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Writing IF
26 Jul 2009 20:01I'm stuck. I'm really, really stuck. I've actually only had two ideas, ever, and now that I've discarded both I'm kind of meandering without concrete ideas.
The first was an injoke which would be relegated to the outside periphery of IF and required a lot of fiddly bits for one relatively important, recurring aspect of armor. To re-write it without the injoke kind of removed any particular tension and, bizarrely enough, turned it into a cooking game. Too close to one of the puzzles from Savior Faire, so I threw it out.
The second idea worked, it really did. But I have to put it, not even on the back burner, but all the way back into the freezer. It's huge. Last count there were over 30 locations, across a town, with three buildings that had at least three rooms, one of which had to have SEVEN for plausibility's sake. NPCs were going to be hellishly complicated or the town was going to be creepily deserted. It starts with a good puzzle and then...kind of fizzles out from motivation. Originally, I thought of a motivation (love) for my main character, which lead to a very good puzzle. Then I decided it was pretty contrived. The character doesn't actually want to fall in love and leave town.
Zonked out from the ridiculous heat, I was sprawled on a couch and said to a friend, "I don't know where to staaaaart." Okay, it was a bit whingey.
"Start inside a door," my friend says. Ha, ha. That was a bug/feature I encountered once in a Rybread Celsius game. I somehow managed to get stuck inside the property of the name of the door, or something like that. It was special.
"You know," he continues, "from the point of view of a termite, maybe."
"Nooo," I say. "I can't write 'A Day for Soft Wood.'"
People'll think that's AIF material anyhow.
The first was an injoke which would be relegated to the outside periphery of IF and required a lot of fiddly bits for one relatively important, recurring aspect of armor. To re-write it without the injoke kind of removed any particular tension and, bizarrely enough, turned it into a cooking game. Too close to one of the puzzles from Savior Faire, so I threw it out.
The second idea worked, it really did. But I have to put it, not even on the back burner, but all the way back into the freezer. It's huge. Last count there were over 30 locations, across a town, with three buildings that had at least three rooms, one of which had to have SEVEN for plausibility's sake. NPCs were going to be hellishly complicated or the town was going to be creepily deserted. It starts with a good puzzle and then...kind of fizzles out from motivation. Originally, I thought of a motivation (love) for my main character, which lead to a very good puzzle. Then I decided it was pretty contrived. The character doesn't actually want to fall in love and leave town.
Zonked out from the ridiculous heat, I was sprawled on a couch and said to a friend, "I don't know where to staaaaart." Okay, it was a bit whingey.
"Start inside a door," my friend says. Ha, ha. That was a bug/feature I encountered once in a Rybread Celsius game. I somehow managed to get stuck inside the property of the name of the door, or something like that. It was special.
"You know," he continues, "from the point of view of a termite, maybe."
"Nooo," I say. "I can't write 'A Day for Soft Wood.'"
People'll think that's AIF material anyhow.
