In Dawn of Heroes, every time the reader selects a check, it increases that stat; pass or fail. I’m going off the idea that the more you do something, the better you get. A nice +% so stats that are already high do not gain as much.
With this skill methodology I never lower skills. They only improve, but I do not have extremely high checks in hope that characters will be a bit more balanced in their skills.
I kind of touched on an idea for how to do something related to this. I’m not sure if it’ll help, I was a bit long winded and there are a lot of numbers thrown around. It is all game theory anyways.
I am in the weird place I always am when I write children’s stories. It is with sci-fi my favorite genre to write in…
It comes to me almost naturally… Then where is the issue ?
I get frustrated with myself because is a genre that nobody here gives 4 shits about. It won’t let me any freaking where I should be writing romance or any other popular thing I am bad at it and I do not care but is what people only care.
I feel like a failure and guilty as charged for only be more or less competent in genre will never ever get me near of my dream. That makes me bitter with myself and feeling that I will never reach my dream of publishing. I will never be there working on kid stuff.
This actually makes a lot of sense to me… Although, in real life, skills degrade over time if you don’t practice them. What’s your opinion on that compared to your system? Is it just the “games are escapism” argument? Or do you have some other thought on it?
Games are meant to be fun. If I feel that something will take away the fun, then I will avoid it. While lowering stats might add a challenge that some will enjoy, it is not something I am willing to risk when it comes to Skill Checks. Players often like to see improvement and Skill Checks happen too often for me (as a player) to want to fight with the system to keep them maintained.
If I ever do a long enough time jump, maybe I would lower skills, but give the option to maintain specific ones. This would still require a rather long period of time before I’d consider it.
I do something similar in Lies Under Ice. Skill checks increase every time you fail at them, so you always get something out of a check: either you succeed at what you were doing or you learn something and get a bit better for next time.
This is the main way skills evolve in the game. Learning through failure ties in to the themes of the work, but also doing it this way it neatly avoids any rich-get-richer/poor-get-poorer problem with the skill challenges.
My next story, which is going to be a full game version of my Halloween Jam, isn’t going to have any player stats at all. I wanted to reach a kind of wide audience with The Bureau and I was just starting out, so I thought I had to add stats when I started writing that story, but I personally like writing choices that matter narrative wise rather than stat wise. I find it can feel much less restricting to certain players because they don’t have to worry about building up stats to pass checks later on.
Instead, you make choices like picking up a certain weapon that they may use 3 chapters later to save the character from a life-threatening injury, or deciding what clues to investigate in the field, which will give you a certain amount of evidence for later chapters.
Well it’s my native language so… all I can say how hard it is depends on what language family you’re coming from. (From where I’m standing, English is really really weird.)
Finno-Ugric (or Uralic, if you prefer). And don’t forget Estonian. It’s waaaay closer than Hungarian. But a language doesn’t need to belong into same family to have similarities - I’ve been led to believe Finnish is relatively straight-forward for Japanese, for example. Whether or not that’s actually true, I don’t know.
For folks who know another language besides the one you are writing your WIP in, I’ve recently been doing something fun with my story lately…
After I get my compiled game onto a browser, I translate the page into my other language, and then read through my current story. It’s actually helped a lot because it allows me to read my work again with very fresh eyes, almost as if it was another person who wrote it, so it’s easier for me to catch things that I may have been overlooking because I’ve read the same scenes so many times in English
And also, if there are any sentences/paragraphs that read VERY strangely, as in “even stranger than the already bad job that Google Translate does”, I go back and read that part of my story in English again, and sometimes I find that it really was my original English writing that was too complicated or unnecessarily elaborate.
So yeah, just wanted to share a fun little trick/tip with everyone haha, even if you don’t use it to edit like I’ve been doing, it’s still really fun to read your own writing in another language translated by google
Which is pretty much always, especially when ideoms are concerned. I laughed so hard at a translation of ‘having beef with someone’. (It translated ‘beef’ to the meat equivalent, not to ‘being in conflict with’.)
this is actually also one of the reasons why i translate my story and then read it as you say, when English idioms are concerned, it almost always translates terribly, so I notice it and go back and see if i can change my phrasing, because for my story, I want to use as few idioms that have roots in english as possible haha (not saying idioms are bad at all! it’s just for my game in particular, i’ve made this choice lol)
I think that’s absolutely brilliant. I’ve long wished for something similar, and I hope other authors will be inspired by this model. Especially in stories that take place over a span of time and/or in settings that would allow or require the character to continue to build or refine skills, there’s no reason they should be stuck forever with exactly the skill stats they had at the end of Ch2.
So what kind of week has it been? Vampire’s Kiss was released last Thursday. And I have been trying to figure that out all week. I think, doing this for the first time, there have been more lows than highs. The rest, I’ll put under a spoiler in case you want to preserve some of the mystery.
There have been some moments of joy, no question. Seeing people dig the game, especially hearing it helped someone get through being sick, is huge for me. And seeing the game in the wild? That’s fun!
The biggest soul sucker of the week was first the piracy, then being trollled by pirates saying I should somehow be grateful and honoured they stole my game. And, looking at the figures (and I have no idea how it sold - zero information) it looks like more people stole the game than bought it. I am not grateful, any more than Inigo Montoya’s father appreciated how his sword was ‘bought’. It is an acute pain that feels like a betrayal of creative promise, and a reminder of how worthless some people consider me to be. I know that sounds embittered, and perhaps it is; it sent me into a very dark flunk and is going to be the source of sleepless nights in the future.
The first review being negative stung. Not anywhere close, but it did hurt, mainly as it accused me of copying the game Vampyr. I have played Vampyr for about an hour and really didn’t like it, but other than both being vampire games set in London I can’t see any similarity. (And if that’s the main charge, I hate to tell you where Dracula is set…).
A lot of comments have been how short the game is, which is purely subjective, and I can respect that as feedback (although it didn’t feel short at the time!). It’s really useful to see how people feel about pace, and I am very happy to take that feedback on board. I think most reviews have been fair and measured, and I thank everyone who’s taken the time, from the glowing to the more lukewarm.
One review commented that it felt I gave up after the first three chapters. That felt pretty hurtful; it has given me a new appreciation for how difficult it is to carry any artistic project through, and how it can be perceived by the audience. I’ve said CGI is rubbish before, or stories felt muddled and that people dashed them out, and now the shoe is on the other foot, the idea of telling someone they ‘gave up’ is something I will never do. The final chapters in terms of word count are double and triple the first and I just… don’t know. I don’t feel like I gave up. I did talk to the editor quite a lot about length, and I posted above about some of the practicalities of writing. Ultimately you can’t know how the game will be received until it comes out.
So, that’s what things have been like this past week. A lot of self-doubt, a lot of disappointment (I have no idea how the game has sold or when I’ll find out - my guess is not great). And it might be one-and-done on interactives. Or I might be wrong. I don’t know. Writing is fun, and I won’t stop doing it - but it might be in a more traditional medium in future.
There are kids stories on COG/HG (Dryad’s riddle springs to mind). Not a popular genre for sure on this platform, but no reason why you can’t publish something there if you’d like to write it
Do it I’d actually like to see more games that aren’t heavily player stat checked around for variety.
I’d actually like to see more games that aren’t heavily player stat checked around for variety.