I’m a longtime reader of CoG and HG, and I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and try writing one myself. I’ve got some programming experience, I’ve got CSIDE, and I am exploring the forums. This community here is so supportive and encouraging; the tips I’ve found so far have been invaluable!
I’m about 7k words into the first chapter, and honestly it’s such a relief to finally get this story out of my head and onto the page. I’m really excited to be here and say hello to all of you. I hope your projects are going well and I hope one day we’ll all get to read each other’s work:)
I am not despairing; that was more for 2020 when I wasn’t writing and wasn’t sure when I ever would again. But I am a bit frustrated.
When I was in high school, I ran cross country my senior year. For anyone outside of America, that is a sport where you run a 5 kilometer course along rough terrain. One of the guys on our team was a slightly mentally handicapped fellow, and he ran quite different from the rest of us. We were taught about conserving energy, making sure we kept our speed up yet still had a little something left for a sprint in the last few hundred meters. This other fellow just ran at the same slow, stolid pace from start to finish. No slower or faster in the first 100 meters than the last 100. He did finish, and while it was close, he wasn’t the slowest on the team (since a couple people lacked discipline and sprinted themselves out, then started walking). But no matter how we cheered him on, he always avoided any sort of last minute kick to the finish.
All that to say this: I feel a bit like him with this story. My 10,000 word goals each month have really helped keep me productive. But no matter what I do, I can’t seem to generate much more. I even cut down on eBay listing and set aside that time for writing, yet still barely got in my 10k that month (while still listing a lot less than usual). I know I should not complain too much; barring calamity, I will submit my third story in a couple months. But man, I wish I could kick to the finish. I’m tired of podding and getting bogged down by spread.
Hello! I’m new here so I thought I should come here to say something! This forum looks pretty cool, tho I’m not totally sure about navigating around it.
I got myself a notebook to write down my ideas and characters. I have CSide but I want to plan out everything first. I’m reading up Choice script blog section about game design and I already found some interesting ideas.
The only thing I’m not so sure about is how you people are able to plan out stats.
Much appreciated. Still, I managed 25k in November of '18 writing Parenting Simulator as a demi-NaNo of sorts. Seems I may not reach that number again anytime soon.
On an unrelated note, can anyone tell me if Google Play is no longer allowing you to sort reviews by most recent? I can’t seem to find the option on the new format their page has, and if so, that really sucks. For games with a lot of reviews, there will no longer be a way to see new reviews. Especially problematic for any author who does DLC releases like Jim, since there’s no way to get feedback on the new content post-release.
Hello fellow newbie! For me so far, the opposed pair stats are complicated, and I’m still really trying to get the hang of them. I’ve created and deleted so many. I eventually decided to just start writing the story, and the pairs’ usefulness would reveal themselves as I wrote the choices. Here’s a link to a very useful post I found that includes a great section on “stat disease”, which is something I’ve noticed in other games that I’ve read. Hope it helps What I learned from playing every choicescript game
You’re in a challenging season of life, man. For me, when I had littles at home, I had to keep reminding myself that my home life was at its apex of difficulty and that I should adjuster my expectations for any creative outlets accordingly. You’re still going to get a third game out, which is a significant accomplishment.
And yeah I’m seeing what you’re seeing on the Google Play store. Our ability to see/get/read reviews is really dying on the vine. Pretty soon, Steam might be our only only remaining option for new reviews.
That’s true. And it’s why I settle for the little bit of writing time I do get rather than trying to grab more; I know this is just a season, and when it passes, I’ll miss it even as I enjoy the newfound freedom it’ll provide. Just tough to have story ideas backlogging as my ability to make them manifest keeps trundling along in low gear.
@LiliArch How can you do it? I have looked and looked in Chrome on my desktop and on my iOS browser on my phone and not seen an option either place.
Thanks for the link! Although I’ve already saw it (it’s very useful. Actually, it’s probably just as useful as CoG own blog).
Honestly, I don’t think I have a problem with opposed pairs (beside the fact that in my test projects I often write them as “opposite_pair” or something other than correct name, and then I wonder why my code isn’t working), by problem with stats I mean that I’m not sure how to distribute the stat increasing choices so that PC won’t be master jack of all trades by the end of the first chapter. I think I saw somewhere some script or something like that, which was able to count your stats, and told you what minimums and maximus were at any point. Gotta find that.
That’s the old format. If you refresh, presumably it will be replaced with the new one. Unless it’s different in countries outside of the US or something.
Well, I bit the bullet. Removed the last of the fantasy elements out of this story. There’s no way to fit both the alt-historical politics and everything else plus magic in a reasonable timeline. So now things are mainly politics, the character’s regular life stuff… and a bit of industrial revolution-era banking? I know nothing about that last one (Weyman’s Ovington’s Bank is my history crash course), so let’s see how well that’s going to go…
Something I notice in early 20thC novels is that authors are very upfront about a character’s personality, letting you know if he’s a good or bad guy from the first time they appear. Maybe not the full ten-paragraph-life-story treatment, but I wonder if a toned-down version is a good thing to imitate in IF, when the player is expected quite early on to pick sides that are well-established (and quite partisan) in-universe? These are issues that the player character is more familiar with than a reader is because he lives there, add alt-history, so it’s going to be weird anyway.
Slow month for personal reason in terms of progress. The planned secret romance route in my IF was scrapped because I couldn’t make it work. A character mentioned in passing got upgraded to supporting cast. There’s now a talking bat as a minor character.
Summer is going to be BUSY so goals are so low for June.
I’m in the UK right now. When I look at the Play Store on my laptop, I get the useless new format where there’s no option to sort reviews – but on my smartphone Play Store app, I still get the option to sort by most recent. Have you checked that?
I have an iPhone, so I can only look at it via browser. I’ll have to charge up my decrepit Android tablet to check the actual app look, but that’s a good sign that this information is not lost entirely. And it might be on App Annie too.
Don’t rub it in. I know it isn’t the company’s fault, but even all this time later it still hurts that one of the things that kept me going during the grind to finish Toaster before the contest deadline was eventually being able to see my own game in the Top 200 paid RPG list on the App Store where I had spent so much time shopping…only for them to ban our standalone releases mere months before it came out. Y’all are fortunate to have that extra venue for reviews and income.
It’s been so nice keeping track of these writer support threads over the past couple of months - love seeing folks plod along on their WIPs, and new writers start their journeys!
May has been a good month for me, writing-wise. For both my WIPs, College Tennis: Origin Story and Merry Crisis, since my last update in Mar and Dec respectively, I’ve written a total of about 60-70k words (shitty-first-drafts of all the planned scenes, but at least now I have something to edit!)!
June will mostly be re-arranging, cutting, adding, and re-writing. Hopefully I get to release at least one update next month! All the best to everyone!
