August 2023 Writer Support Thread

Game Development Writing and Content
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It’s so good to be back!

First of all, I think I owe everyone a significant apology.

To all those who have read Maverick Hunter: Scandalous Mission in the past two months, thank you for your support. However small and however hard, I have found an audience.

To all @moderators, especially @Eiwynn, Hannah and others, I am so sorry that I was unclear about certain things. Since this game can’t be published (according to the rules, you can’t publish an existing IP like Harry Potter, Star Wars, even Mega Man), feel free to classify this in the Hobby Project section if needed. And if possible, kindly please reopen my WIP thread. I am open to further discussion- you can PM me if you wish- but be aware that I may need more time to be clear about what I am saying, lest something like this happens again (and leads to me and my work being deleted from the face of this forum). Also, the copyright disclaimer has been added.
It is officially a fangame like Mega Man X Corrupted. The disclaimer reads:

This project is not endorsed by nor affiliated with Capcom, Sega and Nintendo in any way. All Mega Man X / Rockman X material including but not limited to game, characters, images, names, and music are (c) Capcom Co., Ltd. Creme de la Creme and its franchise is (c) Hannah Powell-Smith. No copyright infringements are intended, this is a project purely intended as an unofficial fan project to show our love and appreciation for the franchise.

Thank you very much and know that I still support every one of you, even though I am still sort of stressed.

My goals for August:

Personal: Have a clearer understanding of what I want and how to deal with personal issues that I face.

Writing: Revise chapters 0 and 1. Connect better with my audience.

With the recent release of Emily Short’s Elite Status: Platinum Concierge, I would also like to share a certain piece of hers on regarding the interactive fiction community at large, which has basically answers questions regarding publicity as well:

My rationale for writing Maverick Hunter: Scandalous Mission was the last one: Share IF with readers and players in your other communities. I had a good intention, maybe I just carried it out the wrong way. Mara was bad at times, but I was worse.

Speaking of achievements, here are some of mine:

Summary

Get Ready to Rumble: Defeat a copy of Magma Dragoon. (10 points)
Curiouser and Curiouser: Find out what is behind the mysterious statue. (10 points)
Wild Iron Claw: Defeat Grizzly Slash. (10 points)
Guardian of the Deep Sea: Defeat Duff McWhalen. (10 points)
Super Electromagnetic Trap: Defeat Squid Adler. (10 points)
Spark of Intelligence: Defeat Izzy Glow. (10 points)
Forgotten Warrior of Shadow: Defeat Dark Dizzy. (10 points)
Air Force Chief: Defeat The Skiver. (10 points)
Jurassic Inferno: Defeat Mattrex. (10 points)
True Crimson Illusionist: Defeat Axle the Red. (10 points)
Bumomomo…: Defeat Shadow Devil. (10 points)
An Old Foe: Defeat Rangda Bangda Mk II. (10 points)
The Best Maverick Hunter?: Defeat Lady Renaldt. (10 points)
In It to Win It: Defeat Dynamo. (10 points)
Attack Me If You Dare: Obtain the Hadouken, Shoryuken, Tatsumaki Senpukyaku and Seiei Enbu. (10 points)
My Ult is Ready: Obtain the Ultimate Armor. (10 points)
Alright, It’s Over!: Defeat Final Sigma W. (10 points)
Showdown of Maverick Hunters!: Defeat your twin in a winner-takes-all battle. (10 points)
Up, Up and Away: Defeat a Maverick while wearing the Poise Armor. (10 points)
By Your Powers Combined: Defeat a Maverick while wearing the Spirit Armor. (10 points)
Theatricality and Deception: Defeat a Maverick while wearing the Intrigue Armor. (10 points)
Ice-skating Uphill: Defeat a Maverick while wearing the Wit Armor. (10 points)
One, Two, Go: Defeat a Maverick while wearing the Flair Armor. (10 points)
The Best Offense Is…: Defeat a Maverick while wearing the Candor Armor. (10 points)
Out of the Frying Pan: Fire the Eclipse Cannon and detonate the space colony. (10 points)
The Red One- no, the Blue!: Defuse all the bombs in the Skiver’s stage. (10 points)
Insert Tab A into Slot B: Collect all the power-up items to equip you and your RO’s armors. (10 points)
You’re Quick, Man: Complete Lady Renaldt’s stage 1 without using Dark Hold. (10 points)
The Trick is Not Minding: Defeat Rangda Bangda Mk II while wearing the Candor Armor. (10 points)
Time Paradox: View all endings and complete all achivements. (10 points)
As Long As I Have This Saber: Finish the game. (10 points)
One Down, Fifteen to Go: Defeat one Maverick. (10 points)
Now We’re Getting Somewhere: Defeat four Mavericks. (10 points)
Let’s Get This Party Going: Defeat eight Mavericks. (10 points)
Where the Heck is Sigma?: Defeat sixteen Mavericks. (10 points)

Thank you once again, it’s been a nice time walking this road with you, to know that I am not alone in this journey, and let us continue to try our best for the months ahead, to deal with our fears and hopes in the right way.

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Hey, welcome back! Best of luck for the month :smiley:

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23

So after an “adventure” in Gloucestershire, (oh god…) during which my car broke down, I am finally back home, and am ready to start the month.

August goals:

  • Fix all identified issues with my most recent update.
  • Begin working on Act 2’s rewind section.

I’m keeping this month pretty chill, since I’ve got a few things to sort out IRL, the aforementioned car being pretty up there. Thay being said, I would like to participate in Mara’s haloween jam, but It’s increasingly looking like that won’t be possible :frowning_face:

Also, everyone is super excited for Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield, while I’m just playing Train Simulator…

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Don’t name both games in my presence or you will have a lengthy wall of texts of a hyped Mara. Poor @Eiwynn is a saint to have entire encyclopedias of my rp plans in Discord lol.

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Aww, thank you! Is there any chance that my WIP thread be reopened?

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Done :smiley:

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So my second day will be a fail but only because had to take my youngest to the hospital because the little man tripped over and smacked his head off the concrete floor. So he now has a little hole that had to be glued.

Back home now but it’s nearly 10:30pm here so it’s a bit late to start writing when I’ve got to get up for work in the morning.

Hope everyone had a more productive day!

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I’m sorry to hear you had such a day @Nocturnal_Stillness.

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Thank you @Eiwynn was definitely not how I intended to spend my evening. Just keeping an eye on him at the moment.

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Hey, everyone!

All in all, I have plans to make August quite the productive month. While it increasingly looks like I’ll miss my announced release date of August 10th for Update 0.5 (Estheria), the Update is still heavily on track nonetheless.

In short order, I’ve got some wicked plans for August.

  • Finalize adding content and first polish passes on the Prologue (Character Creator Demo 2.0).
  • Implement the first combat scenario. Testing has occurred in a live environment which shows my code and ideas for combat are indeed functional, now I just have to write the scenario content and pray it doesn’t break.
  • Add the additional items required to make each of these scenarios possible.
  • Finalize additional skills and magick spells for use in the Arena (Combat Simulation Demo).
  • Begin the first implementation of the new Trait System. I just scrapped my plans for fair-math personality values as an alignment towards a core pen-and-paper experience. Part of this was the design of a new system to take its place, where players will be able to unlock new traits (positive) or through certain actions receive negative traits. It’ll be a pain, but I’m looking at modelling this system off of CRPG’s such as Divinity: Original Sin/Baldur’s Gate 3 and titles such as Fallout: New Vegas.
  • Rework of the Sanity system plans. Sanity will still play a major factor, but is planned to be introduced much earlier than I anticipated so I don’t have to rework prior content to accommodate it.
  • With all that finished and some bug fixing/testing… Launch Update 0.5!

All in all, it’s going to be quite a hectic month. Nonetheless, I have my eyes firmly focused on getting Update 0.5 in the hands of those interested with the project soon.

Have a great month, everyone!

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Hello writers and welcome to August.

So, my plan was to finish Daria: A Kingdom Simulator and begin beta testing in July. Honestly, I had high hopes of doing the majority of the work at the end of June and opening Beta right away. Well, that didn’t happen. July was good though and I did finish the game (woo hoo!) although my beta testing start got pushed to yesterday, August 2nd. Only missed it by a few days, I’ll call that a win. :smiley:

My plan for August is to keep up with the beta testing feedback and do some practice runs myself, since there I things that only I will notice are missing or not working properly. That’s my goal. I’m not sure when the first wave of public beta testing will be, likely a week or so, depending on the feedback, what I must write/fix, and how much time I have.

Good luck, everyone!

Oh, and I’m also an August baby, so thanks for the birthday wishes. :slight_smile:

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I have a design question. First choice there is a clear choice that I am aware that it will be far more cooler for the player to pick. The story requires that choice. Should I hide the real meaning to look less cool or let it be and the player chained to only play a branch?

I will put here the choice to you can see what I am talking about

Summary 
“No, no, no! This has to be a joke! There's no way this is happening to me! Where are the damn cameras?!”
You look at your hands under the strange dim light surrounding you like the halo of those old medieval paintings that your father loved to restore. Little by little even that light goes out engulfed by a slimy and oppressive darkness.
You sigh as you unconsciously bite your lip. Magic, your father's legacy. You stomp the floor, but there is no floor only the void.
Damn, Dad! He knew he was dying; he shouldn’t have returned to this miserable town. Freak town
*fake_choice
#All, that is cool and dandy. But where in hell am I now?
#It has to be a recording. It sounds like one. Talking will not help me here
#I will remain calm and focused. This is a carnival it has to be a trick I can detect.
#[i]Actio divinarum[/i]. I have tainted blood, maybe I should start to use it.
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The third day has drawn to a close and while I wasn’t feeling my writing with the Graveyard Watch I was feeling my entry for @poison_mara 's Halloween Jam so instead I’ve written 1673 words for.

Hope everyone has had a productive or at least useful day!

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This post is so timely - I just added achievements to my game’s recent demo :smile: Heading over to read the article tonight.

Wishing everyone the very best of luck with goals :four_leaf_clover:

My August goal is ambitious and I have no idea if I’ll meet it - but I’m going to try to finish my game’s chapter 8 by the end of it. I’ve been experimenting with more detailed chapter outlines and have found I write faster with them, so now I’m just sort of experimenting to see how much faster, lol.

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Achievements! Here are some of my darlingest ones

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot - name your computer “Computer”
It Was A Joke - name your computer “EDI”
What Do You Think You’re Doing, Dave? - name your computer “HAL”
End Of Line - name your computer “MCP”
I Will Be Everywhere - name your computer “SkyNet”

Plot Armor, Initiated - no one can survive that.
Thief of Different Color - steal a catchphrase
The Hat Did It - create a plot hole
And Now for Something Different - create a plot twist

Birds of a Leather - befriend a vigilante
The Wild Hunt - befriend an alien
(S[S#,P#]) DIVIDEDBY (P[P#]) - befriend a genius
When Clock Strikes Thirteen - befriend an ancient horror
Apocalypse Will Not Be Monochrome - befriend a trickster

The Square Root of 462 - learn to hide your thoughts
Generic Doomsday Villain - uncover a nefarious plot
Three Sides of a Coin - win a court case
Tastes Like Squid - have a strange meal
A Friend in Need - get saved by a villain
Schrödinger’s Cat - get insulted with a mathematical formula
Critical Existence Failure - they’re called eldritch for a reason
Sidekick Syndrome - you really shouldn’t be out there on your own
Deus Intus Machina - what do computers fear?
Through Horn, Ox - language is just words, right?

Necessary Evil - are you sure you’re a hero?
Deus Ex Machina - are you sure you’re a bystander?
No Strings Attached - are you sure you’re a villain?

This Is How the World Ends - whoops.

As a sidenote, I found this in my notes and realized I really need to sort out my mad geniuses.

“And this machine…” you say. “I have no idea what it even does.”
“Pancakes.”
“Pancakes?”
“It does pancakes.”
“You have a super weird device in your lab for making pancakes?”
“What is the point of being a mad genius, if you can’t have high-tech breakfast?”

I think they all look equally suitable, for different MC personalities?

As it happens, I, too, have a design question - I’m playing with an idea of a concept that involves the biological parents of an MC, would it be weird to have the appearance of one of them to be fixed, since their point of origin (namely, a remote Fennoscandian village) is kiiiinda relevant?

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In my opinion it is normal, always you let open the other parent to be any race and let player opinate about the culture of that parent if that is relevant to the plot. It sounds interesting

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My goals for august are as follows:

  1. complete chapter 1
  2. outline chapter 2
  3. add another months worth of queued posts on my Studio Blog
  4. Find a 40hr week job. (necessary for my survival)

Here’s hoping Phoenix Rising can survive the advent of a full time job. Who knows.
Wish me luck! I might consider joining into the halloween jam, but I’m not sure.

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My wife and son are August babies, so I’ll be baking lots of cake this month. (I’m a July birthday myself, and celebrated with a truly world class pizza.)

My writing goal for Aug is to turn my dense outline for Ch 2 into an at least 75% complete text of Ch 2. :slight_smile:

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Happy Birthday to all the August-born!

Yes Mara and others, lets hope Starfield launches well. I won’t be playing, but when Bethesda does it right, chef’s kiss.

Nocturnal, I hope your little one is recovering from the head injury.

Lucid, I own some Daria games. Good luck with your next installment!

Eiwynn, I have no idea how to do the symbols thing; thank you for that. When I came back to the forum, I noticed many writers using symbols to indicate choice-intention. I thought they were cool.

Hannah, what are these character studies? How do you conduct them? As far as over ambition goes. I am plagued with it---- just a big heaping pile of variables…

Ok: I am nearly done with chapter 2 of Gemini: Winds of Change. It is almost entirely rewritten. I’ve decided to post the first two chapters online. I hope to develop a more sophisticated work sharing process in the future, but this is what I know how to do now; and, I don’t want to travel too far down any “overly ambitions and idiotic” roads before I know I’m on the right “ambitious and non-idiotic” roads---- hoping for better choice cadence and choice options. I think I’ve come a long way, but I never know anymore…

May you all find the Golden Mean of ambition and take the roads less traveled.

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I’ve done short interactive stories before about characters in my games (a couple of which I did before Crème de la Crème came out, and some others I did for Patreon while I was writing Royal Affairs), about times in their life that don’t appear onscreen in the games or about the Crème MC interacting with them in some way outside of the game. These recent ones are short linear stories, about 1000-1500 words long; I did one about one of the Royal Affairs characters a few months ago.

Basically I think of a scene or set of scenes that I imagine happened at some point in the characters’ lives and go from there! It’s partly for my own enjoyment, but it’s sometimes helped me understand a character perspective better too :slightly_smiling_face:

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