oo Even though I had set out to create a vnovel a few years ago, I am still pretty dreadful when it comes to the writing department. It really isn't that I cannot write well or that I have nothing to write, but it's that in sharp contrast to how efficiently I can draw, my writing is quite inefficient. Every story I start I restart at least a dozen times, and even then I'm left questioning whether or not that start is good enough. I think "maybe the plot needs to start earlier in the storyline than this" or "maybe I should just jump to the interesting parts of the story" and after hours and days of burning myself out thinking one of those two over and over, I just go back to drawing.. Heh.
I think I would had become a fairly decent writer who is able to only include the things that are important to a story if I hadn't moved around so much, but I guess I sort of missed my window to learn the skills necessary to write well, so now I'm struggling to learn those skills the hard way using my frustratingly-hardened adult brain. At one point I did sort things that happened around me by the categories "interesting/funny" and "boring stuff" but these days I sort information by "important/money related" and "unimportant/not money related". Ever since that change has happened in my mind it's been super tough to write any stories because I feel urged to inject every story with an annoying amount of reality.
I think for
Sa'ee it doesn't need as much reality as I try to force it to have. While writing the stories I end up drawing entire town maps about what is where or family trees of every character, but I have a strong feeling that that kind of stuff is not useful for writing: it's just another way to escape writing. Or is it? Does the whole fiction world and reality factor need to be determined before a story can be written?
One of the biggest problems I have with
Sa'ee is that the setting for it and the audience are alien to each other. The game is basically based on late 90s Korea, while practically the entire audience is English speaking Americans. I can deal with the English-speaking part by writing the game in English and by giving the characters English names, but the alien school system and lack of issues important to teenaged Americans (pregnancy, driving, malls, jocks, braces, prom) is probably a little off-putting to a majority of the audience. I don't want folks who play this game to feel like the game is foreign and alien to them, but I don't want to make it so American that it is alien and foreign to me in return.
Which then leads me to wonder if I should just make this entire game in Korean, or if the game would still be significant if it was in Korean. I don't have strong desires to expand into the Korean vnovel field (what with it being practically nonexistent, after all, despite the fact that all the skills necessary to make a successful game are abundant) or to gain/find Korean-speaking fans. But as for the second part...
The game, as it is, loses a lot of its significance if I write it in Korean. Korea has lots of girls-only or boys-only public schools, and those schools converting to co-ed aren't all that uncommon either. The subject has probably been touched upon several dozen times in all kinds of media. But I don't think that significance of the game in the Korean culture necessarily means significance in American culture either. Even if the game was successful in Korean, it could be pretty uninteresting in English for Americans because each culture has its own thing that it finds interesting. I've designed the game assuming that the audience would be English-speaking Americans, so I don't think changing the entire language at this point would do any good. In fact, it's just another way to start over.
So... yes, lots of thoughts going through my mind, and very little writing getting done.
Even though I'm behind in writing, I will probably still draw&stream Tuesday, 7-9PM EST: http://www.livestream.com/skims
Happy Fall-back-one-hour Day, everyone.
