Personal experience., my friend. Personal experience. i did so many beta attempts when no single person replied. No single one. No feedback from anyone. Nada cero.
Edit. It is better have trolls that feel the Nothing. Refresh page over and over. Knowing that yes, another time no single person will answer
@agraysparrow – I am replying here, to keep the other thread on point.
I understand what you are saying here, but I think there is a significant difference between “flavor choices” and “meaningful choices” as used within the IF world and the game world in general.
Flavor choices can have a huge impact on a reader’s or gamer’s experience. It is one reason I am thankful for the multi-replace tool in Choice Script.
The meaningful choice (to me) is one that impacts the narrative, in such a way that other types of choices do not.
The same choice (e.g. to take a knife to a gun fight) can be considered different ways, all depending on the context that the author puts that choice in.
Does that mean the choice will impact the reader any less, if bringing a knife to a gun fight is just flavor textual? No, the impact of a choice depends on much more than the usage being chosen to describe that choice.
If you don’t mind me expanding on this and trying to draw a bit of a ‘line’ just for the sake of clarity…
Would you also consider choices which are remembered by other characters to be generally meaningful? Or would they be ‘flavour’ unless they have some sort of branching (an argument, or an additional scene, etc) associated with it?
Let’s say, for example, you have a discussion with someone where you mention with someone about loving the violin (and have a choice between several instruments to say you like). The RO remembers this, and will pick up the violin themself and play a solo for you to ‘serenade’ you. If you say voice, they will sing you a sonnet, if you say you prefer dancing they later set up a slow dance for you both) Where would this fall into?
What if instead of an the RO’s actions shifting entirely, they just play a different record according to your preference, would that then fall into ‘flavour’?
(Since I am a lover of reincorporating choice, it always has made me curious how much it needs to go into play to shift from being ‘purely’ flavour into being considered more ‘meaningful.’)
To me the line between ‘meaningful’ and ‘flavour’ has always felt pretty nebulous.
I think part of the difference with Honor Bound is that I’m writing it closer to full-time than my earlier projects (part of Blood Money, and Creme were written at around 2/2.5 days a week, on average, and Royal Affairs and Noblesse Oblige were written in evenings/weekends around other full-time work), so I had more of an impetus to spend more time on “promotional” materials and I knew I wanted to use Patreon for early access which I’d done previously with RA and NO. I used the weekly character-bios and such to get people interested and also give them something to read or discuss while the Patreon version of the first chapter was on early access for subscribers. So, to be brutally honest that part of it was about marketing/promotion, and if I do end up posting short stories that would be for the same reasons.
I feel generally more confident about sharing a bit more about the characters, at least some of them, because I have a very strong idea of them in my head. I don’t feel as concerned that people’s opinions of them will make me second-guess things; I think back when I started Creme, four years ago (!!) I was more nervous because it was my first time posting a WIP. Partly I think this is experience, but also partly it’s from having triaged a huge amount of feedback very recently with the Royal Affairs and Elite Status betas, and making decisions about what to do with feedback and how to implement it. Doing those two very different betas in quick succession was intense but has helped me feel more sure about what, if anything, I want to do in response to player commentary.
I’d also started thinking about the game back in January, and in more detail in February, so by the time I posted about it in May, I’d already written 95000 words and was working on Chapter 3 - so I felt very solid on the premise and overall plot. I’ve continued to write pretty far ahead of what I’ve put up or talk about - what’s available to play is less than half of what I’ve written - so again I feel generally solid about the earlier chapters because I’ve gone through edits and have done some polish as I go, rather than writing a draft and putting it up straightaway.
However, I still tend not to say a huge amount about elements/characters who come in later, or big plot points - there’s a fairly influential character who appears in Chapter 2, and various characters from further-on chapters, which I didn’t mention much or at all initially because it felt strange to reveal a lot about them before they appeared in-game.
This is immensely true. It’s very much about the person and the project and what works for one person or project won’t work for everyone else, or a different project might need a different way of doing things.
I’m going to take things out of the order you posted, I hope that is okay.
Any time a term of art is used by a group of people, things get fuzzy. This is why i am trying my darnedest to keep the focus of my replies on my take on this.
Using these recorded choices in a relationship mechanic as proposed by @Havenstone above would impact the narrative (who you end up in better or worse relationships with, who you’d be romancing, etc), so in cases such as this, recorded choices such as this become meaningful.
On the other hand, 90% or more of recorded choices of this nature that I have seen/experienced in the IF, VN, and even RPG genres are simple call-back choices. Things like long blond hair streaming out in the stormy weather being mentioned by your companion in one scene and in another, the companion you are with mentioning the moonlight hitting your blond hair in an enticing manner while on a date.
In Baldur’s Gate 3, there is a minor character singing a ballad in a druid’s grove. For the majority of the players, the little arc you engage with this character ends up being flavor.
For the minority of players, running this otherwise flavor arc turns into something very impactful, and it really hits home in several different ways.
In this case this arc that is open to all and which does not change on the surface, becomes deeper and more meaningful for the minority of players.
Unless you search for answers on the internet, the only way to “get” this difference is to play the campaign more than once in different ways.
As a writer, I am deeply inspired by things of this nature, and it is my hope I can bring some of this magic into my projects I am writing for Hosted Games.
Actually, the Queen of Summer wanted more power so she attacked the other three
Maybe, if the PC is indeed a pacifist, like mine…
Then, if they go round killing Mavericks, that doesn’t count, right?
I think you missed the point of Eiwynn’s post. It is about the approach of meaningful differences in choices, not the specific example. You can make that choice ultimately flavor to the narrative, or you can make it impactful to the direction of the story.
These comments brought up a good point. And while I do agree with some of it, I think everyone’s kind of forgetting one major issue here.
Our job when we are writing is to write a good story with in depth characters and heart-moving themes.
Our job when advertising our games is to interact with the world in a way that produces fans and puts eyes on the work.
It’s the seperation there that is important. You should write like the world isn’t watching, but you should market in a way that reaches the eyes of the people most likely to like your work. You have to maintain a seperation of these two. Fans are going to demand things. That’s just fact.
The fans of the Voltron animated series sent deaththreats to the writers because of their choice to make one of the characters gay. Fans of Star Wars have literally camped out and stalked writers for choosing to make specific characters female, or POC, or anything else. This is just a fact of life when creating. This doesn’t stop Disney or Cartoon Network from advertising to those fans and appealing to their rabid nature. This definitely doesn’t stop writers and animators from throwing out character profiles or fanservicey voice clips.
I don’t see any reason not to advertise a RO from your game as a specific trope, even if that trope ends up not being valid later. If those mobile game commercials are any clue, NO ONE CARES if the advertisement is 100% accurate. Especially not at the VERY BEGINNINGS of creating a game.
I would suggest looking into the marketing strategy for “Yandere Simulator”.
I do think that completely sequestering your game before you put it up for sale is a recipe for disaster nowadays though. Which is why I’ve been building up my ‘studio tumblr’ since day one, so as to try and get SOME eyes on it, early as can be. As they say, “any publicity is good publicity.”
You are a connoisseur of TTRPGs and we should be friends.
Thank you for bringing this up. I don’t know enough about how the system works, fairmath or not, to know if fairmath is working out well. I feel like I will have to do a lot of adjustment after I get the storypaths down, because some of the checks are gonna have to be adjusted. I think probably a combo of fairmath and regular arithmetic should work.
The thing is though, this is just a standard part of game creation. Every game ever has had to adjust it’s metrics for each game-affecting choice. It’s the source of the term “Nerfing” after all.
Please see my Relationship system which basically does exactly that! and then, using the four variables, I translate that into a relationship bar on the stats screen, along with a prose description of the characters level of trust in the PC.
((In reference to everything in this post, I wanna state for the record I do not think I’m better than anyone. although I realize that this post has a tone of condescension to it, I do not mean for it to? Ive just done a lot of research (thank the AuDHD) into these subjects and this is the conclusion I’ve come to.))
I worry about overly complicated subsystems, especially for romance.
I thought the same! What could be easier than the ol’ say-the-right-thing-add-points romance counter?
Then I watched this:
Romantic Narrative Design - Youtube
It’s a panel from the Game Design Conference held in 2022, about narrative design and how games are handling it. It goes over a ton of stuff, like “Kindness Coins”. You be nice to a person and they fuck you, essentially. XD Good games have it! Stardew, many visual novels, even Skyrim uses it.
But it has a bit of a poor connotation, which is what the system I adapted is meant to help. Which is to say, even if you’re nice to a person, they might not want to fuck you. And even if a person wants to fuck you, they may not want to marry you.
And that can be interesting and fun to explore in the narrative, not only for your players, but for you as a writer.
That said, if you’re one of those “It aint broke don’t fix it” then stick with what works for you. That’s what’s most important.
My comment is in direct response to that video! The issue I take with it is considering it to be a prescriptive approach – “most games do it badly and this is how you do it well” – when I believe that the intent of games is never to mimic real human interaction. A certain level of abstraction makes things a lot easier on both the reader and writer.
As a reader I want predictable results, and as a writer I don’t want to die in the writing mines.
“Die in the writing mines” – love it.
But well over half that video (which I quite liked) is commending a highly abstracted, predictable, even single-variable approach to writing ROs. It’s just advising a swap from niceness to “chemistry” as the coin of the realm, to ease out of the “niceness earns sex” game design rut. The latter parts of the video skim through some possibilities for more “realistic” mechanics while acknowledging everything that concerns you about going down that road.
Niki’s four-variable system doesn’t look crazily complicated to me, and could generate some really satisfying romantic gameplay. Thanks for sharing it, Niki! But for any writers who look at it and think “too much work,” there are options between that and a one-dimensional romance stat. You could do it two-dimensionally: trust and attraction. (The dynamic tension when a reader sees “Jim likes you but doesn’t trust you” can be worth a few extra lines of code.) Or just adding a few Booleans to track moments of significance or turning points in the relationship can lead to relationships that don’t feel completely hostage to fairmath.
Beyond the whole seasonal kingdoms aspect, my story is about twins, Reina and Delphine, transforming knights who defend the kingdom from The evil Summer Queen and her army of hypnotized sea creatures. I’ll probably have more knights later. Potentially The Princess of Spring and the Summer Queen’s daughter.
You’re absolutely right, but as an author who just likes and wants to overcomplicate things, I feel personally attacked 
Thank you for linking this video. It should be of interest to many.
Also, thank you for sharing your scripting … I am still tweaking my relation and romance mechanics, so I am not sure how my systems will look when finalized.
While I believe your take on “our job” is valid for many who are independents and who self-publish, the situation is somewhat different with a Hosted Games (and CoG as an aside) project, especially for a first time author.
The reason I say this is two-fold. First, the structure and nature of Hosted Games is itself set up to do the second “job” you list. The marketing and the backend of publishing (like dealing with the various platforms for you) are there already.
Because of this set-up, the focus for us shifts to the production of the game.
One of the publishing requirements is to have a “beta test” of your game. This means many things to many people, and the discussion of meeting this requirement is ongoing in this monthly thread and in the community as a whole.
When most open a WiP thread for a first time, they do not have the experience, nor the knowledge to handle in-the-moment interaction with the community as they write and end up suffering the consequences of trying to react to the demands of an established community.
There are exceptions and outliers, of course, but this has been the norm for the past 15+ years here.
An established fandom demanding things from an author is a different experience than an established community expressing established expectations to every author who makes a WiP.
That is why in my quoted post, I talk about a fandom that coalesces … When Lys and JimD dropped their new WiP, both of their established fandoms rallied to the thread and started providing constructive criticism right away. Their fandom is established and helping them with this project from the start.
A new author, especially an inexperienced one, has to build their fandom up, and it can take a long time for it to reach that critical mass needed to be both helpful and effective.
Going to outside sources, such as social media, for additional marketing and fan development is a major undertaking, and to do it correctly, it takes a lot of resources, resources that most will want to devote to their writing when first starting out.
This is why I said: “I do not intend to write side-stories or other such common promotions found elsewhere, such as in the Tumblr IF realm, until after release.”
I want to establish a presence, but right now, every resource I have is committed to the writing aspect of my projects.
I think Hannah’s experiences, as they detail under the cut in their post to me, illustrates such a journey that many others mirror in their own trajectories towards publication.
Authors who have a successful presence in social media all talk about the commitment needed to do things “right” and how draining and exhausting it can be.
This is especially so for someone who wants to appeal to two fanbases at once. The pressure is real. The lack of knowhow in building a good base has me jumping around in the dark.
And these were the people that encouraged me to continue to give helpful advice, to continue to fight, to continue to make my stuff known, to let it out into the world for further feedback, as well as to test the market.
What is it about summer queens that always lends to them being evil? I have a project on the backburner (not a IF WIP, but a comic) that had a Summer Queen as the antagonist too!
RIGHT?! Like maybe I want to die in the writing mines! Ever think about that? (Just kidding, please don’t let me. Send food. Send water. HELP.)
Here’s the thing. All of this is valid feedback for the community, and valid for each and every new author who happens upon this as an outlet for their creativity.
But I do have one problem with your comment here:
I feel that perhaps a lot of the newbie authors in here will take this as “Oh, if it’s that difficult, I should wait until I’m better at it, until I have it all figured out.”
And speaking as someone who has looked into both traditional publishing and self-publishing of Novels, Games, and comics (all of which are their own beasts, but these beasts are scientificially similar enough that they can be compared), that just straight up isn’t the case!
A lot of brand new developers/game designers/self-published authors, etc, have gotten the kind of engagement you’re talking about simply by showcasing that they were new, and by interacting with those in their wheelhouse. Hell, TobyFox got his fandom set up because of his connection to the homestuck fandom, and how? He interacted with their spaces and focused his attention on THEM during the production of undertale. (didn’t help he was living in Andrew Hussie’s basement at the time, and that man was a genius in maintaining fandom engagement, so he had a bit of a leg up on us all there)
But I can tell you that no published author who wasn’t an overnight sensation (which is a statistical anomoly and should NOT be used as an actual method of managing your success) has ever done it by avoiding the limelight.
In the end, it does come down to resources. You have to allocate them in a way that leans towards the kind of success you want. If that means focusing 100% of your energy on writing, and then later coming into the scene, hoping to be able to draw attention quick enough for your launch? Go for it! I support you all the way! I’m sure that book will be AMAZING, because you clearly have given it your all!
I totally get where you’re coming from! (I am the person known to tell CoG or HC authors that it’s a good idea to put up WIP threads on here both for promotion and feedback reasons.) I think there is a lot of nuance, and have seen how sharing many things upfront straightaway can have a negative impact on motivation or player expectations; but then, a scant week ago, I posted an oldie but goodie video from Olivia Wood about showing things early and often… so I see it as a combination of factors and preferences. I think there is some difference between sharing what’s being worked on vs lots of additional writing (whether that’s bonus stories or answering questions less formally) and it’s very helpful for authors to figure out consciously how they want to do those things if all l at all.
I love that Michelle Clough video and am interested in how something similar could work in ChoiceScript; for me, I do a combination of relationship bars and recording big decisions that affect how the NPCs feel about the PC with booleans or integers. I like combining those because you can have things like “you saved my life… but you’re still so annoying!” or “I don’t approve of what you did but I grudgingly respect you”.
I’ve said it before but Michelle Clough’s Passion and Play book is an absolutely fantastic resource for people writing interactive romance and, specifically, spicy scenes.
(In other news, many years ago I ran a Changeling: the Lost campaign, played in a live game for a year, and even now my wife and a group of our friends are playing a live campaign, heh)
Ah, that wasn’t my intention if I came across that way 
when I talk about caution when figuring out promotional activities, it partly comes from a place of thinking about potential negative impacts as mentioned above… but mostly about avoiding overstretching and burnout. Intense promotional activities plus writing, plus whatever work or other life stuff going on, can be really tough to sign up to and maintain consistently.
I want this book so bad, but it’s expensive and my library doesn’t have it. TAT
THIS IS A GOOD POINT. It makes for good dynamic interaction.
TAT No one in my gaming circle likes Changeling: The Lost… So I have to sit and fume.
THE TRUE ENEMY OF ANY CREATIVE.