Carassaurat wrote:
Sapphi wrote:I'm really honored to have won second place and glad Stellie seemed to go over well.
Oh, I would've guessed this one correctly! I noticed I was reading Stellie in the voice you did for Windy in
Volky McLupinstein, probably because of the repeated use of "sir," and consequently couldn't shake the idea that the author might be the same. I've tried to see if I could find hints of British or American spelling in
For Stellie, but couldn't find any conflict words so quickly. Is that a conscious decision or a happy accident, or did I overlook something?
LOL! You recognized my "adorable British orphan" syntax!!
About the spelling... I don't quite understand your question... (haha)
Are you asking if I purposely made the spelling ambiguous by leaving out conflict words?
Well, on to the comments.
Funnyguts wrote:The professor seems to go crazy really fast. He was annoyed before, but wow, did he suddenly go murderous out of nowhere. Stellie was kinda cute, but I'm not quite sure what her motivation was. She seemed to suddenly want to help the professor by screwing with him. The professor learned to deal with the situation a bit too quickly, as well. The professor seems to just change moods depending on when it's needed, not when it makes sense.
I'll have to read through it again to be sure, but you're probably right... I knew the pacing was wonky while I was writing it, but since I was racing to meet the deadline, I didn't really have a lot of time to sit back and analyze it. Somebody else pointed out a typo, as well... I was rushed, but I'm still embarrassed by the typo
Funnyguts wrote:Competently written, but kind of weird. Whatever college that professor teaches at sounds absolutely insane. I've had papers with coffee on them before and it didn't ruin the lives of the professors and teachers that handed them back to me. Motivations all seemed underdevloped to me. Not bad, but definitely not my favorite.
I couldn't decide while writing if it was
really an over-the-top college, or if the professor himself was just a ridiculous man who obsessed about ridiculous things. I wanted to give him a sort of over-dramatic, pompous, Dostoevskian voice. I'm not sure how well it worked for the theme and prompt of the story, but it was so fun to write...
rasburn wrote:The cynicism of the professor when thinking about teaching and grading was fun, though the character wasn't likable at first. He seemed petty, but
as the story went on I felt more comfortable with him.
He was supposed to be petty, so that's good. Hopefully his dislikeable traits are neutralized in the beginning by the fun of watching him suffer...
Daggio wrote:
The visual was awesome, the author go an extra mile to present it differently than any other normal VNs (even though he/she probably knew the entry wasn't gonna be graded by visuals), it makes me feel like I really am reading a book instead of a software on my laptop, this presentation also makes the lack of transition between the spirit's facial expression makes sense, because well... it feels like I'm reading a book.
*blush* Yep, I knew it wouldn't be graded, but I thought it would be a fun time to try playing with Ren'Py's features to see how far I could go without breaking the rules. Designing the layout was just as fun as writing the thing, even though it took tons of trial-and-error... and in the end, I used the global defaults for NVL and it messed up the entries, so I had to compromise a bit with the design. This was how it was originally supposed to look:
Daggio wrote:Another negative point was that I don't feel like this story conforms with the prompt. Sure, she fell from the sky and probably the destruction she caused to the classroom and office fit the definition of "disaster", but she is NOT a spirit. She is a shooting star, she addressed herself as a star, and talks as if she's a shooting star, NOT a spirit. (I differentiate between spirits and stars)
Fair point. While writing I thought of her as a "shooting star spirit", but the way she refers to herself doesn't make that so clear. Although:
"We sleep for ages until the proper time, collecting knowledge without direct experience. At the proper time, dust surrounds us and we are born into your physical world, in which we have but one short moment to live."
was my way of saying, more subtly, that in the world of Shooting Star Spirits, spirits are "stored up" in a spirit queue somewhere, and throughout time it dispenses them, and then they take their respective turns being cloaked in bodies of "physical" matter for the sole purpose of throwing them into our atmosphere and burning them up. I didn't really feel like it was necessary for Stellie to give us a detailed explanation of the spirit world, though...
Daggio wrote:
No music. Bummer. Even though using the reasoning of "feels like reading a book" justifies the silent atmosphere, I still expect it coming from a game.
Yeah... I planned to use a couple tracks, but I ran out of time and just managed to finish coding the thing before the deadline.
Although, I wasn't entirely sure that was a bad thing. I wasn't sure how much "dissonance" the mostly eerie music would create when I set the professor's over-the-top voice to it.
Funnyguts wrote:Edit: Unrelated to Fragile, but something I forgot to mention in my review of For Stellie: There was a lot of weird word choice in that one. For example, I can't imagine a pompous English professor, one that would describe himself as a 'Professor of the English Language" no less, as someone who would ever in a million years let the word 'stupider' escape from his lips, instead of saying the more conventional 'more stupid'.
Yikes
That's one thing I need to work on. I tried, but I know the voices were all over the place. I have a hard time in that regard... I have a decent vocabulary because I read a lot, but I also speak very colloquially and use improper grammar in conversation just because it's comfortable, so when I write, I tend to have trouble separating the two.
OokamiKasumi wrote:
What I wasn't so keen on was that despite the fact that the sprite character; Stellie, was almost immediately established as being not-so-bright, she had difficulty with the word 'streaked,' and seemed to be a little simplistic in her views,) this was Not carried over.
Blane Doyle wrote:I did notice others mentioning that Stellie's character development was broken from someone with a poor grasp on the English language, as she has difficulty with the word streak, but that was not the impression I had gotten. I got the impression that she was just confused about the past tense of the word and not simple minded or not-bright. This is something many people have problems with. Even writers who study English and have large vocabularies have the problem sometimes, especially with commonly misunderstood words. I felt this scene was used to show off how the two character bounce off each other and how unusual Stellie is. She is a shooting start after all, she's certainly got quirks. (She did mention that they gather knowledge but do not get to properly use it, I felt that was a decent explanation as well.)
But, I could be utterly incorrect. We wouldn't know unless the author told us.
True story: I threw that in because
I couldn't remember what the proper past tense for that word was!
I figured that if
I was dumb enough to get confused, and I'm not actually dumb about grammar, that it was a realistic, conversational touch. I do agree that having it right in the beginning like that set Stellie up in a way I didn't really intend, so thanks for the feedback on that.
Blane Doyle wrote:Also, "scrambling like flaming foxes" is the best simile ever. The only thing that would have made me laugh harder at reading it would be if they were flaming squirrels.
You might not laugh if you knew the story behind the reference, lol. (It was kind of an ancient case of cruelty to animals...)
Carassaurat wrote:
If I have to criticise it, I think the coffee scene drags on too long, and while I understand that it serves a purpose to show the character and why his environment is so hellish, it demands a lot of attention to the irrelevant theme of coffee.
Gotcha... I think this is tied to my pacing issue. I spent more time on the beginning than I did on the end, so it's a little lopsided...
***
Well, I think that's just about everything I wanted to mention...
I did notice some people raising questions if it broke the prompt... Admittedly I got a little creative with it, but I hope it didn't diverge too far. It's true that Stellie did the professor more good than harm, but I did try to make her pretty disastrous as far as destroying his classroom, and stealing his papers...
I also noticed a lot of people hated the pauses every sentence. I apologize for that. I'll try to make text presentation less annoying next time!
Overall, I'm decently happy with what I wrote, although it's not my best work by far... I'm conflicted about the theme and tone. Originally I had it in my mind to make it a sob story (what else!), but I didn't have any really heart-wrenching emotional music, so I abstained in favor of giving the narrator an over-the-top style and toning down the sentiment a bit. I'm not sure if it was a success, but I think it's decent enough for me to revisit sometime and maybe expand a bit. I could see myself releasing it as a short KN with my own illustrations and music. In the event of that, does anyone have any suggestions for how I might tweak the story to make it better?
