I feel you; I had this anxiety about reading through my own bad prose for a long time - like with my early attempts at making a game id spend two days in a whirlwind of writing then just delete the whole lot rather than cringe at my prose. But I kinda told myself its like any skill - when you start out learning how to do something difficult your gonna suck whether its writing, piano, skateboarding or whatever - but the only way you get better is just by doing a ton of it. Any writing is good writing practice.
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I have finally finished outlining my next chapter, which by itself is almost 4000 words excluding commands, but that’s because I often describe what goes in a space as I’m going with the code, so I don’t forget what I was thinking when it comes time to write it. I think this is my own version of “write first, edit later”: get all the basic stuff down in the right order, then make it something actually readable. 
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Hey, that’s awesome! It’s really encouraging to hear your hard work paying off. And wow, I love learning about how everyone works…Helps me think about my work flow in another way. ^^
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Squashed so many bugs yesterday. Feels wonderful to do things even when you can’t write well.
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Here we are, one week into July. I think next month, a fresh thread will be made; making a new thread acts as motivation for me.
July Update One: “Make a Vertical Slice Demo Month Three.”
- Scripting of the demo, cont’d.
– Finished scripting the manuscript; total wordcount is 100,000+ words without code.
– Focus is now on enabling the base mechanics and implementing the “end-chapter interface”
– Stretch goal for July is to start debugging and editing.
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@bubblesodatea – I did read your amusement park WiP … the arrival scene in your game (at the employee entrance) brought back memories of a couple of high-school friends that worked at amusement parks in Socal. So, good job on your world building.
@Jaybirdy – Your outlines sound like mine. Except, just like the manuscript, I write them externally in Scrivener. I also think these outlines are carry-over from my University days.
@Alice-chan – Just finish it is a saying we all should repeat to ourselves daily.
@malinryden – It looks like our July goals are matching up quite close – the scope being the complete game for you instead of a demo.
Everyone – Remember that no matter how much time you spend on something or how many times you go over what you wrote and scripted, there will always be bugs.
Hopefully game breaking bugs will all be quashed, but it is best to remember that bugs are just part of the game-making process and sooner or later, one will emerge, even after release.
Honorable Mentions Update One:
@Schliemannsghost – Finished and submitted his game to Hosted Games!
@adrao – Finished and submitted his game to Hosted Games!
@poison_mara – Judged her 100th game contest … simply amazing!
@rinari - Made a major update to her WiP and made it through 1/2 of her manuscript for publishing!
I’m sure there are accomplishments and milestones I’ve not listed, so be sure to point them out to me, so I can update the Honorable Mentions.
How did everyone else’s week go?
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Today’s work brought my game to 333,000 words. Its been hovering around this for a long time because I have been deleting superfluous stuff, thhink I actually got rid of a thousand words today. But I had this great moment where I realized that what I want to upload for my v0.3 is basically all done now 
super pleased. I’ll spend a couple of days to do a few runs through, but basically I’m there, yay.
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Hi all! Dropping in to join the discussion, my goal for this month is to finish polishing up my WIP and submit it! I’ve been less motivated to work on it recently since there’s no clear next steps other than playing it over and over and fixing the odd thing here and there. I’ve lost some of the momentum I had when I was writing my first and second drafts, probably because that part was more fun for me. I have another WIP in the works, but I promised myself I could only work on it once AtS was submitted bc I was getting sidetracked 
. Hope everyone’s having a productive month!
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Hi Luiza –
Welcome to the support thread. To counter this, I conceive “stretch-goals” that if I complete everything I “wanted” in the game, I then work on implementing and deploying into the master-copy.
I don’t know if this is possible for this project, but maybe on your next, if you design a few of these goals for the future, it can help.
For example: One of my stretch goals on this project I am working on is to include three different mechanical structures… “normal”, “story-mode” and “hard-mode”. I am focusing on the "normal mechanic structure first, but would like to give my audience the choice of either increasing the use of stats or decreasing their use, as dictated by their preferred play-style.
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Okay. One piece of advice to everyone. Don’t be me. Document what all your various flags and variables do. Don’t trust yourself to remember your naming conventions two years later.
Past me was way too cocky…
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I live!
What a messy June. Everything came together at once and kept me from writing. It was nearly a month of nothing from me.
That’s really hard to come back from. So, I started on Monday by editing the latest chapter. It’s something that needed to be done and it allowed me to slowly submerge myself into the story again.
I thought it would take 2 days, but here I am on day 3, and not quite done. I’ll finish the edit today.
The good news is that it worked. I have the entire project in my head again.
But first, I have about a dozen tweaks to make. I wasn’t entirely unproductive through June as I wrote some ideas for changes and tie-ins. So, I’ll do that first, and THEN finally get some forward momentum by adding to my word count.
I’m so glad to see a version of this group is still going. I find it really motivating, since editing/tweaking doesn’t add to the word count, at least I can say to myself (and others) that progress is being made.
Congrats on everyone and welcome new joiners.
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'Tis enough in these hard times.
On a much more serious note, don’t overwork yourself.
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Sadly, I haven’t submitted my book manuscript yet! 
It’s taking longer than I thought to rehaul the third act, and my submission deadline to the team is mid-August. So I’ll be taking July to work on that too, haha… 
I did get a lot done on the WIP, though (at least by my standards): 25,000 words added to the project and a release for the public demo!
Congratulations, this is amazing! 
Goals for this month:
- finishing work on my dumb, stupid book (I’m currently at page 255 of 524, so halfway there)!
- getting a significant chunk of Chapter 5 of ShoH done!
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@Lucid I am really happy you are back in track, please don’t overwork yourself.
I wish could say something positive about my writing but there is nothing positive to say. Now I am judging in another site for a contest. But I am totally incapable of writing due I am too depressed for it. I have a month a half to end a project for a contest, but I don’t feel like it. Because of the fact I now I can’t win mostly because many of the people there insult my English at least twice a week, how my games are bad, impossible to understand etc and how I am retarded. Then called me whiny to get depressed.
So I am again, the same dark place some years ago, I am simply too trash to write publically.
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That really sucks, those things can really get in your head. Those are horrible people! Something that helped me when I was doubting myself was to allow my wtiting to be mediocre (not saying your is, just a thought process that helped me!) I would think “Is this perfect? No. Maybe it’s not even good. But I know for a fact that it doesn’t suck.Therefore it’s worth working on and improving!” If you have trouble thinking your writing is good, just tell yourself it doesn’t suck.
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Daily update number 3. 2000 more words written down in the game than yesterday, where, I do not know, but it grew by 2000 somehow. I also deleated about a thousand so, 3000 words added somewhere. Just play-testing now, I’m timing how long it takes to go through a single run reading every word.
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We don’t have to write publicly to just express ideas and feelings, and practice writing. 
But it does depend on individual’s goal about writing (for self-expression, improvement, approval, financial gain, etc.).
I’m thin-skinned, so I don’t actively seek out feedback (and I accept that I won’t improve this way). But I also want to put stuff out there sometimes, and let people find them as they may (and obviously it’s rare for people to stumble on it).
And a little depressing motivator I have during this time period: I might not live through it (I have to be on a long flight soon to return home, unsure when and how as flights keep getting canceled; plus I’m pessimistic about the global political tension in the coming months), so I’m going to write, poorly or not, as much as I can while I still can. 22,948 words in document so far since June, including code (not ChoiceScript in language but in spirit 
). My failing eye sight means I eventually can’t draw anymore, but maybe I can still speech-to-text. 
Best wishes to all. 
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As I script my demo, I realized I have 120 unique variables made in Start-Up scene … at this point I wonder if I’ll be able to break the 200 mark.
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This is mainly a follow-up post to my original comment back at June.
I have taken a lot of time to reflection my story’s themes on discrimination and how they are presented. Although I was really anxious about it at first, the many things happening right now have really enlightened me on the complicated social issues my story was gearing up to deal with.
This July, I really feel like my work has gone a long way and I really feel like the things I’ve learned have really helped me with writing it.
The story was originally going to be a standard superhero story with a racial allegory in a similar fashion to X-Men, but it really feels like that it has begun to become its own thing by now. It has evolved from the ‘superhero story with an allegory’ and into something that appears to be actively questioning the idea of superheroes mainly on the grounds of “If superheroes were real, would they run into the same problems as modern-day police?”
However this change has also brought a couple problems. I’m struggling to find a balance between many things. I don’t want my story to be considered edgy, but I don’t want it to be so bright that I’m offering a playground version of things. I don’t want the allegories to be so subtle that they would fly over a reader’s head but not ham-fisted. And a lot of other things.
I understand if this idea comes off as pretentious or controversial. In fact, I’m posting this to get feedback on the idea, as it has made me a bit anxious.
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Day 4 of my do some work on this every day: Mostly bug checking but I did manage to write around 1700 words. and my game still passes both quicktest and randomtest, hooray. I’ve kind of set myself a challenge to write at least a little bit new each day, even when testing.
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