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Shining Evening Harmony
c5b152
Howdy folks. It's time for a not so brief announcement.
There are a few things about this quest that I'm unhappy with. Don't worry I'm not going to cancel it or anything, but I will try to fix the things I don't like. In this post I'm going to go through the list an item at a time, explain why I dislike it and what I'm going to do about it. In addition there might be some rambling on that general topic. Not all items are equally serious but since I was making a list I might as well make it complete. What I would like you to do is go through the list and tell me whether or not you agree it's a problem and if I'm taking the right steps to correct it.
And a final caveat, this might include some spoilery stuff, so stop reading this now if you're sensitive to that type of thing.
1) Artwork
Most of the artwork in this quest looks bad. Rushed and just bad. I haven't been drawing for very long, in fact I haven't drawn at all until I started doing these quests. I also have a tendency to try and rush the drawings together as quickly as possible. These two things don't combine well. What I want to do is spend more time on each image. I'm still learning, so I want to take the time and construct each character properly, draw proper backgrounds instead of cheap gradients and incomprehensible squiggles. I want to improve my drawing skills. Always rushing the artwork isn't helping.
This will, of course, slow me down. Especially in the beginning. Instead of fifteen or twenty minutes I should spend an hour drawing an individual picture. I know this isn't technically necessary here on /quest/, but I want to improve.
2) Planning and structure (more spoilery)
Planning. Hah. None of that here. And by that I mean none. There has been very little planning involved in the making of this quest. This is a problem because it makes the quest less coherent. The quest becomes tiresome to follow if we're constantly meandering around with no purpose. This doesn't mean that I intend to start railroading. If something surprising comes up I'll just change the plan or scrap it and make a new one. But there needs to be some direction, some method to my madness.
I have an idea that I've been playing around with. It has to do with the overall structure of the quest. I would like the quest to be of the form of consecutive short stories. What I mean by that is that every chapter should be self-contained with offscreen time in between. It shouldn't be necessary to have read all the previous chapters to understand what is going on. Essentially I would like to move from a strictly linear story to a more encounter based approach. If you've ever read Usagi Yojimbo you'll understand what I mean.
3) Update times
As some of you know, I'm from Finland. While it is indubitably the best country in the world, it does put me at an awkward timezone compared to the US. I could potentially update with some regularity between 18:00-23:00 local time, which is 11AM-5PM EST. I realize that many american viewers are still at school or at work at that time. This cannot be helped. Sorry. I simply cannot do all-nighters anymore. I've been doing it far too much this autumn, it's fucking up my school and to a larger extent my life. Whenever I do that I'm dead for days at a time. Can't get a damn thing done.
There are some options to this. I could for example go to sleep early and wake up at 9PM EST to do a couple of updates or some other arrangement like that. I'm still thinking this one over.
4) Combat mechanics
As you know, I've been experimenting with combat mechanics. While I do like the whole step diagram thing and the detailed explanation thing they both have a common issue: It's exceedingly difficult to determine whether or not an action should be successful or not. For example, in the first thread there was an instance when Mu tried to grab the goblins hand. Why it failed? Well, I don't have a good answer for that. The rationale I settled for was that Mu was off-balance and had just been stabbed. The problem is that since it could be disputed it was probably not satisfactory for the players. What I want is a system that accurately determines success or failure so that there can be no debate. Whether or not it uses dice. It should be something simple and easy to understand, yet very customizable (at the very least our current techniques should be doable in that system). If you know of an existing system that does this, let me know. Something that actually has stats. I will eventually work something out on my own but I'd prefer to use something that has seen some actual playtesting.
5) Style of storytelling
There are a lot of problems with this one. Most of them are a direct result of my lack-of-planning but there are some things are very typical for me, though not exclusive to me.
An update should always end in a decision. After all, the players are the decision-makers, there needs to be something for them to do. It can be an explicit choice, it can be deciding a new destination or something totally open-ended. I don't always remember to include this. I'm not the only one to do this, but it is a huge mistake. Other times I think that the choice is there, but it just turns that that the players didn't realize it, or they didn't think that X was an option. This is actually the reason I've been including suggested actions in some of my posts. By the way, do you think it's a good or a bad thing? I'm trying to think of a way to highlight this in a less explicit way, but so far I've got nothing.
In summary:
In the future I will be moving my focus from quantity to quality when it comes to updates. I probably won't be doing all-day update runs quite so often. I'll also be changing the structure of the quest to a more modular, encounter based system, with largely self-contained chapters with titles like "Mu and the Mountain God" or "Mystery of the Weeping Ghost".
Kudos to everyone who managed to read this far. I think I've rambled enough for today. Over and out.
-Nahkh
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