Merits of Announcing WIPs at Beginning vs End

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.

All of that said…

I think this is the right approach!

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