The concept reminds me a little of Hans Grueber from Die Hard. He was pretending to be a terrorist making demands to release prisoners, but all he really wanted to do was steal 600 million dollars.
Holly: You’re nothing but a common thief!
Hans: No, I am an exceptional thief.
yeah i was gonna say basically the same! and also, idk as a writer i have a pretty strong determination that however readers or players respond to any of my work is fine and okay. even if it’s stuff i disagree with or think is just totally off base, i’m like “well, to each their own.” i don’t like the idea of sort of policing how any reader/player responds to any part of my work because it feels sort of censor-y and i don’t think it’s helpful in creating better writing, stories, or art generally. and i think every response is sort of very useful information to me as a writer, one because it’s just exciting to have people interested in what i’m doing, but also because it makes me think more about the story itself and if i’ve somehow glanced off something super essential, or if i’m focusing too much on something that isn’t the core purpose of the story, or whatever else.
i know how i feel about what i’m writing (including the characters, the plot, the themes, and so on), but on the other hand, i know that the readers of whatever i write aren’t going to know exactly my thoughts on it. and i’m not going to tell all because i don’t want readers to have me, the writer, as an authority figure in their minds as they read (so to speak) on a correct or incorrect way to read it.
this is also because i feel like the writer/reader dynamic should be anything goes on both sides. the same way how a reader feels about a character i’m writing doesn’t have any impact on how i write them (usually, anyway, unless it’s a critique that i find helpful and want to integrate somehow), i don’t want to give my opinion as a writer entirely because i don’t want it to monopolize how the work is received. if that makes sense. and also because, at least in my head, i feel like what i write is less something i’m inventing and more something that exists in some vague ‘somewhere else’ that i’m finding pieces of and compiling together somehow. it feels like i would be playing god of a world/story that i really just sort of stumbled luckily on.
anyway WHOOPS that got long. but i think about this a lot!!!
So, I’m also new here and I’ve just started writing a story. I’m cautious about overcommitting, so your advice about starting out with some shorter 2000ish word games sounds like a good idea.
Do you have any examples of short and effective games of that length that I could look at and take some inspiration from?
Make them mildly annoying.
That’s mostly a (cynical) joke, and my answer is largely the same as the ones above: more grounded types of cruelty or callousness will help, but in the end people are going to react how they react, and there will always be some who are ‘attracted’ to the villain no matter what kinds of horrible things they pull. It’s fiction, after all; part of the draw is that no one has to reckon with real-world consequences, which provides the level of detachment that facilitates that reaction, I think.
But the joke does also have a kernel of truth, in my experience. Being annoying, even just a little, makes people hate a character quite a lot faster than anything ‘evil’ they might do. Unless perhaps some of the evil deeds are against the Player Character specifically/a particularly beloved ally, maybe. That might work too.
So I guess I’d say, make it at least a little bit personal, or make them at least a little bit annoying, or both.
ETA: I also do think that even a relatively small-scale act of injustice or cruelty, on-screen, can have a lot more impact than a large number of offscreen deaths or harms. There’s something to be said for making the player actually experience this character doing something terrifying and horrible, up close and personal, even if it’s not to them. But how much that one’s possible may depend on what you’re comfortable writing, and what otherwise suits the story and its tone.
…why am I suddenly having a sheriff’s deputy arguing with a federal agent about whether or not a town has a homeless problem?
This really turned out to be pseudo-nordic noir, huh.
I feel like this is pretty common, to the point where I wouldn’t really call it genre subversion. The pure cackling Kefka-esque villain is, imo, far less common than the “villain who seems like a cackler but actually has a reasonably sympathetic motivation that sorta makes sense if you squint at it a bit and are willing to accept large amounts of collateral damage.”
You can’t, sorry. No amount of evil will make people decide that they don’t really want to bang the hot villain.
You can try to force it by giving them some unattractive behaviors, but it’s really easy to make that feel forced. IMO you are way better off if you just accept that people are gonna be hot for your villain. If nothing else, comments about your dommy mommy villain or whatnot are good for engagement.
Some players are just going to be down bad for that villain.
So use that, take advantage of that horniness to let the villain hurt the player more. Let that villain string the MC along and get them to do things against their interests, things that hurt the MC, or their allies, or the world around them.
An effective villain would know they’re attractive, and use that attractiveness to use their potential enemies as a weapon.
If the player is smart enough, they’ll realise just how badly they’ve been used, just how much their own intuition has been debased and weaponised. If you make the things that villain makes a sufficiently devoted MC do bad enough, then most people will be “smart enough”.
I have a bit of extra free time these days… does anyone want me to read and leave a comment on their WIP? If yes, let me know.
I’ll do Talon Saga soon.
Cool, thank you! If you get a chance, please read The Rise of Cthulhu so far and leave some feedback. I’ve gotten some good stuff already, though the changes won’t be put live until Chapter 3 is ready, which will probably be a couple weeks.
I’ve been working slowly on a WIP of my own for a while and I had a question about coding.
If I have a branching section that reuses one paragraph from the middle of another section, but nothing else. Should I use *goto commands to jump back and forth to avoid bloating the word count? Or is it fine to just copy paste that paragraph.
I try to avoid having duplicate paragraphs or even duplicate sentences when I can, I’m just not sure if there’s a standard or I’m wasting my time with excess coding
Good day!
So my goals for this month is to continue finishing up the linear version of my chapter 3 before branching it out.
Once branched, I can focus on the land of the dead branch, the cave branch and the small village branch.
Essentially the story had no involvement with werewolves. Actually there was a plan to only include one or two but after the story led the land of the dead, I’ve figured this could be the best place for the last clan to be. But unlike Wulfric who supposedly has all 3 transformations, this clan of werewolves can only access 2 of their forms. The Innate Form & Wolf form.
Also I want this chapter to include the first sighting of one of the weapons picked at the prologue. Specifically Urrul’s Spine.
The chapter is also planned to end in a crazy cliffhanger but when I release the updated WIP it will also include the first bit of chapter 4 which answers what happened in 3 and includes learning about the diffent kinds of vampire organizations and their lore
Chapter 4 is probably gonna be the quickest chapter to write since it’s not as branched out as the others but it’s also one of the most important ones due to the binding vow that mc can choose to accept or reject.
Sanku!
Personally, if is a large paragraph, I’ll use gosub. For single sentences, I’ll sometimes make the sentence a variable. Otherwise, I copy/paste it all. But that’s just my approach.
The latter. While not avoiding duplicate block of text is a common courtesy, duplicate sentences are perfectly normal. They’re unlikely to meaningfully change your wordcount and writing *goto commands for them is a first step on your way to spaghetti code. Just Ctrl+C that stuff.
Thanks everyone for your replies (and hello to all the other new people)! It’s a very warm and lovely community here I feel like.
Currently my idea is to make a thread when I’ve finished chapter 2 (hopefully by 19th April as mentioned above), so there’s a decent bit of content for people to start with. I guess I should probably consider doing some polish on the menus and stats screen before then as well! I’m also still not committed to a title… 
I love seeing everyone’s writing goals, by the way. Wishing everyone the best of luck with completing them! I’ve been working solo for a few years now and I’m just realising how much I’ve missed being around other writers!
Today’s pondering: I’m having so much fun calling this MC Löke (there are a few levels of multilingual pun there that I’m very fond of) that I’m considering surname-locking them in addition to first-language-locking them.
How important is it that the sentence/paragraph is identical to previously used ones? If it’s super important and you will be using it a lot, then I would use variables, simply for ease of editing. One change, every instance gets updated, no need to search the text for the others. It also marks it out as a special sentence which you need to be careful editing.
If it’s not important, copy and paste.
My story is still in its early stages, but I’d love to see your perspective on it, if you could spare the time.
I’m all for locking in a last name. It keeps me from having to think about what a good last name would be for the setting.
Locking in a first language should be fine, as long as any instances of that language can be understood by context clues or a translation given or something like that. Just so the player isn’t looking at the game, confused by what their MC is saying.
Oh, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. It’s mostly some odd spelling, light swearing, and a trait that affects the investigation in different ways.
Of course! Scope creep (which just means adding in a feature here and there until your workload becomes too intense) is very real.
Game jams (such as this IF Short Games Showcase) are a great way of participating and getting feedback to make a short game in a short amount of time. Searching on itch, tumblr, or on these forums for “game jams” or “if game jams” is a great start. Playing these games is also super recommended to get an idea of what’s possible!
If publicly releasing games make you nervous, then I recommend either participating in the game jam but never submitting, or drafting very short concepts and work on them in private. Before I made my first WIP, I had already made 12 smaller games privately (4000 words or less), 1 medium (9000 words) fan-fiction game, and 1 large (20000 words) fan-fiction game.
What I mean by a short concept is:
Then, bit by bit, plan for five pages. 10 pages. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s so much more work than you’re expecting when you’re beginning. My first ever game was only 25 pages of choices and it took a month to fully complete each branching path and option.
I hope this helps a bit! It was kind of long.