I’m still learning to write romance as well, but from a reader’s perspective and lots of testing experience under my belt, “authenticity” is what not only hooks people, but allows them to stay connected.
This goes for all relationship-based writing in my experience: friendship-arcs, companions and companion quests and much more as well as romance.
How do you actually write a game? writing is easy, you just put down on paper what you already see in your head. Having to constantly stop and add choices just seems to break the flow of it.
It seems that you have to write a sort of screenplay and then describe the scenes in it. Is that how it’s done? or how do you do it?
Read interactive fiction and you’ll get an idea of how it’s written
Okay but how do you solve this problem of “I have to stop the story to add in choices” ? it seems you have to write a screenplay like a movie, and then sort of create something that plays the movie in someone’s head when they read it.
Like you can’t say “a thousand acres is the measure of a man” you have to put in a such a way like “He surveyed the land he had. A thousand acres.” And then that earlier quote is maybe one of the choices.
This sort of makes it something like making a movie scene and then describing it. Set-piece after set-piece, like a movie. You’re not actually writing a book, you’re writing like, one scene, then you cut and then there’s another scene, and then you cut.
Not like for instance a book, where there’s this one overarching scene and things happen and people talk a lot and do a lot of things but nothing really out of the ordinary happens actually, life goes on and then one day it doesn’t. LIke “Middlemarch” or “A Thousand Acres” or anything from Pratchett’s “Discworld” series, or something like “Bridges of Madison County” for instance.
A book in this format based on them would be really boring.
If I wrote “Fight Club” in this format, it would be all about the fighting. It would have to be about Durden’s Strength and Constitution stats. It would not be about the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.
And that’s my problem. Anyone who’s read these books can see how incredibly multi-layered it is, how on the surface, it’s about X, but if you really think about it, it’s about Y and also about Z. That is the goal.
So my question is, how do you do this?
Choices are part of the story for me.
Here is an example I am working on as I write this post:
You are allowed to say “a thousand acres is the measure of a man”.
Who told you that?
Why are you making up a bad adaptation and then claiming it is the only possible way of adapting it? Respectfully, I think it’s pretty clear that you have not widely read IF – luckily there’s a very obvious solution here.
It’s not magic lol. There’s nothing inherent to the medium of IF that makes subtext and layered themes more or less difficult to do than in other mediums.
EDIT: I also want to be clear that I, personally, want you to read and write IF. It would bring me the greatest feeling in the world to see you reflect back on this 1-2 years from now while you’re joyfully editing your completed IF piece and wondering how you could have overthought it so much before you began. The only obstacle is not believing that you can do it because you’ve already decided ahead of time that’s (falsely) too difficult.
Go read interactive fiction for yourself to see how it’s done. I promise you we don’t write them like screenplays.
I often write large sections as prose first. No choices. Just one playthrough. Maybe a comment here and there if I feel this might be a good place for a choice. And then I go back and add choices later. My coding brain is often different from my writing brain, and you’re right, adding choices can break the flow.
No need to do everything at the same time!
As someone who was weaned on visual novels, it’s being true to oneself and trust between romantic partners that count. I especially loved Kotori’s route in If My Heart Had Wings, as she’s initially presented as the typical abrasive tsundere, but there’s really something more to her.
Since I am only a planner, not a writer my answer might not be that helpful, but for me planning an IF is a lot like making an adventure for pen &paper. I plan what happens behind the scenes and then I imagine how people would react to that, and how the reaction affects whats behind the scene.
So I have a concept and then plan what can be done in that scene.
At the moment I plan a lovecraftian story where the investigator must rescue a friend from an asylum so they do not loose the Family fortune. The leader of the asylum is a very creepy cult member, who geht’s obsessed with the friend of the investigator. He found an eldritch Monster which can manipulate the Feelings of people and he uses this Thing to control the patients.
Thats the backstory, for the Main story I just Take the investigator and imagine in what different ways they could overcome obstacles and rescue their friend.
Oh, thanks you 
. I will try to take that in account from now on thank you
I don’t quite understand how making a choice would make it a screenplay, as opposed to a novel. I have never seen a movie reacting to my choices any more than a book does. Have you truly never seen/read/written a story where the viewpoint character theoretically couldn’t have done/said something differently than what they did in the story?
For me too. Interactive fiction actually helps me because now I can write all my ideas down and not just decide on one path to take.
Imagine your story but try inserting different MCs. How would that affect a story?
What about the story branch that you had to scratch because it was not viable, can you make it work when the MC takes a left turn instead of a right.
Sometimes not every choice has to matter it’s just to help to emerge the reader into the story and keep them interested and give them the feeling they can really play a character (example what food do they eat even if it will never come up again)
Yep, I do it similarly.sometimes I write and note where I want what choice and then concentrate on one branch first. Again with notes for example (insert stoic reaction if I write an emotional one first) then I go back and write that part and only afterwards I go and write the code.
You can also use Excel if that is easier for you.
Or maybe it will help you to write everything down physically. I use post it’s in my outline so I can change the setup if I change anything
It’s really personal to your writing style.
From my perspective as an only-player, besides the initial set-up/exposition of the intro and POV switch scenes, if I go more than two full laptop-screens of text without a choice, that’s too many. So, a choice every three full-screens, at the absolute most, and it should be more than that for the majority of the game.
I think @will covers that under “roleplay a character” (or, perhaps, under “flavour of conversation”, haha, get it?.. I’ll see myself out).
Or understood the point of Fight Club. Also, I’d kill for an IF set on the Discworld, somebody very much please get on that.
The Tension between the characters. Not even a “Will they, won’t they” situation, because I actually very much prefer knowing if my pairing will be together by the end of it. Rather, the way the two characters CARE for each other and how that causes TENSION within the story’s plot.
Aka, don’t show me two people fucking. Show me how one character’s need to keep the other safe accidentally puts them both in harms way instead. Show me how one characters need to provide for the other causes a shortage of something necessary for them to pass this particular arc-test. Etc. Show me how they overcome these obstacles.
THIS. RIGHT HERE. I stop every 4 paragraphs and add a choice or a page break, but usually it’s a choice. And I only recently learned the “It doesn’t have to matter” rule, but there’s also another rule to consider: “If you want it to matter, it can, without any reasoning whatsoever.” Aka, if you want a choice to affect a specific stat, make it affect that stat. If you don’t, then don’t worry about it.
That’s how I’m dealing with my current issue of somehow only managing to care about two of the options enough to have them affect stats. By adding a third option that doesn’t.
Not to be mean, but I did not understand this sentence, and so I’d like to ask for clarification…?
AN OUTSIDER
(just kidding)
Not in the public domain yet, sadly. TAT It could be a fan game, but…
Not the one you asked from, but I believe it means using Post-it notes in the process.
I’d want a proper Nordic Noir IF. (I’d also want to make a thriller IF with multiple POV characters, but I’m not sure how well that would fly, since there would be multiple player characters.)
December Goal: learning to write a story
yep, you read that right, I still don’t have a proper formula on how stories should be presented, I was trying to find a way to code properly with rules I set up myself and hoping that those codes can be reusable in any projects I’m gonna do in the future
I tried playing all open WIPs in the forum but I feel the way people presenting their stories is making me dizzy, I feel there are too much details and informations in a single page that is not presented on the right time, I think there is a problem with the pacing in a story, so I don’t quite agree with them and I decided not to follow their methods
I think I’ll use december just to read successful IFs done by other authors, I won’t touch choicescript this month
so where can I find a straight-forward, simple and short stories to be used as references? feel free to throw some titles so I can check it out right away, thank you
Haha sorry 
English is my third language so sometimes I get things wrong .
An example could look like this
I usually do that digitally, although sometimes I use playing cards on a similar vein. 
Your notes must have better glue than what mine have, I’d have to gather half of the paper from the floor every time I turned a page especially if I moved them!
As others have said – yes you can, why couldn’t you?
However, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t having trouble with getting hard on myself and having similar thoughts lately as I write/code my WIP. The way I write is pretty heavily influenced by the lit I read, and it’s been a learning curve to adapt that to something more IF-friendly. Even though I know the best practice is to write for yourself, I can’t help but worry that it will be harder to find an audience willing to engage with my particular style. Just something I’ve been struggling with myself!
