I don’t have experience in writing and game making. But I always think of my ideal game or story after playing many games and reading many novels. Like RPG, Visual Novel, Novel in Ncode and Kakuyomu. Well, most of it Japanese oriented works.
I consider to publish it outside of CoG because i hesitated about i can’t publish same story in another platform but since I’m in short cash, i publish it in CoG anyway. I still can make spin off.
I’m still working in first step to write my first game. For the time being the genre is High Fantasy and Medieval. Of course the stage is a world of sword and magic. In world with multiple races, cultures, and nations. The main stage is a certain kingdom in a certain continent where the protagonist born. Since there’s RPG elements, i will try to make the story more Character Driven and there’s always circumstances that make the protagonist forced to move along the circumstances or move against the circumstances and change the flow. There are multiple paths for protagonist.
Well it’s still planning
I want to write a game with choicescript. Since I’m new to writing it make me must publish it in HG label?
How about Art related? Do you guys draw it yourself or pay someone to draw it for you?
Since i want to make multiple paths or story branchs, are there words limit?
How to make RPG mechanic in this game?
What’s stats i must use Include if i want to apply RPG mechanic? STR, AGI, VIT, INT, DEX? What do you think each of stats will do?
Once again Nice to meet you All and thanks for reading.
Welcome! I’m pretty new myself but if I had to offer any tips. It’d be to get CSIDE, they have an extremely good interactive tutorial and should help you figure out how to code the RPG elements, as well as being much easier to read what you write and being able to test it quickly.
If your writing resume is blank, then the HG label is your only option.
You can draw it yourself if you have the skills, or use images from the public domain or under any free license that permits commercial use. I don’t recommend paying for art unless you have a really popular game, or unless you have money to burn on this hobby.
Not that I’m aware of. We have games over a million words. Go nuts.
There are many ways to do this. Check the code of WIPs on dashingdon, or published CoG/HG games, if you want ideas. Looking at how other writers make their games is a good way to learn.
If you haven’t done much/any writing before, you will have to publish through Hosted Games. (If you have written before, even if you haven’t written games, you may be eligible to apply to write for CoG.) You’ll get royalties at the same rate as CoG writers, but you won’t get an advance.
HG writers have to provide their own art, but it’s up to you whether you want to make it yourself or pay someone else to make it.
There is no word limit. Hosted Games publications have a minimum word count of 30K words, but most are longer. The most popular games tend to be much longer, in the hundreds of thousands of words, but some have gone over a million.
There is no “must” list. You’ll have to use what makes sense for your game design. “RPG mechanic” can mean many different things after all, since there are so many wildly different RPG rulesets.
I would, in addition to this, say “or unless you have the money to spare and have an option to get the art from artist you really really want to make your art”.
Just don’t put all million words in the same text file. It’ll cause technical problems. And be a nightmare to debug if you make an error.
This makes me shudder even thinking about it… Hands up not helping to debug if someone ever does that!
In all seriousness though, if you’ve never completed a game before, I’d be thinking less about the money you will make (as this may not happen depending on how popular your game turns out to be) and how you’re going to get it finished. Start with trying to code a small section and go from there. Also do a forum search as the are lots of topics talking about game development and what tends to be expected if you want something popular.
I hope to see some work from you! Also, the monthly writer support thread is full of helpful tips and tricks, and the middle-of-the-month snippet sharing session is when we update each other about where we’ve progressed. Of course, you can send it in there, and I’ll be happy to give a critique!
And once you have something substantial to share, draw up a WIP thread of your own, as so many others have done, and join in the joy and pain of building your story!
That could be your long term goal, but your short-term goal is to put it up here on this forum as a Work-in-Progress. Start with that first.
Don’t worry about art. That will be a problem for you two years from now, and it won’t be a tough problem.
No.
I think this question reveals that you haven’t read much IF, or at least not much published by Choice of Games. Some of the games in the catalogue are well over one million words.
One million is not feasible for you. Start with a goal of like 100,000, something relatively short and achievable in a two year timeframe.
Play the games to start. That’ll give you a good idea of what’s possible and how most people tackle it. Play games under the Hosted Label especially, as they’re usually a little more experimental with their systems.
Be careful about scope creep. For your first project, write something short and achievable.
I also worry that there isn’t a lot of Zen2 in this idea. There are some great games with this exact premise in the IF catalogue already. How do you bring your own experience into this premise to make it unique and fresh?
One last note: from your writing, it seems that you’re not a native English speaker. There are a lot of non-native speakers on the forum, so it’s not a barrier to entry, but it’s still a challenge you’ll have to overcome. I’d recommend doing a lot of additional study with English, particularly English grammar, if your goal is to write wholly in English.
