IWSG: NaNo Rebel '22, Day 2

   

        So, this month's question/suggested post topic is about whether or not you (have) participate(d) in NaNoWriMo.  And my answer is "Yeah, I used to, but I hate what they did to their website when they changed it over a few years back, and I'm not going to officially participate again unless they change it back to something less ugly and that's more respectful of our projects."

    But I still kinda participate in the form of being a NaNoWriMo Rebel, meeting the challenge of writing 50,000 words in the month of November, just without officially entering on the NaNo website, or using it to keep track of my words.  (Blogs are useful for the latter, though I have no way to make a chart graphing my progress.  At least, none I know of.)

    However, that'd be a short and boring post, so I want to talk about my main project for NotNaNo. XD

    I mentioned in an earlier post that I was really struggling with the visual novel script I was working on.  That continued to be the case until I started chatting in Discord about the format I was planning on using for the routes (for the dateable characters), asking some more experienced visual novel writers about if that format sounded like it was going to work.  (I have loads of experience as a writer of standard fiction, but am still pretty new to interactive versions, only a little over a year.)  The more I talked it over with them, the more I realized that not only was the format I had planned (which was designed to make the branching easier to write) problematic, the whole thing just felt off.

    The plot of the game, you see, was that you were playing an immortal being in ancient China, one who had once been mortal.  When the Jade Emperor's son runs away from home, abandoning his duties in the heavens, you're sent down to the mortal realm to find him and bring him back.  Of course, you don't know what he looks like (and he can shapeshift anyway), so you have to go undercover at the location where you know he's been residing.  It's...well, the original idea was for it to be a school, but since schoolwork at that time would have been solid memorization and recitation (thus simultaneously super-boring and something we couldn't show, because all the good translations for the classic texts are too recent to be public domain), we opted for a handful of disciples following a rather eccentric philosopher.  The idea was for the game to be a mystery, and you're trying to figure out which of the disciples is the runaway, while simultaneously potentially romancing one of them.  (With the rather awkward situation that if you choose to go down the runaway's route, you're screwed, because it's a trap route, and you can never win his heart, because the whole reason he ran away was because he'd fallen in love with one of the philosopher's disciples.)  On top of the fact that the structure I picked was mostly going to be easier to write but would make for very boring replay there was the fact that my collaborator (project lead, the other writer, etc) seemed to view the runaway's love interest as "the" love interest, rather than any of the characters the player could romance.

    So I approached my collaborator and explained my concerns about the structure, and everything that the others had said in the chat, and suggested that we change our plans--someone, either my collaborator or one of the other devs in the earlier chat, used the term "pivot" for it, and it's really the perfect term--and instead of writing about the immortal who's trying to bring the runaway home (forcing the player into an unpleasant situation, making them choose between the runaway's happiness and his extremely important heavenly duties), we should make the game about the runaway instead.  I had hoped that would mean my collaborator wouldn't have to pay for so many sprites, but they'd already promised to buy a certain number, so apparently I didn't manage to save them any money on that score. 😓  The important thing, though, was that as soon as we made that decision, a lot of stuff just fell into place, and by the time we were done brainstorming the new version, we were both feeling like it was going to be so much better than the original would have been.  (And the MC I had so much fun making up a crazy backstory for isn't gone for good; we're planning to do two games, and he'll be the lead of the second one, which will still feature him being sent down to recover the runaway, only the runaway will just be like "nope, not going!" and it's actually something else keeping the MC on earth long enough to court one of the philosopher's disciples. 😁 )

    The script is still coming along more slowly than I'd like--VN scripts always do that for some reason--but it's flowing much more naturally than before, and I think it's actually coming out better, too.

    I'm hoping the NaNo boost will let me finish the script this month.  Well, the first draft, anyway.  My part of the first draft, that is.  (My collaborator is writing the really romantic parts, and a few other bits.)  Then I'll be able to go back to my novels, as I have one that I actually realized needed another subplot after I put it out there, so it's been sitting there with a "hey, FYI, I'm going to change some of this as soon as I have a break in my writing schedule" since like February.  And the next book in the series has been waiting for its next draft for just as long. 😭  This VN project has really taken way longer than I originally intended...

Yesterday's NotNaNo word count:  1,791

Nov. 2 words written:

1606 words in the VN script, 508 in the fanfic piece, 2,114 total

Total Words written so far in November: 3,905

(If you're seeing this message, that's because I wanted to get this post up early in the day, and I haven't done my writing yet. 😅 I'll edit the post to add in my totals after I've gotten the day's writing in.)