It’s been really lovely to see you again! I hope that you get some breathing room next week.
Your prose is very solid and has some nice descriptive details. I think it also flows quite nicely, but I agree with @Zaxwlyde that the quoted section is too much exposition that could instead be expressed through implication or by scenes devoted to the problems.
Otherwise, your world-building paints an inticing image.
After hours organizing and building out a system that can run the longevity of the game in a decentralized manner, the Message Center is now operational in The Frontier!
Accessable from players housing units or ships, you’ll occasionally find new messages sent from mission contacts, friends and romance options, advertisements from vendors informing you of sales or of new products being available, and more.
When accessed, all new messages must be read at least once before closing the message center to ensure that critical information is not missed. However, all messages can be re-reviewed through the message archive, appearing once they’ve been read for the first time.
Given that this isn’t much of a spoiler, messages are formatted in a sense like emails, and some messages may even have message amendments in the event that something new was added prior to being opened for the first time!
After months of low progress on the choicescript front, I managed to complete a 30k choicescript game in a couple of days. Signing up for a couple of small itch jams was good for motivation. Now, I need to transfer that momentum to my main project.
After writing like a possessed madman for the last few days, I have one last thing to say.
We are never ever doing this again.
Edit: I could submit this to Hosted Games, but 30k words isn’t going to be popular with this crowd unless I drastically lengthen it.
honestly i think you should submit it anyways!! why not ya know. also on a related note…i’m lowkey hoping that games with shorter wordcounts come back into popularity more. oftentimes recently i just find myself wanting to play a really nice game that i can play in 1-2 comfortable sittings. to be clear, i also love a good long-long-long IF game—but i’ve been really enjoying some of the less lengthy ones on itch and the CoG/HG apps and whatnot a lot recently!
There’s a lot of tedious paperwork…
I could bundle this game with my main project… or release both seperately. But I will want to boost the wordcount to 49k if I pick the latter. (There’s a reason I picked that number.)
Hey all! KP here! It’s been awhile since I posted. I just wanted to let you all know that I am making headway on “Beneath a Bloodred Dawn Book 1: The Awakening.” So far I have 10 chapters slated for book one.
I’ve had a lot of hardships and set backs in the last few months financially, physically, mentally and emotionally. But I’m slowly starting to come back. I’m taking a break from my video edits minus my RO introductions.
So far I have introduced 4 of the ROs just recently on my dev blog kpeverlyfiction.com. I will post who I have revealed thus far:
Ezra Talon: Your childhood best friend. Stands at 6’0, has wavy raven black hair and ocean blue eyes. Has tan skin. Has a lean muscular body and always seem so serious until you begin to crack his armor. He is an assassin second in command of the Red Scales Assassin guild. He is what they call the Silver Scale. His past with you is very enshrouded in mystery. He never got to tell you he was in love with you before you disappeared…without a trace. For the last 10 years you’ve been missing. He is 27 years old. He is player sexual and gender locked.
Eleria the Exiled Elven Princess: she is beautiful with an ethereal look about her. Pale milky white skin with butterfly wings that shimmer in the light. She is quiet and does all the things a princess should do. But her people are in a strange land of Solara (Solara is mostly desert with 3 suns. ) her people fled to Solara for unknown reasons. She is young and is very sheltered from the unknown. But she wants no part in any longer. (Not sure her of her age just yet. ) She is a cleric/priestess but does not believe in her elven customs she rebukes them. She may seem innocent and naive at first but she is not. She is player sexual and player choice. She has a male counterpart and a non binary counter parts you may choose to romance.
Will update later 2 ros tomorrow im too tired tonight and need sleep
A post was merged into an existing topic: Choice of Games and Hosted Games Recommendations – Consolidated Thread
If you end up with any leftover momentum, hand it over. I’ve spent the last two months on small updates, writing less than a thousand words per day, and I don’t even have a good excuse.
My goal for this month is get a hold of myself, stop obsessing over stupid details and pick up the pace.
I wish I had an idea about how to make this slog of a start of my space opera more interesting. And it’s not like there aren’t things happening! It all just sounds so boring.
A lot of shows do something big then cut to something smaller in scope? Gundam starts with a giant ship hitting a city before it cuts to the main character at home.
Can someone else have a look at this? I don’t know if I’m blind but it looks like I used a *temp
variable from a different scene file?
Summary
If I were you, I’d open up with an exposition dump about how spaceship gravity works in your setting and how it interacts with acceleration.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea. It’s probably not. But this is what I would do, and it would get me hooked in for sure.
Appears so. No one claimed *temp
variables are lost when you load a checkpoint, just when you use *finish
or *goto_scene
commands. Have fun keeping your temporary variables around for a little longer, I guess.
I’m starting with the ship getting attacked by Reapers unknown aliens, and proceed to investigating a literal ghost ship, and I have no freaking idea how I managed to make that boring, but here we are. I mean, no matter how the potential readers might feel, I’m bored, and that isn’t good to the writing, so something needs to be fixed.
Not my jam, I’m afraid. I’m a computer scientist, not a physicist. It runs on Star Trek magic. I’m having much more fun in figuring out how a teleportation overflow interacts with acceleration.
It happens. You tried playing it like a ttrpg? Be an NPC, roll some dice, see what happens. Then play again as an alien, or another crewmember, reacting to your first character.
Ravenloft and Strahd were thought up when the author got a vampire on a random encounter table (apparently).
Hi everybody! My June was super hectic. Travel, illness, squeaking in Pride Events, turning in Chapter 8…I feel like I can finally breathe! What’s happening, folks?
While I have a little break, I’m going to assemble my monthly newsletter and maybe eyeball some old short stories. Feels good!
Since everyone is sharing something, I might as well about my ongoing project, Cost of Utopia.
Some of the possible paths that are planned.
The Weird Figure: You’ve so far seen two weird dreams. First is how the “savior” of the world, Johnny Green, sacrificed himself for an attempt to kill the traitor. Second is about the biggest “traitor” of all time, Harry Flinch surviving a bombing attack.
What’s more, a new figure appears should you help the traitor. He shows you the rebirth moment of Chairman, the all-seeing “benevolent” AI. What do you mean Mr. Green just trusted him like that? And why you keep seeing stuff about this? Will the figure reveal his secrets?
Chairman’s Planned Destiny: The players that end up dating Samantha will get a unique request from big boss himself: Love her no matter what happens. Chairman is planning something here, but maybe you already planned to love her through the end. If you enjoy emotional abuse, that is…
That is of course not all paths that are planned, but more “interesting” ones
For your start, what are the stakes? While a fight scene is definitely action-oriented, it is hard to care unless you know who is fighting and why it matters.
Alternatively, can you kick off with a quick series of choices that immediately put the reader in the proverbial driver seat? Or use a choice to set stakes?
Writing-wise, the general wisdom for fights is shorter sentences because those make the scene feel faster. That said, variation makes scenes more engaging. As does pulling in sensory detail. Compare:
ROAR! The skyboat rocks. Screams. Sweat burns your eyes. Gun trained. Trigger squeezed. Blood explodes out the monster’s neck.
vs
The stinking heat of another roar rocks the skyboat. Passengers scream. Sweat burns your eyes, but you stand firm and breathe. In. Gun raised. Out. Sight true. In. Chaos fades. Out. The monster’s maw opens. Trigger. Bullet. Blood.
I know neither of these are particularly great, but I do hope the second is, at least, more engaging than the first. In it, I varied sentence length and construction style. I also added in the sensory detail that the roaring breath stinks and is hot. Plus, I added in the physical sensation of breathing. I thought the calming impression of breathing contrasted nicely with the very short sentences of the shot’s preparation and execution to hopefully give the feel of calm amid chaos.
There’s a short story by Suzy McKee Charnas that I rec looking up: “A Musical Interlude.” The story is about a vampire attending Tosca. Much of the story focuses on him watching the opera. This should be boring, but instead the tension builds and builds until the vampire breaks and feeds.
So I’ve no idea if any of that helps with your specific issues, but that’s what I’ve got. *shrugs*
I’m curious about how other people avoid getting distracted with ideas while already working on projects they’re committed to. Because of the timing of waiting for feedback my brain has had a bit more leeway to think of stuff and I’ve got 3+ ideas churning around that feel like they have solid legs, but none of which I’d be able to do serious work on until at least two years away…
@HarrisPS
When I’m hit by the Idea Train/the Muse/lightning inspiration/plot bunnies, I usually block out time to write out every thought in a notebook. Just gush it out and put it somewhere, to let percolate for those two years. I try not to return to the brainstorm the next day, but sometimes I do add a bit. Writing by hand produces more productive brainstorming for me: some combination of slowing down to write the words makes the ideas more coherent and more “out” of my brain than if I type it up.
Hope that helps. Enjoy your break while you wait for feedback!
I have to comtinually reinforce to myself that I have to finish something before I can start a new project or I’ll never finish anything at all.
As far as waiting for feedback - I just use chatgpt as a kind of beta reader to get that need for feedback out of the way. It just helps me to keep thinking about that one project instead of wandering. 90% of the time it doesn’t say anything that is new to me or it’s something that I disagree with, but it’s helpful to solidify my own decisions.