I think horror would work with the gameplay style. I mean, Goosebumps has a bunch of choose your own adventure style books, so I can see it working.
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For almost everyone, this is a part-time gig. So ‘do it faster’ isn’t a viable suggestion unless you personally want to start giving them retirement and health benefits so they can afford to quit their day jobs.
Teaming up with another author, while it could potentially increase output, would also cut royalty payments down considerably. As it is, an author gets less than 20% of the gross from each sale. So work with someone else and now less than a dime of every dollar goes to you.
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There’s the financial aspect, of course. But there’s also the creative one. Speaking personally, with how many ideas I have I’d normally love to bring on a co-author, but I’m too attached to my ideas, my story worlds, characters, etc, I don’t trust anyone else to write them.
There’s also the very real chance that a co-author simply wouldn’t see eye to eye with the original author and their ideas. Or that the original author wouldn’t like the ideas put forward by the co-author. In short, that kind of partnership isn’t for everyone.
Edit: All that said, with how my story ideas tend to work, I may end up needing one sooner or later anyway.
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I’d actually argue that faster production by authors is exactly what ‘needs’ to happen to build more sales, attract a larger fan base, build momentum (and satisfy fans who expect consistent content in our current binge/streaming culture) that could lead to eventual part-time or even full-time income. And I mean nothing negative by this whatsoever; we all get frustrated when our favorite content disappears for a while. My wife and I have been complaining “When’s the Boys coming back? What about Witcher? What happened to Ozark? Blah blah blah.”
It’s exactly why successful indie authors do what they do; release a lot of content, the more the better. Just a constant stream.
Many of them don’t even release a book until they have 3 or more written and ready to go, so they can rapid release boom boom boom to satisfy fans, giving them a few months to get more content ready to go with no gaps. When authors release or book (or game) and then don’t release their next product for, let’s say 2 years, those fans they’ve won over have nowhere to go. They drift away. This has totally happened to me, I’ve seen it first hand.
Now, you know I 100% agree with you when you say it’s not viable for most of us. Between most of us (probably 98% of us?) having full-time jobs, kids, full-time school, or some combo of those, and considering these take a long time to produce, and (perhaps most importantly) considering that the HG queue can only accept so many games in a year, I don’t really see a path forward for the faster releases that I’m sure many of us (authors AND fans) would like to see happen.
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I think that a book where the protagonist can reverse and bend time would be quite cool. Like a puzzle game where we desperately try to find the right combination of events to solve it all and let us decide what means we use and what kind of person we become after finding the solution
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Historycal fiction or slice of life would be great. I love fantasy, but i think that writing about everyday life can be just as good
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I’d love to see game like Psychonauts in here.
There are Psyhigh that look like (and are very cool) but that’s about it.
Other game, like the orpheus ruse, are too serious.
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for me:
- War ( with rom-com ) genre absolutely :vv like medieval wars, future wars, modern wars, anything that involve wars :vvvv
- High school genre : form gangs, beat bullies, go on date with your crush ( successfully romance or feel the power of friendzone :vvvv ), studying for exams ,… :vvv
Yep those are the 2 genres that i want to see in the future :vvv
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Still want to sée a psychonauts game like…
Other than that, I think I have a thing for the medieval gothic horror, like Shadow of Esteren.
I would love to see more stories based around the different cultures in the world. China, Japan, Philippines, Africa, India etc.
Especially if it has to do with each cultures different mythologies.
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I would love to see more “normal” story with a realistic setting, I feel there are too many fantasy ones.
Extraordinary things can happen even in “ordinary” life.
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Realistic fiction in general. It seems like every other story somehow involves magic, spaceships, some weird alternate reality, or all of the above combined.
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I would also like to see more realistic fiction, but it’s fair to point out that it tends to be less commercially successful than fantasy and such.
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Like the story of being a firefighter in other emergency jobs? Well, another non-fiction that I really liked is in which you are a mother, I would object that they did not include a single father or widower in the game but it is very good to reflect on raising children. So it would be interesting a game where you play a school teacher having to deal with so much work at school, your life outside of it and teaching your students.
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It would certainly be nice if it was a Soulsborne - Resident evil-ish style game. (am a simp for Karl Heisenberg aight… 
) aaaaand Harry Potter of course.
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Probably a futuristic desperate last stand kinda game
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Currently the genre of game that I kinda think need to be look at is a fantasy game where you level up in abilities and the mc is aware of they level
a friend was working a wip like this but for a reason I still didn’t understand got it shutdown because it was too gruesome or maybe there were no warnings I don’t know but this is something that should be look at
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Damn, did not know that.
But the main problem is that authors want to give soooo many options to their game and that’s what takes them so long. They need to remember that this are book games and we mainly ‘‘play’’ for the story and have some kind of control. Right now there are games where they even let you choose which types of shoes to put on. Like, in theory it looks cool, but in practice there is not much use to have so many options when the quantity of endings is the same and that the author is forced to work for years to write that many codes in their games.
I disagree with you. Many players prefer a great amount of choices and customization.
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Authors aren’t being “forced” to do anything. If a game gives you a choice about footwear, it’s because the author really wanted to include one.
And purely cosmetic choices don’t actually take that much time to write. Meaningful choices do. You’ll hardly ever see people here talking about the number of endings a game has, because there are so many factors that go into the end states that the actual number of distinct endings is … exponential. Almost unquantifiable. If you really think about the level of complexity involved, it’s absolutely mind-blowing that a person can create such a thing at all. Authors aren’t doing that because no one’s ever told them there’s a simpler way to tell a story, they’re doing it because they want to tell a story this way. Many of them wish they could include more choices, more customization, more to explore, but they realize they have to set some boundaries to keep the project manageable.
Okay, so maybe you don’t think that level of interactivity is worth it. But if so, you need to remember that you are overwhelmingly in the minority here.
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