I’ve started a project of my own and it’s still in its very early stages; I’ve got the story more or less planned out, list of characters and such but in terms of writing/coding I’ve really only got about a chapters worth.
Since I’m new to writing in general I’m unsure what the general modus operandi is, and while there’s some helpful resources about choicescript and writing tips, I’m still unsure how to go about asking for feedback. Is it better to do so near the end when you got a lot to receive feedback on, and then focus on implementing and changing things accordingly, or is it better to do it from an early stage and develop it along with the community, as it were?
That mainly depends on which approach you prefer, but asking for feedback relatively early in the project can help with keeping the project going until it’s at the stage where it can be released.
If you’re going to ask for feedback on the forum try to have a working playtest/demo ready with at least a few pages of text and some choices so that people have something tangible to give feedback on.
There are a lot of early phase “ideas” on this forum, and to be honest they get a little annoying to me personally. “I have an idea X, what do you think I should do?” And then endless discussion from there, with no real progress for a couple of weeks, and they might abandon the thread to start a new one with the actual demo.
If that’s the kind of discussion you want, though, feel free, just consider labeling it as an idea, vs. an actual WIP w/ Demo. Also, please be very detailed, and not just a paragraph-length post for people to then ask you more and more details about.
I prefer the WIPs that have a chapter or two up for demo, and even better if the author has more and is just previewing the beginning chapters for the forums. This will let people see your writing style, give you any comments about that, maybe find some bugs. Welcome!!
Welcome! I’d say it’s up to you. You could start a topic now. You can start one where you’ve more written. Everyone works differently, some people like the encouragement, others find they spend too much time focusing on their thread and not enough writing. Also if you post at early stages you might be steered off-track away from your initial idea by the feedback you get. So up to you.
As someone who’s actually made several of those idea topics, I don’t think it’s fair to call them annoying.
I think it’s good people want to share their ideas even if those ideas don’t always come to fruition. It can help to work things out by speaking to other people. And some people like the encouragement.
Every writer has their own creative process … I know a person that has charted out much of her new project beforehand then wrote a big chunk of it ( 100,000 words) before giving a beta-test for the community.
I, on the other hand, usually get in a writing “state-of-mind” then allow the characters to draw my story out from there; I’m not organized at all.
So, I ended up pushing a rough draft out sooner than later. Both are o.k.
If you do a demo, @Cecilia_Rosewood once suggested to me at least 35,000 words and that seems about right to allow the community to provide proper feedback and ideas.
A third method, which I will be switching over to next, is a combination of the two above where you have a “milestone” you write to, then push that live into the community.
The community is really a supportive community and I’m sure, however you decide to introduce your project, you will find the community to be very supportive.
I agree it’s a little unfair, and it was just my opinion. I don’t mean to say don’t post anything at all until you’ve got a demo. That’s not my intent.
I just find it annoying when I click a post labelled “WIP” or something similar and it’s just one sentence,
“Hi, I was thinking of making a game about a flying spaghetti monster who always wanted to become a God, what do you think of this idea?” (This is fake, hope I didn’t steal anyone’s thunder! )
Seriously, don’t take what I said as discouragement! I just see those ‘stub’ posts as unserious, so I don’t really take them ‘serious.’
Did I give such a precise number? That doesn’t sound like me… Or was that an example of a word-count of one of my own WiP’s when I first posted it? Still, I’d go with a couple thousand words as a bare minimum.
I would say you should have enough of a firm outline that you don’t get derailed by trying to change a lot, but not so much that you’re at the point where you’ve written so much you don’t want to change anything.
It could depend on how much involvement and/or feedback you would like from the community. If you wanted suggestions, ideas, and the like then the earlier the better. If you were needing just help with errors like spelling, then later stages of development would suffice.
I’d say once you have a decent start, maybe 10% of your story done or so.
I say that because: 1) you want to give them enough to understand your tone, setting, themes, and mechanics, but 2) you want to be early enough in the project that you can change the above if justified by the feedback.
Welcome!!
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