Normally, I would just continue the thread started by @poison_mara, but with her consultation, I decided it would be better to begin each month with a fresh slate.
I will begin with my work for the month:
Project – “Make a Vertical Slice Demo”
This past month (May) I began working on a demo to showcase a game I am attempting to design, develop and write.
The specific goal of this demo is to introduce the story, systems and mechanics of the game (showing a vertical slice of the game) to an alpha-group of testers. So it’s much more restricted than the real thing will be.
The next goal is to release a more comprehensive test demo that will be explicitly for bug-hunting and similar activities seen in a WiP thread.
I also have a list of features I plan to implement - fighting feature creep will be a major point-of-emphasis once I hit this phase.
Cannot wait for you to unveil your work, @Eiwynn! My project this month is the same as last month, but for today specifically, I have made a bit of progress in determining a title. Narrowed down to a few ideas. The reason I want to make a title is that whenever I write, my ideas always flow way more when I have settled on at least a placeholder name. I don’t know why but my brain rolls like that.
@The_Lady_Luck Well, Lady Luck is literally on your side! What can go wrong? (Not actually answering that and suspending disbelief as a writer who is imaginative is key here )
My goal for June is to finish my damn WIP! I’m on the final section now. I’ve spent the last few days doing a full read-through and re-edit of everything so far (which is a lot, so it was hard work!), and I just finished a detailed plan for the final section. Hopefully tomorrow I can actually write some new words.
Getting my wip to the point where I can start to write what is essentially shorts stories. I have a few of them down, but I can’t seem to emotionally commit until I can actually put them in the story.
And this:
This resonates. Stand fast. You can succeed, one word at a time.
The funny thing is I finish things and I am fast normally. In fact, since September last year, I have written more than 400 k words in more than 12 stories. I finished second in a contest. But now that I decided to work seriously and officially in my wip. I work so slowly and I am really paralyzed by the anxiety and fear of nobody will like it.
Nice! I wrote a short audio drama (13-14 pages) based on a prompt as part of an application to join a podcasting network. I thought it was a fun exercise!
RE: anxiety about people not liking your work:
What helps me, weirdly enough, is the realization that no matter how good your work is, there will always be someone who hates it with a burning passion. There’s always gonna be that one guy who despises everything you write and by extension, you, personally. Don’t write for that guy, and you’ll be fine.
To add to that, don’t use “haters gonna hate” as an excuse not to critically evaluate and improve upon your work. Just know that you’ll never please everyone, so focus on pleasing yourself.
Okay. This month I’m trying to work on a mini novel that I started earlier in the year. It’s called Fossilised stories, it may not be interactive fiction but I really want to finish it, the problem is writers block, for the first half or so of chapter two. In the second half it should get more exiting. But how to get there… Any ideas?
Oh, I was in a similar situation last week writing a nightmare I didn’t like to write but it was necessary for the plot. So I decided to write one scene of the nightmare followed on the scene after the nightmare and how the companion and Pc can react to the stress.
Can’t believe I wrote 9K word for “skills” page that was supposed to select difficulty of game but became an info page for mechanics, lore etc. And only 1336 of them are words, rest are coding! And, it’s not finished yet. I’m also “supposed” to write a whole chapter so I can upload it to dashingdon and start to take feedback.
Edit: My mistake, it’s 10K character not 9K word. Sorry for inconvience. I’ve misread a part of CSIDE
Well done! Making the bases with skills stats and customization is key for success. However, I recommend you wait to have at least two or three chapters to show the demo. That way you will receive more feedback from people and people will get better what is your project. I am about 20k, still, I will wait to have what will be the future demo before presenting it publicly
Working towards an update for my demo, would be easier if my brain didn’t keep interrupting with new ideas for game-mechanics, that I then have to write down (and create sample code for) before I can get back to writing…
Also, how do you motivate yourself to write the boring parts that you need to complete, instead of skipping to the interesting stuff in later chapters?
I’ve started writing this other game I’ve had in my head for a while. I feel… pretty guilty and hesitant about it. It’s just that the world-building and planning for my main game is so involved and detailed and heavy–it’s all Politics and Romance and Murder and Teen Angst and a bitch and a half to code as my first project. which isn’t really a complaint because I love my story and I’m learning a lot while making it, I just… need a way to take breaks from it, but I still want to write. This new one is just a short contemporary fantasy taking place on a Tuesday in a generic office lol. super small scale, way less serious–basically the opposite of my main project in a lot of ways.
i still feel paranoid about writing something else, but… i guess i’ve done that before without stopping work on bigger stories in the past. i’ve been avoiding indulging this desire to write it until today and the moment i got to like sentence 4, i felt my entire being relax. it’s p much exactly what i wanted. now if i could just shake this weird feeling that i’m betraying myself, i’d be great! sometimes i can’t help but self-flagellate because i feel i’m like… being creative wrong
I try to identify why the part is boring and then change something up in it to make it less boring.
Example: In one of my projects I describe a Victorian Age camera. At first, I described it as the protagonist enters the room it sits in:
Before you sits a wooden box camera on a tripod… it is an old-fashioned camera dating back 150 years. … blablablabla
BORING
So I reimagined the scene a bit to make it less boring…
Entering into the room, you spy a young waif of a girl fiddling with a camera from the past sitting on a tripod. “What are you doing with that camera?”
Looking up at you, the red-headed freckled girl, pauses trying to fiddle with the black leather sleeve sitting between lenses of the camera and answers. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m trying to adjust this thing to take a picture of the painted mural on the wall… but I can’t because the leather in the sleeve is so eaten away by time, that looking through the lenses is like looking into the Milky Way.”
So much less boring to me …
If this is how you reset yourself, then allocate specific time to set-aside for this purpose. Then stick to your disciplined plan. We all need reset time… just don’t let that reset time become procrastination.
I understand this frustration … I think Mara has the gist of the situation down though. Foundational writing is just another form of coding, one that translate back-end behind the scenes work into front-end experienced game-play.
They’re also the fact that scenes that you as a writer feel as boring aren’t boring for the player.
In my story, there is one drug which buffing Player abilities but presses a toll on short memory and causes nightmares and messes up with human brains.
Players are injected with it at the beginning of the game without their knowledge. They then have a nightmare and found themselves that suddenly are trapped in an old junk ship when they wake up.
For me that I know why the nightmare happens and is just a game mechanic is boring to write. However, the person who read the scene so far found it thrilling, because he didn’t know what is going on.
)
