As I work on Modern Majesty i can’t help but think back on the projects I gave up on and why.
my first two I lost all I had down when my computer was damaged moving. Next time i tried i tried doing a romance story starring a girl mc and these gods of reality I had made up. But in the end it felt like I hadn’t set it in a god enough setting to get enough personality out of the characters.
And the last one i gave up on was called starlight academy it was a mixture of sci fi a universe id been building up through my comincs, and princess maker style game play. it was supposed to be a story of a kid who goes through 8 years of school and your stats would then be used to tell you of what you did as an adult. but i had been drawing pictures for it and my tablet broke. so i gave up. Though i hope to rewrite it some day.if you want to try it. it will crash and im not going to fix it anytime soon.
So what projects have you stopped? and why? do you want to return to them?
This is going to take forever if I list stories and other projects, so just ChoiceScript -
For one of the CS contests I made a game called the Moonlight Circus, which was basically a series of randomly chosen rooms where earlier rooms would influence later ones.
I coded it as a concept piece to see if something that different could work, and honestly it didn’t. It was overly complicated and confusing, making it harder to grasp the plot or relate to any characters. Rather than reworking it again and again until it overcame those limitations, I went back to easier structures.
The second game’s easier to explain. I wanted to write one about a post-apocalyptic barkeep, auditioned co-authors, chose one, he backed out at an inconvenient time, I decided I was probably too busy for a second game anyway. I might put out another open call when MoNHH is closer to done and revive the idea.
I like pushing what choice script can do but the weight of complicated coding to get a story that really changes tends to get me down. Over-ambition is and always will be my down fall.
Every project I have tried to write with a co-author ABANDONED!!! Still it’s fun planning out games with someone else and bouncing ideas together even if nothing ever happens beyond that.
I think my main problems are the projects end up massively more complicated than I expected them to.
OR I end up liking the NPCs far more than a blank canvas protagonist and that starts to make it tricky for me to write.
But mostly it’s writing is hard work, and my brain doesn’t like focusing very much. I remember when writing was so easy, that was amazing. I wish it was like that now.
People say you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, and that makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it at all.
I almost started a project I never even mentioned on here while I was working on it, but after like two pages I realized I couldn’t write the story I was thinking of and couldn’t stay awake while coding, so I dropped it.
I got a good 40,000 words into a story and then had to start an intense module for my masters and put it on hold. Due to having not been on the site for almost 6 months it seems to have closed my game thread for me
Honestly though I used to work on a WIP called freefall but I found out ADD, not being an original english speaker and being terrible at coding is a bad mix
Very kind of you FairyGodfeather but I should probably make sure its worth the time of opening it before I do any of that. I count rejoining the site as my warm-up and will see if I can even get back into writing a game I’ve avoided thinking of for 6 months.
There’s a good chance it will remain abandoned if I can’t get going on it again
