Something I am struggling with is deciding exactly how much detail I should be putting into each entry of my story. I want to put enough where the player understands where they are and what they are doing, but I don’t want to put so much so that is overwhelms them. If I write too little text, the player will be unable to understand where they are in the story and what choices they are making exactly. If I write too much, I run the risk of boring the player by turning the game into a novel. Once I have every choice written out, I will definitely have to do a read through of all of them to ensure that there is an understandable level of cohesion throughout the story. It would also be wise to have a friend of family member take a look at my game to ensure that they can follow along with the plot and choices, and to ensure that it isn’t boring to play. Related to this concern is how I am not sure if the endings will feel earned by the player due to the choices they make. I will know more about that after I actually get to the endings but after I have everything drafted I will need to ensure that each ending is a logical conclusion stemming from the choices of the player. I believe they are right now, judging by the plan I mapped out, but I will need to write each choice in a way that makes it clear which direction they are headed morally.
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2 responses to “Details”
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I 100% understand your struggle! Writing for me is definitely not my strong suit and I’m practically going through the same problem as you where I want to write as many details as I can but I’m afraid that it’ll come out not that interesting for other people playing. Unfortunately, I honestly don’t have a solution to this problem, however, I think it’s best to focus on what you find enjoyable. Currently, I’m just writing my story without really thinking about the audience and just basically having fun with it. Anyway, I’m sure your interactive story will come out great in the end and I hope the best for your writing journey!
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I completely agree. With the big initial IFstravaganza project I found this to be an issue as well. I was trying to be cryptic and make use of ambiguity, but I found myself writing more and more per page/choice and had to do some serious cutting down. One thing that really helped was breaking the larger pieces into smaller components. We had one branch in our project that ended up being really long, so I split it into 3 smaller sections, each with a single “move forward” choice at the bottom. I think it was a lot less overwhelming to the player to move from one paragraph to the next one at a time than to be slapped with a wall of text after making a seemingly random choice. It also helped build suspense, as ours was a bit of a thriller.
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