#13 Space Layout and The Witcher 2

 In this post I will start talking about the space that quests might play in. I will borough some techniques from level design here and there, but as a matter of fact I've already applied some of the rather basic ideas in quest designs of previous posts. Today we begin with a simple map layout.

Space Layout

The events of a quest usually happen in a 3D environment. The quest goals usually refer to some progression in that space. Note that, to me, characters are a part of space and so are their interactions (i.e. dialogue etc.). For the design of space-based quests, on which I'll focus here, it is thus important to keep in mind the spatial arrangement of preexisting things when a quest starts, and the change of these things and the players goals with them while progressing in a quest.

A most basic tool to work with is a map layout: An image of the map, preferrably top-down or isometric (or similar) in which perceivable distinct areas and special things are marked and named.

See these two examples from a Portal 2 map I recently made:

The first image shows a preproduction layout of the level made with the tool AutoREALM, based on some hand-drawn sketches. It provides a solid basic framework to identify the main gameplay flow. The clarity and lack of cluttering with additional informations helps to focus on the important issues. Color coding and naming help with semantic distinguishing.

The second image shows my final map as seen in Portal 2 with a special lighting option from the command console and extended with namings and coloring. When looking closely, you will find that the basic spatial relations depicted in the first image are almost without change represented in the final level: Next to some minor transformations the only bigger change in that regard is the parting of floor button and surrounding portal surface (K in first picture, M/O in second). The greenhouses add some walkable surface and (in the case of N/O/I in the second picture) some connections, but they preserve the original flow and do not disturb it.

I conclude that layout maps help greatly with consistency: In opposition to thoughts and memories, digital images usually do not change and vanish over time without conscious human action. They are inscribed in the world and provide us with a guide to stick to. 

In the second image you might also notice, how every as "distinct" perceivable area (e.g. A-F or I-J in the first image) became indeed also distinct in lighting, form, asset-usage etc. in the final level. Thus I conclude secondly that such semantic distinctions early in the process help hugely with specialization of the area and its relations: It allows to say: "I'll focus on area/place/transition insert-name-here for now". This will also help with quest design when subsequent quest events/goals are assigned to locations in the map: Event/goal and location can be constructed in a more interwoven way (if level designer and quest designer work together).

I will now proceed to present a map layout for my Witcher quest.

Further Reading / Inspiration

• Christopher W. Totten: An Architectural Approach to Level Design, p. 51-108, Drawing for Level Designers
  

A "Witcher" Quest - Part 4: Map Layout

There are several locations that need to be in a map in which the quest will play:

• the village
• Alvin's hut
• the lord's manor
• the woods, the lake/river and mountains
• few streets entering and leaving the valley

Luckily enough I don't need to completely make a map from skratch in the REDkit, but am able to use a preexisting one: An early alpha version of the Lykaon mod, developed by CD Projekt RED quest designer Philipp Weber and released by him for further development by other modders.

So here is an image of the level with locations names assigned:

A second image shows the walkable areas:

Based on this, we will next time discuss more concretely where player movements and events/goals map into the level.

Ideas for Feedback

• What additional informations could be inscribed in space layouts without cluttering it too much?
• How could the long walks imminent in my current quest designs map be compensated for?

Conclusion

A short post remains a good post if its content is coherent and closed. In my eyes, this is such a post. And as an all-knowing TEDx talker once said (approximately): "A slight change in consistent behaviour towards the desired goal can work miracles".

While I'm writing about all these methods I always return to the question of how a quest design document or a quest design portfolio could look like. It seems to me that a space layout should definitely be a part of it, if we're making quests for a game like The Witcher 2. Maybe we will find out more about that in the future.

Have a good time!

#12 Character Webs and The Witcher 2

Today I'm going to talk about and use character webs, a method/principle introduced to me by John Truby in his book "The Anatomy of Story". Since I am a bit short on time, this post will be a rather short one.

Character Webs

John Truby begins his chapter on characters with telling the reader that defining the hero's traits and then telling a story with him changing is "all wrong". Instead of focusing on the characters as separate individuals he advocates for looking at "all of them together in an interconnected web". According to him, this approach has several advantages:

• the characters won't seem to be "alone, in a vacuum, unconnected to others"
• the hero won't seem to be the only person that matters
• comparing characters and possibly defining their dynamics when they meet will help in defining them and make them more complex
• secondary characters are rather seen on the same layer as the hero/the main characters
• helps constructing story functions for characters and inscribing archetypes, themes and oppositions

While I do agree with many of Truby's thoughts, I do believe that e.g. character sheets have their value on their own: Not every character needs to be distinguished in as much detail as the main characters, and focusing on a character and his connections for a while will help achieving that. (And, I don't believe that there is such a thing as a "wrong" approach.)

A quick word on character dynamics: The term dynamics was not introduced by the book I'm referencing, but by myself. It is taken from a seminary I had and probably inspired by systems theory (focusing on a delimited system) and/or cybernetics (which is all about a system's inner and outer entanglements), Character dynamics in that sense are concerned with the processes happening in and between characters. For our character web I'd like to highlight especially the latter: What behaviours do characters show when meeting certain other characters? What is the atmosphere like? What do they do to their environment? What is created (music? words? battles?)? What are typical patterns in their meetings? Answering such questions seems to be a very promising approach for making a very coherent story.

But know I'd already like to proceed to my Witcher quest.

Further Reading / Inspiration

• John Truby: The Anatomy of Story
• Wikipedia: Social psychology

 A "Witcher" Quest - Part 3: Character Web

A bit of a problem at this point is that I haven't yet defined any character but Alene in more detail. I will nonetheless do a character web and if it fails I will hopefully lean be able to learn something from it.

Here comes the result (see post #11 for a summary of the story and its characters):

Here you may look at a PDF-variant of this diagram in unlimited resolution!

I started out with a list of characters and turned each of them into a blue sticky note. The notes were then arranged based on the characters more formal relations: Aisker is Alene's father, Alvin lives in the forest and so on. I quickly started to note that I tended to place some notes higher than others and decided to make a rule out of it: After some iteration it became "the lower a note/connection is placed, the more personal it is". I also used clustering and proximity to indicate the closeness of characters (Aisker and his wife) or their distance to something (Aisker and Alvin). I made two enclosing lines to denote the border of the village and the valley, such that e.g. Geralt could be placed more sensibly. The line type also got a meaning: Straight lines indicate a more formalized or stable relationship, while curved lines are rather dynamic and skewed/angular connections indicate a not optimal, somewhat broken relation. The central dashed line represents Geralt's wish for non-involvement: He'd rather like to visit the valley on a formal level of contract, employee, employer and work. The mere connection of burgomaster and Aisker shows, how difficult it might be to uphold this distance, especially if Geralt is confronted in the beginning with Alene and Alvin, rather than the eldorman himself in his official role. Lastly I tried to identify the main characters in this web, denoted in red.

So, this was the positive side: I managed to express a good many things with this diagram. However, there are some caviats:

First of all, it is difficult to take into account every character with the amount of detail I'd wish for. For example, defining the relation of Geralt, Aisker or Alene to each of the other characters would be very desirable, but simply not practical in one diagram: It would result in too much clutter. Here the more focused character sheets might be of help, or a single diagram devoted to the relations of one character. Furthermore, little can be expressed of character dynamics: It is rather a description of the overall dynamics in the story that is delivered. For some important characters thinking about their concrete dynamics might be sensible.

But in the end I was suprised by the ways of characterization that emerged whilst using this "method". For example it came to me, that Nohman could be seen as a surrogate brother for Aisker, which would result in a much more interesting connection than "seeking the river". And I am altogether content with this overview, which would surely help to introduce the setting to someone who is new to the project.

Ideas for Feedback

• How else could characters be described besides character sheets and webs?
• Which character/reation in the above diagram should be explained more deeply?

Conclusion

This short method really helped me to take a more holistic view on the characters, their environment and their connections. It also provides, as Truby mentions himself, the possibility of setting several themes, archetypes and conflicts into relation by inscribing them into characters, which would lead to a very natural source of inspiration for a story (at least, that is how it seems to me).

Concerning my Witcher quest, I'd like to turn my eye towards more gameplay-adjacent matters. The story space/level needs a post and when I lay out the so far existing story (as described in post #10) in that space, then there'll probably be a lot of re-adjustments to be done. And maybe I will get some inspiration to fill the remaining gaps in the story.

I am looking forward to this and hope you have a good time!

#11 Character Templates and The Witcher 2

Today I want to talk about characters, both in theory and in practice. I present a short approach to character design and am then going to use it in my Witcher quest. Let's get into it!

Characters

It is probably hard to find a book about narrativity (be it in video games or any other medium) that doesn't contain a chapter on characters. Funnily I enough, in none of the six books on storytelling/game writing/quests/narratives I possess it is made clear why we need characters in stories. Moreover, even though this is less surprising, none one of them seriously explored a more experimental use of the term "character" (a.g. the city as a character).

The first finding is probably related to the fact that characters are just such an important part of storytelling in our societies that there is not felt any need of explaining the reasons. I do not think the reason to be very complex: It is probably because seeing ourselves or someone like us in stories is part of what makes them meaningful, relevant to us. However, and here we come to the second note, we seem to not necessarily need humans in order to have a narrative character.There are a lot of examples of aliens, animals, computers or toys being used as characters in a story. But I'd like to take this even further: What about cities, mountains, fate, wind, "the land", "the streets" or Uncle Sam? In school, such things were called personifications or anthromorphizations, whenever human-like properties of a non-human thing were emphasized and/or added. Going in this directions is the chapter "The Tales Cities Tell" by Dr. Konstantinos Dimopoulos in Chris Batemans Game Writing. Instead of diving into this topic further, I will content myself here with stating, that a character can be anything: It only needs proper highlighting of its (possibly made up) human-like attributes in the story.

Character Design

So, we now let us think about human-like attributes. This is the main focus in all the literature on characters (at least that is, how it seems to me), so I won't be able to catch all of them in one post. Consequently, for pragmatic reasons, I'll just present the approach chosen in  the book "The Game Narrative Toolbox" by Tobias Heussner et al., more precisely, chapter 5 "Characters".

After talking about player-characters (or avatars) and department coordination on characters (which both need an extra post to meet them), they start with introducing 

• internal conflicts, 
• merits and flaws,
• psychological types and
  
• temperament theory
  

as four major inspirations for creating a character. They furthermore advocate for creating diverse characters and use the spaces they exist in to tell more about them. At last, a holistic approach is prefered where traits, conflicts, diversifications etc. intertwine and are woven together. To have an overview over all the informations making up a character, character templates are encouraged as a starting point. Here I have distilled from their templates and lists some groups of attributes for such a template:

Outside: Materialistic Description:

Name, Title, Age, Ethnicity/Race, Sex, Complexion, Height, Weight, Eyes, Hair, Biography, Family, World they live in, Profession

Outside: Demeanor/Attitude:

Environment (home, work, ..), Motto, Way of talking, How they dress, Means to reach goals, Relations, Culture, Behaviour towards Strangers

Inside: Knowledge/Image of World and Self

Goals / Desires, Interests, Abilities, Gender, Spiritual beliefs, Philosophical, Political Learnings (...), Experiences/Memories (Childhood, Teenager, at Work etc.)

Inside: Possibly Unknown to Character

Motivation, Emotional States, Personality, Fears, Conflicting Traits, Merits and Flaws, Temperament, Relationships with other NPCs and own Fmily

In the Story

• Function: Protagonist, Major Sidekick, Friend, Villain, Minor Sidekick
• Drive, Conflict, Motivation, Happenings, Growth, Regression, Arc
• To the Player: Meaningful, Engage, Involve, Capture, Attachement, Seeming Alive
  

Seeing that the above cited "major inspirations" named in the book are all more or less to be found in the more hidden areas of a character (inside and unknown to him), I am reminded again of other sources I read on storytelling so far. It always seems to be about an unveiling of informations, and the deeper the origin of these informations, the better. This, I am sure, is something to be explored - unveiled - in further posts. But here, today, my look is now directed towards my current quest design.

Further Reading / Inspiration

• T. Heussner, T.K. Finley, J.B. Hepler, A. Lemay: The Game Narrative Toolbox
• L. Sheldon: Character Development and Storytelling for Games
  

A "Witcher" Quest - Part 2: Character Descriptions

A short recap: Pursuing a contract in a small village, Geralt finds that the people's problem is deeply rooted in their attitude to their environment and a local family of woodworkers.

To be more concrete, my quest design was about an insecure girl called Alene and the rustic village she lives in. The village is torn between holding on to the old way, woodworking, and a recently found focus on the nearby river. This conflict is instantiated in the relation of Alene's uncle Alvin Wudmager (living alone in the woods) to her father, stern burgomaster Aisker Wudmager, who is not comfortable with the forest nearby. Alene feels drawn to the forest and her uncle Alvin and plans to leave the valley with him. Geralt travels into the valley, because he heard of a possible monster plagueing the people: Indeed it turns out that a fisherman's son has gone missing. He soon meets Alene, Alvin, Aisker and the other villagers and has to decide to what degree he wants to get involved in their personal matters.

Here are the main characters of this story:

• Geralt of Rivia, professional monster slayer
• Aisker Wudmager, burgomaster of the village, focused on the river, is not comfortable with the forest
  
• Alvin Wudmager, his brother, forester, living alone in the woods
• Alene Wudmager, Aiskers daughter, insecure, drawn to the forest
• Nohman Kapuner, part of the only traditional fisher family in the village, lost his son by the monster
  
• The Village, a collection of simple people having a long tradition of woodworking, now mostly following the hype surrounding the river
• The Local Lord, a selfish man who doesn't care much for the inhabitants as long as there is peace
• The Forest, young and calm, stretches far and wide through the valley, wondering why the villagers don't care about him no more
• The River, flowing swiftly, curious for the sudden attention

Being a main character doesn't mean to me that the character needs to talk much or be seen a lot. Much rather, main characters have a big presence: Besides being physically present and speaking, they might also be mentioned often, be felt often or do major movements while the story progresses. Side characters, who do not have such a big influence over time, are:

• Aisker's wife (being Alene's mother)
• A friend of Alene
• Nohman Kapuner's son, who got lost
• An old bear in the forest
• The mountains surrounding the valley

I haven't given much thought to these as of yet, so there is definitely some more room for improvement here, tying into the details of the storyline. But I'll proceed to the matter at hand: A characterization of Alene, done with a slightly modified version of the template written down above.

For unlimited resolution, see this beautiful PDF vector graphic.

So, this is it. I noticed that the last six items were rather difficult to answer and I wrote down some redundant answers. There is room for improvement there. But I will leave it at that for now and come to a conclusion.

Ideas for Feedback

• What items could be added/changed/repositioned in my character template?
• Which parts of my characterization of "Alene Wudmager" don't seem refined enough?

Conclusion

Another post finished, another conclusion incoming. When I first encountered character sheets, I immediately thought "How superficial! How shallow!", but then I soon realized how important they are to give an opportunity to  start with, diversify and refine your character. It helps making them more concrete and embedding them into their surroundings. And, last but not least, it is a good format to exchange between departments and to include in a quest documentation.

This is how my post ends today and I'm happy with it - may you be happy too! Have a good time!

#10 Ideation and The Witcher 2

Today I'm talking about finding and expressing quest design ideas, which in some form is part of every quest design process. I am planning to think of such a process and I hope that my previous and future theoretical posts will help me with that. The second half will present a quest design idea based on the world of The Witcher and will then proceed to refine it in the manner described in the first half.

Ideation

In order to make a quest, we need to come up with good ideas. There are several techniques that might be used to achieve this - I decided to combine some of them and distinguish two aspects:

1) Be aware of Conditions and Context

It makes a difference whether we know about the underlying technologies, the existing game mechanics, locations, narrative - in short: conditions. It is much easier to flesh out a quest idea, if you already had all or some these conditions in mind:

If we want to come up with a quest idea that plays e.g. in a world consisting of a single big ice desert, then it might help to learn about the Inuit, expeditions to the north pole or previous cultural captures of that theme. If used with care (e.g. not blindly/rigid copying), setting up this context or frame in your mind helps, since it gives you material to play around with.

An example for this are the inspirations listed by CD Projekt RED quest designer Philipp Weber for The Witcher 3 (source):

• old legends, fairy tales, witcher lore or history
• real-life issues and problems
• gameplay features
• other quests (-> continuations)
  

2) Setting up a Space for Creativity

Step 1 was concerned with game/quest-specific material. Step 2 is about creating a space for creativity, where all thoughts allowed - even though they do not fit the conditions/context right now: We want free thought - it might be inspired or influenced by some material, but there need to be as few restrictions as possible on the thought itself in order to explore as many possibilities as possible.

Here are some rules which might express this philosophy (inspired by a course on game design at my university):

• creative self-confidence
• every idea is allowed, there is no failure, unfiltered ideas
  
• express your ideas
• all ways of perception/expression are valid
• everything is a material (ideas themselves too!)
• continue any flow and do not rest
  

Extra rules for multiple persons:

• communicate
• just one person talking

It is a very interesting task to create spaces in which such rules are set. In his book The Art of Game Design  Jesse Schell advocates for the unconscious as a source of creativity. To him it seems necessary, to let the unconscious speak and capture its expressions. He quotes analytical psychologist C.G. Jung who believed that god speaks through the unconscious. In fact, since Jung himself was most of his life time occupied with learning about the unconscious' nature, one might look at the methods he used. Jesse Schell furthermore cites Salvador Dali, who waked himself in the moment shortly before falling asleep to get into a fresh mental sate. Some software tools might also do the job:

During one of the game jams I participated in, there was the need for some brainstorming of missions, separately for several planets in the narrative. Above you see two frames I created in the program Miro, an "online collaborative whiteboard platform". To each frame a planet is associated and I placed informations on the planet and its characters in the corners of the respective frame. During the brainstorming sessions the other narrative designers and I just freely associated in these frames with sticky notes, note arrangements and connecting lines, as can be seen on the left. When finished, we sorted them into thematically somewhat coherent columns and proceded to write a mission based on each column of notes.

Philipp Weber provides another great example: In this tweet he remarks that he got many inspirations for The Witcher 3 quests simply by riding through the game world. Here the quest context is directly present and since you can just be in that world without much distractions, there is also enough space for free exploration of thoughts and feelings.

So we see that with an open, adaptive, somewhat focused approach, much can be achieved in the ideation phase without great effort. While one might think brainstorming should be free of any structure, I believe it is very helpful to get into a certain mindset and use some material as a starting point.

Further Reading / Inspiration

John Sharp, Colleeen Macklin Iterate: Ten Lessons in Design and Failure

A "Witcher" Quest - Part 1: Pitch and Ideation

My newest quest design will take place in the Witcher universe. I will continue some ideas that I had begun before starting this blog, so first of all already existing ideas shall be documented.

Summary so far

The quest is about a young woman, named Alene Wudmager, and her place in the village and family she is living in/belonging to.

Geralt arrives in a wide valley with a great forest, a small castle and a villlage near a lake. Heading to the village (hearing of a monster contract there) he encounters Alene weeping and lost in the wild. He decides to help her get back to her home. When they come back to paths known to Alene, she takes the lead and they arrive at a woodmaker's hut in the deep forest. A mid-aged man who introduces himself as Alvin Wudmager opens up and bids them in, but quite it soon it is revealed that he is but her uncle and cannot take her in. Ashamed of lying and apparently in stress about going back to her real parents Alene breaks down again.

Her uncle asks Geralt to escort her to the village and regardless of his decision - when he starts out the next morning, Alene will follow him, being to scared to walk alone (her uncle apparently does not want to go to the village either). In any way, walking to the village becomes very strange. Alene is obviously very insecure, doesn't speak much and Geralt is not very apt in dealing with such situations.

Arriving in the village things become worse. The inhabitants tense up when seeing them pass by, but it seems that something more fundamental is off here. When delivering Alene to her family, Geralt realizes that her father is the eldorman and a rigid patriarch. Fuming, he takes her in without giving any heed to Geralt and immediately starts scolding her, implicating to employ violence when in private. The door closes and Geralt is left with a decision on whether to intervene or not.

1) Geralt intervenes. Geralts enters the family's house and forces the father to let go. He becomes even more furious; Geralt and Alene leave. Aleene feels thankful and entrusts him with a plan of hers: To ask the local lord for permission to leave the valley with her uncle of whom she knows, that this had been a dream for a long time. She originally intended to share this plan with her uncle the day before, but was too scared and confused with the unexpected situation. She asks Geralt to help.

2) Geralt intervenes not. He returns to think of his original plan, the monster contract. Since he cannot speak to the eldorman, he heads to the local tavern and speaks to the innkeep. He learns that the village has a long tradition of woodcraft and only in the last fifteen years began to heavily focus on fishing and "boating" the lake. This movement was apparently driven by the eldorman and the only original fisher of the village - Nohman Kapuner. The Kapuners are said to ever have been fishing and be a little bit different than the other villagers, "living directly at the lake and all". The eldorman enters the inn, joins the conversation and ruefully excuses himself for his behaviour. He introduces himself as Aisker Wudmaker, Alvin's brother. Turning the conversation to the contract, he explains that it is the fisherman's son who disappeared and of whom it is believed that a monster captured and murdered him. He asks Geralt to help.

At this point in both threads the next decision is to either accept or explore the village for a little first. Upon exploring you can find some environmental storytelling and minor dialogues, but you can also talk to the respective other party - Alene or her father - and gain the chance to switch.

From here on my design is only sketched:

1) Alene and Geralt return to her uncle Alvin (this time a much less awkward journey) and convince him of Alene's plan. While Alvin starts preparations, Alene and Geralt visit the local lord, who seemingly doesn't care much about anything happening in his country and sees only an opportunity in this bid for leave. He tasks Geralt with something (in his view) stupid and upon completing it, gives him some reward and allows Alene and Alvin to leave the valley. Returning to the hut all is ready for the departure and Geralt says goodbye.

Geralt, if he is curious, will visit the village before he leaves. Upon arrival he sees a hut burning and several people fighting each other. He learns that the conflict between wood- and lake-loving people escalated when further people died and neither conflict moderation nor a prospect of resolution were there.

2) Geralt starts his investigation on the issue of the disappearing fisherman's son. He asks the residents and learns that the conflict between water and wood is much tenser than he originally was told. He hears of accusations that some family kidnapped the son. Nonetheless, the people seem relieved that somebody finally tends to the matter. Geralt ventures into the wood to trace the son's steps. (Here I don't have anymore notes)

After returning to the village it is discovered that Alene is missing again. Some time later, her dead body is discovered in the woods.

In the end, Geralt beliebes to have found the origin of the murders, but is not fully convinced. The village however is content with it and returns eventually to normality.

Finishing the pitch

While this isn't the only material I have (there also some characterizations I wrote, a small flow chart and a pacing graph), I believe here is a good point to stop and evaluate. This summary (or pitch) is not complete:The first half is pretty good described, but I am not content with the degree of concreteness in the second half. So before moving on to other ways of examination, I will finish this one.

To do this, I employed my ideation techniques. I created a frame in the Miro board and started constructing the storylines with small rectangles, arrows, color codings, descriptions and so on. This way I was forced to think about this quest in its entirety. It helped to spot areas that need(ed) some rework or polishing. The flexibility provided by Miro allows to quickly rearrange whole branches and arrange everything in a well-ordered way. Here is the result:

I recommend downloading and opening the image with an image viewer to get a closer look.
If you want full detail, here is the image in a vector graphics PDF version.

Besides changing and formulating events/goals and their specifics, I also got the chance to think about some bigger concerns:

• I envision this design to enclose two quests: "Alene" and "Wudmager". The former concetrates on the personal fate of the young woman you meet, while the latter is about Geralt doing his job: Solving problems. Thus, the second quest has a slight focus: You can essentially decide to not meddle in the familiy's matters (even though you get several chances to do so) and only do what is necessary to complete the contract. The contract however needs to be done in both ways.
  

• When I came up with the idea for this quest I wanted to create involvement, and to this the current iteration also gave heed: At several points you are (or are offered to be) dragged into something that is actually not Geralt's concern, but as a player you might decide - out of emotional or rational reasons - to continue or follow these involvement cues and events.
   
• My inspiraiton are the more complex, locally bound quests created by CD Projekt RED. The prime example is the storyline around the Bloody Baron, were, amongst other means, several main quests were intertwined in a non-trivial way, which highlights their complexity. I applied this in my design too by adding cross-references, inclusions and one-way connections between "Alene" and "Wudmager". I also plan to let them start at different times.
   
• During constructions I found that my previous plan had a lot of walking around and talking and decision making. Consequently I thought of some places for fighting - for the same reason I marked some story points where free exploration might be possible: In those moments there would be some room for side quests and minor content.
  

Having this more detailed outline now, I'm probably going to continue with a post on the space and world this story plays in.

Ideas for Feedback

• In what are other situations and/or states of mind does creativity emerge?
• Should I make my quest's beginning more elaborate? Are the latter parts too elaborate?
  

Conclusion

My ideas on creative processes could be extended: There is, for instance, the analogy of play space and creative space. I could also expand on architecture or the unconscious. But for now I am content with my characterization.

I started a bigger quest design this time. There is interest and hope in me that by building upon some existing ideas some more focus on refinement and concretization will happen. Looking upon my doings I see, that what I did today was already a good sign.

Looking forward to the next post, I hope you have a good time! (...)