Lemma Soft Forums

Your project sounds interesting. I just PM'ed you.

Sounds interesting to write. Sent a PM.

The best way is to write well "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the s...

There's only one rule, and that is to make every moment within the story interesting separate from its complexity. As long as the writing is great, the characters are developed, and the events within themselves don't need a lot of the context that comes before to be powerful, you'll be writing a goo...

It's all completely in the language and rhetoric. Minimize Jargon and maximize language flow and human analogies. Writing on a theme, for example, about Liberty, is an exercise in saying the same thing as many times as possible without using the word 'Liberty'. Of course there are some people, like ...

Firstly, fantasy and flights of fancy are not distinct from slice-of-life, since dreaming is itself a part of life. See the short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. The greatest slice-of-life book in the world is probably Ulysses by James Joyce, both being a realistic slice of life in the most l...

Of course you can write any setting and still make it good. That's why people write fantasy or historical settings after all. The problem is representing it in a fair way. Most Japanese slice of life anime or visual novels mainly play with the sense of nostalgia, which requires a good amount of pers...

Do you always write dialogue heavy stuff? Maybe you should try some descriptive prompts like describing a scene. I always find people who want to start of writing loads of dialogue strange because dialogue is one of the bloody hardest things to get right and even though it may sound right when vocal...

The thing about Visual Novels is that since you already have a background, its extremely wise to cut down on a lot of unnecessary descriptions. Since the Art does most of the work for you then you should focus more on the interaction with the environment. Use only the words that are necessary to con...

Why can't closure be a win-condition especially in more action or logic-puzzle oriented VNs? Can't solving a riddle in a VN give greater immersion than simply saying so with text? Show, not tell. Feel, not tell. And why shouldn't closure or "better" endings (defined by the player) be a wi...

If you want to kill your jargon, kill your quasi-legalese formatting. This "rule" honestly seems redundant. I'm sure there are VNs out there with only text and sound or images and text. I think we're still talking past each other on certain portions. The problem is that its hard to put a ...

@ enigma and blankd I'd like to extend this discussion of good and bad endings to another type of ending--good ends that are not the "true end". The good end that gives you a happily-ever-after with the individual love interest, but does not properly tie up the main story's resolution whi...

@ Enigma Okay, then I'd like to debate this: Do you feel like there are any particular aspects or conventions of VN's as a medium that tend to be flawed? Not bad, not wrong, but flawed? What do you feel we could do to turn these aspects in another direction? When do you feel these flawed aspects ar...

@enigma and Caveat Lector Maybe I haven't played enough VNs or I got very lucky with the draws but most of the "bad ends" I came across seemed to be fairly stand-alone endings (then again they typically had lots of death or fates worse than death but eh, name of the end I guess). Though t...

Trust me though that my tone is mild here compared to the direct intellectual assault that goes on in the University debating circuit where literally blood and brains rush out into full blown combat. Trust me too that passive-aggressive retorting is basically hardwired into my thought process after...