There’s a place for both mindsets. And it’s not black or white. Just because you have a couple of ideas and decide to proceed with the more marketable one doesn’t make you a soulless sellout. At the same time, there’s nothing inherently noble to make a deliberate choice to write inaccessible stories with no speck of compromise or concern of reader feedback simply because they are what speak to you personally. Nothing inherently bad in doing that either, but it’s not a good idea to glorify writers shutting out the whole world to keep their efforts pure of commercialism.
Art is great, but I would argue the somewhat controversial point that entertainment is equally great. When you have the ability to reach a large number of people and alleviate their stresses and problems for a couple of hours, that has value. However, so does reaching a much smaller audience yet impacting them much more deeply because your writing comes from the depths of your soul instead of being influenced by market research and genre trends.
@malinryden I think I have the perfect metaphor for how you always describe how you handled genre with FH: the audience was your dog, and you took the bitter, heartworm pill of sci-if cyberpunk elements and stuffed it deep within the Snausage of superheroes in order to insure the audience did not spit it back out.
I agree with that wholeheartedly. But I thought that present the other hand in the topic was intriguing. As the discussion sounded like Popularity was the only way to handle writing and the only thing new writers should focus on.
I don’t necessarily want to say that. It’s more that I wanted to warn people about the perils of ignoring trends and such if popularity was their aim, and soften the blow if they already had and their efforts had been met with disdain, or worse, the deadly cricket sounds of indifference and disinterest. If you are writing without popularity and financial renumeration as your aim at all, you don’t really need me to to validate your path. You are already validating yourself, and to that I say rock on, you’re doing what few people can. We wouldn’t want Hosted Games to be solely people writing art for art’s sake, because with no mass appeal it will fail to make enough money and eventually be shuttered. But there’s room enough for both here. Just like MGM used to be, releasing Oscar bait serious movies that had like a $10 million gross, then just when things looked dire they’d drop a Bond movie that brought them back from the brink.
Yes, perhaps I was a little harsh in the previous post, but I do stand by what I’m saying that there are far more efficient ways (albeit perhaps not as fun) compared to writing games. So yes, as you say, income is a nice bonus . But especially as a first release, that’s not what I’d recommend an author’s primary motivation hinge on.
In terms of popularity, this is where things start to fall down and I really think (from hard experience) is where new writers possibly need to have a perspective shift in what the first goal is as hustlertwo was discussing in the first post. First and foremost, it needs to be something you’re happy with, and acclaim from others (if you get it) being the bonus.
There’s a few dangers to wrapping up your sense of self worth in how well your game performs.
Story time: The initial reviews for my first game were really harsh and I took it personally as a big failure on my part. I almost walked away from game writing entirely I was so disheartened. This would have been a shame as I actually really enjoy writing in CYOA games. So, I thought about it, took a deep breath and asked around as to why everyone thought my game had “failed”, and used the feedback as a learning experience to try and improve my games from there on out.
So rightly or wrongly, I now try to work on something that I’m happy with for release. If it flops I can’t say that it makes you feel on top of the world, but it’s no longer as soul crushing. And because I now have a small separation between my self worth and the game’s worth in the public eye, it means I can be less afraid to write something that makes me happy/experiment with unusual game types and themes, even if it’s not in the golden triangle of what tends to make games popular if I feel like it.
One of the things with trying to write what you think everyone else will want can become problematic. Let’s say you’re a die hard fan of westerns, but you know that to have a good chance of a successful game, you really should write a superhero story. Will your heart really be in it? Will it get finished, or join the pile of abandoned WIP’s? (And there are a lot of abandoned WIP’s!!!)
Same goes for length. Not only is it in my opinion objectively better to write a shorter, solid and well tested game as a first effort for a heap of reasons, but what a lot of new writers don’t realise that the effort required to make games longer isn’t linear if you’re trying to do it properly with tracked variables and tied in storylines. I find the amount of time it takes to write the game in my case at least becomes exponentially larger the longer a game gets and I’m not the only writer to say this. Planning on a 300k+ word game as your first release is not as likely to end well on average from either a getting it finished, getting it polished (or $/hr point of view if that’s the motivation.) Longer games may earn more on average, but they also take longer to write, are harder to get polished, and if they don’t get finished, they earn nothing at all.
Do I never do things just because I think that’ll make the game more popular? No. I’d be lying if I said that was the case. Neither is there anything wrong with writing in ways to maximise the chances of the game being popular if it’s something you’re keen to do. At this point in time, I’m unlikely to write another highly branched type game because I know it’ll have a high chance of flopping. I don’t mind writing branch and return games, so why not go with a more popular option? I’ve included RO’s that I hadn’t originally planned for as well. There’s nothing wrong with gearing your game to be popular to give it the best chance of getting out there and being picked up and read (after all, if we didn’t want anyone else to see what we were writing, we wouldn’t have it on a platform like this!) but IMO it shouldn’t be the only driving factor that gives it worth to you.
@poison_mara Oh no, no reason to be sorry. I asked for the feedback and I wanted people to be honest with me, that’s the only way I could work out where to go from there. I actually really appreciated the help and support I got from this community at that time
The feedback that knocked me for a six was on the stores. The feedback you get there is far less likely to be descriptively helpful or considerate of your feelings. A 1 star rating with the description: “This game is crap” tells you there might be an issue, but not what it is or how to deal with it!
I also want to add one final thing since I am procrastinating writing:
Luck also plays a BIG part in it, especially if you are unknown.
An example: I set up at tumblr at release. I did search for all the fanart, stories, comments I could find, and reblogged them to that tumblr. I wrote snippets, answered questions and was very active in a way that is VERY much opposite my personality. It was a massive chore, a lot of hard work, but it helped connect people that played the game with each other, and that got them talking and that got more content and so on. And still I think I owe like a fourth of my sales to about three people, very talented artists who played the game and then proceeded to make art of it for their very large followings. The spike in sales every time that happened was massive. I didn’t know who they were beforehand, I had no idea where they came in contact with the game, but I do know that so many people picked up and bought it just because of them. If they hadn’t done that, I would have been a lot worse off than I am.
So much comes down to luck, but you also need to be ready to take advantage of any lucky breaks you can get.
I would love to see both pure historical and sci fi games do better myself, but I suppose I am in more of a niche. I also really want to see more romance focused games that a. Don’t involve anything supernatural or magic schools and b. Like Weyhaven cater to all preferences, including the dreaded M/F option. My dream game might be Weyhaven for super heroes, something that taps into the love triangles super hero comics often have and make it the focus.
Sorry! (I will say Fallen Hero does a bit of that with two solid well developed romances and optional others abut I think the format of four or so mouldable characters to romance just works for me personally. I guess I want a Spider-Man style COG is what I am saying.)
What genre exactly would you classify SOH as. I always see it as “Anime” in my head when playing it but I guess anime isn’t really a genre. We could probably do with more Japanese style ninja samurai games, surprised there aren’t more of them
(The second survey is from my Chapter 2 update, and it has about 50% new readers)
I know it’s not a large sample size by any means, and there’s definitely some bias here (I describe my story as a fantasy adventure), but for my audience at least, Mythology seems to be the second most popular (sub)genre.
If there’s one thing I learned though, it’s that including multiple genres in your premise doesn’t necessarily have the appeal as you might think. Or maybe that’s just because my title is doing me a disservice at capturing readers. (Or maybe it’s because of my MC’s age.)
Hopefully my little side-project would enlighten me if those factors are what’s actually hindering me. I’ve always wanted to write a multi-genre story though, so I’m not really trying to write based on what’s popular or not.
I actually found the author’s third point about sex and how it may bring action or plot to a full stop intriguing. Does anyone else think it does? That sometimes it may be too much, or has it detracted from a story? Not that you dont like it but, that it felt out of place in relation to the story and pacing.
@FatedFlame The good thing with IF stories is that you can implement that kind of content in your story without having it be a burden and be out of place because the reader can out right avoid those type of encounter. My game contains a good amount of explicit scenes, but the reader can go through the whole story without never finding themself in one if they don’t make the choice for it.
So the choice of adding such content or not adding such content is up to the author.
For me, I added it for the readers that would enjoy it all the while coding those scenes in a way to hide it from the readers that would feel uncomfortable reading such content.
I wouldn’t say it doesn’t bring anything to the story because it get mentioned again again if the reader went that path, but for the ones that didn’t it doesn’t take away anything from them.
I agree with you it should not matter how many readers a story has it should matter on the quality of the book being wrote if it doesn’t have quality but the story is 1million words long it doesn’t matter because it’s a pourly wrote story
While I agree that popularity shouldn’t be what motivates an author. Many of the people who are worried about how successful their writing will be are the ones who want to make a living off writing. Something you need a bit of popularity to do.
That said, you’re right that caring too much about popularity isn’t a healthy mindset to have. If you don’t like what you’re writing (at least in general for those of us who’re critical of ourselves lol), why should anyone else? Compromising what you’re writing for popularity will never end well for you.
“You were just an ordinary kid, until one day you got bitten by a radioactive termite and became The Termite Kid, New York’s newest wisecracking teenaged superhero.”
“You were just an ordinary wisecracking teenaged superhero kid, until you got bitten by a Wendigo. Now you must balance your responsibilities as a superhero with your hunger for human flesh.”
“You were just an ordinary cursed, cannibalistic, wisecracking teenaged superhero kid, until you discovered your grandfather’s magic sword in your attic, unlocking your true potential as the Heir to the Forgotten Elven Kingdoms. Now you must reclaim your crown from the Dark Lord.”
“You had no time for love as a cursed, cannibalistic, wisecracking teenaged superhero heir to the Elven Kingdoms, until you met Carol.”
“… and Josh.”
“… and your childhood friend Max and rival superhero Black Edge and supervillain Murderdeath and the suspiciously ravenous girl Wendy and the elven princess H’thanias and the Dark Lord, Keith the Usurper, and …”
. But especially as a first release, that’s not what I’d recommend an author’s primary motivation hinge on.
Sorry! (I will say Fallen Hero does a bit of that with two solid well developed romances and optional others abut I think the format of four or so mouldable characters to romance just works for me personally. I guess I want a Spider-Man style COG is what I am saying.)
