Writing Salon Week 5: Room Descriptions

This post is for the May 29-June 4 writing event of the 2016 AIF Writing Salon.

When your game starts, the player needs to know where he or she is. Establish the setting. Write a paragraph describing where the sex scene takes place. Is it an empty room, or do you want to have interactive objects in the room too? Post your descriptions for everyone to read.

Since traditional interactive fiction is built around moving between different rooms and interacting with objects in them, interactive fiction often has a strong sense of place. By focusing heavily on where you are and by forcing you to examine and interact with things, traditional interactive fiction immerses you in a world. Twine uses a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure model of the world, so Twine stories tend to emphasize plot more.

Although rich room descriptions with many interactive objects can help with immersion, don't feel obligated to spend too much time there. AIF stories are unusual in that they focus mostly on character. The setting isn't too important, so many AIF games provide only brief descriptions of your surroundings. What is important though is that you describe any exits that are available and any characters or objects that can be interacted with. One side-effect of this is that room descriptions sometimes read like dry lists of stuff, which is fine.

To help get you in the right mindset, I have grabbed a random assortment of room descriptions from some public domain novels. These descriptions read like traditional interactive fiction room descriptions, so you try to adapt them to your needs.

Writing Salon Week 4: Program that Introduction

This post is for the May 22-28 writing event of the 2016 AIF Writing Salon.

Cut & paste that introduction into your game. When you start your game, that introduction should appear, drawing players into the story.

If you want other people to try out what you've programmed so far, upload it somewhere and post the Internet address in the comments. I believe that DropBox and Neocities are okay with people sharing adult content on their sites.

Writing Salon Week 3: Introductions

This post is for the May 15-21 writing event of the 2016 AIF Writing Salon. It's not too late to join in. If you've got an idea for a game, feel free to discuss it.

Every AIF game needs a sex scene. In order to keep the scope of the writing manageable, we're going to concentrate on writing a game with only one sex scene first. Later, more chapters can be added on to create a longer work. Choose one sex scene from your game and write an introduction that summarizes everything in your story leading up to that sex scene. Post these teasers to get feedback and to generate excitement about your full game.

Although it is painful to replace the amazing plot points and puzzles that you had in your mind with a simple introductory summary, doing so can often improve your game. Starting in media res, right in the thick of the action, can really improve the pacing of your plot. One of the most common writing tricks used in romance novels is to start with the protagonist and her love interest already be in love. A story about how two people get together is much more difficult to write and can be tedious to read.

Beta testers wanted

Hi everyone,

I am looking for beta testers.  I have been working on my first AIF story for a number of months now, after being motivated by the writing style of Palmer on ESA and also Aonehitwonder on ‘Dinner Plans’. 

My story is set over a weekend for the PC.  Like those other authors it offers enjoyable, consensual nooky, after a challenge or two.  As a variation to those works by Palmer and AOHW I have written a story with several ladies, and your choices at various points cause you to follow different paths through the weekend.  This means that over multiple plays you can find several possible endings with several different partners.  I also written in some characters that are not involved in action scenes for this story but whose roles and activities will hopefully be developed in subsequent episodes.

I am using Adrift 5 and over the past month or two I have worked pretty hard on debugging (and spellchecking!) the story.  I am doing some final runs to check that minor plot variations work, and then it will be time for some third party review and comment.  So….I am grateful for all offers of help with beta testing, but particularly grateful if you have experience with Adrift and/or editing.  In return I can offer my undying gratitude and a big thankyou in the credits.  If able to help, please leave a comment, or contact me at: ptypoe123 - at - outlook - dot - com

Ptypoe

Writing Salon Week 2: Choose an Engine

This post is for the May 8-14 writing event of the 2016 AIF Writing Salon. It's not too late to join in. If you have an idea for a game, feel free to discuss it.

If you want to program interactive sex, you need a story engine to run in. Discuss your choices or come get advice about your options. Choose one, install it, and start it up.

For beginner authors, I highly recommend that you choose Twine. Specifically, I recommend Twine 2 with the SugarCube story format. When choosing a story engine, the most important thing is to choose one that has been used in other games. The more people who use a story engine, the better it becomes. There are also more people available who can help you. Twine is the most heavily used story engine available now. To be honest, Twine isn't very well-designed. It's very simple though, and over the years, the community has improved it to the point that it has become very usable. Unfortunately, the main designers of Twine created a new version called Twine 2 that discarded all the improvements made by the community. Twine 2 is easier to use but is missing many of the features from Twine 1 that are needed to make interesting games. The SugarCube story format brings many of these Twine 1 features to Twine 2, and it's mostly compatible with tutorials for Twine 1.

May Open Thread: Help and Criticism

If the first thread of the writing salon is anything to go by, we are going to have a lot of talk upcoming about people’s ideas. Thus the topic: what are some tips you have both for giving feedback on ideas and for being the person receiving feedback?

Writing Salon Week 1: Pitch Your Story Ideas

This post is for the May 1-7 writing event of the 2016 AIF Writing Salon.

Have an idea for an erotic adventure? Have a steamy sex scene that you want to write down? Have you ever wanted to 'ship your favorite fictional characters? Pitch your ideas and get feedback from others. We'll spend time talking about how to flesh out concepts and simplify ideas.

The biggest problem faced by new authors is that they work on ideas that are too ambitious. They decide to write a novel when they should start with a short story. Another problem new authors face is that seemingly innocuous details of a story idea might require thousands of words of writing and code. The work needed to implement a minor character or alternate path can easily grow out of control.

By sharing your ideas with others early, we can help you simplify your ideas. Often, you can keep the core characters, emotions, and sexiness of your story but with fewer characters, rooms, and plot points. We can also offer suggestions about what order you should implement things in. With AIF, it's important to have something playable as early as possible. It makes it easier to see how it works, and it gives you a base from which you can build out something bigger. We can make suggestions about which scene might be best to start with.

If you have something you want to share, just post it as a comment to the blog post. Be careful to use a separate account for posting and not an account you use IRL. Anonymous comments are welcome, but it would be useful to tag your comments somehow so we know which comments are from whom. AIF Central sometimes has difficulties dealing with longer comments. You can break up your posts into multiple comments, or sign-up to become a blogger on AIF Central and make a new blog post with your content.

April Open Thread: Plot Twists

This was originally going to be an open thread for April Fool’s Day, but I didn’t want to knock down Lost Trout’s post so quickly.

The question: what is the best ‘twist’ you have encountered in AIF? Did it add a lot to the story? If an author chooses to use a twist in the plot, what steps can they take to make sure it succeeds (not saying it is essential, because it isn’t)?

To define twist via Wikipedia: “A plot twist is a radical change in the expected direction or outcome of the plot. It is a common practice in narration used to keep the interest of an audience, usually surprising them with a revelation.”

Two topics: Abstract Challenges and Pictures

Here are two topics I’m interested in hearing people’s thoughts on. This isn’t quite an Open Thread as usually with those I put out a topic to stir discussion; this post is more for elements I have been considering. Most of this is based on elements I have seen in other adult products (hentai games and RAG AIFs)

AIF Writing Salon and Minifest: Official Announcement

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