Yes! Make it a fixed, non customizable MC and include no romance. For best results, walls of text thousands of words long between a few choices that don’t impact hardly anything, with some brutal stat checks in between and lots of early endgame states. That should be perfection.
@Nocturnal_Stillness Yes, I’m writing a screenplay. It’s a bit tough but I’m over halfway.
Hello @Nocturnal_Stillness
I’am writing books in Wattpad. I’am all so a Vtm story teller.
I guess I’ve known for a while now that I’m not a writer, but that doesn’t stop me trying sometimes. I have a lot of stories that live inside my head. Some I occasionally toss around the idea of finding a way to tell.
I’m not yet, but I want to try writing a novel(la) or a selection of short stories. Years ago I wrote a lot of novels - these days it’s just hard to fit it around my work writing and pace the brain energy. I also have some baggage and imposter syndrome around prose writing and I feel rusty. But, the easiest way to fail is by not trying at all and I think I just need to get over myself and do it rather than shilly-shallying.
I’m not working during most of April, so I might try and do some non-game writing then. I’m not sure whether it’ll be original or fanfic; the latter appeals because of feeling more low-stakes and maybe that’s what I need at the moment to get over the imposter-syndrome business. If it’s fanfic, it’ll probably be related to Pathologic, to one of my TTRPG characters/settings, or Heart of Battle. (I realised that the Heart of Battle fanfic I started could end up being a huge long story - which I’m not sure I want to do, but is a possibility!
I do keep going back and forth over whether a particular idea would work better as a game or as a book. I know various people here like @leiatalon and @Raven_de_Hart have done both and Leia has translated one of her books into a game - how do you make that decision?
Hello @Omeg
No problem. No need to apologize.
I’m not officially a writer (I’m not even good at it lol), like officially published with actual books on my name, but I do love to write and have written tons of romance stories (mostly unfinished), and publish in social apps like Wattpad or Ao3 (if it’s fanfic), and most of my finished ones are shorts or one-shots.
I’m currently working on a sports romance novel though, and my Stardew Valley-inspired IF here is mostly my side project that I enjoy writing. It’s a combination of little romance stories in one book, it’s great to able to expand on those rather just be scenes in my head hehe.
I haven’t written in two months. Getting started again was SO hard - I am still trying to recall some quick keys I had in my muscle memory - but Komodo Dragons here I come!
I have a YA romance novel I’m working on. I can picture a lot of really fun scenes, but the scenes in between are kinda boring! I think it needs a subplot or something.
Also, I want to write a mini series script to put on YouTube or something. Probably Little Women, but I think a mystery/horror would be fun (and a bit more successful). I really don’t have an interest in screen writing, but I like acting. And there isn’t a ton of opportunities for acting in my town. So I figured, why not get a group together to film something?
That sounds fun. I briefly considered submitting a script to the BBC as I had an idea for a series where a group of friends who used to play DnD together until life pulled them apart are drawn back together by the death of the friend who was their DM then after the funeral they find out he made them one last campaign to tackle.
It would have flicked between the group as kids and the group as adults.
Ironically I ended up not being any good at writing scripts lol
That sounds like a fun idea, though!
I’ve been playing Heart of Battle in a blind haze for the past two hours. Not sure how I missed this one, but I haven’t been this hooked on an IF in ages (currently beating myself up over choosing to start it before clocking in to work – not entirely sure how I’m going to survive the next eight hours without it). Thank you for your mentioning (and by proxy recommending) it!
Good luck. You can get back into it, just takes time.
Awww, I’m really glad you’ve been enjoying it! My wife made it so it’s very close to my heart (pun intended).
I’ve written a dozen or so novels, have produced a few full-cast audiodrama, and freelance as a narrative designer when I can find work (which isn’t often). I’ve considered going all-in on solo game dev given the current job market.
Currently I’m focused on IF for my next project, but I also maintain a youtube channel for retrogaming content like video game history and analysis of RPG and adventure games.
I can only offer my perspective, but hopefully it’s some help to you, and maybe to @Nocturnal_Stillness as well. I also came from writing novels to writing IF, which I know I mention, like, every time I go in to give writing advice, but it feels like an important distinction, just so y’all know what my background/experience is. I was forged in the fires of slush pile hell and NaNoWriMo before they embroiled themselves in weird controversies and kept making the wrong decisions.
That out of the way, the ideas I preserve for games are those that are, in short, vibes-based more than anything. For example, Freshman Magic was a result of me, first and foremost, wanting to play around in the Academy Romance space, which was very popular in romance novels for a bit there several years ago. I didn’t have a distinct plot in mind, and I didn’t have a strong character that I wanted to explore through that story. In essence, it was an idea I was interested in, but I wasn’t particularly attached to any character or plot progression. That made it so I could more easily “let go” and hand that stuff over to the player/reader.
In contrast, the current series of books I’m putting out was pretty firmly about this found family of small town queer men—and their one token straight friend—who had a falling out being forced back together and repairing their relationships. That’s the kind of story that, for me, needed me to be in more control, so that worked better as books.
The other benefit to going “vibes based” on IF, for me, is that if I already like a vibe enough to want to work on a project in that space, chances are good I’m going to continue to like that vibe. One game is about 5-6 novels’ worth of words, so it really helps if it’s the kind of thing that keeps me excited for a longer period. If an idea feels more self-contained or fleeting (Figuring that out just comes with a lot of practice. I’ve been writing for mumble mumble years.), then it’s probably better in a more controlled narrative style, at least for me.
I’ve been having a procrastinate writing by doing housework day. I’ve just been feeling pretty lethargic the past few days, and haven’t felt up to doing much writing which is unfortunate because I’m actually really excited about the scene I’m working on I just haven’t had the energy.
As for the working on non-IF projects, I have a bunch of linear novels that I started and never finished in my google drive that I hope to work on one day. I do have an idea for a side project that I am currently trying to decide if it work better as linear or IF which is why I haven’t started it yet. I originally conceptualized it as an IF, but thought it might work better as linear. I’m just having a lot of trouble deciding which version should be cannon if it’s linear, which makes me think it should be interactive. So I’m still pretty undecided on it.
I don’t feel much inclination for writing linear novels myself these days, because apart from self-publishing on Amazon or something, which I refuse to do, my audience’ll certainly be larger with IF, no matter how small that audience is, since, you know, there are so much more English-speakers than Finnish-speakers in the world, and there’s no way I could land a publishing deal for an English-language manuscript.
I do miss writing in Finnish though. I’d write my stuff in Finnish and then translate it to English, because I enjoy writing in Finnish more, but it always ends up sounding machine-translated for some reason, so I don’t. My (English-language) text flows way better when I write directly in English than when I translate it.
I haven’t written a novel since 2017 because frankly the market had shifted and I wasn’t making enough in royalties to justify the time it’d take. I started freelancing and transitioning to game writing and narrative design instead.
Art for the sake of art is great but when you don’t have a day job, you have to take the economics of everything into account.
I hesitate to call my work art, but I used to write a novel (multiple novels, I guess) for my website, so I wasn’t making any money with it in the first place (I was also plotting so many game mods). But yeah, that was before I had to actually worry about making a living for real.
My art teacher would say that art is “the act of deriving meaning from synthesis” so if you’re making something intended to make people feel or understand something, it counts as art as far as I’m concerned.