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Hi guys,

I hope you are doing well. I wasn't sure which forum to post this on, and I apologize if this request is a bit presumptuous, as I assure it's not my intention.

I've been thinking a lot recently, and I have these really crazy ideas for epic story games but one way or another they always fall through. I know that it comes with experience, so I'm not worried about that.

It's just I have a small request to make. Could someone write an article titled "Writing an epic story game?" that talks about the writing process behind writing those 100,000 word blockbuster gigantic monsters. I hope it's not a weird thing to ask, Endmaster or anybody who's written a 100,000 word plus story game, please it would be such a huge thing just to see how you approach the material, how you go about it, how you decide what to write day to day, just a little glimpse or a guide to writing an epic would somehow make such a goal a bit more tangible and realizable. Writing advice that's specific for writing those large sprawling epics that get your name up on the featured front page, because that's the aspiration and dream for so many people here.

If possible, if any of you 100,000 word giants have the time or energy, it would be much appreciated by me and many of the other site noobs. I feel like there's a lot of mystique and mystery behind writing something like that, so I feel like this article may at the very least give someone more confidence and insight into approaching such an endeavor, even if they ultimately don't follow through. Only if people here agree and are interested, otherwise it's probably ok and not a big deal, just a thought that's all.

Thank you for your time, and I apologize for the large dense paragraph. I also apologize if this is not really the right forum to discuss this and if I broke decorum in anyway.

I had an idea about writing an "how to make open world story games" article a few weeks back. My MLP fic is about 97,000 words, so while it's not quite 100K it's certainly in the ballpark. My LOTR game is also quite large, and both of them got featured, so I think they must have some level of success in them. 

If people are interested I could give it a go, I just don't know if my article would be good enough to be featured or not. 

Yeah you should give it a go, you've written 17 story games and considering that your my little pony fan fiction is 97,000 words and it was a coherent story, you should write an open world story game article, it would be quite interesting for sure. I think we'd learn a lot for sure.

I wonder what changed so quickly, was it really just Malk calling him a clopper?

I've never written anything over 20k and will probably never write anything close to 100k unless the Gods of Inspiration grant me the willpower to slog through it.

However, based on my experience with the writing process, I imagine the first steps are mapping out your story/ game. Flowcharts helped me with my 3 story games (only 1 is finished). Connecting settings, choices, etc. Fleshing out the characters, their personality, their desires/ motives/ etc. From the MC to the lowly tavern owner. Their actions need to make sense and utterly be consistent through out it (unless they are destined for character growth or something). Next, I would imagine building out the plot - the finer details. You got a story in mind, probably know the beginning, probably know the end. Now you need to create an engaging middle.How do all these characters fit into the story? Who dies? Who is an ally to the MC? Etc.

Now with all this in mind, crank those tips up to 11 and do it for the 50 different paths you are creating as a CYOA.

Thanks dire! I've also never written anything over 20k yet. I'm still in the 5/8 length range.

The mapping makes sense, I'd imagine it's hard to keep everything consistent over that long of a time period.

I haven't written any epic storygames, so I won't write that article, but I do have some general tips to offer with my experience in starting & finishing long projects. This post doesn't contain any advice on actually writing a story, just how to focus on a project.

1) First make sure you actually want to. Sometimes people want to write epics because they think this is the best way to get a readership & acclaim. Actually the opposite is usually true: people love reading short games, and put off reading the long ones. I think this misconception stems from survivorship bias: as a reader, our favorite games tend to be the long ones that were good enough to hold our attention the whole way; so we assume the length is what made them good. Extra length gives you the room you need to create emotional depth & complexity, but it's not what causes it.

In sum: you should only write an epic if you're in love with a story idea that will actually require that much space to be told. Otherwise you'll be better off sanding down your idea into something manageable for both you & the reader.

2) Then make sure you're actually ready. No one's first project is an epic. Before attempting one, it's a good idea to have already done many smaller projects so you can develop your skills, your comfort with the medium, and your self-knowledge about what interests you. (In your case, it looks like you've got at least a good start with your two games--only you can decide if that's sufficient.) A good technique is to gradually increase your project length & complexity rather than making any big jumps.

Another good thing to look out for is your familiarity with your own writing process. If you can't yet clearly articulate the usual stages your own writing projects go through, it's probably too soon to write an epic.

3) Make sure you have the right idea. Best piece of writing advice I've ever heard was from Kurt Vonnegut: Write on a subject you care about. For an idea to work as an epic, it has to be an idea you care about so strongly that it can effortlessly hold your attention for months (or years!) on end. If you don't care about the idea enough, once the initial passion wears off, you'll completely lose interest. 

So how do you find the right idea for yourself? That's a really hard question, but there are some things you can try. Think about what your favorite stories are, and why. Think about the projects you have finished, and what got you through. Think about what first catches your attention with a shiny new idea, and why that shine later wears off. Try writing out a list of commonalities in these areas, and see how many of them you can work into a single story idea. The things you care about most should be the most important part of your story.

I think most (but not all!) people's "key idea" has to do with characters & character arcs. Think about what the most meaningful character arcs you've seen & imagined are, and what the commonalities in them are.

Don't rush the idea. Give it time to settle & mature. Think about it during other parts of daily life, and relate it to other things that interest you. Keep a disorganized notes document and write down every new related idea that occurs to you without overthinking it. Bear in in mind while working on & completing smaller projects. Force yourself to work on it intentionally at least occasionally.

Have multiple ideas like this collecting over time. Be willing to shift focus between them, or combine and split them, and follow your passion. Notice what you're passionate about, and center those ideas. Keep those casual ideas documents alive even while you're working on your main project--that way when you finish or take a break, you'll have something else you can jump right into.

It's tough to say exactly when you're ready to get serious. If one idea maintains consistently high interest for several months that's a very good sign; but you might feel ready much sooner.

The first major part of your project will probably be getting your messy list of ideas in a coherent order. It doesn't have to (and shouldn't!) be a complete outline, just something well-organized. Don't be disheartened if this process is grueling and you feel burned out afterwards--I usually find this is the most difficult part of the project. Take a break to clear out, and then come back to your outline with fresh eyes.

4) Keep a schedule. Any schedule is fine, but it has to be consistent. I recommend picking a daily word count goal so easy you can't possibly fail to achieve it. 100 words is my go-to daily goal. If it's the right idea, sitting down to start for the day will be the hardest part, but once you get going, you'll want to carry on far past that daily minimum. Then again, on some days you really are brain dead and it's better not to force yourself to write more than your minimum.

My writing style is very outline-heavy, so I count outlining words towards my daily goal. Your call if that works for you.

Some people prefer weekly schedules, or ones based on time rather than word count.

5) Don't be afraid to take a break. Sometimes you've exhausted all your ideas on this particular story and you need time off to avoid burning out. The trick is to A) work on something else during your break; preferably a smaller project, and B) Make sure you actually come back once your break is over. Getting distance from your story is a great way to refresh your brain and get a new perspective on it.

6) Once you have a draft, let it sit for at least a month without looking at it. This is hard but really helpful. You need to get distance from the story before you can assess the value of your own ideas. This isn't a post on editing, so I'll stop here.

7) Experiment with your writing process. Try everything once, but don't keep following any rules that aren't helping you. Try outlining sincerely, and ditch it if you hate it. Try a daily writing schedule, and change it up if it flops. This includes all the advice on this list: try it out, and then judge whether or not it was effective for you.

Personally, I love heavy outlining & story structure, and I plot stories from a character-arc-first perspective. Everything else collects around the character arc. I'm not going to go into how-to-outline here since this post is already way too long, but I recommend looking into it. Consider looking into 3 act structure. The trick is to treat structure & outlines as optional tools rather than rules. Use them when they help you and ignore them when they don't. (If you end up hating outlines & structures, that will be "always".)

8) Follow your passion. I've already said this, but it's honestly the most important part. Make the things you care about the most important part of the story. Take the story in the direction you want to see it go. When deciding what to do on a day-to-day basis, work on the part of the story that you're currently most excited about. When you do need to grind out a task you're less interested in, see if you can change the story or task in some way so that it interests you more. If you're bored writing it, the audience will be bored reading it. Having fun with the writing isn't a guarantee of quality, but I do think it's usually a prerequisite.

Thank you so much for this post Gryphon!

I'm honestly ashamed to admit that I was in the camp that longer is better, so hearing you say different did surprise me, but come to think of it you are right. I spent so long reading the great long stories because those are the only ones that survived, there might be some really crappy ones that are just the author writing and writing without making it interesting. I'm so used to the good ones that I've sort of just associated "long" with "good", so thank you for that correction. I didn't consider the point about survivorship bias until you mentioned it, but it makes perfect sense now.

My favorite part of your post is probably this: "If you can't yet clearly articulate the usual stages your own writing projects go through, it's probably too soon to write an epic.", because it really makes it clear whether one is ready for it or not, and it's so deceptively simple. It's a very clear yes or no, and in my case it's a no for now.

Funnily enough, I may end up working on an 'epic story game' myself. The scope was only supposed to take a month (November) but it's quickly gotten out of hand. Since it's still very early days I don't want to go in depth about what I'm doing since, by my estimations, I'm only 13K words deep. (Guessing the project will be 50-80K words. Too early to tell.)

The one thing that's helped me see this project through is the way I've broken things down. With everything planned out, I realised there's actually only eight chapters I need to write, which have their own objectives within them. So far, one of eight chapters have been finished and I've ticked off three of five objectives for the next chapter I'm working on.

I don't know if you're an anxious person or a bit of a perfectionist, but ironically, the one thing I've found that helped my anxious mindset was to stop thinking about it as a 'front page genre defining EPIC' and just imagine you're writing a people pleasing 6/10. Set your expectations lower for yourself, write every day (even if it's shit, you can always edit later) and tick things off your planner once you've done them. Hopefully - it'll keep the work chugging along.

I like this post and good luck with your endeavors! What's your epic's premise?

I finished playing Metaphor Re:Fantazio and wondered if it was possible to write fanfiction integrating the Calander system into a CYOA format. I won't say more then that for now - hopefully it ends up working lol

End might wander in to talk a little more about his process at some point, but I know he's said he focuses on fully writing out one major storyline at a time, and then backtracks to other branchpoints until they're all filled in. Might be the only way to keep a really sizeable story organized and not fragmented all over the place.

I mean you pretty much said what I did, so now there's no reason for me to say it now.

Besides what Mizal already said, it wouldn't do much good mainly because I know the way I do it, doesn't seem to be the way everyone else does it.

If you're interested in seeing how I'm organizing stuff, well here's some examples.

So obviously "in progress" stories would go in the appropriate folder, though it usually isn't in there since I tend to have whatever I'm currently working on actually on the face of the laptop for easy access, but I do have some stuff in there that I got distracted from or on the back burner, so its useful to keep those in there.

So here's all the completed stuff, or at least the completed CYOA stuff. Shorter stories and such are elsewhere. (Probably in the Assorted folder above)

So here's the "level 1" look at Eternal which is the longest story. I had to actually divide that one into multiple folders.

And here's a "level 2" look at Eternal focusing on the Struggle path. Again that one was a little longer so I even divided the chapter into two documents since it was getting really long.

So here's an example of a "shorter Epic". In this case Suzy. There was no need for extra folders and one document per path was enough.

And here's an older example with Ground Zero. As you can see, the method of organizing didn't change much.

Of course that's all macro level organization. Things get even more fun when you do it on the micro level, which I'll show an example of in another post.

Thank you so much for posting these screenshots, this system of organization is seriously amazing!

I really love how you organized it in the folder system, thank you so much for posting this!

So here's Rogues which despite being shorter than Eternal, probably had WAY more notes and shit I had to keep track of. (Or at least it felt that way when writing it!) In fact if you look close enough, you may even see things I didn't even use at all. It happens, but you always got notes to keep track of stuff.

And yes, I still had a few more pages on this note document, but I think you get the idea. Now you'd look at this mess and wonder how the hell you'd find anything, and the answer is probably YOU wouldn't.

Me on the other hand have been doing it like this for years, so this is normal to me.

This is amazing!

I really appreciate you posting your in-progress notes and organization charts because I can sort of see things from your perspective as you write it. It's so cool cause to me Rogues is this amazing, gargantuan,monument of interactive fiction that to me has always existed, and it's an immutable fact, but somewhere out there there's a gifted author who's laying pen to paper and actually making it really happen, but we forget that when we just see a really beautiful tapestry of writing as the finished effort and completed product, so it's intimidating to imagine that we could do something like this, but somehow it seems more tangible now. Obviously it'll still require a ton of effort and dedication, but I really enjoyed this inside glimpse of the behind the scenes work involved in writing the crazy and awesome stuff that you do.

So I've played both of the Klyton Kingdom paths(the one where you go with Annah and the one where Anna dies and you run away to Klyton) and I've played the Delantium Kingdom one(which is regrettably shorter than the others cause I really thought the game would let you become like the head of the ebony claw syndicate main branch in delantium kingdom as opposed to the offshoot in klyton a la godfather, but then again that would been an antithesis to the overall theme which is that of a rogue on the streets who could rise to high positions and he does rise to a position in ECS in Klyton). I also played through all the subsequent paths after you become a slave to that wizard dude, so all I'm missing is the one where you go to Holgard and join thieves guild I think, but I have some idea how that story plays out because we meet Sneaks in the Klyton paths and he gives sort of a blurb of that schism war between ECS, and thieves guild, and how some of the Klyton ECS came from Holgard so they hate Sneaks I think.

As such I really like how you organize even different events together under the same year, because as I understand it you'll never actually meet Yvette if Tom is alive and you're inducted into Crimson Talons, but at the same time you put that there just as a reminder that while this is going on here are what the other characters in the city might be doing, because it is important to remember that although for us, the readers, characters like Yvette temporarily cease to exist in our minds, since we didn't pick a path where we cross paths, they still exist in that city so it's important to just keep that in mind in order to write the city as a living breathing thing, which Endmaster excels at in this story, and looking at the notes, it's not hard to see why.

Like reading Rogues, I always wondered how you made so much worldbuilding and city development seem so realistic, because there's no contradictions and everything seems internally consistent. Events that are merely alluded to in one branch, like Annah might tell you stuff about Ebony Clara syndicate and their movements from a afar and then you actually see those play out in another branch, or Sneaks for instance comes in later at the Klyton paths but in the Holgard path you actually grow up with him(he's older but still).

It's so much information for me to process and take in, so I don't know how you do it Endmaster, I think you've spent so much care crafting this world that you've truly succeeded in making it a living and breathing thing. Seeing this post really inspires me to write a review of Rogues, I just need to finish all the paths and get all the endings. Thanks again for responding to my post with a little insight into how you're able to do what you do, it slightly demystifies the mystique surrounding epic stories like Rogues and Eternal, while at the same time making it clear just how much work it takes to write a truly epic story.

I also like how you write major players in each city based on power level because you do this really cool thing where you make people aware of each other, as they should be given that's how they would in a real world. Like sometimes, people will write a vignette than the characters will be forgotten as they go on to the next vignette, even though both vignettes are set in the same place so it'll be cool if some people knew each other.

The holgard priests(I think?) knew Ral or I think they sensed dangerous magic there, and when you turn into ice with a giant pet gryphon, people take notice so that's a good realistic thing that I would have never thought about unless I wrote down all the major players who are powerful and could potentially cross paths.

The same thing with you still remembering to include characters and orgs even if the MC doesn't join them is present in Klyton where you say "if you don't save Tom then Jake becomes head of the Crimson Talons, making them much more violent". I remember Jake was that asshole side kick character I think whom you have this rivalry in the beginning.

Thank you so much again for posting this, I not only learned a lot about Rogues, but also gleaned a little insight into how you process information and go about making such complex living breathing worlds that truly just feel like actual places we haven't had the chance to visit yet, not something cooked up in an author's mind, but a true real place, if that makes sense.

This is cool to see. I'm impressed by how concise it all is. My notes documents always get really bloated, but this is strictly the relevant stuff.

So End obviously uses Word to organize things.  I've mainly been using Notion.  What other programs do people use for organization of notes?

I swear by scrivener. Great flexibility since you can have nested folder systems within a single project that also collapse into a single document. Also comes with a lot of neat features like automatically tracking daily word count and easy options for split-screen referencing.

I think for school, I've been using google drive because I'm pretty basic or OneNote