needed to take five more minutes and think why the kids miht be doing the dangerous thing on their own. I think the worst example of this trope was in “The Mouth that Roared” from Dragon Booster” where everyone older than the ten year old was made an idiot just so they could do a boy who cried wolf plot without the kid ever lying (even better, the kid was one of the most moral characters on the show).

So, I have recently been playing through Life is Strange for the first time.

Whilst I didn’t notice it as I was actually playing, the events of the end of episode 3 and the beginning of episode 4 seem to be there simply to mess with the player. Though I’ve just finished them, I fail to see what practical effect it will have on the plot. Making them a waste of time.

What is Bard?

Over the past week, I've been working on an app called Bard - it's a stand-alone program meant to make plot design for games easier. It can be used to write dialogues for movies too, I guess, but it is really built with the non-linear, multiple-dialogue-options sort of format in mind.

Why are you telling us this?

I suppose this will be an introduction post - firstly to just put Bard out in the open, and secondly because I miss a certain special person dearly and this will be a nice way to take my mind off her until I see her next.

How will Bard work?

I'm tempted to write - "What? Bards don't work!" On a more serious note - it is meant to be a graphical representation of a plot. The GUI (graphical user interface, for non-computer-science people) will be a bit bare-bones, because I'll be building on Python and its simple GUI module Tkinter.

When you open Bard, it should have a timeline that is modifiable by the designer. You basically set a single timeline (or multiple timelines, if time skips or alternate universes are your thing), from start to finish, and you can create Event and Dialogue objects that link to a specific point in your timeline(s). However, you will first need to create characters - mostly just a name and a description - because Bard will end up tracking your characters across your dialogues, timelines and events, so you can see when they speak and with whom and what they're speaking about, etc.