The Wayhaven Chronicles are written in first person.
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It may be tooting my own horn, but Falrika the Alchemist is definitely in first person, with clear and distinct POV changes as necessary.
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It’s very funny being married to another writer and opening up the shared laptop to see things like this in the VS Code tabs:
(I’m very proud of Fay for doing loads of writing last week; for a bunch of reasons she’s not been able to do much writing for a while. But getting back on the horse is a great first step and she inspires me every day.)
I am very tired today, but I’m going to try to make a good push on Honor Bound Chapter 9 for this third week of March. Let’s go for it!
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In addition to the ones mentioned, there’s at least The Shadow Society, Academy of Disaster, Golden: Book One (WIP), The Voice of Silverking (WIP), and The Chronicles of Asteros (WIP).
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Oh no, that’s an IFComp entry from last year.
Character outlines: I have character profiles, but they’re locked in the vault right now.
I don’t draw them, I simply imagine them in my head.
Now I know why you have that style of character-building. I basically do a reduced version of yours, but with exclusive stuff like strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes added in.
Yes, Shadow Society is in first person.
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In today’s writing news, I plugged in my external keyboard I haven’t used in a while (my laptop has a chronical deficiency of USB ports, and I usually write in short enough bursts that my body doesn’t have too much trouble), and it does miracles to my writing to have better ergonomics (even if I did need two pillows, two teddy bears, and a hattifattener to complete the setup), although it’s been long enough for me not using that particular keyboard that my muscle memory is fighting against it. 
The worst problem with that is that it doesn’t have background lighting, and I like writing in the dark, so I keep hitting wrong keys more often than usual.
Moral of the story, remember ergonomics!
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They just appear in my head and start telling me what to write. 
I generally start with name, attitude, physical attributes, goals, motivations, and conflicts, which I jot down in a stream-of-consciousness paragraph to include in my outline. But mostly I get to know them during the course of the story.
Good luck! I hope you find the energy you need and that the chapter comes along nicely.
I’d think adding teddy bears to anything would make an improvement. My laptop also has a deficiency of USB ports, but I use a dock to fix that issue so I can enjoy the simplicity of a proper keyboard and mouse and stop cursing every time I accidentally hit the mousepad and mess up whatever I was doing on my laptop.
In other news… climbs on platform
I’ve finally got my WIP forum post up and a DEMO ready to play!
bows, cheeks flushed from pride and fear of being perceived
climbs down in a hurry
For real, though, I’m super excited to announce that the first three chapters of Ink and Intrigue are ready to play. I’m opening up a private beta testing round, and would love feedback if anyone here is interested.
Also, can I just fangirl the title of my game for a minute? This is the first time it’s been announced. Ink and Intrigue is such a fitting title for the story. I love it!
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Congrats on your WiP threads (both the adult thread and the sfw version)!
Ink and Intrigue brings up images of Mata Hari writing her secret correspondence as she played out her intrigue, so it fits very well, when you know that your genre is right there!
I love the title as well.
. 
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I’m currently writing up the next batch of content for Scarlet Sorceress. I’m feeling oddly productive this week. Interestingly, gender-locked-female isn’t the popularity death sentence I thought it might be. The interest level seems decently substantial, and I’m actually seeing a fair bit of interest from male forum users.
…and I’ll play some Atelier every now and then just to visualize how to make anime candy.
I’ll also need to prepare the Spring Thing version of Dragon of Steelthorne before the deadline, but that shouldn’t take too long. I can probably get it done sometime this week.
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My own WiP, The Bureau, is also in first person with POV changes. Surprisingly, as many people have said they dislike both of those things, the forum page just recently reached 800 hearts! I’m extremely happy with that and it only wants to make me keep writing to make sure it reaches 1k before publication. That is I suppose my end goal for forum notoriety for the first installment of the series. As for goals for March, I’ve gotten the first half of Chapter 4 out, as well as an extra scene for the game as well. So, as far as I’m concerned, goal finished! Goal for April, get the rest of Chapter 4 done!
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It feels a little weird coming back to these threads.
I was here for a little while last year, plugging away slowly at a WIP and making the occasional post in the support thread. Unfortunately, real life decided that we couldn’t simply be permitted to have fun, and I had to deal with a minor chunk of unemployment and a major chunk of personal issues.
In that time, I simply couldn’t work on my story at all. I didn’t have the spoons left to deal with being creative, which sucked.
Thankfully, things have settled down. I have a job again, and a whole box full of new spoons back in the drawer, which means I’m able to get back to the WIP that I’ve missed so much. I’ve picked up a few ideas for improvements, so I’ll most likely be rewriting what was there somewhat, but it feels so good to even open CSIDE. I’ll be getting that WIP thread reopened when I have a solid update to upload.
It’s great to see these threads are still going as well, and the community still going strong supporting each other. Big congrats to everyone that’s made progress 
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I feel ya. I have lots of free time on my hands now, but I can’t bring myself to really work on my current WIP. It’s not even a matter of energy in my case, I just don’t have the heart for it.
I started a side-project to keep myself writing. Not something I’m likely to ever show anyone, but it’s relaxing to write something else for a change, something built from the ground up with my current knowledge of ChoiceScript and storytelling generally. I wish I had that experience one year ago, maybe then my main project wouldn’t be such a pile of spaghetti code.
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This is probably a weird question, and not terribly urgent since I’ll need to finish my story draft before starting a WIP thread (I’m 200% sure I’ll need to rewrite the beginning, and I feel it’d be unfair to the readers to first publish a WIP and then rewrite it, knowing I’m going to rewrite it), but I got stuck in my head worried about this and it doesn’t really help me with anything, so here goes.
I have this project that’s kind of structured like a TV miniseries, as in it consists of five (currently. I may add a sixth, if it seems to require one, but I’m not at that part of the plot yet, and I just recently added the plan to include a fifth, it was originally supposed to be four, but then I realized I want to spend more time in the latter half) parts. They, in turn, consist of chapters. The problem? Those chapters are less than 2k words apiece, playthrough-wise. Which, I think, is fine for the story, but how am I going to talk about it? Given that most of the stories here have way much longer chapters (which, incidentally, of course also means they have way less of them), I’m pretty much going to go against expectations here. Should I just never mention chapters in the forum posts at all, and instead go for something like “half of part (X) of (total)”, and the wordcount?
Oh, and also,
I had totally forgotten your game, thanks for reminding! I’ll need to reread it one of these days, there’s quite a few updates I haven’t checked.
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How could you forget such an amazing game!? (jk jk)
But you were missing out on @ViIsBae newest updates! 
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Yeah, I’d honestly not bother mentioning stuff like chapter length and whatnot. My newest update, the one that was 60k words total? It only added about 5k words per playthrough because fight scenes are extremely branch heavy. And the next update which will probably add 50-60k more, won’t add anything to the average playthrough count, because it’s literally just a different branch of the same scenario. So, in short, write what you know is gonna be good and don’t worry about what others are gonna say about word count and such. That’s my advice, at least.
Although, I’m also someone who has gone against norms a lot for what’s popular in games around the forum (POV’s, 3-7k word flashback scenes, etc.) so take that as you will LOL
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Happy Marchish!
It’s been… a busy month to say the least.
I’ve resumed Update 1’s development on Estheria: A Realm Divided, and that’s coming along intermittently. Admittedly, I’ve been a bit ‘burnt out’ in terms of my heavily creative component of writing. Just, a lot going on with life and the like.
In an effort to rejuvenate/recharge, I began working on a Life Simulator known as Once in a Lifetime.
My goal is to over time introduce 3 unique eras to the game (1842, 1921, and 2004). This’ll give players a wide variety of events and actions that can be used in the game, but will be ambitious to implement. To give myself a starting grounds towards a WiP build, I’ve focused on implementing 2004 for now. This is the most feasible route by placing everyone firmly on a ‘modern’ ground.
I’ve spent plenty of time visualizing how I plan to actually let the game progress from a functionality standpoint and have settled on a series of subroutine files/injections that all play into a ‘main’ scene.
From the ‘main’ scene, you’ll find yourself able to interact with every element in the game. Job Management, Relationship Interactions, the News, all of it. This’ll be a hell of an undertaking to feed in, but should be doable based upon some early tests I’ve made.
Since beginning work on Once in a Lifetime, I’ve finally delved into the code and development side of things. Yesterday saw massive strides on the Character Creation side, with both the Talent and Attribute allocation code fully functional. This is described below and shown in screenshots!
- The player will select the Attributes section of the Creator list.
- This opens the main screen, showing their remaining Attribute Allotment Points, and their current Stats for each of the 6 main Attributes.
- Upon choosing an Attribute, the player is given the option to apply points or to view details on the Attribute from the Glossary (via subroutine).
- Presented with an input_number field, the player can submit between 1-4 Attribute Allotment Points to allocate. Each point raises the base Stat (which starts at 20 for all Stats) by 20, to a maximum of 100.
- If the player does not have enough Attribute Allotment Points upon submission, the game will inform them (in a playful way), and force them back to the Attribute main window.
- If the player’s choice would bring the Attribute over a Stat number of 100, the game will inform them (in a playful way), and force them back into the Attribute main window.
- Once submitting and confirming their allotment, the player is provided the updated Attribute Stat number and continues back to the main Attribute window.
I detailed this through a series of screenshots that can be seen below in the workflow!
All in all, been quite a productive week. Looking forward to the next week of development!
Take care ya’ll.
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I am positively overjoyed by the fact that I finally, finally found an app to replace the one I was using for mapping out character stat sheets, which stopped being available some time ago!
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Hmm… I really like your idea, but I feel like the attributes are a bit out of place for a life sim. They work for the initial character creator, but it’s a bit clinical(?) for this type of game. Instead, I think these attributes should increase through a more narrative bit of gameplay. For example:
- over the last few months, you’ve worked on X
- there are X number of activities, all involving one or the skills, but you have time to do Y number of them
Etc
Hey, Anna!
So, the way these attributes will work will provide a starting baseline, ultimately.
They will raise and lower through your individual actions. This allows the game to provide a series of undercurrents to every activity that help determine chance percentages of X occurring. They work in conjunction with your Talents, studies/degrees, special ‘traits’ that can be unlocked through gameplay, etc.
The reason for this is that I wish for gameplay to be emergent, with emergent chances and consequences. When you make a Risky choice/activity, I want there to be a chance that it could still succeed or fail dynamically, rather than just picking the correct option.
I spent quite a bit of time in the game design ring on this one before settling ultimately on Attributes and how they’d function. Ultimately I do need them as a balancing act.
That said, I do think that you have a solid proposal of your own, and it’s something I certainly looked at. Right now I am determining as a derivative of that to propose a number of ‘Actions per Year’ before the next year must forcibly be passed.
I hope that explanation helps!
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I’ve begun beta testing for some Seedcomp and Spring Thing entries.
This year I plan to consolidate stuff earlier, so that I don’t have to show up late. Last year, I could only play stuff. This year, I would want to be more proactive in beta testing and reviewing existing stuff. And then use the strengths of others to continue to make my work evolve.
I will build my IFComp entry off my previous jam work. But (almost) everything will be (nearly) original this time.
Congratulations once again! I may give this one a shot, time pending. I’m just a little more active on the other forum.
No idea how popular this one’s going to be, but from the looks of it, it’s off to an early (and good) start. As for the latter, I have no idea how well-received the otome genre is in IFComp, so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t do as well as you anticipate.
Speaking of which, my stuff hasn’t been that well received, since my ideas are still all over the place.
Forum notoriety? You’d gonna be kidding me. Bureau is one of the most active WIPs out there (there are others like Thousand of Us and Monster Evolution though, but they are sort of niche.).
I hope work on Steam and Shadow is still underway.
You’re more experienced now, so the process would be smoother!
Sounds resource management-y.
Edit:
The catch is “the three distinct eras, or rather, centuries.” That alone will distinguish it from, say, Our Lives: Beginnings and Always.
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