1. I am rubbish at writing, my creativity muscles haven't been tested, flexed or otherwise for longer then I care to imagine, however I used to love writing stories growing up, until year 12 anyway. Thankfully, I've started becoming more creative after listening to Dave Burgess speak to Michael Matera at the Hive Summit last month as well as from reading Teach like a Pirate. Dave gave me the motivation I needed to just give it a shot, and while I won't win any awards for my writing I now have somewhere to start.
2. I felt like this was the main reason I hadn't written any decent storyline to follow, but while writing this blog post I realised this was just a lame excuse I kept using to let myself off for why I hadn't written anything... Moving on, the second reason was to do with the fact that I keep the same students for anywhere from 3 to 5 years. Therefore I couldn't write a story that the students would progress through to finally achieve hero status at the end of the year, just to have them come back again the following year and do it all again, from scratch... I also couldn't have a story that would take a full 5 years to progress through because chances are it wouldn't move very quickly so it would most likely be forgotten and wouldn't help motivate the students further. Also, students don't all start in my class the same year and then finish at the same time, they are staggered.
3. I teach multiple subjects in a year, the usual English and Maths and a yearly Health topic, but then each year we'd have maybe a science topic, a history topic, Business and Enterprise which might consist of work readiness or even budgeting, Civics and Citizenship even. But because I'd teach, lets say a Work Readiness topic this year, I then wouldn't need to do that specific class again until I had a complete new group of students come through, due to the nature of SACE. So writing an integrated story across the topics wouldn't always work because we don't always do the same set of classes at different times either, it changes depending on the needs of our students.
When I finally overcame these issues which were keeping me pinned, and really started to think things through I ended up having somewhat of an idea flood. First off I decided I'd write a storyline for each planet, which will become the quest chain, with some side quests thrown in later, each of these planets would focus on a particular topic for that year. With this I could ensure each planet was very different and hopefully come up with some very different story lines for the students to progress through over the course of the subject. Currently I have only begun fleshing out the story line for one planet, Crefenus.
Crefenus will be a lush farming planet, however the creatures of the planet while initially rather subdued, even the predators, have started becoming aggressive, wiping out entire crops and even settlers. With the help of a Xenobiologist my students will try to determine what is happening on this once peaceful planet.
Writing my stories in this manner allowed me to look at each planet as if it was its own 'zone', such as which you would find in World of Warcraft. To follow on from my WoW aligned thought process I decided I still need an overarching story that encompassed the entire system. So I figured if I start with one story, flesh that out to a year long story that had you travelling between the different planets would give a reason to start those planets, and to revisit them to progress side mission so the student could unlock parts of the main story before others. Depending on how the story unfolded I could almost disregard the previous years storyline and introduce new characters each year that were seemingly there all along. While I haven't figured this all out yet, I am feeling pretty confident that I can make it work. Also it's my storyline so it can be changed without having to stick to previously written lore as if I had done it in a Star Trek, Star Wars or Stargate universe, instead I can take elements from each of these stories as I see fit.
So I had an idea for a story which I decided to run with, it followed on with the idea that my students were pilots in the Federation Fleet. However there is a small renegade group, called the Outliers, that live and work on the outer planets that don't always get the resources they need for society to function. With the players help the Outliers or Fleet, or both, will solve the circumstance causing the issue. I realise I am being fairly cryptic in this story, I apologise, however I don't want to give it all away just in case some of my students are trying to get a leg up on the story and solve the problems of Stellar Voyage before I've even released it to them.
To make this work I ended up writing a list of key story points that would need to occur, I ended up with approximately 17. With this list I am planning on creating a video, a sound file, a comic, or whatever I possibly can to give that part of the quest chain. I am planning on time gating these, however I am unsure if I will do this on Moodle/Onenote so students need to log on to access them, or if I will just have them occur as a class during whatever session. It will most likely be both.
So my next big plan is to now write up each of these storyline missions to decide whether each specific part of the story needs to be a video or sound file etc. Part of this has been looking at 3d animations which even if I use something like Dazstudio to create a basic character I can easily use that character again in another scene if needed, otherwise I am organising World of Warcraft friends to do some voice acting for me. The one I have currently done was so much fun to write out and play with the sound file. Hopefully my friends enjoy recording it as much as I am hearing and playing with them.
Once I have decided what I am doing, and have started working on it I will try and check back here again with an update on how hard/easy/silly it is/was!
Thanks for reading.