Devlog 15: I'm a writer now.

The last time I posted here was the end of May, and I was just transitioning from the phase of "collecting all of my thoughts" to "turning this into a game". I spent the 6 weeks between then and now forming a massively jumbled set of ideas, places, characters and gameplay elements into a game script. Indeed, yesterday I handed in my design outline to Dave G of Wadjet Eye Games, and crossed my fingers that I had explained myself well enough and that my idea was good.

Don't get me wrong, I thought the idea was great. In my head it's the most lively, original, heartfelt thing I could make right now. It's over a decade of built up dreams, hypotheses, little philosophies all rolled into a huge ball, with the fat trimmed off it mercilessly and as well rounded and cohesive as I could get it in 6 weeks. It's 24,000 words, 56 pages of what I hope is the best I can do. But of course there's still that nagging feeling - what if I can't see the problems? What if I missed something big, aside from all the big stuff that I had missed then caught and fixed? What if it's too weird, too silly, breaks too many unspoken and spoken rules of the genre? 

It's natural for any writer to be anxious while waiting for feedback. I should know. I'm a writer now.

You might remember this post going around a long time ago, about the funny ways ladies have died in literature: 

All your writer friends will have laughed at it because it's so stupid to die from "Too many pillows" or "Missing slippers" or "Pony exhaustion". Some writers will tell you that the funniest one is "Someone said "No" very loudly while they were in the room" because that's a very stupid thing to die from, and then we can all feel very proud that we would never write something so stupid, isn't it a good thing that we're modern writers and not stupid old writers.

But next time a writer is in the room you're in and asks if you liked their work say "No" very loudly and watch a them literally die. That's proof of what we all know - that writers are just people who will tell lies for attention and money. Trust me on this, I'm a writer now. I wouldn't lie to you. Not even for attention and money.

In any case, Dave Gilbert didn't say "No" very loudly, and so I have survived. He said this, in fact:

That's an awful lot of praise and I'm very grateful! I'm going to warn you now that some people will not share his opinions here, some of my friends will hate this game, that's okay. We can still be friends. You don't need to like my guitar playing, either. But it's a good outcome. I took lots of ideas, I designed the best gameplay I could around them, and then I wrote a game around that. The design stuff still needs a lot of work, of course. The writing stuff will too! It's ridiculous to think that a 56 page document with 27 characters and 73 backdrops will make it unscathed from document form to game form. But nevertheless. I'm a writer now. I haven't forgotten how to do it, and now I can finally, finally start actual production on this game that everybody is bored of hearing about before I've even shown a single screenshot. 

If I had to be really honest, I would give the classic answer that I didn't really do much writing. I came up with the setting, I came up with the general thrust of the plot, and I came up with some fun characters, and then the game just kind of wrote itself. You know how your friends will react to weird situations, so if they're your imaginary friends and imaginary situations then that still counts. Not all of them are my imaginary friends, some are imaginary bastards. I should know, I've been stuck imagining them for weeks now. But that's how the game got written, I threw all the bits together and it wrote itself and mostly I just spent dreadful, agonizing hours editing and lamenting that I had read this too many times to know if it was actually the most boring thing to read imaginable or if I was just burnt out on it. I do maintain that taking out two pages of quantum physics was probably a good move, however.

And look, I could have shown screenshots. I know people like my illustration work enough that I could ride that wave of "x amount of people already like your drawing, and will probably buy a game because you drew it". I really appreciate that. But I wanted to sell this game to Dave based not on my drawing, but my writing and design, and I'm pleased to say I did that.

Oh, and how did I distracted myself from overthinking everything while waiting to hear feedback about my document?

C'mon, friends. You already know the answer...