Hey there! Fae back again with another (much smaller!) Void Dreaming post! This too is cross-posted from when it was originally uploaded well before the Itch page was active, but now here for your delectation!

Last time we dove balls-deep into the concept that drove me, mechanically, to get this project underway in the first place. It’s a lot of theory and probably not the most interesting stuff, so if you want to call this post Entry 1 and the previous one a sort of Entry 0, I sure don’t think I could blame you. But don’t you worry, because today we’re talking a bit more about the core concept that drives what makes Void Dreaming, and Rael as a protagonist: Origins!

In The Beginning

Origins, as I mentioned last post, are one of the cornerstones to how I think I can actually pull this project off. They form the basis of Rael’s character in the story, and let you, the reader, have a bit more control in what elements make up your protagonist. It also lets me add a lot more flavour and variety in the story for you, while mitigating a lot of the complexity and keeping story branches from spinning off into infinity.

First though, it’s worth pointing out what it doesn’t change. You don’t get to change Rael’s name, his sex or gender, his species, or his physical appearance. Those are all locked in. Even if I just gave the player the chance to play Rael as a femme, or non-binary, I would have to create variables for every single pronoun usage in the whole game. I’d also have to have all the CGs involving Rael (which is most all of them) account for that. Because the project is already almost unworkably large in scale and cost (the latter of which is incredibly important to me since I’m self-funding so much of this from the start), these are statics. Rael is always a male, masculine wolf, twenty-eight years of age, with the same build and appearance every single time you play.

What Origins do however is serve two roles in Void Dreaming. The first and simplest is that they’ll define Rael’s base Skill values at the game’s start. We’re not going to be going into Skills in this post, so you’ll have to have a wait for the next one before you’re able to get a handle on how exactly they work. Suffice to say that your Origins will never let you build a bad Rael, but depending on the way you want to handle things some Origins will do you more good than others

More importantly however, they affect key moments and aspects of Rael’s backstory. They shape how he approaches people and situations, and not only provide unique dialogue and narration during moments where his history informs his behaviour, but also allow you to make specific choices in dialogue with other characters that refer back to his lived experience. We’ll talk more about that in a moment!

Your choice of Origins comes up very early in the prologue, shortly after you meet Zuberi, the captain of the ship upon which you’re to embark upon your story. He’ll quiz you on your background, and give you a chance to get into some details with him. Some of them he’ll like. Some of them he may not. This is true of all the crew, in fact, and we’ll touch on that later. Also, after you’ve selected your Origin choices, you’ll be informed what Skill values you’ve gained from your choices, and you’ll have the chance to go back and choose them all again if you like. Feel free to experiment, but once you accept them, that’s it! They’ll be your Origin choices for the rest of the story.

Origins are split up into three categories, each with three options within them. If you’re counting or paid attention and remember from the last post, that means there are a total of twenty-seven different unique combinations of Origin choices for Rael. You can build a lot of different wolves this way!

The first category is where Rael was born and raised. Perhaps your Rael was born in the black of space and raised in a starship engineering bay as a Spacer, giving him an affinity for star travel, ship maintenance, and staying out of natural gravity wells. Or perhaps his parents raised him as a Colonist on a newly-settled world, flush with fresh air and all the wild fun that comes from a whole wide open planet to explore. He could also have been born and raised on Torderra as a Core-Worlder, the trade capital of the galaxy, rubbing elbows with high society even in his youth.

Whether a Spacer, a Colonist or a Core-Worlder, Rael’s early life informs the base of his personality. Spacers naturally know a lot more about ships and their tech than others, but a Colonist might be more physically adept for their youth, and a Core-Worlder might have received advantages that neither a scrapper nor a bumpkin might have.

Rael had a pretty interesting adolescence regardless of which Origin choices you give him. Maybe he got a bit rebellious and turned Punk, running with a crew of other gutterpunks in the capital city on the world of Ferelia and getting up to all sorts of trouble. Perhaps he was lured by education to Palfrini where he became a bit of a Dreamer, head in the clouds and more interested in drama, culture and a good story than math and science. Or he could have gone the other way and been such an excellent student that he was picked out by the prestigious Institute for Galactic Advancement to become a prized Tech Student on Avercys, only to find his hunger for knowledge getting him in all sorts of trouble.

You might be seeing a bit of a pattern here in how these Origins are lining up, like how Spacer might lend itself well to Punk, or how Colonist might naturally precede Dreamer. There’s a reason for that and we’ll touch on it at the end, but now we get into, as Zuberi calls it, the meat of the issue.

For all of Rael’s life, nothing compares to what he was getting up to in the period of time just before he arrived on a fringe station and met with Zuberi to get aboard an exploration ship. If the first Origin tier can be called Rael’s Youth and the second defines his Adolescence, then the final Origin tier of choices could best be coined Rael’s Shame.

In one instance, Rael wound up turning to a life of star piracy. Now an Ex-Pirate, he’s got some very nasty skeletons in his closet. In another, he stayed on the straight and narrow and found himself becoming a Colonial Administrator of no small repute. Unfortunately and in the wake of a tragedy, he’s on the outs and operating in exile. In the final option, Rael’s turned his experience and skills into becoming something of an Innovator, writing software for anyone and everyone and earning some pretty sweet creds for his efforts. Disaster strikes and turns his life upside down, and now he’s desperate to atone.

I don’t want to go into too much detail with these choices, because I want them to be something you discover more about in the course of the story. This is especially true of the third tier of Origins, as while the first two help to define Rael’s personality and a lot of his dialogue options (along with his interactions with the crew), each of the final tier of Origins directly impact the story in interesting ways by defining, among other things, what brings Rael to Zuberi in the first place.

Pre-Definition

Finally, very early on in the process I wanted to streamline somewhat the reader experience. The prologue isn’t long in the grand scheme of things, being a fraction of the length of the first day of the story. In thinking about how I could give a player a sort of quick-start option, a couple of choices occurred to me. The one that I went with for the quick-start was a skip of the prologue, two key choices made that define certain things Rael could have done that directly impact several other events that follow, and a choice of one of three Rael presets.

These correspond with the ‘natural fit’ options from the prologue; the ones that ‘make the most sense’ as it were:

 - Starfire Rael is a Spacer, Punk, and Ex-Pirate

 - Wordly Rael is a Colonist, Dreamer, and Colonial Administrator

 - High-Tech Rael is a Core-Worlder, Tech Student, and Innovator

These choices allow you to have one of three Raels with good-fit Origin choices that interplay the most naturally. That’s not to say that a Core-Worlder who leaves Torderra to study as a Dreamer on Palfrini and goes on to become an Ex-Pirate isn’t viable; it absolutely is as viable as any other Origin combination you can imagine. These just seem like natural fits and work well, I think, for getting a player quickly into the game.

You might be wondering why I didn’t just allow the full customization suite for the quick-start, and that’s because it incentivises the player to actually go through the prologue. Between that fact, and the fact that the quick-start option doesn’t earn Rael any extra Approval from interactions with his crewmates (which we’ll be talking about in a couple posts or so!), the quick-start options give you a chance to get into the main part of the story nice and quick without losing too much, if you’re happy to settle for a preset Rael. And if not, hey! The prologue’s right there if you want the full customisation and all those chances to earn Approval!

And a final fun fact before we finish up for this entry: in testing, most of my alpha build readers always went through the prologue and defined Rael deliberately rather than going through the prologue-skipping quick start. However, among those testers, a not insignificant fraction of them would wind up, with their first runs through, effectively picking the High-Tech Rael choices without recognizing them as a pre-set. Seems Core-Worlder, Tech Student and Innovator aren’t just a natural fit, but appeal to quite a few people!

So… that’s it! That’s the Origin system that underpins most of the variability in this story. No two playthroughs will be identical if you change only the Origins you play with and alter as little else as possible. My hope is that between that, the Skill system, and the interplay between Rael and the crew, it’ll keep people coming back to Void Dreaming again and again.

Well, for more than the CGs, anyway.

Next time we’ll be diving into the Skill system, how they’re initially laid out in regards to your Origins, how you can build those Skills further over the course of the VN, and what they allow you to do… or fail at doing. Consequences! We’ll also touch briefly on the structure of the visual novel and what you can expect from the releases.

Until then, stars guide you.

 - Faora