I hope that this post doesn't come across as pessimistic - It's the literal inverse. I haven't been this excited for a long time. 

A couple of days ago I had a stream with my good friend Ing  and we played the current chapter of Noir and basically tore it to pieces. I knew this day would come. 

I think it's important to establish—I've built Noir from a systems-up perspective, where I treat things like writing and characters as superficial and changeable. I just don't care about them for now because I'm more focused on the tectonic plates that make up the game's logic and how a player interacts with it. The "characters" in Noir actually embody parts of the system, meaning that if and when they die or are happy with you, etc., this should have a knock-on effect with how the player is then able to interact with the game. My focus is that even if someone skips over every line of dialogue, they will want to keep characters alive because they perform a function.

 But what happened was that the build of the game was very 'lumpy'. It was just a bag of pieces. Pieces that could be considered interesting to people with my weird fetish for systems but that didn't actually offer, you know, a game. A plot? 

Essentially, Ing poked me to do what I knew I needed to do: Boil it down. Smooth it out. Find the game's actual identity. In practical terms, that can mean removing all the bells and whistles I had built up. Phone system. Map system. Why are they there? Do we really need them? Could we introduce them later? Can't we just tell a focused story?

And whilst this was happening, something else clicked. 

Ing (Very correctly.) pointed out to me that the dialogue boxes could be better. It's an interesting thing because they had been with me for so long now that I could barely even see them any more. When you work on something so long, it can become very calcified in your head. 

So I played with the dialogue for a while and finally settled on the style above—very minimal. Garamond. And something clicked:

"Whenever you have a challenge, ask yourself whether it can be solved by doing LESS rather than MORE."

And to me, the simplicity of Garamond has a symbolic resonance to this next phase: I want its elegance to inform how character sprites are drawn from now on. I want that classy font to radiate out into every aspect of the game. 

So yeah—the next phase, 'The Garamond Build,' is when things get really exciting.