Hey @GoG, thanks for chiming in! I found the Hero’s Journey an interesting read on Wikipedia and it was actually pretty funny to think of how many stories follow that pattern (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, though–getting back to that at the end of this post). If that’s intended as a negative comment on my game’s story and a way of saying that you consider what I revealed to be bland and generic, let me assure you that my game’s story actually doesn’t follow the Hero’s Journey framework very much. Like, very little at all. I have a setup, rising action, a climax, and a resolution, but then, don’t 99% of all stories have that? I know that the way I represent my story in the dev blog post seems to be a bit cliche, but that’s actually what I intended. Some of the major facets of my story are fairly spoiler-prone, so I’m trying to keep a considerable amount of it back from the public until the game is released and I get a cult following which writes expansive wiki articles on the analysis of my game ;). Suffice it to say, it’s a Hero’s Journey in the very loosest sense possible–take the description from the top of the Wikipedia article:
the common template of a broad category of tales that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, and in a decisive crisis wins a victory, and then comes home changed or transformed.
It follows my story after a fashion, but if you think about it, Wikipedia has basically described what makes a good story: setup, conflict, and resolution. Anything past the Wikipedia blurb and my story stops following. My story is considerably more psychological than anything else, and rather than depicting the epic shenanigans of the hero, it focuses more on the mental burden, moral uncertainty, and inner struggle that comes with your power. Sure, it has aspects of the classic Zelda-style story (I’m a normal dude, I’m on an adventure, I’m gonna turn into a powerful dude), but it’s much, much deeper than any Zelda story and than most other game stories I know of as well.
Besides that, I think an important point to raise here is that following the Hero’s Journey “template” isn’t really a bad thing. If you’re a good storyteller, can add some compelling details of your own, and tend to shy away from cliches, go with Hero’s Journey all you want. [N.B. Another important thing to do here is draw the distinction between “cliche” and “commonly used.” Something is cliche if it’s commonly used and is a “cop out” of thinking on the creator’s part. If you write a distinctive, compelling story about an underdog who rises to mastery, defeats the greatest evil in the world, and retires to be a normal person for the rest of their life, you’re not by requirement “cliche”–instead, you’re just using a common framework and you’ll need to be considerably skilled to keep it original.] If everyone in the world tried doing new things solely for the sake of their newness, we’d have a pretty sorry world. We’d have basically no literature save the “initiation” book of each genre and avant-garde, inaccessible, monstrous mountains of prose written by people who could come up with increasingly unusual formats for telling stories. We have the diversity we do in literature because there are plenty of people who don’t mind recycling ideas of any sort–the Underdog Saves the Day story [You don’t think a Hobbit from the Shire is important? Spoiler alert! Think again!], the Corruption in Some Big Society story [Remember how you thought <Insert Corporation> was good? Well it’s not. And Joe the average guy is about to change that.], the Completely Twisty Mystery story [Bu-bu-bu-but the room was locked! Impossible!], and countless others. I could go on for hours listing all the story formats we use and reuse to get our art across. I believe it was Pablo Picasso (or was it Shakespeare?) who said “Good artists borrow, great artists steal,” and, while that statement has been reused 'til threadbare, I’ll end my mini-essay here with it.
