Fifteen Thousand Plus

The Human Reignition Project has gone through a few iterations and false starts before it became the story it is today. One of those iterations was a nice, campy little Slice-of-Life story about a kooky old professor dragging a group of regular people along to take part in wild shenanigans while learning the importance of human connection. This, aside from its current form, is the Human Reignition Project that we stuck with the longest. It seemed a decent enough story, the setting was nice, and the characters appeared interesting.

The only problem was that it wasn’t, and they weren’t. But we never noticed that our story didn’t have a story to it, that it was just a group of people sort of aimlessly wandering around without motivation or reason. The characters had depth in our minds, but they didn’t have any real involvement, because again, there was no story to speak of. And the worst part of it all? We had no appreciation for The Holy Outline. Our outline at the time probably topped out at around two hundred words for the first act, reasoning with ourselves that even though we couldn’t figure out any more details for a particular scene, we’d just leave it to the writers to ‘figure it out later’ and patted ourselves on the back when we thought that would give the writers the greatest amount of flexibility (notice: we’re the writers.)

And so we thought up scenes and wrote. We wrote what came to us, as it came to us, outlines and structure be damned. After all, it can’t possibly be that difficult to write a story with multiple branches involving at least six heroines, right? It wasn’t too much longer before we wrote ourselves right into a corner, and we were left with a sickly script that limped spasmodically from one event to another. By the time we realized it had to be scrapped and the idea reworked from the ground up, the script topped out at around fifteen thousand words.

But this week, a little over two weeks after we started drafting again, we’ve finally reached and surpassed that word count. Our shiny new rough draft, with its interweaving plot and characters that actually matter and develop throughout the story, is over 15,000 words long so far. And we’ve not even done with the first act yet. Hell, we’re not even done with the first quarter of the first act yet, and we couldn’t be happier with how things are shaping up!

The further we get into writing, the more necessary it’s getting to hire a CG artist to finally fill out our ranks. If anyone reading this post is interested in applying for the position, click here to get an idea of our initial contract terms, and send an email along with your portfolio to AlienWorks.Recruiting@gmail.com

By Ethan

“Oily” is one of the original members of the DevTeam. He’s the mediator of the group: “The Great Compromiser.” Fitting, considering his favorite U.S. History figure is Henry Clay. He just can’t understand why Jackson was such an asshole to his homedog Henry. Again, a gifted writer, though he keeps his past shrouded in a veil of intrigue and lies. We know, Oily. We know everything.

2 comments

  1. (also im new to finding your site, sorry if i ask questions for what you’ve posted in the past before;;) I’m not going to apply but i’d like to ask, the story for the game is no different from the summary in the home page of the site? (im kind of confused about that too, so i cant really image well about your project) but didnt Human Reignition Project already have artist joined..? (if its personal reasons, then you dont need to answer ^^) I’d like to cheer to everyone who is part of the project! / v /

    1. We have a sprite artist and a background artist right now, but ideally we’d like a third artist for those complex ‘CG’ images you see in other visual novels.

      What you see on the homepage is really just a summary of the world HRP takes place in. The actual plot hasn’t quite been revealed just yet, and might not be until we release our demo. But we’re always willing to talk about our story on our IRC! No spoilers, though. 😉

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *