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ITT: Share your horror stories of when stories gain sentience and go skittering away from you in a thousand directions and all your neatly planned branches become this Sleepy Beauty-esque snarl of brambles to work your way through.

This happens to me all the time but right now in particular I'm dealing with what was supposed to be a single page conversation with a couple of world building details and then three simple choices laid out. Somehow it turned into eleven pages. None of this involves the character actually doing anything, mind you, this is just the build up to making a choice and getting started down that path a little ways.

And now I'm just going to shut it up in a folder and shut down my computer and hope I don't discover its grown even more by the time I get home.

Tonight I get to transfer the whole thing over to the actual site which is where the real fun begins, I'm going to have a rat's nest of topics that have to be combed out and spun into something resembling a naturally flowing conversation with scripting, which I'm traditionally very bad at.

 

 

Oh that’s happening with Rogues right now. I’ve actually had to cut some stuff and re-connect other parts just to shorten it. If I don’t, it won’t ever get finished.

Though I still keep certain sections around on another document, just in case I have the time and decide I do want to expand on certain branches again.

Egads!  You mean it's not just me?  My latest creation abomination (a very simple idea, or so I thought) has morphed into a creature out of a sixties sci fi flick and now has five distinct main plots.  I thought I'd break it up into a series, but at the rate it's expanding, I might have to abandon ship altogether or risk losing my sanity.

I'm not really going to stop, though, because I'm a glutton for punishment.

This happens to me all the time, really so I know how you feel. It's currently happening to most of my storygames.

Let me tell you all my sad story.

One day I woke up and thought to myself, 'Mizal, you're really stalling out on your main WIP, you should write a small, straightforward fantasy action adventure thingy as a palate cleanser.'

And so I started writing action scenes. And lo, they were good. 

But then I thought to myself, 'You know, this action stuff is all over the place...yet I don't want to include actual skills or classes or anything, that's not the point of the game. I know! I'll let the player choose a favored fighting style and give them customized choices and combat scenes!'

Immediately after that I thought, 'Well I might as well let them pick a name and a customized appearance too, they might enjoy that."

Then I decided that while it was nice I was letting them choose the order the character had their action scenes in, the nature of some of these situations meant it would only make sense to give them time limits. From there it was only a small leap to wanting to track the days all the time. 

I decided the whole thing would cover a month of IG time.

But there wasn't enough content to last an entire month! And the player would never see all the work I planned putting in consequences if they never ran out of time on anything. No, what the game needed now were random encounters to delay them whenever any of the more plot relevant stuff wasn't going on.

...the random encounters should sometimes involve NPCs with ongoing storylines.

Oh, and I would have to lay some groundwork down for a potential sequel.

"Wow okay I've got all these fight scenes from later on put together, but I should probably write up the actual intro to all of this to get this all going on CYS."

"....huh, this might take a lot of scripting."

"Uh. This is a lot of scripting."

You and I are the same in this regard. Though I'm probably less skilled than you in scripting, I too like to expand the stories and make them as interesting as possible, but I'm not sure if this affects you, but I(for whatever reason) want to expand the background of most characters, no matter if they're a minor character or a major one.

So... again, I understand how you feel.