If there's one thing I've ever learned from writing with people for well over a decade, it's that no matter how much you write, you'll always think your past work sucks. Congratulations if you're the exception to the rule (really, you're having it easy), but the usual truth is, the more stuff you write, the more experienced you get in creative writing. And when I say "more stuff", I literally mean, when you write a single sentence, you're a better writer than you used to be before you wrote it. While it's a blessing, it's also a curse.
I'm no stranger to it and I'm certainly no stranger to seeing other people in the same sauce. The first manuscript I ever wrote went through a complete rewrite the moment I laid my eyes on it again. The key is to treat it as practice: You learn how to recognize where it shines and where it fails to do what you hoped it was going to do. You push through it, cut through all the spots where you were trying to brute force your way into writing, expand on things you want to dive into, and then you write new stuff when you're done.
After a while, you get to a point where you realize it could keep you there forever. You get a what's-done-is-done mentality. You keep your edits to an absolute minimum so that you don't rewrite a single world five times where you could've written five other stories you wanted to write. And besides, you've put enough skill points into it that you feel more secure about your writing now. You already know what to watch out for when you write.
This is my first game, though. A branching game. My inner editor has seen lots of text, my own and others', gave lots of advice, and it's seen me play games my whole life.
The good news is, I already went over the whole text. Aside from a minor tweak to wording, there's no point overthinking it. The text says what it had to say, it points where it needs to point.
The bad news is... well, good or bad depending on who you ask. Branches. THIS is a first. I treated it as a chance to do things that I couldn't do in linear writing, not even in roleplay. All the times I needed to choose where to go with a story, with only one way forward, were now free to throw all their frustrations out the window and write whatever they wanted.
Let's just say I got a little overexcited. Behold: Branches!
So, let's dive into the story.
You find your brother in a ghost town. He's completely out of it, and the one other guy in town tells you about the disembodied voices that drove everyone out. (It's not a horror story, mind.) Your job is to solve the things that trouble your brother, preferably while keeping your sanity intact. The more you stay, the more you lose it. The more things you solve, the saner both you and your brother become.
The dialogue side quests are actually the meat of this game, because it's the voices you'll mostly have to deal with.
There are currently four side quests, one of which will be sprinkled throughout the story. You hear them every time you go to sleep. If I have it my way, there will be additions to both types of quests, but I'd like to finish this game while we're still relatively young.
The current development stage is very straightforward: paste text into a node, tweak text and choices as needed, cuss as needed, move on to the next one. It's the conveyor-belt side of work but it takes time.
The only real difference is that I'm doing this without friends around to watch it evolve. There's the writing, the branches, the audio, the coding, everything. I'm used to having a shared creative process with people, whether we're working on the same thing or not, but I'm afraid I'd just bewilder anyone this time around. It feels very odd.
