While I don’t mind games taking place in the US, it always annoys the hell out of me when they automatically assume/force your character to be American, even when the story itself doesn’t require it. The worst example that comes to mind is the Keeper series, which had a custom origin option, but no matter what you would input the characters would be like “I know this state, I learned the state song!”. Maybe it had a different reaction to something like “Europe” that I just didn’t see, but imo it’s extremely annoying to make that the default answer.
And RE: nicknames, I think the best option is to just ask the player if they want to be called the full name or some sort of nickname. I personally like the option, because where I’m from names can get pretty long and people tend to use diminutives. Still, forcing the player to pick a nickname can indeed be annoying.
I may be going off topic here, and forgive me if someone has asked before or if you have already said something to this. But is Rokusuppo finish or is it still a wip? And forgive me for asking I am still new to these stuff.
“Lifeless worlds” or “worlds where everything is in stasis when the protagonist is not around”.
Two of my favorite games are F.E.A.R. 1 and UnderRail, both of which are great examples of creating an atmosphere of oppression and a world that is in constant motion. In F.E.A.R., you are a member of a special task force sent to neutralize a threat that becomes supernatural as the story unfolds, but you are alone and without communication, save for a few specific messages with HQ before you inevitably lose contact the deeper you go. As the game progresses, you are introduced to two simple things that are absolutely vital to creating this sense of a world where events are happening independently of you: radio and phone messages. When your Black Hawk is shot down twice, at that point, you can hear the news discussing the event from an outside perspective. When you are inside the ArmaCham building, you get to hear interactions between coworkers ranging from a guy warning another not to hit on the boss’ daughter to the top dogs of the company quarreling with each other about how to cover up their own mess. It gives me the feeling that things are happening alongside my actions, not only because of my actions, and creates this paradoxical feeling where you are utterly alone most of the time, but the world feels like it is alive just outside of the highrise’s windows.
In UnderRail, you are trying to find your place in a post-apocalyptic world filled with dangers and mysteries, from living in the ruins of an ancient corporation hundreds of miles underground to cultists worshipping a Cthulhu-like creature created from the goo of melted scientists in a massive capital where treading off the beaten path to the slums will lead you into the clutches of ruthless bandits to the unexplored wilderness of caves with mutated creatures and hidden bits of lore that barely give a hint of the truth lurking within. The point is, the world feels alive, and you feel minuscule. You are not God; you are not the chosen one sent to unify the fractured world; you will not save the day with a single pull of a lever. You are you, trying to survive in this harsh world and getting tangled up in the power plays of those above you. There’s no doubt that if you disappeared from the world, it would keep spinning as if you were never there.
This is what I crave in history. Movement, vibrancy, and complexity. I don’t want to only kill the dragon and save the princess. I want to know how the dragon burning the fields has affected the kingdom’s economy. I want to see the political maneuvers at court when the king’s only heir is missing. I want worldbuilding. Even a tiny, brief mention of some long-gone war or that the peasants are preparing for harvest season would make me happy. But when the entire world only moves or shows any sign of life when the protagonist happens to be nearby and then enters stasis when they leave the area, I find it hard to suspend my disbelief.
Disliked trope (really more of a writing/marketing flaw): Writing like the reader cares as much about your worldbuilding as you do, so they throw it in your face with zero warning. I fully understand the appeal of writing crazy amounts of worldbuilding, but so many authors get so excited that they end up just front-loading all their fancy new terms to the point where it becomes noise.
I don’t care that your fantasy kingdom is Ellisatren of the White Coast and that King Haindar is the hero of the Seven Ellyid-Cormor Wars and that his firstborn son Prince Dazgal is a Noctorne, a man born with the soul of one of the Lunar Beastlings who ruled the land of Mitharash in the Age of Slumber (this is all random fantasy trope-mash, I’m not singling anyone out.) Like that sentence was boring to write and painful to read. My eyes glazed over. You can write a story where all of those things are true facts about the world – hell, you can write a story where all of those things are hugely plot relevant – but framing it as something as simple as “the war-hero king and his son, the prince, who was born harbouring the soul of an ancient moon god” is more digestible and thus actually functions as a hook.
Seeing one Made Up Term in a description is a red flag for me at this point. Seeing more than one is enough to discard the game altogether.
I actually do care about that stuff but you don’t need it all in the first paragraph. Wait until it’s relevant. It’s tough, I get it. Figuring out when to put relevant info is hard. I’ve messed it up too. But you gotta space things out more.
I don’t remember who said it, but no one cares about your world more than you. First, get us hooked, then you can start to sprinkle in more details and build on the foundation you’ve created. I love Dune, but the first 6 pages you get bombarded with a dozen different terms, and while it worked for Frank Herbert, it’s unlikely that you will be the next Frank Herbert, so don’t step on the gas too quickly with the jargon.
Ah, you’ve just described info dumping, the process of throwing big, random chunks of information at your audience before they need to know most of it. It’s a big no no in the traditional writing space, but it isn’t talked about much over here. Probably because it isn’t uncommon to have a page on the stat page purely for info dumping. Or maybe it’s just a different standard? Either way, I agree with you that it’s not a good way to go about it
Info dumping is part of it, and it’s definitely the part I highlighted for effect, but honestly even a sprinkling of Mumbo Jumbo can sour the description for me, including fantasy names. It’s rarely necessary and it doesn’t tell me anything about the story, but it does force my brain to slow to a crawl to process and categorize a New Word that I will never use again.
Oddly enough, using anachronistic/oddly euphemistic terms doesn’t seem to have this effect at least for me (ex. Homestuck using aggrievei nstead of attack) even though from my perspective both types of terms are made up, which is fascinating because it implies a subconscious pattern-recognition of an underlying structure in language that checks if a word is “legitimate”, which is even more fascinating because English has been affably described as “three languages in a trench coat” which means that implication is on shaky grounds at best
I don’t disagree that a lot of weird terms can be off-putting, but I don’t really see how this can be fixed. The king and prince still need names, as does their home, and presumably the other places mentioned. “Lunar beastlings” could maybe be replaced with “moon gods” and perhaps you don’t need a specific term for a “noctorne” (although it’s a unique enough concept that if it’s common, maybe you do), but otherwise I don’t see how you would change it. Your “fixed” version just removes all the names, which works for a quick summary, but they would definitely need names in the actual story. Would you use real world names, and for the places as well as the people?
For me personally it’s not that those things need names, it’s more that often author’s tend to info dump that information, rather than piecing it out as needed during the story. And, just as often, they name things that never have any real relevance in the story they are trying to tell. In the above example is any of that backstory relevant if it has no impact on the story of an orphan growing up in a neighbouring country, or is it simply world building that amounts to padding?
The next few lines in that reply give a possible solution. Give a brief summary, and then give yourself chances to elaborate further
Compare:
They gestured to the painting "That's a painting of King Haindar who is the hero of the Seven Ellyid-Cormor Wars and his firstborn son, Prince Dazgal, the Noctorne, a man born with the soul of one of the Lunar Beastlings who ruled the land of Mitharash in the Age of Slumber. "
#Whoaaaaaa.
#Fascinatimg
#neat, where's the coke.
The man gestures to the painting. "You like it? It's one of the few remaining portraits of the war-hero king and his son, the prince, who was born harbouring the soul of an ancient moon god. Everything else is either a copy, or painted with only second hand descriptions to work off on."
#"War hero... King Haindar, right?"
He nods. "The very same. This was after the Seven Ellyid-Cormor Wars, more specifically, that wracked the other nations-the wars that propelled him to fame-or infamy, depending on who you ask. There were many others he fought in, unusual for our otherwise generally peaceful kingdom, but this is the one most closely associated to him. "
#"...when you say, "ancient moon god"..."
He laughs at your tone. "Funnily enough, that was the king's exact reaction when he learned Prince Dazgul was a Nocturne. To have a son with the soul of a Lunar Beastling? The very same creatures who ruled Mithrash in the Age of Slumber?" He clicks his teeth. "I daresay if he died that very night, his soul would be laughing all the way to the ends of the earth."
*If opinion!=1{
#"It's a good painting."
*Set opinion 1
The man grins. "Glad you like it. It's a bit of a rarity in Ellisatren due to our position on the White Coast, so it never fails to draw attention from a guest."
}
*If opinion!=1{
#"It's...ok I guess."
Set opinion 1
He laughs diplomatically. "Well, I suppose that's lucky for you, since like I mentioned, it's one of a few. I do hope you'll find the rest of Ellisatren more interesting, since there's not much else to see on the White Coast."
}
#Before you can say anything else, a door opens and in walks in...
I don’t disagree – I gave up on Dune precisely because I couldn’t get through the chapter 1 infodump – but I don’t think that was what they were complaining about. Their “fix” is exactly as lore-dense, it just doesn’t have any of the proper nouns, and I was wondering how a fantasy story could work without even any names (and this includes names made of English words, like “the Age of Slumber”).
And sure, this doesn’t mean anything to an orphan growing up in a neighbouring country… unless they end up falling in love with Dazgal and having to help him break his ties with the Lunar Beastlings, who are trying to return the world to the Age of Slumber as a direct consequence of the Ellyid-Cormor Wars. And even then you wouldn’t want to just infodump, but you would need to give these things names.
@8Milkpower8: True, it’s a lot easier in Interactive Fiction, as you can just give the player the bare minimum, and then let them ask for more details or not, but for most stories, you don’t have that luxury and have to gauge exactly how much they need to know vs how bored they’ll get. But again, unless I’m completely misreading their post, it’s the fantasy names specifically that @rfzhao is complaining about, not their presentation.
EDIT: To be clear, I’m not saying that @rfzhao is wrong; everyone interacts with fiction in their own way, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m just trying to understand what the issue is, and how it might be avoided, if possible.
To be clear, I am mostly talking about the description/marketing aspect of the game. If Prince Dazgal is a major character in your game, then obviously he will need a name and his condition explained, and it’s likely that the country and his father will be discussed. Worldbuilding is good and important for stories. Not knocking worldbuilding. It just doesn’t have a place in the description to me, because I am a stranger to the setting and all these terms don’t illustrate concepts to me the way they do to the author, they don’t communicate information, and they might as well be filler, like a clump of static in the middle of a paragraph that should be as clean, efficient, and interesting as possible.
A big part of it is the Made Up Word phenomenon; I fully agree with @8Milkpower8 here that Homestuck’s silly word usage and combinations don’t trigger the same effect to me, so I think it does have a lot to do with completely unrecognizable words slowing down my brain.
Still, I think the problem is bigger than just Made Up Words. A lot of authors have trouble differentiating between what is important for the world and what is important for the hook. For instance, elves are a concept that has established an English word behind it (thus not Made Up to the brain). Lets say in this setting there was a war several hundred years ago between elves and humans which ended up causing an unending feud between the two races because of x y and z war crime. The relations between elves and humans is an important part of worldbuilding then. In the plot, you are an elf thief hiding out in a human city, looking to heist an artifact from the same period as the war. Thus, this worldbuilding fact has an obvious effect on the whole narrative that needs explaining when you go into depth… but the hook, or even the first few pages, is not the place to go into depth unless you know exactly how to pull it off. Using something like “You are an elven thief trying to plan the heist of the century. There’s just one issue: your prize is held in the capital city of the humans” trims it down to what is actually interesting, and the hidden information actually serves to generate more interest than it would otherwise: why is it bad to be in a human city? why are there segragated cities? what caused elf-human hostility?
I think an author who has done really well at this kind of witholding information to just what’s important is @HarrisPS . I am now someone who is very interested in the worldbuilding around the setting and the different countries in the CDLCverse, but I wasn’t before I read it and I was skimming through story descriptions. Imagine if the description for Royal Affairs screeched to a halt to give you a run down on Westerlin’s electoral policy. Time and place.
I don’t know if this is exactly the right place to put this but me personally I hate how choice of games is just not to the level it used to be. I am by no means saying I could do any better but I feel like the games used to be held to a higher standard and I would actually enjoy reading them. I grew up secretly reading and falling in love with some stories and now it just seems like they let just about anyone release their projects which I am not against everyone should have a chance but at the same time they should be held to a standard to where not just any half baked or pointless story is release. Choice of games used to be filled with complex and well thought out games that would bring u back dozens of times now it just seems like either they r unfinished or just flat out terrible.
Were they? In terms of actual requirements, nothing changed for quite a while now. Hosted Games always accepted almost everything, and the official Choice of Games writers have used the same design principles for many years. Or at least I think they have—any of them is free to correct me, but recent games seem to follow the 2016 design guideline fairly closely.
As for the readers, I think they hold games to a higher standard than they used to. It’s hard to play old CoG stories without thinking “yeah that wouldn’t fly today” every once in a while. For example, compare the relatively recent Royal Affairs to the far older Affairs of the Court and tell me they weren’t written with completely different standards in mind. The former takes care to make every gender variation of every RO feel natural in the whole of 482k word story, the latter has less than half that word count, throws in fake gender selection and then splits the story into three parts like it’s Fallen Hero or something.
I think it’s those changing stardards that can make the newer games feel worse. There’s a reason we don’t see Zahary Sergi on these forums anymore—writers need to try harder now than they used to, and not all of them manage terribly well. Shame, but no reason to let nostalgia blind us to how the brand evolves, and how it’s mostly for the better.
