Thanks LilacRebel and good luck on your pride challenge. I completely forgot my username on here was that till I read your mention. Haven’t used that one in ages. I should probably see about changing that to one I’ve been using more recently.
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I am honored that you broke a 9 year hiatus because of my post 
Welcome back to the forums!
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I’m finished my non-CoG freelance writing today, which has been interesting; it’s a very different kind of writing and it’s nice to have a little change sometimes.
To catch up with discussion here, though…
Yes, I worked on other games while writing my games Royal Affairs and Noblesse Oblige. It was… a lot. I recommend setting specific time aside for writing if you can, using whatever methods help you focus (I use Pomodoro timing) and make sure to take breaks because it’s really easy to get burned out.
Ooh exciting! I was on holiday in Portugal last week, which was lovely but I don’t think I can claim it for research unfortunately… must remember to set something in an equivalent climate to coastal Portugal sometime…
Seconding and thirding what others have said about trying not to think about it too much. You’ll change the very beginning a lot after you start, so it isn’t set in stone. If you’re not sure about the overall plot, I recommend thinking about that some more though.
This is a good question! My first thought when I’m writing is to make something I want to play or read. My second is making something my wife will enjoy. Both those things make me feel excited about a project in a sustained way and help me keep the discipline throughout a long project.
I have a broad sense of the audience who likes my work, but I’m also excited when people who don’t expect to enjoy it do so. I’ve also realised that variety is important to me; I loved writing Royal Affairs but enjoyed how different the other games in the Creme de la Creme series were to the first one too. It’s sometimes nerve-wracking to not know whether new things will land with an existing audience, but also it brings in new ones too.
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I’m late! And I didn’t even bring starbucks.
Honestly all I want to accomplish this month is to plow through a couple scenes that I’ve been avoiding because, frankly, they’re boring. Why bother writing them if they’re boring? That’s the thought that keeps letting me put them off, but I have to remind myself that their only job right now is to be finished. They can be interesting later.
Good luck this month everyone!
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I haven’t been writing much on my WiP for a solid month and a half. My final exam is on the 7th of June, and is the reason for my lack of work. Luckily, afterwards, I will have a lot more free time to work on my WiP, and I hope that I will be able to churn out more frequent updates.
I also seem like I’m going to need to spend time moving the demo? From what I skimmed of last month’s thread, Dashingdon found someone to host a new site? Not sure, I’ll have to look into it more next week.
As for my goal, starting June 8th, I hope to complete Act 3, or at least get a considerable chunk of the way in by the end of the month.
I hope you all have a productive, and peaceful month <3
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Best of luck with the exam!
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I believe I have a good chance of finishing another chapter of my story before my self-imposed deadline—June 6th, that is. By then, Saturnine will be over 350k words long, which would make me feel kinda proud… if not for all the noise around Unexpectedly Green Journey, a 1.5 million word story that recently got submitted to hosted games.
Seriously, am I the only one who finds these super-long games kinda demoralizing? It’s hard to tell yourself “it’s not the size that matters” when the size is all that matters to many people, and the difference between your size and someone else’s has a whole seven digits.
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Maybe it’s my lack of reading comprehension in English, but I wouldn’t say the difference between 350k and 1500k is seven digits.
In any event, I’ve spent eight hours working today, and all I have is slightly less than 300 words for it. Although admittedly, I spent most of it reading.
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1,500,000 - 350,000 = 1,150,000 → seven digits 
Although I tend to mess up numbers myself too.
Plus, CoG/HG writes out the number in full on the description, since that makes it look bigger and more impressive. 
Granted, the most common criticism of my first game, by far, is that it is too short (it’s 140k words, but my initial target was 100k). If I could turn back time, I really would have worked to add more to the wordcount before publication, and thrown the suggestion to “keep your first project a managable size” far, far away.
Admittedly, there was an unexpected advantage. By submitting everything in Jan, and with a smaller wordcount, my game got published in three months and during a time with little competition from other new HG games in the publishing line. I suppose that’s also how I got the steam release. When it comes to business, timing matters too, I guess. 
For what it’s worth, I played your WIP a long time ago, if you recall. I enjoyed it.
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Aah, that makes sense. I just read it as 350 000 = six digits, 1 500 000 = seven digits, → difference = one digit.
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Will releasing a shorter game cost you sales? Yes, probably.
But so did writing a genderlocked-male series existing at the intersection of two niche genres (gunpowder fantasy and military fiction) and I’ve done pretty okay for myself there.
The thing to remember is that every creative decision you make (and choosing when your story has enough wordcount to release is absolutely a creative decision) will alienate someone, because every time you make a choice to make your story a particular thing, you’re waving off people who want that story to be something else.
And that’s fine.
Because there are more than enough people out there who are looking for the particular kind of story you’re writing to make something like a living off of, and those people will judge your story on its merits as what you intended it to be, Your story will find an audience who are looking for a 350k word story, not a 1.5 million word one, and they will be the ones to judge it fairly.
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This is something I am wrestling with myself!
Thank you for helping us see the forest instead of only seeing the trees, because those trees we see can be as big as giant redwoods without perspective.
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Back in 2018, I wrote a 80k word glorified Choice of Broadsides fanfiction to unwind and to ramp myself up for Lords of Infinity.
It didn’t review all that well, it certainly didn’t make me much money (tbf, it was free + ads), but it did what I set out for it to do, I had fun making it, and I think a lot of people who picked it up had fun playing it.
And that was good enough for me.
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I think the only times to directly compare your work are:
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Conceptually, before you start (am I copycatting this? probably not, unless you’re grabbing the exact same plot)
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Coding/structure, if having difficulties (how did X handle this coding issue/structure its choices? would that work for me?)
like. it’s hard. it’s only natural to start comparing. but any trail of thought that leads you towards ‘is other thing better/longer/has more likes’ is one to be avoided. It fosters insecurity, it raises your doubts, it just plain makes you feel bad. There’s just no benefit. Maybe down the line analyse what worked/didn’t work about your project, but the focus should still primarily be your project.
*Asterisk that I haven’t published anything, but I did write a lot of fanfiction in a big fandom and saw a lot of people drive themselves to despair over their works being less popular than others.
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I’m probably going to get flak for saying this, but I’ll say it anyway.
Money had never been my motivation for publishing under Hosted Games. Popularity… somewhat yes, but people have told me that they enjoyed my game, and that works for me.
However, for Hosted Games to survive, they need to release games which turn a profit. During the early days of my game’s release, I was worried about my game’s performance, not because I needed a bigger royalty check, but because I knew HG had expenses to pay and the sales mattered to that end. By copyediting the game and putting it up on Steam, they were taking a huge financial risk on a first-time writer without any sort of background in game development or creative writing. Honestly, I want to write without caring about what others think, but I’ll admit that this fact kept me up at night sometimes.
I’m guessing that my game will still turn a profit for the company. But either way, this was my concern. Although I could always use a bigger audience…
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Okay, first off, holy shit PHD is amazing. You are already working your ass off, wow.
Second, maybe a ‘change of venue’ sort thing? For example, if you’re listening to music while writing all day on PhD, put on a specific “work playlist” and then when you get home, pick an entirely different genre of music?
Oh my god, yes, this. this is the singular best advice for anyone stuck with creativity. That said! If it’s Executive dysfunction at play, the best thing to do is trick yourself. You’re not starting the story, you’re choosing your font. You’re not starting your story, you’re testing the font on the first sentence. Oop, you’ve written a paragraph. Well, you aren’t finishing the page, you’re just writing the next paragraph cuz one paragraph is lonely. etc .
WELCOME BACK!
Man, it’d be nice to take a trip… but I can’t even afford a trip to the grocery store, much less another country… XD You guys should totes take pics and share! <3 Also, enjoy your research trip! I can’t wait to see how the experience changes and grows your work!
This. My entire audience is “Deranged 35 year old asexual married otaku fujoshi woman who happens to have niche interests in Imperial Chinese harems and Isekai Romance Novels”.
Holy shit, you and me both. XD It does feel pretty nice to get back into it though.
Hooooly crap, I needed to hear this. o.o thank you.
link???
Very accurate. Very well stated. You, friend, are a credit to your gender, whatever that may be. (or not be, as the case may be.)
…ignore me, I’m running on 5 hours of sleep, enough soda to slay a small child and an 8 hour sales shift.
Me, I’m motivated almost entirely by wanting to make a career/residual income so that I can eventually quit working a 9-5 and work for myself, so that I don’t have to worry about whether my boss is gonna fire me the next day or not. I realize this is a pipe dream… I do. But it’s my motivation.
That said, I definitely force myself away from comparing to how other games are going. BUT, that doesn’t mean I don’t pay attention to how other games are doing. Market research is important. obessessing over market research, not so much.
This weekend, I managed to get two whole hours worth of work in! Before I got some demoralizing news that honestly was just meant to be helpful.
I keep having trouble with *ifs. That is, in some places, the *if will just drop into the next paragraph. And sometimes, it doesn’t. and I can’t conceptualize WHY. I don’t get it, and the worst part is, I’ve read the wiki, I’ve read the posts on the discord, I’ve even read other people’s code, to see if I can figure it out.
And I just… I’m so frustrated, because it feels like I have to go back to the beginning and put in some really weird code to make it work, and I don’t… I don’t fucking want to. like. that’s so much work and worse it’s gonna make it take even LONGER to get the demo updated…
But if I keep going without figuring it out, it’s gonna be EVEN HARDER down the road to go back and put it in. I just… I wish I could wrap my head around the rules for it. I wish the rules made sense to me. But I can’t figure it out, and I think it’s probably because of my AuDHD or something but goddammit, it’s fucking frustrating.
Well that’s my rant for today.
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Choice of Broadsides: HMS Foraker, here.
I can’t tell you that it’s likely or easy, but I can tell you that it’s possible, because that’s where I’m at right now. It took a lot of work over the course of a decade, but I am more or less able to live off being a self-employed writer.
If the problem is that your *if blocks are snagging empty lines underneath it (so that the empty paragraph break line is being “reserved” by the if/else block above it), then that’s probably because the if/then block reads the empty line as being indented at the same level as the block as opposed to the rest of the text.
The way to stop that is to use a comment to signal to that block to stop indenting that empty line, so it’d be something like:
*if variable >= 1
[Text]
*comment endif
[Text continues]
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So, I was in the exact same situation as you at one point, dissertation and all. As it turned out, I didn’t start the project that would eventually reach publication until just after the PhD was finished, but I was working on another one at the time. I don’t know if this is at all helpful, but I think the best things you can do for yourself are:
- Form habits. For me, writing works best and gets done if I don’t have to rely on spurious things like ‘motivation’ or ‘executive function.’ I sit down and write every day, first thing after I get up. It’s not something I have to decide to do. It’s just a habit. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but it has to be something.
For situations where you have two huge writing projects, I recommend giving each of them at least a small block of dedicated time (daily, or Monday-Friday, or whatever works, as long as you can turn it into a habit). Which leads into:
- Watch yourself for burnout. Ideally, if things are just habits, they won’t feel like they take quite as much out of you as they do at the beginning when it’s pure effort to get them off the ground and working for you, but it still happens. It can be really tempting to push past your limits to finish faster, but the lost time (and general misery) of burnout are just… not worth it. Make sure you’re taking time to rest when you need it, and doing things you enjoy. And sleeping. Sleep is important, even if it is very rare in your situation.
Maybe this is all a bit useless, or obvious, but it’s what I found worked for me, and still does (just, much easier now that I don’t have to be working on the diss, too). Good luck!
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My goal for June: finish the Rebels update!
Meanwhile, if anyone’s ever wondered what it would be like if one of your computer game NPCs became self-aware, you might enjoy this just-published novel from my longtime friend Roberta:
I’m recommending it not (just) because we’re friends but because I loved it, and can’t wait for her to publish part 2.
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Thanks, I was searching for it but amazon hates show me English language stuff.
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