June 2023 Writing Update - Twine, Audio Notes, and Video Game Design

June's not over yet, but there's a lot that I've accomplished this month, and I think now is as good a time as any to do a little review post. Also, Eid is coming up at the end of this month, and it's going to be a busy time filled with family and friends and good food, so I probably won't be able to write blog posts. (Happy Eid!!)

So, yeah! What have I been up to?

First and foremost, I started using Twine and working on a choice-based game, which I plotted (branches, choices, and all!) and created a design document for. Very proud of myself for that - now I just have to turn it into a Twine project. This is what I spent a great deal of June working on, so I feel particularly satisfied with how far I was able to take this video game idea.

That game idea I just mentioned - that's the story named CBG. There are three other stories that I started writing on a whim once I started using Twine. Choose Your Demise is a fun one - it's meant to be a dark, modern-style RPG where your character goes to small strange towns and meets their weird residents - and perhaps narrowly avoids perishing a number of times! 

To be fair, there's still a lot that I need to learn about Twine. Right now, I'm just writing passages and creating choices. I've just recently started working on adding a little more complexity to the game, including allowing players to input their character's name. I will also need to consider how to create a character relationship counter, among other things - but one thing at a time! It's a pretty big learning curve for me. I have some experience with RenPy, but it's still quite different. 

To make sure that I'm not just putting together the worst choice-based games in the history of game design, I've also been watching a range of lectures and presentations on YouTube to help me understand how to better design choice-based games with impactful consequences without completely overwhelming myself - and all the while keeping things interesting and fun for the player. I'm no expert just yet, but I like to think I'm on my way, little by little.

What else have I been up to? As always, I've been working every now and then on my murder mystery novel, which has a deadline that edges ever closer... No pressure there! Hopefully, once that I am able to successfully pass that deadline, I can talk about this murder mystery in a lot more detail, because it will then be a lot closer to completion - and publication. 

And, most recently, I've been working on a couple of audio productions for my podcast. The first one of the season was released a couple of days ago. Cerberus, the Many-Headed Enigma, is one of (hopefully) many mini audio productions which, when put together, create a bigger picture that deals with the mystery of the Cerberus monster. Of course, it's not perfect - but I am pretty proud of it nevertheless, and very excited to keep making more productions like this!

(PSSST - if you haven't already heard of it, I've got a new segment that I'm launching on my podcast called Write Bites. Send me your Qs, suggestions, comments, writing advice, or anything else writing-related that you'd like to share with my listeners, and I'll hopefully be able to read them out loud on my podcast! You can drop them in my ask box on Tumblr, Tweet me (make sure to mention it's a Write Bites thing!), or leave me a message on my other social media.)

Finally, I've been organizing my audio notes. If you've been around for a while, I've mentioned before that I love taking audio notes. That's how I brainstorm, problem-solve, and plan. So, I have a lot of audio notes. And I mean a lot.

Yikes... And that's only one tiny snapshot of a folder bursting at the seams with them!

You're just going to have to take it from me, though: it looks a lot more organized than it was before, now that I've decided on a file naming system that will help me keep things organized. Date, followed by title. As you can see, ...there are no titles. That just means that I have to re-listen to all of my audio notes and figure out what the main content of each audio is so that I can title it accordingly. This should make it a lot easier to navigate and find the audios that I need to find, or the information within them.

As an aside, making these audio notes also makes it easier to go back and track the evolution of my projects. It's exciting to think about how different my murder mystery WIP, Marie/Elise, is now compared to what I had planned for it a couple of years ago - or even before that. 

Like I said at the start of this post, June's not over yet. There's still a good 5 days left to it - so edits to this post may be coming later on.