Origin of Retallion
The origin of the story of Retallion is longer than I’d like, and more interesting than I ever expected.
I never thought I’d write a novel, but I’ve always had worlds in my head that I would love to share. I’m not an artist with pens and paper or paint so that avenue isn’t one that I can easily express a world. So I’ve looked to other avenues, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The world that I am writing in now is not the original. It has gone through many iterations. I don’t even remember the original world, just the core of the tale. A lost boy trying to get home and along the way he gains a power that he doesn’t understand and it changes his life forever. That is still the core to my story, though instead of a boy it’s a young man. In the original he is separated from his parents while they are traveling and the caravan is attacked by some unknown force. That is no longer the case though the cause of the separation is still shrouded in mystery.
The next part of Retallion comes from another world I created. The Dyr and their magic come from a Science fiction world. In this world, which I may expand upon in the future, Humanity left earth on an ark ship to colonize a new world. They found one and got there through a one way wormhole. The panet was not ideal as is so they had to terraform it. They sent down samples of animals and plants along with vast quantities of water to fill the oceans. (They used a wormhole to the water under the surface of Europa) and a whole ton of nanomachines to help everything survive. While the world was changed beneath them the humans slept in orbit. The nanomachines went a little crazy and ended up creating humanoid races from some of the animals on the planed and thus the Dyr were created from, well, deer. The story in this world would take place with no knowledge of the humans or the technology they brought, but the nanomachines would allow for magic that no one knew was actually technology. This was mine take on the 3rd law of Arthur C. Clarke “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Over the years their magic has changed names and details of how it works but the overarching idea has remained the same. The transfer of physical properties from one object to another.
I got as far as making a wiki for this world complete with a timeline of the advance of space travel technology. It never got farther than an incomplete wiki though. The most important thing I took away from working on the wiki was actually a piece of software. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of it, but it was a program that would procedurally generate a planet. It wasn’t too complex, but you could adjust a lot of different parameters and zoom in on any area to get a more detailed world. It was playing around with this tool a year later that gave me the first map of Retallion.
This is the first map of what would become Retallion. I ended up focusing on the inland sea in the center of the map as the location for the story’s setting
This map was the spark that started me worldbuilding again. With this map in hand I started pulling up past ideas and mixing them together. I imagined a nation, a history, and forbidden magic. A story was not my goal at this point. I just wanted a world. I worked purely on the world for a while, but I felt that I was lacking something. A drive, a purpose for this world. I had always thought about making a world and then doing something with it later. Maybe set a game there or something. But I realized from my past unfinished works that I needed a more clear goal when making my worlds. And so I decided that I was going to make a game and build the world around it. For a while I thought of different types of games I could make, but like I said at the beginning I am not an artist so I always had that constraint in the back of my head. After throwing away some ideas I settled on an interactive narrative game. One that resembles a storybook and that tells a story of characters in this world.
A look at how I made The Book of Retallion in Unity
The flowchart was from a free tool called Fungus and was where all the story was contained along with the choices and other variables.
A short video of what I accomplished
And so I started work on the game that I called The Book of Retallion. I created the 4 main characters, Verdell, Ashlynn, Kitha (Then called Ranna), and Robin. For the core of the story I drew upon that old idea of a boy wanting to get home and started with that. My goal with the game was to get the core technology done and then release it one chapter at a time over the course of a year or so. I ended up getting most of the core technology in place pretty quickly and then I started writing the first chapter to test out the tech. It soon became apparent to me that my writing needed a good bit of work. I was in and out of past tense and my sentences were all over the place. It was then I decided that writing a game is not the best way to start writing.
Left to right: Verdell, Ashlynn, Robin, and Kitha
The first sketches of the characters done beautifully by Kelsey Lee
I took the first chapter I had written for the game and pasted it into a google doc and got around to starting this book. In the original draft I ended up writing 5 chapters a total of 18,000 words. Over time life got busy and work on the book stagnated. I had 3 more chapters outlined, but hadn’t written anything in 6 months.
This past summer I started up on the project again, this time I reviewed everything I had and came up with a list of questions that I needed to answer before moving forward. In making this list and answering the questions I took a look again at the map I had for Retallion and realized it wasn’t going to work for the story I was telling. So I scrapped the spark that started me on this journey and now I am working on a new map with a revised story to go along with it. I’ll make another post about the new map later. For now here is the old map in its fullness.
The complete original map of Retallion made in Wonderdraft
