I mean those tropes are super vague. Like saving the world? that’s like every super hero story ever. Magical land is the entirety of the fantasy genre.
Welcome to the forums, Sophia.
Don’t worry about failure, even if you fail at least you tried.
I’d love to see a game where you’re a teen travelling to a fantasy world. I love those tropes!
The best advice I can give is to just start writing. Have faith in your ideas, that they’re good ideas, since they are, and just write them. Make the game you want to.
You don’t need to add anything at this stage. Just write.
Exactly as @FairyGodfeather says, just start writing. Your story is gonna change and develop as you write
I think the key thing that stands out as problematic is that you haven’t spoken about why your universe is unique. As others have mentioned, what is there now is more a list of tropes than a distinctive narrative. Fantasy of this particular kind (Young Adult Teenage Hero Magic Quest GO!) is a very played out set of circumstances, and you haven’t spoken about what you plan to do differently. Even in your own description you start by making a self-deprecating remark about cliche.
Let me list a couple of ideas off the top of my head and maybe they’ll give you something to think about?
Fantasy Idea 1:
A fantasy world teems with a whole host of fantasy creatures, elves, dwarves, vampires, ghouls, anything you’d care to name. These cultures have lived in a precarious balance for as long as anyone can remember, playing out their long lives in an enormous and diverse world teeming with life.
This all changes when a strange, terrifying new life form begins to creep out of the wastelands of the Southern Continent. These strange bipedal creatures are short-lived omnivores who ravenously consume all in their path. They have amazing endurance, can survive injuries that would kill even the stoutest elf without so much as a scar. Their mouths are filled with shards of bone that they use to grind up food, like blunt vampire fangs. They are relentless and they breed quickly and constantly. Before long they become a terrifying menace and not even the combined armies of all the civilized races look capable of stopping them.
These mysterious monsters are of course Humans, who are creatures of distant myth brought to this world by dark magics.
Fantasy Idea 2:
The immortals are a dwindling race of fantasy creatures living in a world where they are unable to reproduce themselves. Vampires are the only creatures who can recruit new members to their society, but there are plenty more immortal species that are now dwindling nearly to the point of extinction. These creatures were said to have come from a heavenly shard that once hung in the night sky. The Shard has long since been lost to history, and the last immortals feverishly try to recreate that divine spark that would allow them to revive their cultures and societies. Without fresh blood, they will be overcome by the vampires or simply lost to history.
Their experiments yield one possibility of success, a single being taking form in a dark laboratory in 19th century Vienna. Before the New Child can be awoken, vampires stage a raid on the building, destroying as much of the research as possible. The New Child is spirited away to be hidden somewhere out of the reach of vampires or curious humans.
Some hundred years later, a tomb in the desert is opened and you wander out, knowing nothing about who or what you are.
Those two ideas are just off the top of my head, and you’re welcome to either one, but you should then slot those tropes into them rather than starting with the tropes and then trying to grow something cool around them. The selling point of your story is what new ideas you’re going to bring to the table, rather than how you’re going to arrange them.
Should you want any help, feel free to message me, and I’m sure there are plenty of people here who would say likewise. They’re a very supportive community with a lot of cool ideas.
I don’t think it matters. I don’t think it even needs to be unique. I think, most importantly, it just needs to be written, however is most fun to write. It’s already unique enough in being interactive fiction. One of the things I love about interactive fiction is that it lets you participate in stories. So rather than reading about a generic teenager exploring the marvels of a fantasy world, I’m the one in control of the action, getting to see that stuff, and so in a way I am the one transported.
In fact most of the fun, for me would be diving into the obvious cliches and then maybe doing something different. Like aligning with the evil side, or deciding that monsters are being unduly persecuted, that the orcs are naturally angry because they’ve been forced out of their homes by humans, and they deserve a champion too.
So I’d @Sophia should just write the fantasy world that she’d love to explore. It doesn’t have to be unique but it certainly can be.
That’s true, even if we were a particularly vicious critical atmosphere, we can’t offer anything too in-depth without having something to look at.
Just writing is the first and last secret rule of being a writer.
I agree very much with this!
To be clear, my trope comment was not meant to imply that you have a bad idea here, @Sophia. It was meant to say that it’s very hard to offer suggestions about what you’ve got so far, because I don’t have much insight yet.
“Just start writing” is a great approach that will help you explore and learn about your world. And then you can learn more about it from there.
Personal experience digression:
For me, writing is very much an extended process of the “yes and” rule from improv comedy. What the rule means is that, when two people are building a scene, they have to keep building on each others’ ideas rather than tearing each other down.
Example from improv:
If the first person says “I’m driving on a race track!”
and the second person says “I’m pulling you over for speeding!”,
then the one thing the first person cannot say is “That’s impossible, I’m on a race track!”
Instead, the first person needs to figure out how to roll with the situation. For some reason, this race track has a speed limit, and for some reason, there are people monitoring the track to ensure that it’s obeyed. Perhaps the race track is for children driving go-karts? Or perhaps the driver brought a Ferrari to the race track when everyone else is riding horses? Or… obviously, this is a very weird situation, and there won’t be a logical answer to it. But there will be an answer, somewhere.
That’s “yes and”.
Example from writing:
I mention that the story is set in a desert. I also mention that an NPC is wearing coral earrings. I read along later and discover this seeming contradiction. It’s hard to get coral in a desert! Drat.
I can either clean it up… or I can accept that they’re both true, and figure out what it means. Perhaps the earrings are fakes made from carved and dyed bone. Perhaps the NPC is a traveller, or was courted by a traveller, or trades in rarities. Perhaps there’s a secret sea somewhere beneath the desert.
…okay, that last one is awesome. Secret sea beneath the desert! Now what?
That’s how and where my stories come alive.
Thank you for all your comments.
I can’t deny that i’m still a beginner. I’ll just start writing and go with the flow.
Question:
- It’s about the concern of magical creatures. Should I add dragons, elves, gnomes, and others?
___***
I’m sorry for any wrong grammar… I’m still pretty young so please understand. I’m really busy in my school life… I’ll update in a week or two? Maybe?
You can add any of those creatures or all of them, its your story. Don’t get too worried about what we’ll think, because ultimately you’re writing the story for yourself first, right?
Nobody’s expecting your first efforts to be War and Peace, we’re just here to offer guidance and support so that you can write the story that you want to write. The rest is gravy.
Oh… OK. I’ll keep that in mind.
Thanks.
What magical creatures interest you most?
Add those.
So… I’m having troubles with names…
Can someone help me?
http://www.babynamewizard.com/ is a great place to find character names.
That’s a toughie, I would recommend you name your world, and maybe go from there?
Knights of Gardheim to give an overblown example gives a prospective reader a lot of information, i.e. that there will be conflict, knights and a place called Gardheim (probably with some viking overtones).
Or perhaps you want something a little more mysterious? The First Human or The Crown Demands imply nothing too particular, but do subtly intimate a fantasy game without giving too much away. Until we know more about the story, it will be difficult to offer anything more conclusive than that.
I would recommend looking at the names of the other COG titles to try and see if there are any that you like, then think about what you like about them.
Of course if you mean character names, there are plenty of generators that cater specifically to fantasy games, you can pick a style and it generates names for you.
I love http://www.seventhsanctum.com/ It has all the names generators you can possibly need.
I made Random Name Generator which takes the top 100 Boys Names, Top 100 Girl’s Names from Behind the Name, a 100 Common Surnames, and will randomly generate up a name for you. It’s for real world names mind you.
Thank you for helping me. So, I finished somehow like 10% of chapter 1.
Should I change the title? Another World kinda gives away my story. I want a mysterious one, something that will make the readers think and… What was that word?
Oh well… Please help make a mysterious title.
Is there somewhere part in my story I should change?
Does it?
Think about what you’d expect to see on the back of a paperback book, if you were writing static fiction.
If this is the first thing that happens - your protagonist winds up in another world - that’s something the publisher would put in the book blurb. In that case, you don’t really need to hang onto the mystery.
If it’s something that only happens partway through, then it’s something the publisher would leave off. And maybe a little more mystery is good.
Welcome. Another World is a nice Placeholder. The title usually is the last thing a writer needs to worry about. But I bet the community already got a pretty share of Marvelous titles to give.
But how we could say anything about a story on it’s most early drafts? So please gambare at your test so we can give our opiny! :