I personally prefer listening to orchestra music in order to come up with decent chunks of my story. I pretty much imagine what type of situation my characters would be in, or what would be going on in the world when that music would be playing. Problem is however, looking for songs similar to that feeling I want when I get around to putting these scenes in to the game.
A lot of the music I listen to is actually from Studio Ghibli, which is the center of the majority of inspiration for my game. Then I am throwing Final Fantasy 6 (coupled with Ghibli films for the world and universe designs), Dark Souls (for some of the main backstory atmosphere and a lot of character designs), Dragon Quest 8 (inspiration for the casual atmosphere and enemy design of most of the game) and other ideas into the mix.
One important thing I do when writing up the story, the world, the situations and the characters however, is I always put in the word "why?" So I get down to marking how the situations and events get set in stone. I practically start webbing out every motion of action and start interconnecting everything.
It can start with something simple, "This guy uses fire," why? "This world is actually magical," why? "It's freaken fantasy!"
"This man is extremely smart," why? "He was born with deformed arms and legs and is unable to use them, so they only skill he was able to develop growing up was his logic."
Or maybe something like, "Kyo and Clay get into a brutal fight with each other," why? "Kyo was willing to sacrifice an innocent person in order to get information, Clay simply did not want anyone to get hurt, or die for that matter," why? "Kyo was desperate for this information, it was the only lead for what he has been searching for years, perhaps it was his last chance and the girl would've had to die in order for him to catch the slaver. However, this goes against all moral reasons with Clay, and this little girl was playing with him a lot only a few days ago."
Then start branching/reconnecting from there.
Imma throw out a random example, several homeless people have gone missing around town. Ideally its because of slavers, kidnappers and so forth. I go in deeper to this and try and get into the minds of the villians, slavers want it for money, kidnappers may have other plans... I mean, they can be shallow like that... but I prefer not to make my villians too cliche, so I dive deeper.
Perhaps the slavers don't just want money, what if they actually need it? It is vital to them in some way, or some form. Maybe they didn't have a choice but to stoop down to being a slaver. Maybe originally they were trying to rebuild an orphanage, but with no one to support them, and no way to make money they thought that getting rid of undesirables was a way to save their group of undesirables. What about the people they are selling it to? Is the society a slave based society perhaps? Or is it illegal? Maybe the slavers are selling people to researchers who are conducting experiments. Ok, human experimentation, holy crap that is kinda evil.
But lets think more on it, what if the researchers are actually trying to find a cure to a disease that has been going around, and the missing people have actually been in good condition with the researchers. But then again, the researchers can still just be an evil group creating an army of super mutated people in order to try and overtake the opposing government. But maybe that opposing government is more evil than those researchers! I mean, if they just funded that orphanage to be made and allowed for the researchers to find a cure for that plague things wouldn't have gotten so out of hand! Oh wait... all the money went into the military because we are actually at war with the neighboring nation over a territorial dispute...
Ok... I need to stop... things really don't need to go that extreme, on all my cases...
But, Yes... this is my storyline thinking process... yes... I realize I am over complicating this. But the idea is, for me when writing out a story I look at things through all perspectives, and I end up making more convoluted plots. But that basically makes me manage to build up an entire world, and then I start refining even more details from there. So try looking at the motivations, elements and the events that transpire in your story and try to connect them. Well, that's what I would do anyways...
I hope this helps... if this go too out of hand, just go ahead and ignore this post.
Both are story-driven with a lot of focus on story telling and general atmosphere, but Quintessence also has action and gameplay features in case you're interested in that as well.
