This is a thought that I’ve mulled over more than once. I personally lean more towards the idea that it’d be better to wait until I have at least 90% completed a rough draft of a game before announcing it at all. I think it takes the psychological pressure and burden of expectations aside from my own off, and it’s easier for me to edit later, even make radically different revisions, than it is to create from nothing which I know from experience. It’s especially helpful as a first-time hopeful game author because I do not yet know my limitations, what can be reasonably anticipated of my output, doable update schedules, when or if I’d ever finish, etc.
I see a lot of writers discuss how crushing it can feel to want to keep up with what the general public desires from you yet realize you cannot or that you’ve distorted your original vision beyond repair, how it can be a self-defeating cycle. I also see burnout on the time-sinking and overwhelming levels of marketing it can take to generate interest so you can gain feedback and motivation which again creates this unfortunate cycle of discouragement as you become increasingly beholden to that whole beast. Once we put a WIP out there, we’ve opened ourselves and others up for possible disappointment and it cannot be undone.
But I frequently find myself wondering…why not write silently to preserve peace of mind and find one’s footing intrinsically first? This of course has its cons too and ideally would not mean you cannot seek support coding wise or holistically from specific individuals. However, officially posting in the works in progress section, setting up social media pages and building an audience can wait from my perspective. I’d love to hear other thoughts on the matter though.
Edit: I think I should add based on responses I’m getting that I was not so much asking for advice regarding what’s better as I don’t believe there is a best practice per se, more just curious in what you do for your own writing process/what your thoughts are generally. My bad for not making that more clear, originally!
Whilst I’m working on a WIP I haven’t posted at all so I can only offer what I think could be the case but I think posting and getting positive feedback can be a really strong motivator, finding early bugs that you might have missed and being able to fix them whilst the text and code is still small and manageable for that section and knowing if you’re headed in a direction people don’t seem to gel with you can course correct earlier and save yourself having to recycle your code into something new? If I’ve written a whole chapter following plot c with character d and suddenly once I’ve posted these four chapters together I find that people actually don’t feel connected to that plot or character but that chapter is essential for the next chapter and where I’ve headed I know I’d personally feel a tad demoralised as that’s a lot of time spent on that which ultimately I’d have to redo for the best user experience.
Personally I’m team wait until you have a couple of chapters to post a demo but I can completely see why people want to see if their idea will be popular/succeed or want to get that engagement as a motivator before they spend all of their time on it. Plus some likely do just find that “fan engagement,” and social media aspect fun and something that is still productive but a break from writing and coding. If for you you’re fine self motivating and feel you work best without those additional bits then that’s great!
The way i see it,as a reader, better to release 50% or so. It’s not too far done that story can’t be altered/fixed in case that there are issues with it or some mechanic included and there is enough content to generally showcase what the story is about.
But to answer you question directly.
Releasing earlier games gives a lot of room to touch up the story in case the public doesn’t like it, while keeping your vision. Cons being less upfront content.
Releasing near done story gives people a lot of content, but at the same time if that content doesn’t resonate with the audience it will be much harder to fix.
It’s really up to the individual author. For some it’s easier to keep going knowing that other people are invested in what they wrote, while others do better writing for themselves and only involving others in the later stages.
When I first arrived here at the forum I was a lot younger and filled with enthusiasm, and that was boosted by other people being enthusiastic about ‘my’ project alongside me. By now that youthful enthusiasm has worn off because it didn’t get me anywhere, with only a handful of partially finished projects to show for it, so now I keep what I do write to the background until I have enough of it to know I’ll finish it before putting it out in the open.
I’m not too concerned with bugs etc because I’m pretty good at keeping an eye out for those, and whether my writing appeals to anyone else, well, that’s of a secondary concern. There will always be people who like or dislike certain tropes, characterizations, or styles of writing, while there will also always be people who are drawn to those exact same things.
Well, provided that it is readable. That unfortunately isn’t always the case.
I arrived on this forum with a completed draft of a game when I was ready to make a WIP thread. Off the top of my head, I think the following games used the same approach, putting up a content-complete WIP on the forums, then moving straight to publishing it with feedback. (I may be wrong on some of these, please correct me if I am)
Dragon of Steelthorne (closed beta) The Courting of Miss Bennet (closed beta) Big Brains in Little Jars Zoo-pocalypse Scarlet Sails Fortune the Fated Arthur: A Retelling (closed beta)
I will offer a controversial and possibly unpopular opinion- I think there is a stronger case now for finishing your WIP in private, then putting up the full game for testing. This is based on my experiences on using both approaches since I joined the forum late last year, as well as time spent on offering feedback on other WIPs.
Feedback given nowadays tends to be quite general (typos, RO requests, bugs and errors, QoL improvements, game balance). Make no mistake, these are all useful things to have, but these are not things only an unfinished WIP will benefit from. In fact, a finished WIP would be better in this regard, since testers will have more ‘material’ to work with.
The small percentage of people who do offer feedback may not hang around for the long term. In that case, the best way to get the most mileage out of this small group is to provide a full WIP up front.
Community members may not always stick around your WIP forever, and may move on when other new shiny WIPs show up on the forum. Won’t name names, but I’ve seen WIPs which started out receiving a lot of attention, then started struggling for attention after a year or so. A finished WIP does allow you to avoid this predicament.
If people did offer deep feedback on plot development and structure, then starting out with an unfinished WIP would be useful. However, I think feedback of this nature is pretty hard to receive nowadays, even if you have a popular WIP.
Fan engagement is definitely great to have and a fantastic motivator. But it is also a double-edged sword. If this engagement suddenly drops off, it can become very demoralizing. (Personal experience)
For the record, I’ve locked the WIP thread for my current project to finish in private. I’ll release it when it’s content complete. This is largely for personal reasons - working on the project and running the thread has put me under a lot of stress, so I’m doing this to keep my mental health in balance. (But if anyone wants that thread unlocked, reach out to me.)
If you’re running a patreon, then an unfinished WIP is a no-brainer, although reaching the higher levels of popularity is not always a given. Otherwise, especially if you hate to disappoint people or keep up with public pressure, I think coming here with a full game isn’t too bad of an idea nowadays.
I always feel weird offering writing advice but I have an opinion on this one, so I’ll chime in and you can take/leave depending on if it’s helpful. This one’s a matter of an author needing to know themself. At the end of the day we all know writing a story hundreds of thousands of words long is really hard. And the best way to do it is… whatever way gets it done. For me that’s posting each chapter as I write it, maintaining a tumblr with weekly writing updates, and a patreon/ko-fi where I release later chapters of the game. That regular motivation from deadlines + interaction feeds my brain.
But I know writers who are the exact opposite, who wait to release demos for all the (very good) reasons you outlined above. And like @ChanceOfFire mentioned it works just as well, if that list of successful, completed games is anything to go by.
We can debate engagement/sales/time balance between writing and social media/etc. till the cows come home, but at the end of the day the right method is the one that lets you write 200k+ words happily, instead of pulling your hair out every step of the way.
Tldr; my opinion is that your answer’s in your first paragraph
That’s something you could manage. I’ll speak from personal experience. I did “complete” my first project before publishing it. Though I know what you’re talking about, my expectations were to finish the project at some point. As a first-timer and having English as a second language, I didn’t intend to have a best-seller, and my motivations were purely personal, and with or without feedback it wouldn’t make the difference. Besides being a side project from life in which I could work on it intermittently, I would have hated to leave the (few) people who liked my game hanging up for updates until life got me some rope and I could get my hands on it. That could also cause a loss of interest as others mentioned, which isn’t good.
Having said that, for me at least, the feedback has helped me a lot to improve in many things I lacked (and it still does). If I had released the game from the beginning it could have helped me fix that many things at an early stage and not like now, that every time I have to improve something I have to do a 300K+ word revision that takes me months. But this mainly has to do with me being a novice and not knowing English, so depending on where you stand you could weigh the early/late release of your game differently.
Again, besides pros and cons, feedback is an external factor that you won’t control, so I guess the most important thing here is how you manage your expectations.
A personal experience I had. One person gave me feedback saying that the thing that hooked him into my book was that:
short dumb scene
The MC is escaping from the crowd and you get into a library to get some peace. At some point, walking around the shelves, a book falls from a shelf without any warnings startling you. And then another character scares the MC from behind like appearing from nothing.
While another person said that I was not being consistent by inserting unexplainable things at random to make the plot move, and readers would let it pass the first time, maybe the second, and then they’ll throw away the book cause it’s pure bullsh!t.
Yet, I know I’ve put that scene there cause it serves an important purpose, the book doesn’t fall by itself (there is magic involved) but the MC character doesn’t know so the reader doesn’t know either.
This same person recommended me a book, I think by Stephen King, (I haven’t looked at it yet but this is a super resume of what he told me) in which the MC went to an alley and found a portal to the past, and prevented Kennedy’s murder, then bought meat cheap from the past and sold it on the future or something like that.
Now I don’t despise feedback at all, in fact I love it, the nice and praising one as the harsh critiques But you have to know what to take from it. Especially when you are the only one who knows everything from your game and the readers only have a fraction of it to analyze.
Personal preference? If you have the drive to work a complete game without anyone knowing, it’s okay, and also if you want help while building one. Neither should be better than the other as long as you are able to fulfill your goals and get it done. Some people like to drive 200m/h cars, others drink tea while looking at mountains, both to find peace of mind.
I’m going to cite Robers Sapolsky here (not the exact words): Stress is bad, stress makes us angry and worried and it regulates our hormones and gives us anxiety. But we as humans love stress, when it is the right kind of it. When we have some amount of it and some amount of predictability. Like rollercoasters, we pay to get up in a car that speeds up and gets our amygdala pumping stress hormones as if there’s no tomorrow, but only when we know everything is going to be fine and it isn’t going to last a month.
So yeah, pressure from feedback, schedules, and accountability can help some people, as long as you like it, and you have the right amount of it.
Okay, sorry for all the rant. now I’m going to stop delaying all the work I have to do. I hope you find your peace on the matter.
To me, I view a WIP page more as a beta reader thing than a marketing tool. People who like the game can give opinions on your work from a place of interest. They also give the opportunity to ask specific questions, bounce ideas off of them, etc.
Personally, I think getting these opinions during the writing phase is better. If there’s a major element that doesn’t work, or something that could make the game even better, then it would be harder to make adjustments in the editing phase. Because these things reverberate throughout the game.
But ultimately, it’s up to you. Maybe editing is easier for you than making adjustments over time?
I think it depends on what kind of feedback you’re looking for and how willing you are to adapt.
If you release a WIP earlier that gives you the advantage of being able to shift gears easily if the feedback is pushing you in a different direction.
But if you have quite a rigid plan in place then posting early wont necessarily be beneficial since you already know where you want the story to go. Feedback might not consider things you have already thought out.
On the other hand, does posting earlier, help build a bigger fan base?
It absolutely is. Knowing that there’s someone out there who wants to read what you’re writing? It’s gold. (I mean, what’s the point of writing if nobody’s going to read it? I don’t need to put it on paper to enjoy it in my head.)
Woof. With the current trend of size, that sounds huge. (And if I had written, say, 500k already, I’d be really hesitant on revisions that force me to rewrite the whole thing.)
I’m not saying that it isn’t, but there’s also the point of personal achievement, superation, and learning. All of that without the need to be liked by others.
I don’t intend to sound selfish, but I started my main project to stop wasting my time on videogames and do something more productive without needing to interact with people (that’s a struggle I carry with me everywhere I go)
Although I can’t deny feedback is awesome, it doesn’t need to be the main driving force for everyone. Motivation is a broad range, and the perception of it and how hard it is to keep going also varies from person to person.
Oh, of course not. But you also shouldn’t underestimate its value for those to whom it is.
(Also it doesn’t need to be a huge following. Having one person read it can be the deciding factor between continuing the project and letting it die. It doesn’t even need to be feedback, just that person existing! (And letting you know they exist.))
There are a couple of other discussion threads from a little while back with discussions which you may find interesting:
I personally have preferred to announce, discuss, and share my WIP before I’ve written a large portion of it, and I prefer to start with sharing only a chapter, then share more over time. That method does risk player fatigue - most people don’t want to play the first chapter again and again, so if you’re doing this it’s worth incorporating a method of players skipping to different chapters.
Because my games are published through CoG, I do a big beta test of the entire game once I’ve finished my draft. That’s always intensive and usually takes at least a month. If I wasn’t revising and taking player feedback throughout the writing process, not just towards the end, it would have been even more intensive and taken a lot longer!
Plus I like being able to ask players questions about how they feel about things early on, and find out what they’re thinking. It doesn’t always mean that I make huge sweeping changes, but it can inform what I’m doing. I can also have a sense of an overall temperature of players’ thinking - if feedback on the full game comes in that’s very different to what I’ve heard before, that’s really useful information for many reasons.
Definitely this. Don’t worry about what most people do, or what the most successful authors do. That kind of advice is for people who don’t know themselves well enough. If you already know your strengths and weaknesses, play to those. That’s where you, specifically, will have the most success.
From my limited experience, @Sailingshells has it right.
Posting on the forum gave me a loose schedule which helped with motivation. Also, for a first-time IF writer, it brought some attention to my game. At times, this filtered onto places like Reddit, which usually focuses on more well-known games. Seeing that some liked the potential of my work gave me extra motivational boosts.
My game is loosely structured and lacks ROs, which can be instantly off-putting to many CoG and HG players. Posting and developing at the same time gave Green a chance to attract some people’s attention, though I won’t know how well it appealed to IF readers, as a broad group, until the end of the month. Also, I did find a few very invested readers who helped immensely with bugs and typos. I am terrible at reading through my work and spotting mistakes.
Adding to what I said before, and I do still agree with what @Sailingshells says about being in tune with what’s right for you, which is the most important thing, I will add:
Completing an entire first draft before posting a WIP is a tough thing to aim for. For one thing, showing it to no one before showing the whole thing makes it hard to have a clear perspective on it while writing the middle and end. For another, when the feedback does start coming in and inevitably there is criticism involved, it’ll probably sting more if the writer isn’t used to it.
If someone’s new to sharing their writing with other people, I think it’s more sensible to share it early (and better still, write something smaller/less ambitious first so that they can develop the skills of finishing something).
