September 2026 Writer Support Thread

Game Development Writing and Content
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And September is upon us!

Writer Support Threads are here for you to discuss your monthly goals and challenges, comment about any burning ideas you have, find support, share resources, ask questions, and more. They were established by our late friend Eiwynn, and I know she’d be thrilled to see them still going stronger than ever.

Dates & Reminders

On the 15th of each month, we host Snippet Day – post something from your current project, as much or as little as you want! Note please that the primary purpose of Snippet Day isn’t feedback, but to help writers feel comfortable with posting their work publicly. Feedback on snippets should only be given if writers specifically request it.

The Halloween Jam is coming up – still plenty of time to write a short game in keeping with the theme!

Featured WIPs

In other contexts, of course, feedback is our lifesblood. The following writers have requested it specifically this month:

Monthly Resources

Over on the Intfiction forum, there was an interesting discussion last month on a topic we’ve touched on here a few times: Why isn’t Interactive Fiction more popular, and what could we do to boost its popularity? CoG is a relatively commercially successful corner of the wider interactive fiction market; the Intfiction forum focuses more on parser games and Twine games, which for the most part appeal to an even more niche audience than Choicescript games. But the conversation touched on several points that are relevant to our market, too.

In the past I’ve shared this piece from David Mitchell on the challenges of writing historical fiction. In particular, I like his idea of the “Bygonese” dialect – his label for the right balance between writing in a glaringly modern voice and in phony-sounding or incomprehensible archaisms. Last month I found an article analysing how much of his historical writing succeeds in steering clear of anachronistic words, and it turns out he does pretty well!

For my part, in my own fantasy writing, at first I just tried to steer clear of words that were originally derived from the names of real-world historical figures (e.g. platonic, quisling, lynch). That was the gateway drug that eventually got me regularly checking the Etymological Online Dictionary to keep my vocabulary from drifting too modern. XoR isn’t medieval – it’s early modern – but I’ve tried to stick to 1500s-1600s coinages as much as I can, drifting as late as the mid-1700s when I need to.

It turns out that a lot more words and phrases than I realized first cropped up from the 1800s onward! Below is my list in progress.

For folks who share my brand of pedantry, I guess.

Words to avoid in premodern writing:

air (verb, of concerns, grievances, etc.) (1862)
aplomb (1823)
back down (1859)
back off (1938) - use “back away”
camouflage (1917)
crackdown (1915)
downside (1995!) - use “drawback,” 1720
grill (as “interrogate,” 1894)
lockup (jail, 1838)
low-profile (from autos, 1957) - use “lie low”
lynch (1835, named for an American)
mindset (1916)
monitor (1944)
nitwit (1914)
off the hook, i.e. not held responsible, fishing metaphor (mid-1800s)
parlay, for advantage (1942) - not to be confused with parley (meet to negotiate), which is old
pass up (1896) - use “forgo”
pratfall (1929)
quiz (1852)
shack (1878 US), use “hut”
showdown (1904, from earlier poker metaphor)
sidelines (1934, either railway or football metaphor)
smokescreen (1915)
spook (1928)
stand down (in military sense, from 1916)
standoff (1874) - use “confrontation”
stash (1797) - use “stow” (v) or “cache” (n)
tamp (1959) - use “damp down”
thunk (sound, 1952) - use “thud”
tip off (1883)
underhanded (1807) - use “underhand”
update (1944)

Ones I’ll keep using for lack of a smoother option:
pay off (as “succeed,” 1937)
pass out (1915)
die down (1834)
faze (1830, but from a 15c Kentish root)

Have fun writing this month, all. Do it for the joy.

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Congrats to everyone! If you’re still on here you’re either writing or at least thinking about doing it, and that means you haven’t given up yet.

I mostly took last month off, especially since I spent two weeks of it at our usual Daytona Beach resort. I did get a couple thousand words in on The Wild Lands, likely the longest story in my alt-history short story collection, which will hopefully be about ready by the end of the year or so. Tells a thousand year story of an England freed from Roman control by Boudica’s revolt that grows into a matriarchal society and eventually expands to America centuries early.

I am resolved to write more frequently, and to that end I’ve started doing it more at down times during work. Sometimes that’s easier than at home.

Good luck to all this month!

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How is everyone balancing readability versus efficiency in writing their code and prose? There is one scene I’m working on where liberal usage of multi-replace condenses the word-count by quite a lot but makes deciphering it when editing/polishing take a bit more effort to parse. I know there’s no real negative to repeating text if it makes things easier to parse but there’s some desire in me to not “waste” word-count if that makes sense.

There probably isn’t really an answer here and it varies scene by scene, but was just curious if anyone else has been grappling with this sort of thing.

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Escalate. It sounds like a “real” word with Latin origins that could have been used by Shakespeare, but it’s actually a back-formation from “escalator.” It didn’t become an everyday vocabulary word until the mid-20th century, when commentators started using it to describe Cold War tensions.

Sibling. Coined in the early 1900s and wasn’t much used outside of academic and clinical contexts at first. However, in an alternate universe with broader ideas about gender than were actually held in the English-speaking world, it or something like it would have existed much earlier, so if that’s your setting, feel free to use it.

Teenager. The idea of a distinct stage of development between childhood and adulthood, and an accompanying youth subculture, didn’t really exist until after WWII.

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This month, my stretch goal is to finish Ch. 9 of Shadow of the Curse-Eater with 30K words or more total. My day job as a teacher has started up again, so my writing time has gone down a lot, but it might technically feasible. If not, definitely by mid october!

This chapter, based on the first author’s notes, is a big planning session that also serves as the ‘big scene at the end of the detective novel where everything is laid out’. A lot of decisions on who’s going to live and who’s going to die. And this is also the chapter for romance commitments or breakups.

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Take that with a huge grain of salt, since my experience in this area specifically is non-existent, but in other areas of coding I would likely stick to the leaner code and add comments if readability is an issue otherwise.

I usually do my story outlines in Excel. I didn’t bother to adjust it this time (for a short story), but I think I’ll add a new column to note down where to find each scene/beat/whatever. So far it was always page number, but…

Love the list. Downside surprised me (how recent it cropped up I mean). I find semantic shifts super interesting as well. Definitely the most common example, but all the potential meanings of ‘nice’ still crack me up, “wanton or dissolute”?! https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/nice-multiple-meanings

I think I would like to write half of my short story this month. There’s a lot of things happening otherwise this month, but it seems doable. Watch me eat my words and end the month with an outline and character sheets for a different story without having written as much as a draft.

Forgot to add that I wanted to finally try some writing exercises from a book I bought ages ago and that has been collecting dust. Might as well put it on the list as a goal or it will never happen.

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Pactbinder Chapter 4 came out end of July, I got my break, I got a few bug/typo fixes out, a couple of light rewrites done, and the Wrapped. And people mostly seemed to like it. I’ve also managed to build out my outline for Arc 2 of the story a lot better. So I’ll take that as August successfully achieved.

Goal for September is to make meaningful progress into C5. Would be good to get straight back into the rhythm of 10k words a week, which would mean having 45k words of C5 by end of Sep, but I plan on giving myself a good bit of grace.

My real priority, at least for the week to come, is to get back into the habit of writing a bit every day ASAP. I trust everything else will follow that.

For me personally, being parsable for future editing and beta testers is the be-all and end-all of coding and writing in ChoiceScript. I want to be able to eyeball my writing in notepad++ - not just for typos, grammar, etc, but also for comparing the length of individual lines and branches, to ensure that micro-branching doesn’t lead to dramatically different reading experiences (i.e. for one reader a page is really long with dense paragraphs, for another it’s very sparse and short).

Multireplace blows that up hard for me, so I use it a lot less; my coding style is very different for ChoiceScript than it is for other languages.

I do like elegant code though, so I try to avoid repeating blocks of text unless I really want to micro-tweak stuff a lot per branch; action is my weak spot here, I find I’m most guilty of reusing text in combat scenes - though even then I tend to tailor each permutation a lot, so the repeating helps in a sense.

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Hi everybody! My name is Crimskull, and I’ve been a big fan of Interactive Fiction and Choice of Games for many years. My favorites games I’ve played in the catalogs were Tin Star, Breach: The Archangel Job and Choice of Robots. My favorite genres are Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Action. During the past few years I’ve been wanting to make an IF I would be interested in, hoping to put myself out there. So my goal for September is to release a demo on CogDemos which will be a Space Opera called Interstellar Hunters.

Admittedly, I have a hard time of putting myself out there. But I hope to change that and interact with more people. I’m glad to be here and I hope to discuss more about my writing progress real soon. Thank you for reading!

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I think IF needs some quality space opera. I’ll be looking out for your demo!

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Goal for September: wake me up when it ends.

Actual goals for September:

  • Complete the chapter.
  • Complete Flim the Bard’s story.
  • Complete Princess Pevette’s story.
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My goals for this month are the same as before: edit, review, and get to a point where I feel comfortable sharing!

Wow, this is a fascinating list! Never thought of showdown as being a poker term.

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I’m thankful that I specialize in fantasy and modern/slice-of-life genres. Having to check if these words are period-accurate can be nerve-wracking to me.

If IF and visual novels are lumped together, I personally think the former would receive a much bigger shot in the arm.

Now then. My goal for this month is simply to continue development on Lily Adventuresses! Episode 4. Right now, I’m still on the first half of chapter 3, because I not just had so much lore and dialogue to write, but also I had to design three towns in RPG Maker 2000. Maybe I might have to extend the deadline for completing the entire episode to November…

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I like pairing if statements with implicit control flow turned on. If the prose repeats more than, arbitrarily 20/30 or so words, I often make it a gosub.

And lots of playtesting.

I tend to only use multireplace for small substitutions or for additional flavor text in choice options.

Another sci-fi fan! Good luck! :slight_smile:

This is a fantastic resource.

I don’t really prefer writing historical fantasy, so I’m unaware of a lot of fantasy or historical accuracy. I’ve been trying to remedy this with thousands of words of research and reading popular and unknown historical fiction. It sure is a lot of work.

Sadly on my way to browse this and comb through my 50000 word historical fantasy. :face_with_spiral_eyes:

Almost forgot my monthly goal.

I want to write at least 10000 words. And write a few explorative writing pieces to challenge myself.

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Extremely useful, thank you very much. Although, I’m not planning to get paranoid with it. :sweat_smile: The article about faking a 19th century novel is something I didn’t know I needed. :joy: Chef’s kiss.

This is me. I had the vaguest of visions for a story, barely a feeling, much less a concept, and then suddenly yesterday, while I sat down to get a few words on my project, I’m overtaken by the urge to outline this completely different idea. The shiny object syndrome is real.

That said, I want to focus on Untrodden. I won’t put a target number for word count, since I’m just coming back. I’m happy to just get the gears running again whatever that means in the end of the month.

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I suppose I should have said last night that the Intfiction thread wasn’t just about market popularity, but digs into the question of what you can do with text vs graphics, and how much a particular type of game makes the player “work” for their fun – design and genre issues, not just marketing ones.

A few posts down, it also has a link to this good advice:

And I was remiss not to mention the Halloween Jam, which is a great opportunity to do just that. I’ve edited the post to include that reminder.

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I made a lot of progress on Chapter 6 of The Rise of Cthulhu last week, completing my goal for August of getting most of the chapter written. I should be able to finish writing the chapter in the next week or two, with another week needed for testing and editing. My goal for September is to move Chapter 6 live and at least start on Chapter 7, though that will require some “research” (reading H.P. Lovecraft stories) before I start writing it. One of them is rather long.

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Print “Hello World”

I comment word gore, but if you feel thats the right thing for you to do then do it.

Welcome welcome, I hope you have fun and enjoy writing.

Now for my goals for september, it’s pretty simple and it’s too finish writing the interlude chapters for my story and get cooking on the main story. Plan to write 4/7 ish chapters before releasing to get some stock ready to have a decent release schedule.

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Readability of the code is always a priority for me. I see no reason to do super effective coding, it’s not like these games are hard on the system to run. Sure, massive amounts of repeated text that artificially inflates wordcount is bad, but good old *if vs multireplace? I use the latter for small word replacements, but if there’s more than that I prefer *if because that is easier to read and edit for me.

That being said, I am a writer and not a coder, so I can understand that some might see things as readable that I do not. I want my baby coding language thank you :sweat_smile:

EDIT: Managed 63 000 words of Revelations writing in August, and 10 000 words of other writing. Which is pretty nice!

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I favor readability, too. That said, after working in the format for long enough, I’ve found that it’s easier to read at least some forms of code than it used to be, so it might end up being that eventually I hit a balance.

As for this month’s goals:

  • Finish this dang epilogue

And… that’s it. If I can get started on the editing phase of things, or even get going on the next projects, well, I’ll consider that a bonus, but I’m trying to keep the goal modest for the month because we’re doing a lot of adjusting here for some changes in everyone’s schedules, so I don’t think I can count on quite the same amount of time to write as I usually can.

Good luck with your aims, everyone!

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I’m swamped with personal commitments and my other work at the moment, so things are low in energy in my writing world. It’s really frustrating as well as draining because I’m really pretty near the end of this project, but it’s so complex, and it’s hard to see beyond the incompleteness and rough edges. I think I need to take myself less online again because I’m getting symptoms of burnout (including some health bits that I associate with being run down). Best of luck with everything for September and beyond, hopefully I will be more active again both for writing and online socialising soon.

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