I don’t rewrite. I fill-write! What I mean by that is that every time I go back to do something, move bits around, add scenes, add stats, I often find a bit to fill out, or change around. Occasionally my first draft is very bare and I am fine with that, because I know when I go back and add storyline and content it will fill out a lot.
My main rewrite is during the editing stage, when I actually bother to polish things as I know the major structural shifts are already done.
Is it possible to write three stories at once, or am I just being dumb. I got some interesting ideas that I want to explore but gaaah.
@ClearBlueStar Do you want to finish them all? Are they all the same scope?
I think exploring several stories at the same time is a valid thing to do, I usually end up with one I like more than the others and finish that one. I think it’s also nice to sometimes take a break from your main project and write a short story or similar. I know of myself that if it were several ideas for stories that will take me longer, two out of three would be shelved. But that doesn’t mean you can’t come back to them later either.
That makes a lot of sense. I don’t think I’m a good enough writer for it, but it does sound like a very nice streamlined process for these huge projects.
Also I never heard of it being referred as fill-writing, but I guess that’s how I go from my draft to my actual story. It’s a good way to describe it.
I find pantsing weirdly impressive. If there’s one part of writing I could skip, it would be the writing. 
I love the planning part. Outlines, character sheets, the lore…
That’s probably what I would do. I don’t think it hurts to explore several options. It might be how you end up with the better story. How many of them you then work on at the same time probably is different from person to person. For me it’s really just one bigger project. And even then I don’t finish them all. But trying it out is probably the best way to find out what works for you.
I want to finish all of them, and I am not sure they are going to be the same scope. One of them is supposed to take place in the span of a single night. While the other take place over days to months.
I think exploring several stories at the same time is a valid thing to do, I usually end up with one I like more than the others and finish that one. I think it’s also nice to sometimes take a break from your main project and write a short story or similar. I know of myself that if it were several ideas for stories that will take me longer, two out of three would be shelved. But that doesn’t mean you can’t come back to them later either.
Ok I think I understand, I will give it a shot and if I feel like I can’t be true to all of them. Then I will shelf the others and work on the main story for now.
But I only have two hands!
But seriously, when I have new ideas for a story I get the basics down in an outline and perhaps start it off with a few scenes I have in mind, just to get it out of my head. Usually at this point I will then refocus my attention to whichever is the most urgent, or feels like the path of least resistance - the one I’m finding easiest to write in my current mindset. But I think probably the best thing to do is focus on the one feeling like it could be completed sooner. I definitely struggle with maintaining high levels of focus over the long term, so switching between projects suits me better.
Not and get any meaningful progress, however, sometimes you need to get a bit out and then put it in a folder for later. That can be understandable, but you need to pick your favorite baby eventually.
Of course, you might find it possible to scavenge things from two stories to add to the third, making it better. Things that at first glance seems to be incompatible can sometimes fit together quite nicely. Fallen Hero is three stories in a trenchcoat trying to buy a ticket to an R-rated movies.
An approach with great potential, I think. It’s always interesting to peek under the hood of commonly used jargon. It can be surprisingly revealing.
Pre-launch rewrites? Fairly frequently - I think it’s rare that I’ll post a chapter where even a single passage is completely unchanged from my first draft.
Post-demo-launch? Pretty rarely, and usually just ultra-targeted tweaks to specific lines I wanted to land harder. Only big exception is that I rewrote a single RO conversation almost entirely last month, but that was one I’d been feeling wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be for some time. That was painful work, even if it was worthwhile in the end.
I suspect I’ll do one real rewrite wave near the end of the project, but I want a finished manuscript before thinking about stuff like that.
This is my feeling so far too. Even as someone prone to juggling creative and professional projects, I feel like IF games are almost inherently 2+ stories in one (depending on how much branching and reactivity you have, it can be many times this amount), both in terms of word count and demands on the author.
I certainly don’t think I could juggle a second project like Pactbinder without going full-time as an author, and even then I think the time would be better spent redoubling my focus on PB. Trying to split my focus now would just kill my chances of getting to the finish line on anything, I fear.
That’s funny, because I’m also doing the same thing (and just now realizing that it probably isn’t as unique as I thought, being the second-most obvious choice, after all). I can’t honestly remember why at this point, or if there was ever a particular reason, as the world for my current project is rooted in an old novel I wrote years ago, but I like the freshness it brings. I think I was just coining a lot of neologisms and liked the sounds of the Greek ones better when I compared them. Then again, I’m not super strict about it either. I use Greek when talking about the magical and supernatural, but I’ve still primarily used Latin for legal and political terms, so I suppose it’s a nice mix.
“Sauna” is not a proper noun, but don’t worry, it’s a perfectly proper common noun. 
Love this! I usually use knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin to coin new words rather than perverting existing ones, but some of these are incredible. “Monostrophe” is such an evocative word, and yet, without thinking about it, I definitely wouldn’t have realized it has the same root meaning as “universe.” Just goes to show how much of our language is vibes and connotations more than anything else. I also enjoy MEGAPSYCHIC as an alternative for “magnanimous” because it just reads as so hilariously juvenile in comparison. 
I hate words that don’t mean what they sound like so efficiently that you don’t even realize you need to look them up. 
For rewriting, one thing that took me years to understand is that good rewriting is not throwing away your whole draft and starting over. That usually creates new, equally bad rewriting.
I feel like the difference between good and bad writing is only about 10%. Changing between passive and active voice, using interesting words, using direct dialogue instead of indirect dialogue, tweaking the words you start sentences with, etc. can take a bad piece of writing and make it good. Especially in long-form writing; in really long books, people tend to remember only the very highest quality, the overall length, and any especially bad parts. So if you fix the worst mistakes and have at least a few amazing scenes, you don’t have to make everything 100% perfect.
Like Malin, I’ve found that expanding old text is often better than rewriting it; adding more details, more conversations, more branches, more choices.
In parser games (where I’ve been more successful than choicescript) I’ll often have 15-20 testers I work with closely who play through the game at various stages and find the worst parts or things they think it’s missing, then I’ll go through and patch that, then send it out again and find the worst parts and patch it. For those games, I know I’m done when the latest tester writes back and says something like, 'this is ridiculous, there’s obviously no problems, why are you even testing this?"
With CoG’s official method of sending in 1 chapter at a time, I didn’t follow the above protocol in the past. With Shadow of the Curse-Eater, I’ve been getting several people from the forums to play through and I’ve been fixing things from earlier chapters on the side, expanding them significantly. It’s been so helpful, and I deeply appreciate everyone who’s helped out on this thread.
Testing whether this is viewable. It’s a script I wrote as a writing exercise/to see if I could do it after spending years complaining about the writing quality of a lot of the episodes.
Can y’all see this?
I’ll also try this:
Hello again everyone and Thank You @Havenstone for hosting the thread!
I still don’t have any specific goals, I do only aspire to keep writing at least semi-regularly (besides all the reading). I do think I can finish chapter 1’s draft soon.
also
without code - A part of me now wants to just leave it like that.
I had a question. In Shadow of the Curse-Eater, which I’m helping with, the idea is that you play as someone who eats curses from others. You have to spit it out again at some point (cursing someone or something else), but if you hold it in too much, it distorts your body.
The player always starts with one distortion (you can choose between horns, a disfigured eye, wings that don’t work, or markings all over your body), but I have three different places where they can get more.
Right now, I have them as ones that are mostly hidable, as I worry about players feeling their character is ruined if they grow another head or something. So it goes:
-1st new distortion: taloned feet like a bird
-2nd new distortion: scaly skin on the legs
-3rd and final new distortion: fangs
But this is based on what I imagine people would want. Maybe people actually want big distortions to become a kind of human/monster hybrid. So I’d like to hear from you: what kind of distortions would be fun for the game to give you?
(I should note that the player is clearly warned about this and is given opportunities to use up their cursed magic/corruption before a distortion event)
I actually like the idea of obviously visible distortions that may even cause a reaction here and there. I think you already named most of the visual changes I would be likely to pick (horns, visible changes to the protagonist skin/markings, changes to their eyes, fangs or similar, a split tongue could be funny).
Probably I reference BG 3 for anything, but I think how hesitant people seem to be to use the astral-touched tadpole despite the only real downside arguably being visual and the upside being FLIGHT. 
There was a mod for that real fast. So maybe it’s not bad to keep the option for more lowkey distortions the player can hide.
It kind of feels like the distortion should be proportionate to the size of the curse. “I curse you to step on a Lego brick” might just be a funny-shaped birthmark, but something like “I curse your family unto the seventh generation” should at least be a third arm, or something.
That said, I am always on the side of making the PC (and setting overall) less human, so my biases are clear.
I would say given the theme not allowing the possibility to go “all in” would be a missed chance even though it would certainly not be for everybody. The real question for me would be, what the consequences are. Is there a social or other price to pay? Benefits? And that should be true for both decisions.
Good and bad and good news!
Good news: My game is substantially complete and in alpha testing!
Bad news: I only have three testers and I was hoping for four or more.
Good news: So far the first tester is providing amazing feedback, so I might only need three testers! A lot of things to change and several areas to expand.
For me, this depends on what kinds of choices these things are.
If choosing to keep all the curses instead of releasing them is generally the good/noble course, I think the distortions should be pretty serious. The way I see it, if taking all those curses upon yourself is a sacrifice you make for the greater good of the world, it should feel like a sacrifice imo. That means it needs to have some actual consequences and shouldn’t just be “Oh no I have horns and claws and fangs but I’m still hot so I guess it’s my curse to be a sexy demon-esque creature, woe is me.” Ugly me up if this is the case.
If choosing to keep them all is a selfish choice to gain power, then I’m fine with low impact cosmetic distortions like horns and fangs.
Personally, I don’t like when games give my MC a distortion. So I’m on the side of making them hide-able.