So, it appears that my grammer skills, and to a lesser extent coding skills have something to be desired. With that in mind, I am creating this topic to try and find someone who can assist me with fixing my story, so people can read it and are not stopped every few pages by grammar mistakes. Anyway, yeah. I did reach out a few times before, but with little success. Please indicate what you think on this thread I guess?
Also, I hope that you all had a good weekend.
1 Like
Is this a paid or volunteer assistant?
You’d almost definitely have more luck just posting a beta thread than asking for an individual to commit to your project. You might not be eager for folks to see your grammar and coding mistakes, but that’s the kind of thing beta testing is specifically for.
5 Likes
Looks like you have WIP threads. Unless you’re offering a paid job or co-authorship, you’d be better off posting there. Sometimes you don’t get as much feedback as you want for free. That’s just the way things are unfortunately. Not everyone has something on the scale of Wayhaven on their hands. Looking at your your post history it doesn’t look like frequent other lower traffic WIPs to give feedback and it continues the cycle. Sometimes if you give, you might just get back.
What helped me the most with my Grammar was Grammarly, even the free version caught things I never would. It won’t help with your coding, but at least it should fix 99% of your grammar trouble.
3 Likes
I second this. Personally, I despise Grammarly because the free version once told me my sentences were too long, but there are published Hosted Games out right now that would have been so much less painful if someone had thought to run them through a basic check of spelling, grammar and correct vocabulary usage beforehand.
3 Likes
I did take a look at grammarly a while back, unfortunately as of right now it’s not very accessible at all with screen readers, or as far as I can tell just in general. Which is annoying since yeah, it would be a very good resource to use if I could find a way to use it reliably.
1 Like
Make sure you have a Discord server up for your WIP. Make a channel for bug reports. That’s the easiest way for players to report bugs as they find them–quick and frictionless.
If they have to message you directly somewhere, tweet at you, send an ask/submission on Tumblr, post on a forum, or send you an email, that’s just a bit too much work to ask of people who are reading your WIP for fun in their free time.
I kind of disagree here. If you have a low traffic WIP, it’s probably not worth the time sink of setting up and maintaining an active Tumblr. Diacord might be ok, but again, if it’s low traffic I suspect you’re unlikely to get many people joining and using it frequently asked it’s something you’d have to be on top of checking.
If the WIP is already in the forum, at least it’s in one place to keep track of easily, concentrate any readers to one discussion board and a forum thread is at least likely to have some activity on it.
2 Likes
Tbh, I’m gonna have to disagree with that from, just from personal experience. I don’t know what would be considered low traffic; if it goes by likes by post is it under 1000? 500? 100? Or if it goes by amount of clicks on the demo is it under 50k clicks? 25k? 10k? 1k? Genuinely asking this part because I have no idea.
BUT I do know that I created the tumblr for my game about a month after first releasing the demo which at the time had about 100-150 likes I’m pretty sure, maybe even less. Now, the Tumblr has more followers than the amount of likes on the forum page for the game, which means potentially more people seeing my game than is expressed on the forum. I don’t post anything crazy, mainly updates, thoughts during the writing process, songs that inspire certain aspect of the writing, and I usually only post 1-2 times a week which isn’t much.
However, getting your game circulating in different circles by posting an update and by chance having a few people reblog it can lead to more fans of your work. And even though it doesn’t happen too often, whenever I see that little inbox message pop up, I get a reinvigorated sense of determination, because I know someone liked my work enough to take the time to message me about it, which is still just wild to me to this day. Personally, I think it’s a great sense of motivation and gives you more goals to set for yourself, at least that’s the way I look at the social media stuff.
3 Likes
Less about clicks, and more about interaction. Some games have high levels of discussion and popularity, some don’t for a whole lot of reasons. Even among my own WIPs there are some I would consider making a Tumblr for, and some I personally wouldn’t bother with as it would likely waste time I could have spent working on the project for little benefit.
The audience for COG games is much wider than this forum, that is true. A lot more people buy games on the stores than are present on this forum. I guess the question comes down to how many of those are actually wanting to give serious feedback rather than just follow a project’s progress as a fan, as the OP wants editing feedback.
Which is kind of my point here. The OP is looking for feedback, but with the effort put in, it sounds like tumblr isn’t the best place to get that unless you have a very active community there.
That’s cool and all, but it also takes a degree of comittment and time to be able to maintain an active tumblr that not everyone has. It is also very easy to go down the rabbit hole of if you have limited free time, that the time spent on social media is time that doesn’t get put into actually finishing the writing of a game. Particularly if the writing of a game is getting hard to finish, social media is pretty seductive to go and play on instead, it takes a fair bit of self control to manage that which it sound like you have which is great, but the more active a tumblr gets, the more time it’ll potentially take away from your game creation time. If I only have half an hour free, I kind of figure that’s often better put into working on my games so I can try to get an update ready, but to each their own. If social media provides motivation to work on your project and you have the time free to add it into your schedule then that’s fine too 
3 Likes
I don’t know what Jacic was disagreeing with since all I said was that you should have a Discord, but now that we’re on this topic, I do think you almost certainly should create a Tumblr for your WIP. At some point.
A lot of people find new IFs only via Tumblr. Post in the #interactive fiction tag and you get seen by people looking for something new to read. You also might get noticed and reblogged by other authors. There’s also a blog dedicated to keeping track of as many IFs as possible, so it’s all but guaranteed that they at least will reblog your intro post.
If your WIP is “low traffic” that’s just all the more reason to expose it to Tumblr.
But! It’s true that it’s possible to end up sinking too much time into social media and not enough time into the actual writing. The timing of your social media exposure and your demo release should be chosen carefully. Consider how much time you have currently and try to anticipate how much time your life is going to be letting you have over the next few months/years. Consider your ability to self-discipline. Consider what habits you tend to fall into when using social media for other stuff and whether there are red flags in those previous habits. And finally, don’t jump the gun and start getting people interested in your WIP too long before you have anything to show for it.
Personally, I know that I have a track record of losing all motivation and energy to work on something right after I start telling people about it (thanks ADHD), so if I were going to write an IF I’d hold off on any kind of real, definite announcement as long as possible.
As of right now I’m focussing on one, fixing the grammatical errors in my WIP so it is actually readable without a bunch of people sending me comments essentially saying, this is good, but I had difficulty reading it because of.
After I finish all of that, I might consider making a Tumblr. As of right now discord is out of the question, as unless I am really really missing something it isn’t really that accessible, even with the mobile version. To say nothing about the computer version.
Right now, once I fix the grammar and such I’m more looking for discussions on the forum, depending on how that goes I would then probably make a Tumblr. As I haven’t really had that much exposure to Tumblr I would have to educate myself to it. Especially since my primary focus will be on the WIP itself, and secondary will be its exposure through social media, as I am of the opinion that a WIP, or any work really should show it’s worth through what it is, not necessarily what media coverage it has, although admittedly the media coverage would assist in drawing people to be in this case WIP.
So yeah, that’s my little rant. Shrug
Also, thanks for all the feedback.
On a bit of a tangent, it would be nice to know exactly what I did wrong, so that I can focus on what I need to fix, and so that I can focus on not making similar mistakes in the future.
At least with the coding issues, as there have been a couple spoken of in the WIP discussion thread, those are fairly straightforward to find, diagnose, and deal with.
Especially as I know where to look.
What do you mean?