Writing more story. Pictureless demo(?) game

A little more progress on writing.

I'm trying to make it as little convoluted as possible. OTL

Here is a pictureless "visual novel" featuring the plot so far:

http://www.mediafire.com/?fw41ca8p5t8qm5d

Writing and making

    I've gone back to writing on index cards.

Well actually on the backs of old business cards I won't be needing, but it's the same idea.

Using the cards I wrote these past few days I've made a text-only demo: http://www.mediafire.com/?iemniszw6rqlohr

The story reads as being kind of depressing to me, but I think it'll lighten up (be more comical) with drawings.

Slowly writing.

I am very slowly writing these days.

I'm also drawing a little bit, now and then.

The weather has been so hot that it is tough to do much of anything.

Nothing is going on!

    Here I am writing an update that nothing's really going on (game-wise)!

    These days I've been updating stuff onto Youtube and have been experimenting with a video camera I finally found after six months of unpacking since moving six months ago, in addition to uploading time lapses of drawings I had done in oekaki (basically the animation captures, sped up) or had streamed on livestream.

    This year, instead of holding weekly 1-3 hour long streams where I chat and drew on a Tuesday night I've been drawing an oekaki each week. Which was all in all successful until last week where I ended up missing a week because the server I was drawing on wet down when I tried to post the drawing on a Saturday night: I had waited until the last minute to draw that week's oekaki, and it wasn't exactly drawn the way i had intended, I think.

    But I think I may go back to streaming for a couple hours one day a week eventually because I liked the performance aspect of it. Also I'm hoping to take requests/commissions through the stream, kind of like a business' office hours.

    Anyway, the game...

    I still work on the game on paper almost daily, but it's a lot of writing and starting over and so on. Even though I know the beginning of a story is not the most important thing about making the entire game, and that the perfect opening story may not come to me until I write the rest of the game, I still feel that that is the first part that should be made before the rest of the game's gears are to be dealt with.

    In fact, actually I believe the beginning of any story is as important as the rest of the story, as the beginning of a story sets the mood or level the entire story is in. The beginning of the story is where they story's rules are laid out to the reader so that the reader can make a judgement as to what to expect from a story, and then it's the writer's job to exceed those expectations within the rules set in the beginning of the story. So, in fact, the beginning of a story is very important, because rules are important, because without rules in a story there's nothing for the story to challenge or work around.

    Speaking of stories, lately I've been thinking a lot about drawing a short story comic, like I used to do pre-2006. It used to be that I'd run with the slightest contrived idea and take it all the way to comic production, but these days I just consider an idea, laugh at how contrived and disorderly it is, and then go play games or organize my room (which is an ongoing project that surely will see a completion date) because I'm just not that gullible anymore. I want a good story, not some story I'll pursue for about 20 what pages and then give up on because whatever was motivating me to draw that story is over. Also I fully intend for this story to be a self-contained story with no need for expansion past the pages that are to be planned for it, but for now it's still in the "write down the events that happen in the story in a sequence with bullet points" stage so.. nothing to show here either.

   I've been watching a lot of Korean dramas these days hoping that they would help me write, and while it's helped me a great deal at writing more argumentative dialogues it hasn't helped that much because once I was hooked I had a tough time watching some of them. I finally persuaded myself to stop watching 짝패/The Duo this week because I wanted to watch with someone else, which meant finding subs for it as I had been watching it raw. I only need subs for Chinese dramas these days. Korean, Japanese, and English shows I can watch without any subs, which is convenient for me but also a very lonely because for Korean or Japanese shows without any subs there's very few or no people to talk about the show. Though that is also true for (obscure) English shows too.

    Sure, I want to pump out the game fastquick and benefit from it, but I also have some tough expectations to meet too. Since I like to draw drawings with as few mistakes as possible, the story has to match (=have as few flaws as possible) as does the game aspect of it and so on. I think my goal with the game world is hazy too, since it is a new thing to me. I've been drawing for almost 10 years and I've been playing violin since I was 5, so those things are familiar to me. But as for making games I've only been slightly intrigued by that for a few weeks when RPG maker 95 came out a million years ago and then again, just in the last few years through private (custom) MMORPG servers and visual novels, so it's still a fairly unfamiliar thing for me. I just know some games are awesome and some games are terrible, but I've yet to understand all of why some games are some way.

    In any event, these are a lot of weak sissy excuses, and I'd still like to make a game. I just have to make sense of the chaos that I call a "game idea".

Confessions - Considerations

    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.

Sarah's Arc Complete!

Finished Sarah's Story.

It's a little depressing (seems like half of the endings end with someone's death!)

but I didn't want her story to become too unrealistic / farfetched.

As much as we want unfortunate characters to find happiness, 

sometimes they're just doomed from the start.