You have given me the strenght to start as You are one of my idols since your romance mods era. If You say I can I should at least try!
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Yes it was, thank you.
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Thank you for the encouragement, commentary, and consideration!
I’m definitely not married to providing the information in the way I currently have it laid out, though I do have a few reasons for presenting the opening like this. I’ll think on the suggestion for sure.
You make great points that not all work increases the wordcount. Just yesterday, I was disappointed with myself for not hitting an arbitrary number of words in worktime while mostly ignoring that I’d also put a lot of effort into designing and coding character customisation options.
There are a lot of important tasks that go into creating in choicescript that aren’t just writing!
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Absolutely - as writers we do ourselves a disservice by not appreciating those things as much as we appreciate the added words 
(And I include myself in that for sure! It’s definitely something I fall into when the drafts aren’t coming easily.)
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People are indeed lovely and supportive on the forum. This is rare among forums. They have been quite accommodating of me, no less!
Uh oh. It’s really tough not to run into these issues. My condolences. All the best!
Now for my IFComp-style review:
Summary review
Vampire’s Kiss (Dash Casey)
What it is about: You got turned into a vampire. You’ll have to survive, navigate politics and hopefully turn back into a human. And try to hang out with someone along the way.
I am on Team Saffron. A martial pacifist as always, who ended up corrupted and allowing the vampires to go maverick and take over the world, coexistence with humans be damned.
The good: Plenty of well-written characters. Some I never ended up meeting. Plenty of sides to take: do you side with the humans, the vampires who want coexistence and peace, the vampires who are totally neutral (and only care about their pets, as as a bonus, you get to pet them!) and the vampires who are really Maverick- that is, believe in vampire supremacy and want to take over the world. The level of sexuality and violence can be adjusted. Plenty of vampire upgrades to unlock. Good pacing between action and romance. You can choose your hometown (London included!).
The bad: I was hoping for stat descriptions and relationship meters, but there weren’t any. I thought this was the classic formula: 8 areas which you can do them in any order, some items to collect in every area, some upgrades to be obtained in every area, 8 people to defeat, ability to switch between human and vampire form, long and complicated(?) endgame. In fact, quite the opposite. You do have things to collect and rivals to contend, but the story as a whole is a little on the short side.
The Huh: Will we get a sequel? I would want one that delves deeper into the vampire-human conflict. And why is Klem not a romance option for those who want to remain neutral and TRULY pacifist?
Grade: 81.6%
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If it is of any consolation, I had to grab the English term from Wikipedia.
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This is very true. But I often find myself debating myself to a standstill over whether my time would be better served writing narrative or working on abstract systems that while they will make my life easier or add something to the game, do not actually contribute to the FINISHING of the game.
Oh cool! Does that mean you usually write/think in a language that isn’t english? Just out of curiousity.
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Yeah, I’m Finnish. (So obviously that’s what my medical vocabulary is in.)
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If only I could do that…
I am backing everyone here. I know there are people here who are backing me too. It feels great to know that you are backing someone else and someone else is backing you in turn. As for the waiting part, unfortunately I am on the other extreme.
Congratulations! I’m not even on the proper stuff yet…
If anyone tells you you are worthless, that person is downright wrong. Your creativity is part of what you are. This applies to everybody here.
This applies to everybody too.
I am glad that your box is open for people like me to have a chat when I’m feeling stressed. Thanks Eiwynn, Mara and others for still backing me.
Congratulations and All the best! IFComp is taking a BIGGER THAN EXPECTED BITE out of my time pie, so Halloween Jam may be a no-go.
Quality over quantity. That is what I believe. Having a total word count and an average playthrough word count gives a good gauge of what to expect.
Truer words have never been spoken. What goes on behind the scenes- the blood, sweat, tears, confusion- may not be showy, but it is every bit as important, if not more important, than what happens on stage.
I am sorry for you too. And I think writing makes you happy. I also feel the same way. Write on! Don’t give up before the battle has started. This applies to me too. There WILL be people who will read your story, since you hosted the jam. There are people who will have your back. We all support each other, everyone in the same boat. As you said.
Hit the nail on the head!
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I will put a small snippet of the intro Madame Racoon and the Mirrored corpses It is a children’s tale.
Introduction
The first winds of autumn dance around the nearby fir and elm trees, covering everything in golden leaves like apple pies baking in the wood oven.
The old raccoon smiles, shaking a few leaves from her fluffy shawl woven with scraps of wool in multiple colours.
“Autumn is here. I have to start bringing pumpkins so the kittens can carve them at dusk by the fire.”
Madame Raccoon lives in a large, cosy log cabin after retiring from her career as a detective. Normally Madame sits in her rocking chair to knit looking out beyond her porch.
But not today. Today, Madame will have a pleasant visit. Momma Cat the baker, and her three mischievous kittens: Miz, Matt and Mandy, are about to come to have tea.
“I’m so glad they visit me, but I don’t know what kind of drink to make. What would they prefer? Hot chocolate, milkshakes, or maybe tea?”
*fake_choice
#"I will make hot chocolate"
Steaming hot chocolate is the best way to keep our ears and whiskers warm and firm; that's what my mother always said.
Coon comments with a wide smile that shows her tiny, pointed fangs between her fluffy, whitish whiskers. Mama Lula was the best cook on this side of Utah Valley.
"I still miss you, Mom", she softly whispers, remembering her childhood.
*set drink "hot chocolate"
#"Milkshake is my favourite thing!"
Cream with wild blackberries will do the trick! I picked them up in the morning in the forest. A sigh resonates almost as if it came from Madame's poor old bones. The morning dew sticks in you like an old tic,; but the smile everyone will have when drinking it. All will be worth it.
*set drink "wild blackberries and cream milkshake"
#"This will be a tea party!
*set drink "Hot cinnamon black tea"
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This is really cute! I would recommend avoiding using “Coon” as a nickname/term though even if it is intended to be innocuous in this instance.
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Oh, I didn’t know. Maybe Con? It is I want the name coming from Raccoon.
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I see that the word-count discussion is underway … here is my contribution:
Most of the statistical metrics can be manipulated in different ways to say multiple different things, so I agree with those saying every metric is but a part of the picture and none should be taken exclusively as the “golden rule”.
With that said, one metric which I use and has not yet been a part of the discussion is the ratio of words seen per play through.
CoG recommends 20%-40% per play through, if memory serves. (although this might have evolved since I saw this mentioned).
A good ratio will allow your reader to experience enough old and enough new on a replay to feel “satisfying” and as such, this metric can help you to encourage replayability.
Finding the right ratio may mean more people enjoy more of your writing than they otherwise would.
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Well, would Tanuki work? Tanuki is the Japanese word for a species of Raccoon that live in Japan. It has a lot less of a controversial history. tanuki - Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Huh. I’ve never heard of this metric before. It definitely seems like something to pay attention to… but also incredibly difficult to plan ahead for?
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I think a combination of the three provides a much more complete feature, though some things you just won’t know until you get a look under the hood. You can’t know if that ‘ratio per playthrough’ can be attributed to branching paths or to copy/paste for the different genders.
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First:
Thank you.
Now back to the discussion:
I continually check it as I write the game. If my ratio is outside of the expected range, I recalibrate my writing to steer my writing back into it. It becomes part of a testing routine after a bit.
Actually, as a writer you know full well, which is why as you get better at scripting and writing, this metric can be more predictive of outcomes.
I use many different metrics, including all mentioned thus far … so, yes, I believe a combination of everything should be used when writing.
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The ratio is a funny one - it becomes a very small percentage once you start doing large chunks of code with no writing in (such as things like picking a stat with a highest value, or checkpoints). Maybe I will try using CSIDE’s “wordcount with code removed” as the total wordcount. It would be interesting to compare my different games.
Something I have started doing is using my code and placeholder summaries to gauge roughly how long a chapter will be when written (somewhere between 4 and 5 times the length of the skeleton, usually closer to 4), which also gives me a sense of how long it will take to write. All of it is based on the sizes of previous chapters and how long they took. I’ve taken the time to look at the numbers while drafting and it helps me pace myself and have a better idea of how far through things I am - I like giving myself a structure.
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As a productive break from my current story, I decided to look into making an old choice-base story into ChoiceScript. Unfortunately, I wrote the story on a pretty broken phone, so I was stuck trying to recover all the files. It’s unfortunately unrecoverable. I must have done a factory reset the last time I used it, assuming all my files were backed up.
I’m really saddened by it but I didn’t expect much. I still have notes about it that I wrote on google docs, but it’s not enough to recreate it. It wouldn’t be the same anyway. That was around 25k-30k words down the drain with no way to recover. It’s about two months of my life just… gone. This is a bit weird, but I feel like I’m mourning a lost story.
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Coon
Coonie
Rack
Conie
Coonz
Akon
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Coon is the problematic I can not select. I think I will use Con as is still similar in how it sounds and a kid can get Con comes from racoon.