Hey everyone, here’s the Friday Saturday update for this week. Sorry for being a day late, but yesterday was a bit rough on the development front; it was one of those “everything that could go wrong did go wrong days,” and the trend even extended to my lunch burrito. When you can’t even get a good burrito from your regular food truck, you know it’s gonna be a tough day.
But enough about that! First, as always, here are the best ways to stay up to date on the game:
@TheNovelistGame
Greenlight
RSS Feed
Press Page
@KentInPublic
With that out of the way, here are this week’s interviews. Things are slowing down on the publicity front as I get back into hardcore development, although I did get a few interviews done this week. I still plan to answer every request I’ve got, so look for more coverage to keep trickling in!
- Polygon: Here’s an article/interview from Megan at Polygon, who played the game at Indie Press Day. This one gets into the central question of the game and touches on my own lack of an answer to it.
- Greenlit Gaming: This one talks a lot about the decision mechanics of the game, and even goes into some of my favorite games from the past. I had fun doing this one!
- Lastly, I’ll share one of life’s most important lessons with you all: never have a bullet list with only two bullets in it.
That’s it for interviews and publicity. I’m back to focusing on the game most of the time and trying to get it finished and out to you guys. Next week I’m going to write the last four chapters in the game, which is really exciting. I’ve got them outlined, which is actually probably the hardest part of putting a chapter together because there are so many narrative/gameplay criteria that have to be met. The challenge revolves around finding situations that:
- … have no obvious right or wrong answer.
- … have three equally sympathetic, mutually-exclusive character outcomes.
- … are self-contained from a time and location perspective.
- … can be mapped to ordinary household objects.
- … don’t contradict any other chapters in the game.
When you try to meet all of those criteria it can be harder than you might think, and once the outlines are in place the actually writing of the content could almost be construed as the easy part (although writing doesn’t come naturally to me, so it’s kind of all the hard part).
Anyway, that’s where I’m at right now. I’ve got all the UI and menu stuff done, which is a big load off my mind, and now it’s really just about adding the last of the content and working on polish, polish, polish.
Thanks again to everyone who’s preordered the game, sent a supportive email, or voted on Greenlight. Please keep it up! Tell your friends, send them a link, RT posts from @TheNovelistGame, and help me spread the word. Indie games don’t have marketing budgets or PR departments, so grassroots support is the only tool we’ve got; thanks so much for helping me share The Novelist with the world!
Until next week …