I know that feeling. I think if there were infinite Hamartias, one of them would enjoy trying their hand at some kind of very loose pastiche of Brideshead Revisited
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I have no idea what you’re talking about and I’m feeling woefully inadequate due to that. 
(Also really worried about what would happen if there were multiple versions of me – more than there currently are, I’ve come across some that seem like me from an alternate universe – running around.)
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Yes please!!!
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Just nerding out over a couple of books that were quite influential in British literature and wondering what they / stories inspired by them might look as IF - hopefully the below gives some context!
- Rebecca: Book about a young lady who marries a wealthy aristocratic widower and goes to live with him; his stately home and the people who live in it are absolutely dominated by memories of the deceased wife. A bit of a masterclass in atmospheric writing.
- Brideshead Revisited: Book that basically follows a fellow and his relationship with an aristocratic family over the span of his life and the events that took place during it - you follow the lead during his university years and his friendship with the younger son of that family, his unhappy youngish adulthood which is marked by a relationship with his old friend’s sister, and the whole thing is set against the backdrop of the final period, which is the Second World War - the story is bookended by that man, now an officer, revisiting the stately home, Brideshead herself. Also good character writing and atmosphere, and a really haunting exploration of faith.
The latter I think hides the bones of a really potentially structurally fascinating IF - I think it would be really interesting to have a MC effectively define their adulthood via their choices in university. So every MC starts in the same place, at uni, then their adulthood career and relationships diverge materially based off what happened in university, and then everything converges once more in the war.
I could even see the war as a sort of recurring framing device, as well as a discrete arc - start with the war, have an interlude between university and adulthood, again in the war, then finally pay it all off in act 3…
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Weirdly I’ve been playing with an idea that goes a bit like this (not necessarily including war but some kind of big crisis)… my biggest hangup with it (apart from the fact that I have too many story plans already) is that I… honestly have no idea how to write interesting university content.
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My WIP is set entirely at a university, so I am either a good or terrible person to ask, hahaha. Though I am cheating in that mine has magic, too, granted.
My very general and vague advice is that it helps a lot if you have something to say about the type of university that you want to set it at.
- E.g. my Pactbinder is in many ways following the tradition of the classic dark academia stuff like Secret History and Brideshead, where the setting’s atmosphere is very rarefied and sort of aristo-elitist - something that’s sort of seductive but poisoned, if that makes sense. Though I think all of these stories (and stuff like Babel) all take the genre in extremely different directions. But some themes and hooks naturally emerge from that elitist backdrop - scenes depicting the affluent and / or aesthetically satisfying aspects of the students’ lifestyles, exploring the ugliness behind that aesthetic, and generally asking it means to fit into one of these institutions, and what price is one paying to do so?
- By contrast, Eric Moser’s CCH / Community College Hero stuff took the complete opposite focus and did a great job of tripling down on the underdog themes of a less prestigious institution - a looked-down on protagonist at a looked-down on school, grappling with classic community college issues (how do you avoid falling through the cracks? Who’s here for the long haul vs who’s trying to get a transfer to somewhere better? etc). All with a big superhero twist of course.
Once you kind of get the vibe of the type of university you’re depicting down, I think it’s easier to start pinpointing themes and hooks and content that could make for intriguing writing therein.
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There’s also the fact that all stories I’ve read that take place in a university read so differently from my own experiences at university that it looks completely unrecognizably alien and just doesn’t compute to me, and writing based on my own experience would just end up a not-a-plot that would be as engaging as videogame grinding.
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That’s fair - it may just be that it isn’t a setting that speaks to you / stirs your muse, so to speak. For me, my observation is that most of the successful university fiction to me sells less the experience of actually being in university, and more the allure of university.
The high school / secondary school kid’s anticipation for the place that will be the bridge to their shining future and transition to adulthood, an adult’s nostalgia-tinged memories turning a place that, like every other place, was rather mundane in reality into a symbol of past freedoms, glories and excesses, or alternatively, the wistful what-if of the university years they wish they could have had. The friends they will make / did make / could have made, the shenanigans gotten up to, the adulthood ahead - etc etc.
I think it’s pretty fertile ground for a story, but as with all things - something in that does have to speak to the prospective author of course.
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Which is part of the alienness! I’ve never understood what’s alluring in it, demonstrated by the fact that as a kid, in a writing exercise “write the most boring opening sentence you can think of”, mine was somewhere along the lines “last year, I started my studies at the university”.
(The other part of the alienness is that all of the university-focused stories I’ve consumed take place in US or UK and the culture is just. Something I can’t relate to at all? Like, I don’t recognize almost anything of it. It’s just gibberish. Apart from being on your own and having schoolwork to do.)
But I still have this story idea that only makes sense if the characters are getting to know each other at a university! Sometimes I hate my brain. (Today is one of those days, although from other reasons.)
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The most important thing I think is to remember that players will parse “small” differences as reactivity just as sharply as they’ll parse “big” ones, so long as they know things could have been different.
I actually kinda handicap myself here, because a lot of my text variation tends to show up as exposition and internal monologue, so a lot of players don’t necessarily realise something is variable text.
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At one point I wanted to do a Rebecca inspired IF, but I couldn’t figure it out
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I think one way might just be to give the player a lot of greyed-out options to represent things they could do, or might want to do, but just… can’t.
The degree of catharsis the player would get when they finally run into that
-“No, you shut up!”
Option and find it actually selectable might actually break some peoples’ brains.
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As of the middle of last month, I’ve been working on my current game/story for a whole year now. It originally was just a small, rather daft idea I had that I intended to jot down and not get distracted by (as I was then in the process of a writing a visual novel of which I’d already produced 80K words of script), but this idea would soon become an obsession of mine, and I here I am a year later with over 300K words and counting (though hopefully not counting too much more, because I need to wrap this up sooner or later and come up with a finished, playable game).
When I first typed out that inane, six-word synopsis, I had no idea it had any chance of becoming something I would spend most of my time thinking about and probably the most ambitious project I’ve ever worked on, and the fact that I’m not the slightest bit sick of it is a testament to… well, something. It’s possible I’m making a game that’s truly fun and interesting, or my brain broke somewhere along the way and I lost the ability to become bored. Either way works for me.
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My brain broke that way a long time ago.
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I really appreciate this too. One of the two playable characters in my game is graysexual, and a significant supporting character is closer to being fully ace. When it comes to playing games with more user-definable characters, I really do like having more input on whether my character is ace and/or aro.
I’d love to take part in this one of these years. I even had an idea for a toxic-yuri story I came up with last week. Problem is, it doesn’t fit this year’s game jam’s theme. Ah, well.
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Finished two out of four characters’ story arcs! One of them is an RO, and I think I wrangled the sex scene into a good shape. This month I’ll see if I can get another of the two remaining story arcs done. I think I won’t post the new content publicly until I get the entire project completed.
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Thank you for the new thread, @myeraland
Reusing my goal for May, since I didn’t manage to meet it.
May progress:
- Chapter 4 scene-to-scene layout complete
- Drafted two more scenes.
By the way, Discourse added back the feature to see every user that has liked a post!
It opens a scrollable list if you click on the heart.
Wishing everyone a productive month!
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Dang, that does sound very good, but maybe more with the feel/texture of a Twine game than a ChoiceScript one.
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Just started chapter 3.
Me five minutes ago: (squeeing) Chapter 3!!!
Me now: (bewildered, staring) I think I need a spreadsheet…
(Edit) Me five minutes later: I don’t understand why a spreadsheet will help.
(Second edit) Me ten minutes later: I love my spreadsheet with a passion I scarcely knew I was capable of.
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But at least you have an extra spreadsheet? Spreadsheets make everything better by the virtue of simply existing.
If you’re like me and actually like spreadsheets, that is. Otherwise they make everything worse.
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