Turtle jelly sounds like someone made a jam out of turtles. I’m assuming that’s not what it actually is, but I don’t have any context clues to make a guess.
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Ugh. 3 years from thirty today. Someone tell time to slow down, please?
Haha. Jokes aside, it’s been a productive few days.
- An adaptive introduction to the Trakspan has been completed.
- The introduction to Dekker Salvage has been written, with some branching conversation options that can provide different rep levels or show off some stat choices.
- Converted all prior *if choices to *selectable_if with the appropriate P.R.O.T.O.C.O.L stat listed prior to the option. Such as *selectable_if (power >= 2) #[Power] If you weren’t so pissy, you wouldn’t be bleeding clients.
- Fully designed the Salvage progression system, and have begun integration into gameplay, including the Galactic Salvage Guild (GSG)
- Began work on Mireya’s RO’s first interaction post-meeting.
- Yesterday wrote 4217 words (and then crashed the hell out from exhaustion.)
- Added Reed Armaments to the Mega-Corporation section of the Corporations Database, complete with initial lore.
Overall, a productive few days. Things are heading in the right direction, and I’m still barreling towards an initial WiP in September/October well exceeding 100k words!
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Thank you everyone for your thoughts on keeping compelling ideas from being distracting! I did some thinking about characters and plotline (and game name ideas), and that’s helped me set it aside until it becomes relevant. Plus the feedback I was waiting for came through and so I’m pushing onwards with coding which is a great feeling!
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I’ve completed part 2 of 5 for chapter 3 today!
LLG is projected to be 10 chapters. The first two chapters were reasonable in size (26-28k), but chapter 3 is already 46k. So it goes. Even so, it feels nice to reach a checkpoint. I’ve gotten some outlining done today and will likely flesh it out more before diving into part 3 tomorrow.
(I have a full outline, but I do more micro-outlines before each chunk of writing to make sure I’m hitting everything I need and want to hit).
Sometimes I look at my outline and think about how I have so much yet to do. Then I look at what I’ve written and see how far I’ve come. It is a strange mentality to know something is going to take forever, but then being willing to take that forever day-by-day. Can’t just sit on the mountainside.
Many writers expect to write no more than 100k total for their non-IF stories. How do y’all handle knowing your target wordcounts (and story complexity, really) are so much greater?
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Wordcount inflation completely fried my brain. I look at my current WIP and feel like it’s just a few pages long, even though it actually rivals Dune in terms of length. I should have picked a healthier hobby, like mining asbestos or collecting landmines.
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I don’t have target wordcounts beyond chapter playthrough length.
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My advice, as an ADHD haver, is to build a good library of inspirational material and reference it a lot. I build playlists of songs for concepts and genres I’m interested in, and listen to them while writing- so whenever I’m doing dishes or w/e and I listen to one of those playlists my brain trends back towards that specific subject.
Reading things, listening to things or talking about things that vibe with your intended story will help redirect your creative attention by inspiring it towards new angles. It’s about reinvigorating that initial spark.
This may not work for everyone, but it’s modestly effective for me. I still find it hard to stick to a particular project for more than a few months unless something really odd is happening to me, but I make great progress in that time and it’s way better than how I used to burn through ideas.
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That’s great advice! Putting on the music I’ve been listening to while writing my intended project (Pathologic 3 soundtrack ripped from the demo files my beloved…) really helped. And I went for a run with the more closely themed playlist which got me in the “correct” mood too - funny how music can make such a difference for these things!
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Harris, i literally had the same thought just now. did you read my mind??? i’ve been wondering if any other neurodivergent folks here struggle with new ideas sporadically popping up. i love my current project, but the other wolf in me… it yearns…
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Thank you! I’ve decided not to change the hook. Turtle jelly is too unfamiliar so it would be off-putting having it so early.
Regarding having ideas for side projects: I just evaporate them from my mind. Can’t have side projects tugging at my focus when I have a project to work on. I lose out a bit on possible future projects, but it’s worth it for the increased productivity.
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Does anyone know why this passage is throwing me an error?:
With age, also comes the self awareness to realize that there are also things I am not so good at, such as
*fake_choice
*if (high_skill != "might") and (second_skill != "might") #I'm physically very weak.
*set might %-15
I am not very strong. In fact I'm actually very weak. I have a hard time carrying heavy objects, and a lack of general athleticism. Fortunelty for me, strength isn't a trait that women are expected to have, so I can general rope a guard or two into helping me when I'm too weak to do something.
Quicktests keeps telling me that there is a problem in the *if line at character 22 where it expected no more tokens, but found a close paratheses? But I need that paratheneses for the equation to work?
Edit: I did attempt to switch from *fake_choice to *choice with the proper *gotos, but I am still getting the error.
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I think the problem stems from the fact that you use *fake_choice instead of *choice
AFAIK you can’t set variables or use if statements with fake choices
If you don’t want to create new label to go for each choice, you can set implicit_flow_control true on startup.txt. This allows all normal.choices to move on without explicit requirement of a goto statement.
Edit 2: You need to put all statements inside brackets. For example
*if ((condition1 = true) and (condition2 = false))
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I don’t think that’s the problem because I’ve been setting variables with fake choice for my whole IF thus far, and it’s never thrown an error before. Plus the sequence right before this is two *fake_choice with *if statements in the choices, and those aren’t throwing me an error. Just this one, which specifically has a problem with the closing parenthesis.
This isn’t fixing it either.
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*if doesn’t consistently work as an inline command with #options. Try re-indenting it so the #option is on the line below the *if.
*fake_choice
*if (high_skill != "might") and (second_skill != "might")
#I'm physically very weak.
*set might %-15
I am not very strong....
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That worked! Thank you! I’ve been banging my head against the wall on this one.
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I’ll add that when I check more than one variable in a choice, I enclose them both in parentheses.
So
*if ((high_skill != "might") and (second_skill != "might")) #I'm physically very weak.
I’ve yet to get an error doing that.
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I’m having a random urge to make an achievement named “Mutually Assured Betrayal”.
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I love that! What would trigger it? Betraying an npc that also betrays you?
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Pretending to be allies with someone to be able to stab them in the back later, only to realize they were doing the same. So essentially, yeah. But I’m not sure where to put it yet, so could be NPC but could also be an organization.
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Speaking of achievements, how do you all come up with achievement names?
I’d like to have some achievements for achieving different NPC end states (e.g., the NPC is dead, the NPC is alive and in a relationship with you, is alive and fled the country) but I’m feeling uninspired about what to call them.
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