A Plot Exists

“Cereal, salsa, and the end of the world.”

Deadbeat Simulator - or whatever it'll be called - has a story. Hard to believe, I know, but since its inception it's had an intended plot from start to finish. It wasn't created specifically for the project, but still.

A few years ago I wrote a stage play called "An Inordinate Number of Steves". It was well-received, almost selling out its run and even getting nominated for an award at the festival it was produced for. I've never really let go of it, having revised and edited it a number of times over the years, and when I was starting to come up with the idea for a game project the ones I was having kept mingling with the ones for 'Steves'. At some point I just decided the project I was working was going to be a video game adaptation of the play, though it would have to be reworked yet again (and quite a bit).

The story centers around Lewis, an adult man with no job and little interests, who runs into his ex-girlfriend Alison, thereby discovering she's moved back to town. Between Lewis' terminal apathy and Alison's almost pathological need to be productive, the two struggle to coexist in a city that seems to love forcing them together.
Meanwhile Eddie and Earnest are trying to build God and Jonas is readying the apocalypse.

The original play framed Lewis' problem as laziness, his arc had him learning some effort was required on his part to make anything better in the world, while Alison had to learn to focus her attention on issues that actually mattered. For DBS, that's all gotta go - or at least be redirected.
Lewis' lesson of "get up and do something" is remaining the core of the plot, but the way he and the characters around him interact with that notion will be vastly different. I'm taking "play Lewis"' complaints of life being unfair and legitimizing them in "game Lewis" through what is essentially a disability, which works far better for the medium. Other characters will be used a little differently too, but I won't go into detail - especially since nobody knows the source material to compare it.

Preliminary planning has the story divided into fourteen days which will act as chapters  of varying lengths. Since we're already messing with the goal-based elements of a video game we might as well play hard and loose with event separation. Not that things will get stupid but things might get a bit stupid.

I'll throw in the character list because I've gotten the named cast's sprites together (and am pretty excited about it), but as far as the rest of it goes, much more would be to spoil the fun.

Lewis
A well-meaning but sardonic 'deadbeat' fueled by cereal and possibly nothing else.

Alison
Busy and impulsive with days filled with hobbies of varying degrees of passion.

Eddie and Earnest
Cryptic engineers with absurd – and sometimes brutally honest – senses of humour.

Jonas
A manic pixie nightmare. Unhinged and energetic, and not in a good way.

Cody
A flighty soul in an adventurous vessel, busy being far away.

Steve
Ever-silent, always around and tragically unlucky. All seventeen of them.