2018 "If You Write It, They Will Come" AIF Writing Salon

Do you want to write some Adult Interactive Fiction but aren't good at coding? Then join the "If You Write It, They Will Come" AIF Writing Salon. During the Writing Salon, if you write all the text for an AIF game, a programmer will take your text and turn it into a game.



The Writing Salon will be only for text-based AIF games with no graphics. If you aren't familiar with AIF games, then you should definitely go play some now or you will not understand the possibilities and limitations of the medium. I suggest trying Camping Trip as a good example of parser-based AIF, and Enticing Ella or Snowstorm as good examples of choice-based AIF.

The Writing Salon involves a lot of work for the programmers, so please have pity on them and write short works of only a few scenes instead of sprawling and ambitious novels. The programmers are offering you this service out of generosity, so please don't be too demanding of them. The Writing Salon is supposed to be a friendly collaboration, not a venue where writers treat programmers as slaves (unless they ask you to!). Although we will do our best to get programmers to program games from your text, it is possible that no programmers will be available or that programmers will fall greatly behind schedule. Programmers will try to interpret your intentions based on your text, but they will not do any writing and they will not program any complicated logic. You, the writer, must do all the writing yourself and describe exactly how the logic of your game should work.

In order to allow for the collaboration between writers and programmers, all of your text and all of the code for the game should be licensed under the open source license GPLv3. This means that anyone can take your work and use it for other purposes provided that they allow others to do the same. By participating in the Writing Salon, you agree to allow your game text to be licensed in this way so that programmers can take your text and make a game for you out of it.

Code for the games will be developed on GitHub though if you have problems with GitHub, other possibilities will be entertained. GitHub does not allow sexually obscene content on their service. To be safe, you should avoid these things in your stories: underage characters, incest, outright rape, violent sex, bestiality (fish monsters are OK), etc.

Communication will be done through comments of the AIF Central blog. If you have something you want to share, just post it as a comment to the relevant 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, so you may need to break up your posts into multiple comments. At later stages of the Writing Salon, you can also use GitHub issues to send text to programmers.

Here is the general schedule of the Writing Salon:

Announce Your Story Ideas (April 17)

Please announce your ideas for an AIF game in the comments of this blog post. Describe the story arc and the characters involved.

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. They don't realize that AIF games involve more work than normal prose. All the alternate paths and descriptions can easily add up to a novella-worth of text even for very short games. Another problem new authors face is that they don't realize that certain seemingly innocuous details of their story ideas 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.

The Writing Salon is not school. You don't get part marks for partial answers. If you don't have a finished game by the end of the Writing Salon, then you have nothing and everyone's time will have been wasted. So it's important to work on smaller, less ambitious ideas that are easier to finish. This is not Olympic figure skating. In the Writing Salon, a successful single axel is worth more than a failed triple axel.

To help you, this stage of the Writing Salon will entirely be focused on helping authors cut back on their ideas and to see alternate ways of formulating their stories with the same core characters, emotions, and sexiness but fewer characters, rooms, and plot points. Other people may question your ideas and challenge your decisions. Please do not become too defensive. Although it's always painful to have your ideas be "attacked" in this way, it is not meant to discourage you but to push you to see alternate ways of formulating your story. You do not need to follow the suggestions given, but you should seriously consider it. You should treat them like comments from an editor trying to help you improve your work. If someone asks you for more detail about your story, then please do supply these extra details. Don't think that you'll be able to figure it out later. You will have to write the text for all those parts of your game eventually anyway, so it's good to figure out the details early because sometimes you won't be able to figure it out later.

Here are some common pitfalls:

Some authors' ideas are based on thinking of all sorts of sexy situations that they want their characters to go through. Although sexy situations are a good source of inspiration, authors become too attached to them even if they are hard to squeeze into short games. Once you have been inspired by a sexy situation, you should think about the characters and why the situation is sexy for them. Then, it's easier to move those characters into different sexy situations.

Do you know why the characters in romance novels always fall in love at first sight? Because writing about people falling in love is both long and hard to do. If you include a romance in your game, you should start with your characters already in love but with some difficulty in the way.

In the last writing salon, we had several people who were interested in procedural-style AIF. In my limited experience, procedural games are designed differently from other games. You should not start with a plot. Instead, you should focus on the simulation. You want to find a situation that can be repeated many, many times but which plays out differently depending on what has happened in the past. You want this looping situation to be as short as possible so as to minimize the amount of writing you have to do.

You don't need a fully realized story arc for the Writing Salon, and not everything important needs to occur in the game itself. You are a writer. You can summarize characters' experiences in the introduction. You can allude to previous events in their conversations. Your game can be a small slice of a bigger story.

Introductions (Early May)

Now that you've figured out what your game is about, you can start writing. You should post the introductory text for their game and declare what game engine you want for your game so that programmers can start work.

I will most likely be the one programming your game. I prefer programming your game using the Inky engine, which is for choice-based games. If you want a parser-based game though, I can try to program your game in TADS3. I can also program games in Twine or Newlife if that's what you want.

Transcript of Complete Game (End of May)

Write a sample playthrough of your game. List the commands that a player will do and write the responses that will happen. Think about alternate commands that the player might try. Here is a sample transcript:

> kiss her
 You kiss her.

 > Lick breasts
 You gently lick her nipple.

 > Have sex
 You have sex with her. You cuddle with her afterwards and go to sleep.

 The End.

It shows different commands that you can try and the expected responses. Programmers can take this transcript and make the skeleton of a game from it. Be sure that the transcript shows a complete playthrough of your game from beginning to end. Remember that the writing for AIF games is different from normal writing. Unless you have brilliant prose, it is better to have less writing and shorter descriptions but more choices for the player.

If you have problems writing sex scenes, consider stealing snippets from some public domain erotica like the ones below:

Fanny Hill
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25305

The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29827

Romance of Lust
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30254

Playtesting 1 (Mid-June), Playtesting 2 (End of June), Playtesting 3 (Mid-July)

Games are an interactive medium. The final experience is a combination of player choices and your writing. Unless you're experienced enough to be able to anticipate how players will react to your game, you need to playtest your game to find out if players are experiencing the game in the way you intended.

For the first couple of playtests, your game will just a skeleton. It will be playable but incomplete. You should use these playtests to find missing parts of your game and fill them in. You should think of alternate choices that players can make at different points in the game and write the text for them.

For the later playtests, you should focus on refining how players experience your game. You should play some of the other games and leave comments about your experiences to help other authors and hopefully they will do the same for you. When reading player feedback, you should focus on their descriptions of how they felt while playing your game and on any problems they encountered. You should then see if these experiences match what you intended for your game. Keep in mind that players are not game designers, so any suggestions they make for actual changes to your game will often be wrong.

Just post any changes you want in the comments in the form of more transcripts or using more detailed instructions if necessary.

Minifest (End of July)

Your games are done. Release them for a general audience to play.

If anyone else has games that they would like to release as part of the Minifest too, feel free to do so too.