Category Archives: Writing

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World Building

I’ve been finding it hard to focus on programming tasks lately, so I’ve been spending this week working on world building. I haven’t tended to write much background material, but I’ve been hankering to do more, because a post-Baron plot arc has gotta be more than just another antagonist like the last.

My process so far is similar to the one behind Vampire: The Masquerade:

  1. What are the major political divides generated by the premise?
  2. Come up with factions for each position. Give them names, epithets, symbols, founders, derogatory terms…
  3. Who’s allied with who? What are the conflicts? Who won, and how long ago?
  4. What sorts of juicy scandals might’ve been covered up? Who’s keeping secrets?
  5. What’s the sequence of foreshadowings and reveals that leads the player to the bottom of each mystery?
  6. Who do they need to know and where do they need to be, to discover all these things?
  7. What are the tasks and random events that lead them there?

Anyway, I doubt I’ll follow all these steps exhaustively. If I can see a shortcut to writing game content, I’ll definitely take it.

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Last call for survey responses

If you’re eligible for the fetish survey ($15 pledges and up during the OffBeatr campaign) or the name survey ($30 pledges and up during the OffBeatr campaign), you need to get your answers in within the next few days.

The initial batch of forms went out to your OffBeatr e-mail address on the 1st of February. There were about a dozen people who I missed out because their payment didn’t go through until later, so I sent another batch on the 14th of February. Lately I’ve been having crappy luck actually getting e-mails delivered, so if you still haven’t received one, let me know at jack@fleshcult.com

There won’t be much visible progress with the game this week. I’m working on an editing tool to allow writers to add new messages to the sex encounters, and give them control over when the messages are displayed. I’m hoping that by allowing text to be added to a character in a free-form way, I can get more lively, reactive NPCs than if we did it in a big spreadsheet where every character has the same blanks to fill in.

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Many-Eyed Hydra’s fiction

One of the donation rewards in the Fleshcult crowdfunding drive is a selection of eBooks by Many-Eyed Hydra. Applying new twists to the succubus myth is his speciality, so I figure that guys who enjoy Fleshcult are likely to enjoy these too.

The bundle includes:
– The full-length novel: Succubus Summoning 101.
– The short story collection: A Succubus for Halloween.
– And another short story collection: A Succubus for Valentine’s Day.

If you’d like a taste, he’s written lots of freely available short stories here.