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The Armchair Writer Thread

6 years ago
If you could sit down free of your laziness, your ineptitude, your RL distractions, predilections to procrastinate, and various crippling personality flaws, and create the storygame you always wanted to write just by thinking really hard, what sort of game would it be?

The Armchair Writer Thread

6 years ago

That's quite the question you've asked there.  I'd love to create a story where the options just keep branching off into new territory, so that the possible endings keep multiplying.  It's hard to think of so many different ending and keep it all fresh, though.

The Armchair Writer Thread

6 years ago
My answer will probably just be a screenshot of my outline folder btw. Assuming I can even find time to post it in between the uncontrollable sobbing and hysterical laughter.

The Armchair Writer Thread

6 years ago

I’d probably try to create something similar to Eternal regarding sheer epic ness. That and the fantasy genre. Oh and I’d probably use variables. So I guess a mix of The Other World and Eternal (except items. Screw items.) would end up what I’d try to do. 

Assuming I could get to doing it.

The Armchair Writer Thread

6 years ago

Hm, I've been wanting to do a Nintendo SSB fanfic for quite some time. I have about 34 pics I put onto my account here from over a year ago. It'd be a mixture between pretty straightforward fighting (since the progression would be the same), but the stuff in between would vary a ton. I'd hope it'd be 200k at least. The problem is that I suck at writing fight scenes. So, I'd choose that and make the Fan Fic category less horrible.

The Armchair Writer Thread

6 years ago
That is...not at all a thing I would ever have pictured you writing. Please tell us more about this.

The Armchair Writer Thread

6 years ago

There's a plot I made a year or two ago that I really liked, especially for a doable cyoa format. Before I begin, I once was a really good ssbb player back when I even played videogames. It was fun to annihilate my brothers and friends anyway (using some of the worst characters for true trolling). I also was fond of Fire Emblem Awakening even though I never actually played it.

Setting: some pocket dimension where the characters were all taken for a tournament to see who is the most powerful character. I'd have a supply of a bunch of colorful (and hopefully recognizable) characters. It'd be sort of meta because there's an unseen "audience" watching and betting on the characters, though they'd just be humans.

Thus, the storygame would follow the style of a tournament. Essentially, the protagonist (Lucina who's my favorite character to use in SSB4 and pretty interesting in my mind) will have to make her way through the tournament and win. It'd help with the plot because there's no way to change the lineup of who you'll face unless you loose, though there'd be some significant branching in between the fighting (making this a Branch-and-Bottleneck) ranging from wandering around the compound to attending a barbecue to pursuing a relationship with Robin. I even considered using CYS members' personalities for many of the characters.

I'd have some comedy in there, but there's always going to be that next next sitting there in a foreboding manner. Plus, Lucina was actually a pretty bad fighter in-game, so I can go all Rocky Balboa. Everybody knows it's impossible for her to win. The feel of the storygame would hopefully be "fun".

Hilariously, something irl can also be applied. She was originally one of the very worst of the SSB4 characters (though always said to be underrated by some the "best" players); however, game updates buffed her a great deal to make her one of the "better" characters. I could apply that in multiple ways in the game such as game updates occurring in between the individual tournaments.

For a year, this has been my default storygame to plan out but never one I ever went and wrote (beyond one instance where I wrote 4k words). The scope that I'd want to do and my inability to write good fighting scenes are keeping me from making it though... for now. This'd probably be a good entry to any Fac Fic contest we have here.

The Armchair Writer Thread

6 years ago

A massive harem with 72 virgins.

Or I could just settle with some sort of medieval setting as that also catches my interest.

The Armchair Writer Thread

6 years ago

Do a medieval setting with a massive harem of 72 virgins.

The Armchair Writer Thread

6 years ago
I guess I'll talk about a couple of specific games that I'll almost certainly never get around to making.

The first is one of those 'open world' thingies that I've made attempts at creating in various forms for many years now, up until now mostly as IF. It would be an entire land mass with an IF-style map to explore and quests to do and people to talk to in various villages and dungeons and cities. The main plot would never be pushed at you. It would only open up as you aligned yourself with a faction and gained a reputation, otherwise you could keep tooling around with the simulation stuff as long as you wanted. There would be a certain number of unique artifacts that would be a major challenge to research and hunt down if you felt like challenging yourself that way, and an economic side to things that would keep the game replayable a long while even without advancing the plot.

The basic idea would be a game with a Morrowind-like tone of 'here's the world. It doesn't give a shit about you and you're on your own now, make of it what you will.'


The second game is a nation building thing spanning potentially thousands of years broken up into four sections. I think of them as the Primitive Era, Divine/Heroic Era, Medieval/Colonialism Era, and Industrial Era. Like the first game, these would all have simulation aspects and the player would be able to hang out in each section as long as they wanted before deliberately triggering the advancement of the plot. Although the eras themselves aren't hugely connected aside from a few specific civilization-shaping things being tracked.

Primitive Age would have you managing a nomadic stone age tribe and finding a place to build a rudimentary civilization in, develop agriculture and so on. After you get settled in, attacks from other tribes start ramping up, but you also draw the attention of five gods who each offer to make a pact with you.

Accepting leads to the Heroic Era, which will be heavily inspired by the Old Testament and King of Dragon Pass. Prophets, miracles, and superhuman badasses being metal af become the norm as you crush the opposition and carve out a nation for yourself. Every god has a specific set of laws and expectations though, and if you fail to hold up your end of the deal your people will face divine, civilization crushing wrath.

Which leads to the Medieval Era, in which the nation is now reduced to fiefdoms full of ignorant peasants protected by local lords and the glories of the past have faded into legend. In this section you'd build up your holdings and strengthen and expand and research in various directions and send out explorers and traders. The technology would go up to muskets and cannons and there'd be a few different ways to trigger the next section.

In the Industrial Era, you'd mostly balance economy and production with things like worker's rights and managing disasters while try to stay popular enough to keep your faction in power. This is the one I've thought out the least, although it would ramp up eventually into a world war, which, without saying too much would lead to the means of taking things full circle.

The Armchair Writer Thread

6 years ago

Ground Zero style post-apocalyptic epic with inspiration pulled from Mad Max and Fallout. Never got past the concept stage really, been wanting to write it since 2014 or so.

Also a fantasy epic in an original world. Also came from 2014, again never made it past concept stage for the most part. Was about to start writing it on my first account but it got banned literally the day after I started writing. Hazelmyre is kind of like a spiritual successor to this idea.

The Armchair Writer Thread

6 years ago

I really wanted to do the Kingdom of Cystia story I had planned, but that probably won’t ever happen. 

Now I’m just focusing on contests, and a new story games series that will start with the publishing of the story I’m working on for the romance  contest. That will likely occupy most my writing attention for the next while, but if I could just sit and properly write them all, I would be supremely satisfied.