JAP's STORYLINE TUTORIALPart One: Naming Your Game -
A Tutorial for Giving Titles -
HerePart Two: Characters -
A Tutorial for Building Characters and Their Characteristic -
HerePart Three: PrologueA Tutorial for Writing Nice OpeningWhat is a prologue?
According to Wikipedia.org (my dictionary is downstairs, too lazy to pick it up):
Prologue (Greek
?? prologos, from
~, pro~ - fore~, and lógos, word), or prolog, is a prefatory piece of writing, usually composed to introduce a drama. The Greek prologos included the modern meaning of prologue, but was of wider significance, embracing any kind of preface, like the Latin praefatio.
Well, the prologue in our subject is similar, but it is used to introduce our game's STORY.
Let's get into it!!
First Topic: WHY?LOL, I always write this first before everything.
A story without prologue is like a hamburger without ham.
I know it sounds silly, but it gives you a 'true' feeling, right?
Prologue will help gamer to understand your game's story better.
Prologue also make your game's story more 'complete'.
Second Topic: HOW?Writing prologue is actually, easy.
The only difficulty is how to cut as many spoilers as you can.
Write a draft first, except if you're experienced with writing you don't need to make one sometimes (my brother never make any drafts...).
From that draft, convert it into a nice paragraph.
In example (taken from my BETA prologue for Dawndusk):
In the World of Dawndusk, everything is controlled by The Dawn and The Dusk.
The Dawn controls nature and spirits, while The Dusk controls time and deaths.
One day, The Dusk saw The Dawn befriended humans...
Burnt by jealousy, The Dusk killed the humans with his power.
The Dawn was very sad... and her sadness drives The Dusk into madness.
He decided... to bring an end upon humanity...
Seeing this, The Dawn went to Dawndusk, and travels around the world...
in order... to search the key...
The Twilight.
That's it.
See? You need to mention some characters, place, and backgrounds.
That's all... maybe.
Third Topic: YES-YESA GOOD prologue MUST:
1. mention the set
2. mention some characters (the important ones)
3. short
4. introducing
5. beautiful (try to use synonyms and literature patterns)
Fourth Topic: NO-NOA GOOD prologue IS NOT:
1. boring (i.e: just few lines without beautiful words)
2. too-short (2 lines? eewww...)
3. too-long (that's full of spoilers!)
4. mentioning unnecessary details (like NPCs, monsters, etc)
5. in bad grammar (full of redundancy is just BAD)
Fifth Topic: HMM..A prologue CAN be:
1. with pictures (that's nice! x3)
2. from a character's view point (a.k.a monologue)
3. mentioning times, sets, history
I think that's all for now.
Hope it helps.
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