Amber's postmortem and future games
Posted: Sat Jun 24, 2017 6:45 am
If you haven't read the blog post yet: blog/2017/06/ambers-magic-shop-postmortem/
I just wanted to be clear about some things regarding that post: I don't blame the writers at all, they did a good job overall. The main issue is with the process itself. If making a game consist of prototyping/trying several things and repeating it until "it works" (more or less!), you can imagine that writing a story "set in stone" before that whole process is a bit restrictive.
For example in Cursed Lands, there's a fixed deadline. That was needed by the plot itself (there's a menace and people need to eliminate it in time). Now if I was writing the game myself maybe I would still have it (even if I know that most of my players don't like that) but maybe not, or I wouldn't have time advance in general but based on finishing quests. Other things are item rewards that are hard to make (in the CL thread I managed to implement items that grants the user a skill, but I wasn't sure that I could have added that to the game).
In summary there's a LOT of reasons why writing myself makes more sense: I know what my players want in term of gameplay, characters, story, romances. I know the restrictions of the engines I use, so I wouldn't even bother creating an item or a quest that it's too hard to make (hehe I remember in SOTW the writer was very creative with many battles and I tried to make them all, but in some was just too difficult). I know how long a game should be (when a certain game will be out you'll see how crazily long it became) and so on.
Last but not least, I work fast, so if I write the games myself there wouldn't be anymore delays of YEARS and with a good editor, I think the result could be decent (I've asked a few people I know to edit some lines and the starting result vs ending result was crazy, much better quality!).
For certain type of games like more story-oriented, there aren't problem, and luckily I can continue having external writers to help me (I cannot write ALL my new games, would be too much even for me!). But whenever there's some gameplay involved, I think it's better if I write them myself.
And of course I'm not talking about the current games in progress, those will still be finished by the respective writers
I just wanted to be clear about some things regarding that post: I don't blame the writers at all, they did a good job overall. The main issue is with the process itself. If making a game consist of prototyping/trying several things and repeating it until "it works" (more or less!), you can imagine that writing a story "set in stone" before that whole process is a bit restrictive.
For example in Cursed Lands, there's a fixed deadline. That was needed by the plot itself (there's a menace and people need to eliminate it in time). Now if I was writing the game myself maybe I would still have it (even if I know that most of my players don't like that) but maybe not, or I wouldn't have time advance in general but based on finishing quests. Other things are item rewards that are hard to make (in the CL thread I managed to implement items that grants the user a skill, but I wasn't sure that I could have added that to the game).
In summary there's a LOT of reasons why writing myself makes more sense: I know what my players want in term of gameplay, characters, story, romances. I know the restrictions of the engines I use, so I wouldn't even bother creating an item or a quest that it's too hard to make (hehe I remember in SOTW the writer was very creative with many battles and I tried to make them all, but in some was just too difficult). I know how long a game should be (when a certain game will be out you'll see how crazily long it became) and so on.
Last but not least, I work fast, so if I write the games myself there wouldn't be anymore delays of YEARS and with a good editor, I think the result could be decent (I've asked a few people I know to edit some lines and the starting result vs ending result was crazy, much better quality!).
For certain type of games like more story-oriented, there aren't problem, and luckily I can continue having external writers to help me (I cannot write ALL my new games, would be too much even for me!). But whenever there's some gameplay involved, I think it's better if I write them myself.
And of course I'm not talking about the current games in progress, those will still be finished by the respective writers