Rewriting Chapter 1 - Why I'm not Satisfied With It.

The more I reread chapter 1 the more unsatisfied I am with it. Mainly because the writing is not nearly as well done as the other chapters. I think this is because I wrote all of chapter 1 before I had a solid idea of what I wanted this game and story to be, and it suffers quite a bit because of that. All the dialogue is just kind of superficial and doesn't really go anywhere, except for Holly's scene. Plus I've just gotten better at creative writing since May.

All that introduction dialogue with Jacob and Sasha? Silly. Why wouldn't they have called the PC to ask them where they went? Why didn't the PC just tell them they were going to be gone for a week? Why are they so casual about the PC being gone for so long? Even with the original and stupid plot I had, where the player had locked themselves in their bedroom, it doesn't make any sense.  Also no dialogue choice which sucks. 

The cafe scene? It's alright. It introduced Holly's character really well and gives some useful background info on the player. Background info which is actually used later on in the story, unlike the following...

The park scene? Boring, drags on too long, and the self reflection scene is groan worthy. The roommate scene probably would have been better off just being optional dialogue for Jacob and Sasha, instead of being a required self-contained scene.

The living room scene with Sasha? The chatting path is pretty decent because I just wrote that. But the other, longer path? Terrible. It was nothing but pointless rambling. No one wants to hear that much about the player character's background, nor do they even care about Jane or Abbey because they were never introduced or properly characterized. Why should they care about characters they're told, but not shown, that they care about? The whole thing just ends up being pointless and bad because there's no emotional impact, nor is there any character or story progression, except for Sasha getting a little background info. There's a few decent lines in there, but for the most part it's just trash and I know I can do better.

After digging into my own writing like that I feel like I really really need to rewrite chapter 1. Especially since it's a new players first introduction to the game. It could lead to them writing off the entire game when, in my opinion, chapter 1 is not an accurate representation of everything the game has to offer. So I guess I'll rewrite chapter 1 for 0.1.5 as well. Fantastic.

And uh, If you're a new player don't let the awfulness of chapter 1 deter you too much from playing the rest of the game. The writing gets better starting in chapter 2, so I'd recommend playing at least a little bit of chapter 2 before completely writing the game off as trash. Just the opening scene of chapter 2 is, to me, many times better than most of chapter 1.