While two of the three members in your main party in A Realm Divided will be RO’s, several other RO’s are not members of your party and do not drop their lives on a whim for your character, but rather build their own lives alongside it while acknowledging your adventure/task (should you reveal it to them).
I like natural feeling romance, instead of something that is shoehorned in. I am a sucker for it and this is going to be my first true attempt at writing it properly, so I’m a touch nervous nonetheless.
Now I just need to ensure I maintain my 70% deep and in-depth romance to 30% smut/NSFW intimacy ratio as it’s a mature/adult title…
EDIT: Accidentally copied a prior post of mine, somehow… sorry about any that were tagged on that!
I think you have the right attitude about things. In one of my games that I’ve temporarily set aside, all of my ROs had alternative but similar “friendship only” routes so that players could still build relationships with the ROs they didn’t want to romance (or choose not to romance anyone for that matter), and I realized in the middle of writing it that the romance routes were stronger because I had to think more deeply about how platonic friendship could potentially be established. I’ve always maintained a good-romance-is-based-on-friendship philosophy anyway, but these alternate scenarios helped me better put it into practice.
It’s exceedingly starting to look like my character creation may be more complex than it has any right to be, and I’m exceedingly not sure if I should just do that before the game starts even though it’s less fun that way.
I’ve decided on the romance content in my story. I will write what feels true to the characters. This means they will be slower-paced than most other games, but each RO will have their own pace that is based on their personalities. I’ll take the possible hit in audience liking. Thanks for giving me the confidence to do this.
I think that’s a good call - if it feels true to the characters, that’s the most important thing. As long as there are lots of chances to feel like the relationship is deepening, it doesn’t have to be specifically romantic in nature. There’s no point writing something that doesn’t feel right!
That’s my approach too. Romance is an aspect of my game, not the heart of it, and it’ll unfold in ways that make sense for the characters, themes, and story.
A weird challenge I’ve been having these last couple of days is trying not to write. My plan was to avoid writing for a couple of weeks post my chapter 2 drop at the start of the week, both to give more time for feedback to come in and so I can take some time out to read books and play games to fuel inspiration / think about the craft a bit, but I caught myself scribbling an opening to my next chapter earlier today despite not having done anything I planned to!
And I do legitimately feel taking time out to read more and think about IF construction is more important than getting words on a page down right now for me, so it’s a bit of a conundrum to manage that vs seizing momentum whilst I have it.
Hi, I am trying to write my first project and I am trying to write it start with the character wake up and go though their morning routine. I feel like I am rushing but I don’t really know how to expand the scene. At the moment I have somthing being defined at the end of every page (gender, hair colour extra.) what advice do you have to extend I scene?
I’ve had a busy week at the game table (it was brilliant, although I’m slightly worried about our parties), and now my head is full of UIs and character systems.
I finally hit 60,000 words in my novel. The end is in sight. Feels weird to know that this project is definitely going to exist. I’ve started so many novels only to stop after a couple of chapters.
Making a decent amount of progress so far this month. I’m on target as far as word count is concerned, and I’ve been working on planning out the next scene(s).
I’m aiming for the feel of an investigation, so I’ve planned for this to have two scenes. The first, where the MC is gathering clues and information is where I’m at now. Following that, there’ll be a scene with the MC’s mentor type figure where they can talk through what they’ve found and come to a conclusion.
The tricky bits are laying out clues and such to make it clear to the reader what’s going on, and giving multiple routes for the same bits of information. For example, some goods are being shipped to a location - you can either dig around in the paperwork to find that out, or you can interrogate some prisoners. If you specialise in interrogation you can tell when one of the prisoners is attempting to mislead you (or if you’re not specialised you can come to that conclusion by interrogating multiple prisoners and comparing what they say).
I’m also planning to make it possible to get the wrong piece of information and commit to that. If you interrogate one prisoner, get the misleading bit, and don’t confirm that any other way, then you can believe that the goods are being shipped to one place when in fact they’re being shipped to another. The role of the mentor will come into play here, pushing you to have a backup plan to check the second location anyway. Later on the story I might allow failure in similar scenarios, but not right at the start.
This is very experimental for me, so I’m hoping to write this whole thing out and then play through it a few times to see if it makes sense. If it doesn’t work out I’ve got a backup plan, which is to drop the investigation mechanic entirely, but I’d rather have it than not because it really changes up the vibe of the story.
Oof. That was more of a stream of consciousness than I meant it to be.
Romance is an aspect of my game, not the heart of it, and it’ll unfold in ways that make sense for the characters, themes, and story.