November 2023's Writer Support Thread

Game Development Writing and Content
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Oh that is the reason I’d never start a patreon my writing can get quite sporadic sometimes and I’d feel I was ripping people off.

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You can’t worry about a Patreon if it’s unavailable in your country!

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But honestly, the only thing I can probably actually add is a Boosty with “support an author if you really want it and can afford it”. It’s much fairer to me than starting a Patreon that doesn’t have anything that’s worth five dollars. I can buy myself a full Macdonalds’ meal on these five dollars!

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For me, I’d feel ridiculous for creating extra content only a handful of people would have access to. Not only would the time required for creating it be away from the time for actually writing the story, but also if I’d have gone through the effort to make it I’d want it to be available for everyone. Offering early access for updates could work, but only if I’d be able to keep a schedule of at-least-monthly updates which, let’s be real, wouldn’t happen. I write to have fun, not to get a burnout.

(Also the legal issues of asking donations in Finland, so I’d have to be able to offer something significant each month or it would become illegal.)

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I like doing my Patreon a lot and massively appreciate my subscribers, but did have a couple of blips where I needed to scale back how much I was doing on it, and adjust my tiers accordingly. What I was trying to do just wasn’t sustainable at that time.

I can see why some writers have a lot of success offering very large amounts of side-stories, merch, and commissions. However, for now my main job is writing my game, rather than running my Patreon, and I don’t really want to change how I treat those things, nor do I have the time and energy to try to focus on both to such an intense degree. Nor is my Patreon lucrative enough for it to be sensible to spend a couple of days a week on it rather than working on my actual projects! Although it would be extremely exciting to be more wealthy, and maybe if I took the leap to invest more in my Patreon I might have a chance of making that happen, I am more comfortable doing it that way. Ultimately I want to spend most of my work time writing games for people to play.

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Part of the reason why I am so obscurely popular here in this forum is that I have no idea how to publicize my work. True, I can publicize IFComp, but any attempt to promote my own work usually fails. So much that I don’t even touch Tumblr or Patreon. Keeping things to myself is what I do best. People like Eiwynn and Hannah tend to be way better at pushing their work out to the world than me. I’m still learning, one step at a time.

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I am firmly sat in the “if I had a patreon or something similar I’d feel guilty” club. I write for fun, not for money, which makes it even more jarring when I get people asking where to donate, and I can only reply, “Umm… No?”

Combine that with anxiety over worrying that no one actually even likes my work, then you have a recipe for a patreon page never to exist. Plus, I also feel like I wouldn’t be able to pump out the amount of work that others do for their Patreon pages. Granted, I have written one side story, but that was out of enjoyment, not for the sake of readers - I would’ve written that had no one read it. But it, as well as any future side stories are to be posted on my main thread.

I guess, at the end of the day I just feel guilty taking money from people full stop.

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Thank you for the compliment.

I wish I were productive enough to keep a Patreon fed.

I draw stick-figures pretty well when I can find a ruler to use, and I am still learning how to write at the level I feel I should be writing at, so the most I feel I can offer is something like the Writer Support thread.

Likewise, I want this for everyone in the IF community, and this is a way to help make this forum a better place, so I keep the monthly thread here for all to use.

I do intend to open a Tumblr, but I intend to keep it like @lacunafiction 's site if I can, which is focused on her fictionalverse.

Right now my focus is turning my alpha-copy of the Patchwerks common route into a beta-copy I can share with everyone and writing my alpha copy of Patchwerk’s dock route, so I can get alpha testing on it started.

Speaking of which:

I am on the last 100 coding-lines of chapter 4 today, so it looks like I will complete my November goal with minutes to spare (sarcastic raspberry to myself).

So, I am very close to reaching the goal, but not quite there at this time.

I’ll be posting the December thread either when done and rested, or tomorrow, whichever comes first.

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Well my final decision of November is to focus on Daemonglass as it seems to be where my muse is hiding at the moment and the fact it’s a lot more planned out (which is unusual with how I usually work) would mean it shouldn’t take as long to to write (helps to have over 50k words of the earlier draft for NaNo 2017 which I will just need to rewrite).

So I will be polishing off the revised Chapter One tonight and be opening the official announcement and the first chapter topic tomorrow.

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Crossing some streams slightly, but I found out yesterday that the original Love Island the Game app, which contains some of my first studio work, is being discontinued, albeit with some suggestions that the stories may return in some way in the future. Although that writing is four years old and it’s been a long time since I worked with that studio, it still feels sad that it won’t be out there for people to enjoy. I’m still friends with a lot of the people I worked with and learned SO much from them and from my time on those projects.

Anyway: I am bolstering myself for a more energetic workday today than yesterday, so fingers crossed for the rest of the day. It’s not an easy one… I’m writing some stuff that challenges my difficulty with visual-spatial imagination. But I’ll give it a go. And then will do a proper month’s update and the digest later this afternoon.

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This month has been really hard physically for me. But I am happy. I am learning to accept that I am ill and that means I have right to be chill and relaxing and don’t feel guilty about it.

I am a little better now, so I hope be more active here and write again.

I wish luck everyone here and a great new beginning

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Ahhhh, the intrusive desire to just push away all my projects, and come up with a new, simple game idea, that totally wont get massive scope creep, this time…

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Honestly if Vampire’s Kiss 2 goes ahead (there’s a little bouncing around of two idaes in terms of scope, trying to work out what players want the most), I think I’d definitely launch a patreon, because otherwise I don’t know if I can afford to write it. The advance is $5000 over a whole year, and the investment in time is huge; with a patreon I can also share some of the (thousands of words) of extra content that gets produced in outlining the story. There’s so much lore that goes into these games.

I think a patreon is equally important because, honestly, some of the feedback - not in terms of the story, everyone’s entitled to like or dislike whatever, but the more personal attacks - has really shattered my confidence, not just as a writer but as a human. Being told I should be grateful people pirate my game, being accused of homophobia by someone who hasn’t played the game but didn’t like the sound of it, being told I am lazy, useless and stupid, or I’m ripping off someone’s IP etc… before entering this community, it had been years since I cried myself to sleep. And I don’t know if I’d be able to keep the momentum needed for the size and scale required without knowing there are people who want it to happen, especially as I know there are people who think I shouldn’t exist. Fans matter, and it’s a two-way relationship.

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Absolutely, and I hope Patreon works well for you in building that relationship as well as an economic base for your writing.

I can also understand how a negative and/or callous minority of reviewers can have a disproportionate impact on your confidence. (Pretty sure it’s a small minority? Most of the Vampire’s Kiss reviews I’ve seen have been great.) So I’d suggest bracing yourself for a minority of your Patreon fans similarly turning on you.

The main reason I’m not very tempted by that route myself is that I recognize it would give my own workaholic inner bully more opportunities to self-flagellate when fans who are regularly paying me money expressed disappointment, dissatisfaction, “not good enough for the $3 I’m giving you,” etc.

Personally, that would hit me harder than bad app store reviews. I’m geniunely reconciled to the fact that:

Would I be able to take the same perspective on a Patreon community of people who are literally commissioning me to write for them because they like what I’ve already done? Maybe. But it would be tougher.

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I’ve reached my goal. :revolving_hearts:

I’m running the battery of testing and then setting up for next month’s work now.

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I’m honestly torn on Patreon as a whole. Because on one hand, it’s expensive to be a creative, you either need to work a regular job and have less time to create, or you need to find a way to make money off your art. And I think it’s a great way to facilitate a private beta. But on the other hand, as someone in school who can’t join patreon, it totally sucks when there’s exclusive content. Especially since so many people I follow use patreon. I would feel guilty doing that to others

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Haven’t posted on these writer support threads for a bit (I just set myself some more concrete goals so hoping to contribute again in January) but wanted to chime in about having a Patreon since I have had one for a few months now to share my experience with it.

For me – I started it after getting asked by a few people who were asking to donate. I’ve always wanted to have the opportunity to write full time (or at least to make enough off of Patreon and eventually book sales to let me work less hours). I tried making this very clear when creating my Patreon and also stress that I work full time (often more than full time) and didn’t need the money to survive.

Thankfully, I haven’t had the experience of Patrons expressing discontent with what I post – this would absolutely be a demoralizing and crushing thing to hear.

A lot of people also mentioned a feeling of guilt with Patreon, which I totally get. For me, at least, I try to not view Patrons as people who are commissioning me to write, and instead view them as incredible people who really appreciate my writing and want to read more of it earlier.

I definitely feel bad when I fall into writing slumps and don’t post as often, but thankfully haven’t had any complaints about it.

I also think, in my own experience, creating a Patreon was a way of kind of forcing myself to keep with my project. Yes – I could of course just announce I gave up on the project and refund that month’s Patrons and go on with it – but it helped me to motivate myself to write and to keep writing a ton. The fact that anyone was willing to spend their money to support my writing and to read more of it was really motivating and mentally it helped me to keep pushing as a way of putting their “investment” to use so-to-speak.

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@RFKramer this is pretty similar to my experience. The people who’ve subscribed to me have always been very warm and supportive.

I managed to do all this! Over this month, I drafted HB Chapter 6 and did my edits to Chapter 5-6 (and some bits and pieces elsewhere in the game), did a bunch of small edits to the Royal Affairs epilogue, and coded Chapter 7 and started writing. I’m now maybe a quarter of the way through Chapter 7.

And I went to AdventureX in London which was a ton of fun!

I felt infinitely better about this side of things after I shared my next chapter publicly. There is a certain kind of writing-anxiety that rears up when it’s been a while since fresh eyes have seen something of mine, and although I get nervous about sharing, it always makes me feel better to have other perspectives on it than mine.

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Here is a digest of November’s releases and WIP updates! If I’ve missed anything, or anyone would like their link removed, please let me know. Congratulations to everyone who’s created something this month, whether or not they’ve shared it!

Releases:

Current Closed Beta Testing:

CoG WIP updates:

New HG and Hobby WIPs

HG and Hobby WIP updates:

New Steam pages:

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Me deep into my studies, being pinged here to see “Femboy dating simulator” being associated with me

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I actually had a really good November! I hope it keeps up :blush:

check! :heavy_check_mark: I have maybe one more edit, but it was writing based rather that typo or bug based, so I’ll come back to that later

mostly check? :heavy_check_mark: I have to see how it handles being stress tested, but I have something in place now

probably check? idk I wasn’t really counting :heavy_check_mark:

I spent most of my writing time this month working on a code outline for my current chapter because it was a convoluted beast. (which was fun, coding is my favorite part, but I’m so tired :weary: I want to write now) I am learning so much about what kinds of things and how I like write, as well as scope. This current project is stumbling into place rather ungracefully, but it is my little tester pancake and I love it.

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