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For all authors out there!

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@Eiwynn

Congratulations on your demo. If you are still looking for Alpha testers please DM me as I would very much like to help.

June has been a rewriting, revising and debugging month for me. I’ve got Hong Kong Blood Opera to 390,000 words. That’s after deleting over 20,000 words in the past month. I’ve done a major overhaul of the game.

In June I’ve been focussed on the Writers Arc which now encompasses four projects. The writers arc is now as thickly fleshed out as the Gangster Arc.

I’m hoping to have the revised game running to the midway point before the end of June.

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Most of us experience this phenomenon; when I experience this, I have a specific exercise I run through.

I start a conversation with the characters involved in the scene I am having trouble with. I ask them what the problem is and then engage in a back-and-forth with them trying to figure out what the issue is.

Not only does this work, running this exercise has been a way for me to improve my dialogue writing skills.

This may not be for everyone, but I do suggest giving it a try,

===

Nothing to update this day – hopefully this weekend that will change.

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I hate dialogues, I hate companions so much as a writer. As a reader the same cool and dynamic as a writer. I virtually hate them with all my soul, even if I know they are a necessary evil.

What I love to write is descriptions and the inner thoughts of the protagonist. NPCs for me makes scenes muddy and I feel stupid writing dialogue. The beginning of my story is like 50k of pure dialogue back and forth with your Android unit sibling as they are packed together by their master. q

It is being a great exercise of learning but draining. I hope this be a valuable experience for me

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We got major issues reworked today, we have a mostly fully functional tighter plot, some big branch ideas and we fixed the stakes so they actually make sense! Well, to my writing partner and I they make sense. And that’s enough for now. We also added a better love interest and benched the one that was causing us trouble in explaining why they were even necessary. I realized if we were struggling so hard to justify their presence in the story, their status as a character should probably be revoked. I didn’t get much actual writing done, but I am pleased with what a huge chunk of planning story structure and branching we knocked out. While I was excited before, I’m excited and actually feel I’m not wading through completely incoherent drivel now.

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Honestly, I used to feel the same. I wrote horror, which usually only had a single protagonist, and lots of environmental descriptions. I was convinced I could never, ever write dialog or make persons who had anything interesting to say.

Took me years to get comfortable with it, and that was only because I worked hard at it, and started out by copying stories with dialog I liked, to try to figure out how they worked. You’ll get there too, it’s hard work that makes things work, few people have it naturally.

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I couldn’t be more different, I’m usually terrible at writing the inner thoughts of the MC, but when it comes to write dialogues it flows pretty good!!

I meant to reply poison_mara lol.

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Blockquote441937546051

I wanted to say ditto to what @Eiwynn just said. In my case I do writing sprints of 20-24 minutes in length where I turn off all other distractions, internal editor is turned off and I just write whatever comes to mind.

Writing sprints really work for me. I get a lot of writing done that way. I do often have to delete or cut back what I’ve written but it clears my log jam.

The larger point is find a ritual that works for you.

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I want to thank @Eiwynn and @poison_mara for continuing this thread.
In real life there aren’t really people who I can rant to concerning my writing so buckle up folks: this is probably going to be long.

I started a WIP last year. Didn’t even have a name for it, didn’t even have a decent outline, didn’t even plan out the characters completely. And then I plunged into the darkness cause the story was cool, believing I could battle the challenges as they arose.

Well it worked for a while. I got in a good 50k words before realising something. Every new chapter I wrote, meant rewriting a huge chunk of the previous ones. So I took the decision to close my WIP thread until I had everything ready.

I went back to the beginning of the world. To the discovery of spirits by humans. To the character who first learned to command them. To the characters who became deity. What happens to characters when they die? Do their souls vanish into thin air or is there a form of eternal reward? How did nations develop their customs? Politics, monarchs, slavery, discrimination, racism, and other real life issues, how are they addressed? How do they fit in?

At first I had events in my mind that I had to sort of force the characters to do. But now I’m writing a very character oriented story. Let the characters and their archetypes determine the flow of the story. All the way from 900 years before the MC is introduced. It’s been quite interesting and a lot of work too. More than once I’ve looked at the world building and realized that more than 90% of all I’ve done won’t make it into the novels. It’s a little sad though.

I’ve also gotten 2 books to help me write. I have found On Writing by Stephen King to be highly recommended. So I’m reading that. If there are any other books you personally recommend, I’d be very grateful for them.

The biggest challenge I’m facing in making the novel character driven is in the MC. I want to write a morally upright MC who is forced to make decisions which fall within a grey area. I want the MC to tell bad jokes, to treasure family, to chuckle at perverted jokes, to feel rage when they realise who unleashed death on humanity and to kill when they have to. But I won’t be exactly successful if the reader does not feel like the MC acts like they would. And if I find a way to make the events occur regardless of the MCs decision, then it takes away that feeling that your choices as a reader matter.

I guess I’ll end here. Thanks everyone for sharing your progress and challenges. I do hope to read your stories soon.

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Sincerely if you have a Pc so fixed in personality behaviour and Morality. That is not an Interactive story Write it linear first. Because you will never have sucess in INTeractive media create your own character with an upright character forced to take grey choices.

I for example Role selfish characters so I will found that the character has a morality I don’t want and consider choices like I don’t want to make jokes I don’t want either. That Pc fixed can be a companion. But player always have to have agency

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I know this. I really do.

But I don’t want the MC to be like a very bland observer in the story. I want the MC to have personality. I want the MC to leave an impression as much as or bigger than the NPCs.

I admittedly haven’t completed many COGs. A dozen at most. But I do have 4 or 5 I play obsessively. What I’ve noticed is that in some authors’ attempt not to create a sort of hard coded personality, they have ended up creating no personality at all. I don’t think I want that, guys. I’m still trying to find the right balance

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My advice is you should announce greatly what personality player will have since the beginning. I, for instance, Will never play a story that forces me to be a good person who loves everyone and is selfless. Even in games with heroic people, there should be the agency for a selfish and character who made good deeds for evil selfish reasons.

About personality is a difficult choice and subjective. I personally prefer no personality and freedom to create my own via in-game choices.

That’s the problem I have with the witcher. It is a masterpiece, yes. But I don’t enjoy the game because forces me yo be a character I despise when a behaviour I hate even more.

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In game choices it is. :grin:

I guess I’ll just find a way to force the reader to make the canon choices. Like in the first chapter of Tin Star where you get hanged if you refuse to take the badge.

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Damn bro, needed to hear this bad. Changing a scene right now to be more interesting because I haven’t found motivation to write it all week. They say if you’re gonna have to deliver exposition, at least have it delivered by the pope in a bubble bath.

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@poison_mara got it right. The important thing when you have more of a fixed personality/background character (which I love and subscribes to), it’s important to have that showcased right from the start. That way, if the reader disagrees with the story you want to tell, they can nope out early on. Not all stories are for everyone.

In Samurai of Hyuga there’s the killing of the koi scene at the start of the book, for me in Fallen Hero it is possessing innocent people, lying to everyone and generally being a depressed ass, for Tin Star it’s the hanging in case you say no to becoming a Marshal, to show you that the wrong choices can have lethal consequences.

It sounds like you have a really interesting story to tell, so it will all depend on how you execute it. It will be important to establish WHAT morals the mc has from the start, WHY they have them, and then make sure that the choice they have to make is understandable from their viewpoint, not necessarily the readers.

Fallen Hero is pretty much a book entirely powered by one bad decision after another, and some of those I don’t give the player an option not to take. Some I do. I do have an easier time though, since my protagonist is not a hero, and doesn’t necessarily make smart choices.

Your protagonist is a hero, it’s a little bit trickier, but so many bad and horrible things have been done by ostensibly good people, who just didn’t see the full consequences before they acted.

It is okay to have fixed events in interactive fiction, that’s how you keep things from ballooning. Don’t focus on that, focus on making them believable in the story.

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Wow! Thank you!
This means a lot, really. I’ll begin working on that right away.

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Even with fixed events, you can give the players the agency, how they feel about that. Even an evil Person can do good deeds, only the motivation should be another. Money or the chance to manipulate others, or just to feign being good, while hating it.

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Took me an entire day to sort and source the tags for Retribution. Next book I will be careful and document things and not get carried away and just add them anywhere in the startup file…

(yeah, not likely, future me and past me are both out to get me)

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I am really depressed right now. And I need strength so I am hearing music from one of my idols, Chuck Berry trying to recover my resolve.

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Here we are, one week left in the month of June! It has been a busy week since I completed the first draft of the script.

I’ve written the front-end of the demo, started the scripting and rewrote the “origins” mechanics of the game to work much smoother within the game’s execution. I’ll need to rework them at least once more because the current version is o.k. for a demo, but not as comprehensive as I want for the full game.

Project “Make a Vertical Slice Demo” - Update:

June Totals (as of 6-23):

  • 118,000 + words without code for the script.
  • milestone completed: first draft of script is done.
  • front-end, start-up, and origins scenes are scripted.

My stretch-goal for this month is to finish scripting the demo by the 30th … I seriously doubt I’ll be able to reach it, but I am one week ahead of schedule, so at least I will get a good start on the scripting.

===

How is everyone else doing?

It’s a matter of communication … right?

:wink:

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