u/ablondetravelsabroad

I’ll keep it short as the plot isn’t as important as the delivery device right now.

That plot device is a weathered journal passed from person to person and sometimes back to a previous person. Overall I ended up with 17 authors of the journal over the years and about 10 tertiary characters that exist in the story but never directly wrote in the journal.

So 27 characters total.

I don’t want to just cut everyone’s voice out to suddenly only have 3 or 4 telling the story so it’s easier for the reader, but I understand that I have to do something to assist with the pacing and overall character list.

Is there like a magic number writers avoid going above, or is there a ratio of understandable swaps?

Hi. I’ll keep this short as we all know ideas are cheap and implementation is the real work.

Male, 29, degree in history not writing. Active daily, 8am-9pm PST.

Looking for an accountability partner(s)/gamers or ex-gamers turned writers who want to contribute to the Beta re-publishing of a video game mod map as well as hold each other accountable in our own writing journeys/growth.

I made the mod map for a popular dinosaur video game over 3 years ago.

During its creation I dipped my toes back into writing while working on unreal engine or having to let things load and still wanting to bring new content to my community. So with the help of Reddit and through my community of beta testers we crafted a set of characters and whole story, but in the end it really was just me doing all of it and them spitting ideas at me like I’m ChatGPT and me having to try to make a cohesive narrative out of it.

I ended up having to leave a lot of the “but that sounds so cool” on the cutting room floor to make sure our audience understood our story as its told in a very unique/different/meant to be possibly confusing way compared to traditional video games or cutscenes that hold your hand through it.

This saves me a ton of money on animation, allows me to code each one myself fairly easily as a blueprint static mesh, and brands it as a “new unique exploration driven story” not just a way to avoid cutscenes.

This story is a single narrative/discovery/mystery story is told through a single weathered journal that was passed around when memories start to fade and their discoveries that help the user-player whenever the user player finds a missing page somewhere in the world.

I wrote the whole journal, from 17 POVs but I’m just one man. All my entries end up sounding the same or I notice that I’m just expositing across 3 different people who honestly probably shouldn’t even know about what the previous person went through except what’s in their journal entry.

*That’s where the team comes in. While keeping with the major story arc, we can edit characters, re-craft the notes (total of 52 notes now but we can add or subtract)

which tell the story from start to finish and leave a call to action for the user-players who are now playing the mod map/level (gives the player purpose and connects the story of the past to the current players goals), but allows a lot of space for new writers and editors to breathe within the piece itself and expand or subtract characters.

If you are interested I can go into more detail in DMs.

For reference at our peak we had 115,000 downloads across steam, Xbox and ps5, but the community always shifted and was never consistent.

Since I was a work in-progress allowing people to walk my world during its creation and contribute to it, I became more of a stepping stone or tourist attraction rather than a common level people chose to play consistently.

It’s been a little over a year since I set this project down to let it “breathe” as some older writers told me is best to do and I believe the first step in picking it back up is building the team with solid writers first, before we try to get gamers involved again.

Thanks! -Blondie