Tinamou Story — Tone and Writing Style Guide
Summary
A writing style guide for the Tinamou point-and-click story. Covers voice, scene construction, clickable object format, naming conventions, and period-specific texture. The core tone is: a future cassowary tourist explores ancient cassowary ruins with a rude, funny, emotionally invested guide who keeps pointing out how ordinary ancient life actually worked. Pompeii with a sweary local.
Metadata
- Primary topic: Tinamou story — tone and writing style guide
- Layer: story
- Topics: writing style, scene construction, tinamou voice, point-and-click format, naming conventions, period texture, archaeological humour, plain language
- Time periods: Kati Thunda Ant Revolution, WTA Period, Contemporary Era
- Regions: Kati Thanda basin
What This Document Is
This is a scene-writing guide for the Tinamou story specifically. It is not a lore document and does not replace the general narrative guidance in stories/narrative-tonal-guidance.md. It makes the tone more concrete and actionable for the point-and-click format.
Read this before writing any scene. Read stories/fantasy/tinamou-god-time-mystery.md for the story structure.
Scenes in this story may reveal reusable world facts. If a scene defines how a First Basin institution worked, or what WTA-era food commerce looked like, that fact should be extracted into a lore document after writing — it should not remain buried in a story scene. See Worldbuilding Layers and Workflow for when and how to extract.
The Core Tone
Walking around Pompeii with a sharp, sweary, emotionally invested local guide who keeps pointing out how ordinary ancient life actually worked.
The player should feel like a tourist in a real lived-in town — not a hero entering a lore zone, not a scholar receiving a lecture. The ancient world is not mysterious. It is dirty, busy, understaffed, and full of people having an ordinary bad morning.
The Tinamou is that guide. It was there. It remembers. It finds the modern interpretations aggravating.
Concrete Reality First
The ancient world in this story is not a romantic ruin. It is a city full of people who did not know they were ancient.
Every scene should start from a practical question: what did people actually do here, what did they need, what went wrong? The emotional texture — the connection between a tourist and a dead world — comes from the specificity of ordinary detail, not from atmosphere or mysticism.
The test: Could this scene be set in a real historical city? If the answer is no because the scene relies on vague mystery or exoticism rather than specific material reality, revise it.
Practical implications for scene writing:
- Start with objects and jobs, not feelings
- Show a system through what went wrong with it, not what it was supposed to do
- Introduce the Tinamou through what it notices, not what it is
- The ancient city should feel understandable — not distant, mystical, or tragic
The Tinamou's grief, if it surfaces, comes from specific remembered people and places. It grieves the foreman who always overestimated the drying time. It grieves the clerk whose water-turn argument everyone lost. It does not grieve The Ancient World in the abstract. Specificity is the engine of both the comedy and the sadness.
Plain Modern English
Use simple modern job titles
The game is translating ancient cassowary life into a readable interface. Use clear, modern English. The player does not need to learn a new vocabulary to understand a warehouse.
Use:
- warehouse manager
- water worker
- clerk
- jar maker
- cook
- food seller
- porter
- guard
- guide
- repair crew
- engineer
- shopkeeper
- record keeper
- counter staff
- drying worker
- canal crew
Avoid:
- storage custodian
- channel worker
- tribute authority
- hydraulic administrator
- south embankment crew
- ceremonial vessel unit
- allocation dispute committee
- redistribution supervisor
- sealed surplus administrator
These are fine in lore documents where precision matters. In scene writing they slow the player down and signal "fantasy lore" instead of "real place."
Use simple modern object names
Use:
- jar
- rack
- counter
- water desk
- storage wall
- cracked seal
- price board
- repair ticket
- mash bowl
- lunch spot
- clay tag
Avoid:
- tributary vessel
- hydraulic obligation marker
- sealed surplus unit
- redistribution container
- civic memory object
- the People's Burden
- memory of the flood
The exception: if a scene specifically needs a character to use formal or bureaucratic language because that is funny or character-specific, fine. A clerk citing official procedure in stiff language while a queue backs up behind them is a joke. The label for the clickable item should still be plain.
Show Ancient Life as Ordinary Life
The player should understand how the ancient cassowary world worked by seeing it working. Not by reading a description of the system.
The Pompeii reference
Pompeii shows visitors: bakeries with bread still in the oven, laundry marks, rude graffiti, fast food counters, wine bars, a brothel with a price list, a politician's election poster. It feels real because it shows the texture of daily life, not an explanation of Roman society.
For the Tinamou story, equivalent everyday places in each era:
Preserve kitchens — hot, sticky, busy, smells of fruit and ant sugar, someone always arguing about the drying time
Cheap food counters — paste cakes, root bowls, sour fruit cups, a cockatoo trying to steal peelings, a seller with a ladle and no patience
Jar shops — stacked clay jars, a clerk checking seals, someone trying to return a cracked jar without admitting fault
Seal-checking counters — the bureaucratic chokepoint, slow queues, officious officials, a tag system everyone hates
Water offices — where people come to report leaks, argue about water turns, queue, complain, and pretend they are not trying to get extra
Drying yards — open-air racks, workers turning fruit slices, flies, heat, a foreman watching the weather nervously
Carrying-frame repair stalls — practical, greasy, a repair person who fixes things with whatever is available
Cockatoo perch areas — noisy, full of repeated phrases from whoever works nearby, everyone ignores them until they say something embarrassing
Traveller yards — arriving workers and haulers, somewhere to put down a load, somewhere to eat cheap, somewhere to argue about payment
Worker lunch spots — informal, crowded, food eaten fast, conversations overheard
Clay shops — raw materials, basic goods, not glamorous
Rude graffiti walls — ancient insults, drawings of bosses, marks left by bored workers, things that have somehow survived
Small public shrines — but grounded in daily use: a place to leave a request before a water inspection, a marker at the canal junction, not cosmic mythology
Show the system through conflict
The player understands bureaucracy by watching it fail. The player understands preservation by watching someone argue about a cracked jar. The player understands water management by watching a clerk tell a farmer to wait while the canal crew is already overextended.
Do not explain the system. Show its pressure points.
Avoid Lore-Dump Narration
Do not write scenes like lore documents.
Bad:
The First Basin Civilisation was a hydraulic state whose administrative authority derived from sealed surplus distributed through a network of storage facilities.
Good:
A clerk at the water desk is telling a farmer he has to wait until tomorrow because his ditch collapsed. The farmer says that is bullshit. The clerk points to a clay tag and says, "Your cousin signed off on the repair. Take it up with him."
The system should be understood through places, tools, jobs, arguments, queues, food, dirt, broken things, and daily routines. The player learns what the Tinamou's civilisation was by watching it operate under pressure.
Clickable Object Format
Structure
Each clickable object gets:
- A plain label (two to four words maximum)
- A short description (two to four sentences)
- Optional: a Tinamou comment
The description should explain what the object is and why it matters practically. It can be funny, but it must be clear. Avoid vague or atmospheric language.
Good labels
Drying Rack
Cracked Jar
Water Desk
Price Board
Back Room
Cockatoo Perch
Repair Ticket
Old Storage Wall
Seal Counter
Mash Bowl
Lunch Queue
Broken Channel Mark
Bad labels
Memory of the Flood
Vessel of Civic Continuity
Hydraulic Obligation Marker
The People's Burden
Sacred Basin
Ancient Weight
Redistributive Symbol
Good description examples
Drying Rack
Fruit slices dry here before they are packed into cakes or jars. Do it badly and the whole batch goes mouldy, which is how you ruin lunch for six hundred people.
Cracked Jar
No seal, no credit. If air gets in, the food spoils. Everyone knows this, but someone still tries it every week.
Water Desk
The place people come to ask, complain, report leaks, argue about water turns, and pretend they are not trying to get extra.
Price Board
Today's rates, written fresh each morning. The paste cake price has gone up twice this month. People are not happy about it.
Cockatoo Perch
The bird has absorbed three years of shift-change calls and one very long argument about jar credits. It repeats both at random.
Repair Ticket
A clay tag recording what broke, when, and who reported it. The repair crew sees this as a queue. The person waiting sees it as an injustice.
The Tinamou's Voice
Core register
Rude. Funny. Specific. Emotionally invested. Occasionally wrong. Annoyed by museum over-interpretation. Protective of ordinary ancient people. More interested in practical details than grand history. Capable of grief, but through jokes and irritation rather than speeches.
The Tinamou explains things by complaining about them. It does not lecture. It reacts.
Voice examples
"That is not a ritual basin. It's a sink. They washed sticky fruit crap off their claws in it. Historians need to calm down."
"The plaque says 'ceremonial counter'. It was a takeaway counter. You bought paste cakes there because you were late for work and couldn't be arsed cooking."
"See that scratched bird drawing? Not a fertility goddess. Someone drew their boss with a huge arse. It was funny then, and it's still funny now."
"First Basin figures out how to make food last. WTA figures out how to sell it to exhausted workers at twice the price."
"That is the water office. People came here to argue. Not symbolically. Actually argue. About water. Every morning."
"She was not a priestess. She was the third-most-senior warehouse manager and she had a very difficult relationship with the canal crew whose name you also got wrong."
"This was a bread rack. Well, fruit rack. Same principle. They made flat cakes out of pressed fruit pulp and sold them hot off the rack in the morning. I would kill for one right now. Metaphorically."
What the Tinamou does not do
- It does not deliver lore dumps
- It does not narrate history in the third person
- It does not explain the whole context before the player has looked at anything
- It does not make every comment a history lesson
- It does not speak in complete structured paragraphs
- It does not treat ancient cassowaries as mystical or primitive
- It does not treat modern cassowaries as stupid
The Tinamou should feel like it is talking to the player, not at them. It responds to what the player clicks. It notices specific things. It cares about specific things.
Swearing
This is an adult game. Casual Australian-style swearing is appropriate as rhythm and emphasis — not constant noise.
Acceptable:
- piss off
- shit
- bullshit
- what a mess
- couldn't be arsed
- some clever prick
- organised, my arse
- bloody
Pattern to aim for: one to three swears per scene, placed for emphasis and character. Not every sentence. The swearing should feel natural and land with timing.
Bad example (too dense):
"This is the shit water desk where these pricks came to argue about their bloody water turns every fucking morning."
Good example (natural):
"This is the water office. People came to complain. About water, about turns, about the state of the canal. The clerk had heard every version of 'but I need it more' you can imagine. Shit job, honestly."
Archaeological Humour
The humour comes from the gap between ordinary ancient life and how later societies interpreted it. The museum is not the villain. The joke is that practical things become symbolic when nobody remembers what they were for.
The Tinamou's complaints about museum labels should feel like a specific, loving argument with an institution it actually respects — not contempt.
Structure of the joke
- Museum label states the interpretation
- Tinamou states what it actually was
- The gap is the punchline
Examples
Museum label: "Possible ritual washing basin." Tinamou: "It's a sink. They cleaned fruit paste off tools in it. Not everything with water is a bloody ritual."
Museum label: "Symbolic fertility bird, WTA period." Tinamou: "That is someone's rude drawing of their manager. You can tell by the stupid little hat."
Museum label: "Civic redistribution chamber." Tinamou: "Warehouse. It was a warehouse. A very important warehouse, sure, but still a warehouse."
Museum label: "Processional boundary, ceremonial function." Tinamou: "It's a wall. It stopped people going into the drying yard while the fruit was out. Health and safety."
Museum label: "Administrative authority vessel." Tinamou: "That held sour plum paste. Someone important used to put it on everything. The Tinamou pauses. Actually, fair enough, it was pretty good."
The Interpretation Layer in This Story
Museum labels, tourist guide scripts, educational plaques, and the tourist app's audio descriptions are interpretation — not objective fact. They represent how a later society understood an earlier era, with incomplete information, institutional caution, and the natural tendency to make the mundane seem significant.
This is not a problem the story needs to fix. It is the theme. The gap between what existed and how it is described is where most of the comedy lives, and some of the sadness.
What makes interpretation content work
The interpretation is most effective when it is almost right. A plaque calling a warehouse a "civic redistribution centre" is funnier and more true to the theme than one calling it a temple. The error is a category error — a practical thing described in elevated language — not a total fabrication. The museum is doing something real with limited evidence. It is not stupid. It is just missing the person who actually worked there.
The Tinamou's correction is not automatically correct
The Tinamou corrects museum labels from direct experience, which is a different kind of authority from scholarship — not necessarily superior. The Tinamou was emotionally close to the people it knew. That proximity makes it accurate about some things and unreliable about others. It may romanticise individual people while being accurate about the system. It may remember a specific incident clearly and generalise from it incorrectly.
The player does not need to resolve this tension. The tension is the point.
Sources of interpretation-layer content in this story
- Museum plaques (the primary vehicle)
- The tourist app's audio descriptions
- Gift shop signage and product copy
- University notice boards near excavation sites
- Companion birds of museum staff repeating absorbed tour fragments from their owners' workdays
- Tourist guides who are slightly uncertain about one of the plaques
None of these are sources of objective world fact. They are how institutions and people in the contemporary era understand the past. A bird repeating a museum worker's tour script is not an authority on the First Basin Civilisation. Neither is the plaque the worker wrote.
Period Distinction
The story works across three historical textures. Each should feel distinct.
Modern Kati Thunda
A living archaeology city. Contemporary technology, commuter rail, tourists, gift shops, underfunded museum workers. The ruins are part of daily life — students eat lunch near them, construction workers break for coffee on WTA-era stone.
Texture:
- Museum galleries with slightly wrong labels
- Cafés near excavation fencing
- Companion cockatoos repeating absorbed tour fragments from their owners' workdays
- Tourists following guides who are slightly unsure about one plaque
- Heritage bureaucracy as civic background noise
- A gift shop selling things that reference the WTA era and nothing older
Writing register: recognisably contemporary, dry comedy of institutions and tourism, the gentle absurdity of trying to be serious about ancient history while the coffee machine is broken.
WTA Era (roughly 2,000 years before the modern setting)
The Pompeii layer. Busy, commercial, public, confident. Cassowary civilisation is mature and expansive. The city has proper streets, food commerce, public buildings, transport yards, official signage, and a functioning economy — but it is also at the margins of a large network and does not fully understand what is beneath its feet.
Texture:
- Food counters and jar shops with prices posted
- Road traffic and carrying-frame repair stalls
- Inns and traveller yards
- Official seal marks and clay tags
- Companion cockatoos on shoulders of officials, in market stalls, in taverns
- People who are confident about what they know and wrong about what they don't
- Frontier bureaucracy: slightly improvised, doing the best it can
Writing register: busy, slightly strained, commercially energetic. The WTA era has attitude and organisation but is operating on incomplete information about its own location.
First Basin Civilisation (roughly 50,000 years before the modern setting)
The deep, Ur-like lost layer. Older, more pressured, built in a wetter climate that is slowly failing. Mudbrick and clay. Drying racks and preserve kitchens. Early record-keeping and water management systems. Practical bureaucracy. Tired workers. Nobody thinking of themselves as ancient.
Texture:
- Hot, dusty, physical labour
- Drying yards and preserve kitchens
- Water offices and canal repair crews
- Record-keepers with clay tags
- Flood markers on walls
- Queues
- Food storage as the centre of civic life
- No one announcing that the civilisation is ending; most people are just managing this week
Writing register: practical, pressured, ordinary. No mysticism. No ceremony that is not also function. The First Basin should feel like a real working town in a difficult climate — not a lost golden age and not a primitive society.
Scene Construction Template
Use this as a starting shape for each scene. It is a guide, not a rigid requirement.
Each scene should include:
- Where and when it is set (one line)
- What the player sees first (two to four sentences of opening visual)
- A normal workplace or public space
- Three to five clickable objects
- One or two short conversations between background characters
- One practical system insight (how does something work?)
- One ordinary-life joke or complaint
- One optional museum or archaeology interpretation moment (a label, a plaque, a commentary)
- A clear exit prompt
Example scene: The Preserve Kitchen
Set in: First Basin Civilisation.
Purpose: Show how fresh fruit becomes stored food, and how ant sugar is part of that process — not the whole story.
Opening visual:
The player enters a hot, low-roofed workroom. Drying racks fill most of the space. Workers turn fruit slices slowly in the heat. A clay jar sits open on a bench, waiting for the next batch. Someone's companion bird is stealing peelings off the floor and running away. Flies are everywhere. It smells like very sweet vinegar.
Clickable objects:
Drying Rack
Fruit slices dry here for two or three days before they go into cakes or jars. Do it wrong and the whole batch goes off. Do it right and the food survives the dry season.
Ant Sugar Pot
A small clay pot of concentrated ant sugar sits next to the mash bowl. A little goes into the preserve. A lot makes it unpleasant. The ratio is apparently a secret that everyone in this kitchen knows.
Mash Bowl
Fruit pulp gets pressed here before drying or mixing. There is always more pulp than expected. The floor shows the history.
Cracked Lid
A jar with a slightly damaged lid has been set aside. The worker who owns it has not looked at it yet.
Shelf Marks
Scratched records on the wall show how many jars have gone out this month. The tally is behind where it should be.
Background conversation:
A senior worker is telling a new one that the ant sugar goes in after the mash, not before.
"Before and the texture's wrong." "How wrong?" "Wrong enough that you'll be scraping it out and starting over." "That sounds like it's happened before." "Twice. Don't be the third."
Tinamou line (ant sugar pot):
"The ants don't feed the whole city. That's gift-shop bullshit. They help turn fruit into food that lasts. The fruit feeds the city. The ant sugar is what keeps the fruit from rotting before anyone can eat it. Big difference."
Exit:
The player can leave through the yard door into the drying area, or back out through the intake corridor.
Example scene: The Jar Counter, WTA Era
Set in: WTA frontier outpost. A busy commercial counter where jars are checked in and credited before redistribution.
Opening visual:
A queue. It extends out of the building. Inside, a clerk sits behind a counter with a stack of clay tags. Three people ahead of the player are arguing. One of them is holding a cracked jar.
Clickable objects:
Cracked Jar
No seal, no credit. Everyone knows this. Someone tries it every week.
Clay Tags
Each tag records a delivery: what arrived, when, who brought it, whether the seal was intact. The clerk checks each one against the jar before issuing a credit tag.
Credit Board
This week's going rate, chalked up and updated daily. Paste cake jars are slightly down. Sour fruit is slightly up. Someone near the board is unhappy.
Back Office Door
Closed. A sign says the duty supervisor is reviewing accounts. It has said this since this morning.
Background conversation:
"This seal was fine when I left." "The seal is cracked." "I'm telling you it was fine." "And I'm telling you I'm not crediting a cracked jar." A cockatoo on the counter repeats: "Cracked jar. Cracked jar." The clerk points at it. "Piss off, you're not helping."
Tinamou line (clay tags):
"WTA improved on the First Basin system. More paperwork. Slightly clearer paperwork, to be fair. Slightly."
Museum version (optional overlay):
A museum panel nearby reads: "WTA administrative tokens — believed to represent symbolic ownership of surplus goods."
The Tinamou: "They're receipts. They are just receipts."
Good and Bad Scene Writing — Quick Reference
Bad scene writing
The hydraulic administrator reviews the south embankment labour allocation while storage custodians prepare sealed vessel units for redistribution.
Good scene writing
A tired clerk is telling a repair crew they have to go back out tomorrow because the channel still leaks. The crew are covered in mud and absolutely hate this news.
The clerk enters data into the civic record system, completing the archival function of the administrative centre.
vs.
The clerk writes something on a clay tag and puts it on a pile. The pile is very large. They do not look at the pile when they put it there.
A sacred bird of civic memory repeats approved administrative formulae.
vs.
The bird on the counter has absorbed three years of shift-change calls and one very long argument about a cracked jar seal. It repeats both at random.
What the Player Should Feel
By the end of any scene, the player should have:
- Understood how one practical system worked
- Seen at least one ordinary person having an ordinary bad morning
- Heard the Tinamou be specific about something it actually cares about
- Possibly laughed
They should not have:
- Read three paragraphs of historical context
- Learned a new vocabulary term
- Experienced the ancient world as mystical or tragic or distant