Your favourite aspects of game writing

What do you really look forward to when you’re writing? What do you pine for when you’re in the middle of a not-so-fun-but-necessary part of your game?

I’ve come to enjoy writing descriptions a great deal - I haven’t got a very visual imagination, but I love coming up with details to make a scene, or a person, feel textured and individual. Some characters are especially fun to spend time with - one character in particular in my WIP, I look forward to every time!

There’s something very satisfying about debugging and tightening up prose and code, especially when I’ve done a lot of plot-heavy scenes. It feels kind of relaxing, getting into those nitty-gritty details. I’m doing a lot of upping my code efficiency right now and it’s just right for my very jetlagged brain to feel productive!

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Dialog. Whenever I feel too stuck or stressful I just sit down and write a random scene of two characters interacting. So many things are born from that.

That first rush when you pass the quicktest for a scene and you can play through it for the first time is also pretty great…

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The biggest rush I get is when I finish a scene involving the interaction of the MC and a NPC and the testers come back and tell me I nailed it, that what I wrote is how they saw it in their mind’s eye.

The second biggest rush is when the testers latch on a character I thought they would not and that opens up possibilities I did not see beforehand. (This happened with a dolphin NPC of all things in my contest entry).

Coding wise, I agree with @malinryden - that relief I feel once the new material I just wrote passes quicktest and Randomtest.

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Lots of character interaction between the MC and the NPCs, comedy bits, gritty and dark boss battles, and erotic scenes. :angel:

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It doesn’t happen all that often, but I love it when I’ve been writing a chunk and then pass automated testing the first time!

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Coding. I’m nearly 5k into my current project, and like the first 3.5k was all coding.

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@RETowers What are you coding, exactly?

My ChoiceScript WIP - adding multireplace where I can, nesting *choice results so they’re neater, and balancing stat changes among other revisions :smile:

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Banter- not just conversations but those kind of back-and-forth joking moments between two characters who understand each other well enough to just complete this (usually sarcastic) banter that any outside might think was insane but they understand completely.

And action scenes, I really like writing short action scenes because they’re fun!

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Free stuff for us :raised_hands:t4:
I mean, have you seen the template codes at the #game-development?


As for me, it’s not really an exciting thing, but when I rewrite and edit some part of a scene, I realised that there’s something I can do.

And that makes me want to reread them again :smile:

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I love writing possible romance scenes.

It warms my oh-so-lonely heart.

sad violin music :violin: :notes:

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I could world-build for days

The visualization of the world, the factions, the geopolitical landscape, the defining historical events, the social classes and so on

But the most interesting part( and arguably the most important as well) is where I figure out how the fate of the many would lie in the hands of one seemingly insignificant character.

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Let’s see, there’s currently a large “design your PC” bit (which gets into some detail and is able to do a minimal amount of reading text, and guessing what you meant if you type things in, which is its own subroutine), a subroutine for bumping stats that gives reports, both in the styles of Robots (Foo++++), in a simpler, more condensed style (+4 Foo), and as an actual text block in – Foo raised by 4 to 54 --, (Oh, and they’re all capable of being smoothly combined into blocks, so it can be like (+4 Foo, +6 Bar)) and a subroutine takes a numeric value and displays with commas (i.e. 100000 is displayed as 100,000).

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That’s great! I use stat reports in all my new games so that will be really useful, as will everything else you’re working on.