#idea journal

[romaine-bromaine]

what should I do a painting of

soup

hand

dog

sawses (sauces)

Merobiba

stained glass Castiel

tree

shoe

waves

idea journal

Voting ended onFeb 17, 2023

[jauxro]

all I want is for SKYSCRAPERS to have COOL STONEWORK like castles, PARKING LOT PILLARS to have INTRICATE CARVINGS, and for SOLARPUNK to be REAL!!

[getthatstudyon]

3.8.2020.

New month, new bujo spread!

[photosandthoughts]

Daily Carry

[motellaz]

What kind of journaling is best to track my emotions, productivity, and what I need to do that day?

[the-femme-life]

You told me that you miss me every second; I don't even think about you most days, and I think that is the most righteous karma.

talise

[jauxro]

Concept:

In a world where people can switch bodies at will, you’re a hyper-productive person gaining more hours in your day by swapping with someone who wants to sleep all the time. However, the more you swap with someone, the more similar the two of you become.

[backus-naur]

Idea Journal: Tunic Graphic Novel Adaptation

I recently finished playing Tunic, and one of my favorite pastimes after finishing a piece of media I enjoy is thinking about how I would adapt it to a different medium. Tunic is one of those challenging ones because so much of the fun comes from discovering the secrets yourself, and there is no way to exactly reproduce that experience in a medium other than videogames. So to me a good adaptation would need to

Capture the spirit of the game, including the feeling of mystery and discovery, but also

Not try to faithfully recreate the game. This would be bad for both the people who haven't played the game before (because it would spoil the experience of playing the game and finding the secrets themselves) and the people who have (because they already know the secrets and wouldn't have anything new to discover).

So how would we achieve that? Here's what I came up with.

Make it a graphic novel

There are a few reasons why I think a graphic novel would be the best non-videogame medium for a Tunic adaptation. First, we can play with the art style to capture the variety in the game's scenery and visuals, which oscillate between colorful-and-whimsical and dark-and-mysterious. Second, having it be a physical book evokes the experience of flipping through the in-game manual. Just like in the manual, we could add annotations and hidden secrets to the pages, and encourage the reader to flip back and forth to piece together details of the story that might not have been obvious at first. And then there's one more big reason...

Use the game's runic alphabet

It wouldn't truly feel like a Tunic adaptation without one of the game's most notable and memorable features. So just like in the game, my idea is that all narration and dialog could be written in the form of runes, with some English words peppered in for clarity. And since it's a graphic novel, we can rely on the illustrations to convey what is happening even if the reader can't fully understand the text. The idea is to reproduce the effect that this has in the game: provoke the reader's curiosity and make them think about what might be being said, while also letting the story withhold information and hide details and secrets in the text. Of course, if the reader does know how to translate the game's runic script, they can. This might give them some interesting revelations, which only adds to the feeling of discovery that we're going for.

Tell the story of a previous ruin seeker

Like I said before, we don't want this to be a faithful recreation of the game's story, but we still want something that is recognizable as an adaptation. So instead, we could tell a story that at first looks just like the game's story: a little fox sets out on an adventure, exploring the world, collecting items and fighting monsters. But later on, things start to go wrong: the little fox runs against an insurmountable challenge, makes some hard choices, and ultimately gives up on their aspiration to be a hero. It turns out that they are one of the failed predecessors of the game's player character, one of those that the manual mentions have abandoned their quest and disappeared. The story then becomes about how they deal with their failure. Do they forgive themselves and move on? Do they try to run from their shame? Do they even perhaps become one of the game's enemies?

Reveal secrets that the game doesn't

The good thing about focusing on a failed ruin seeker is that it naturally avoids revealing any of the major secrets of the game. After all, the character never got far enough to discover them. But Tunic is a game about discovering secrets, so we need something for both the main character and the reader to uncover. Thankfully, there are all sorts of questions that the game leaves unanswered. Even before reaching into the deep lore of the game's world, we have mysteries like: What happened to the Library Annex? Who are the Envoys? What is the true nature of the Magic Orb? These are all examples of secrets that can be revealed, in full or in part, during the course of the story.

Make the story a puzzle for the reader

Finally, the biggest challenge in a Tunic adaptation is how to reproduce, in a non-interactive medium, the experience of actively piecing together a mystery that is at the heart of the game. In other words, how do we make it so the reader is not just given all the answers, but has to seek them out for themselves? My solution is non-chronological storytelling: tell the story out of order, so that the significance of some events will only become clear in context that the reader will only get later on (think Memento, for example). Not only does this push the reader to piece the story together to make sense of the plot, it also matches how in the game you collect manual pages out of order, with later pages shedding new light on earlier ones. Like in the game, the fact that the text is written in runes also helps, since we can use it to obscure the meaning of conversations and even purposely mislead the reader on what precisely is happening or is being said until later.

What is the mystery that the reader needs to piece together? I dunno. There might be multiple. They can be related to the unanswered questions that I mentioned before, or to the ultimate fate of the main character. It might be an event that is never shown explicitly but that changes the course of the plot (maybe what led the main character to give up on their quest). It might even be some inconspicuous background element that appears throughout the book and turns out to have a hidden meaning. But whatever it is, it should be something that makes the reader flip back and forth to find the clues and put them together into a satisfying answer. After all, that's what Tunic is all about.