how dedicated are you in creating your game's settings??

[curry nochi rice]

settings is a too broad word here... so I'm going to elaborate a little.

setting... aside from the main place and time where the characters interact.

How about the back-story, world history, population, demographics and everything else, from economy to healthcare to literature... and "Why's this?" and "Why's that so?" and "Why is it like this, what happened in the past?)

anyway, if one spends time in "setting development " to the point that you build the world almost the same level you build your characters... how does a concrete background setting affect the story?

really... do we just focus on characters and less on the settings, or should we spend time developing both...?

[papillon]

The more background details you build up, the more you'll find ways that they naturally creep in and affect the story.

[Aleema]

Modern day settings are easy because we rarely have to establish our own history and culture, outside of locations and buildings and stuff. But modern day "worlds" can get pretty complicated if you're using fake anything.

When it comes to sci-fi/fantasy worlds ... I don't personally think there is anything as "too much", but as others have said in a similar thread I made a long time ago, what matters is how you use it. YOU should know these things, but avoid dumping it on the player, and make sure things you bring up are put to use. Like, don't mention the foreign King of Spagnalia if he doesn't have any purpose to the story. That's just useless and confusing.

In a plot-driven story, setting is very important since it likely shapes that plot. In a character-driven story, it's more likely on the back burner since the people shape the plot. Depends on your individual story, I guess.

edit: to answer your title's question: I am very dedicated. Con-worlding is fun to me! I made my world before I made my stories. I find that making the world invents the stories. Suddenly, it becomes clear which nations are at war, what civilization is more advanced, etc.

[gundestiny]

It all comes down to personal opinion and your ability to execute a story based on what you've planned out.
Some people produce better stories planning it all out (in great detail) from the beginning.
Others [like me] have a rough outline and just develop it while writing.

I honestly focus on my characters alot more than I do on setting, but it also depends on the genre of your game.
If it's an adventurous game, exploring a large range of areas, you may want to do some in depth research. It never hurts to have too much knowledge about your setting.
But I think it's important to somewhat understand your setting, otherwise the characters you've devised may not match the place at all xD

Ultimately, though, I think you should develop however much you feel comfortable and confident with to be able to create a good story ^^

[Auro-Cyanide]

I just naturally let the details build up around my characters and their story. If it needs to be there, then it will be there. I don't want to be so concerned with unnecessary things that I forget to tell the story. If it has no importance, then what role does it play outside of being trivia?

[Auro-Cyanide]

Whoops, sorry, double post. Not sure how that happened.

[delta-ion]

Hmm, I think the dependences between story, character and setting are multi-directional. Depending on where your initial point is, (be it the character, a story idea or an interesting setting) many things fall in place automatically.

So I think that, when creation the environment you have to be very careful not to put something in, that would work against the story.
For example, if you would create a heartbreaking story about a girl in need for medical treatment and she doesn't have the money for it, than an environment, where everyone has an health insurance, wouldn't work. On the other hand you would have to think about, why there are not to many people like this girl, or else the story would perhaps not really be a story about that girl. So that affects the background of the girl. That background would eventually affect the environment and so on.
In my opinion it is an iterative process. Putting in some extras that don't work against the necessary things might be nice, but I am not sure if you would really need them.

So dependent on where I start this process I put more or less time in creating the initial environment.

[okonomiyaki]

Setting gets left out of so many games here on lemma...and that's why I rarely play any. =/

The context of a story drastically affects the power with which the story comes off to the reader. If you have a villain, and then you have a villain-with-a-horrible-past, do people not treat the latter differently? But if you don't say, people will assume the former, and he will have less "power" in the story.

People call settings "extra info", but how many stories have become worldwide famous because the setting was so powerful? Harry Potter. LoTR. Naruto even! Twilight takes place in our own modern time, but it still has a world with rules. Modern has a bit more of a free reign, but how many fantasy novels have you read without a setting that you could quantify? I doubt it would be a lot, and if visual novels are part novel, I think it's a good idea to take a note from actual novels when writing them.

[LVUER]

I like to build things as far as I need it. Sometimes even more (and I always care even the minute detail), though I'm more to making/drawing manga than writing a story (similar but a bit different).

A side note:
Even if you already create detailed world structure and setting, it doesn't always mean you have to tell the reader all of it. Some times only a bit of a time, some times you even don't tell the reader at all.

You create the structure only to create consistency, so you don't need to tell the reader deliberately. If you insist want to tell them (perhaps so the reader could enjoy the story better, you could make a guide book or extra section).

[Arithra]

Well I think most people start with the characters when they come up with a story/ game and so on. The world develops toghether with them. Depending on what kind of story you write you will have to put work in the setting as well.

I for one think really love drawing maps for the storys I write, may it be a city or a world map, it just seems way more epic.

But generally the setting is like a characters background, without a good and interesting setting no matter how interesting the characters or the conflict may be, something will always be missing.
So once I come up with a plot I make notes on the world the main characters life in. Because depending on the way they were brought up thei behavior might change.

[okonomiyaki]

Funny enough, for my story, I came up with the setting first, and pretty far in advance to any of the characters.

[yummy]

Before even creating my story, I've begun with its world, in order to make it more realistic (or at least believable). I tried to picture a vast span of time (around a millenium and half) before my characters were even born. Actually, I intended them to be there at the most crucial time, but they don't really look like heroes, but more like people who had to do what they did because they always have to struggle and choose the least "poisonous" path.

I've also done quite a bit of background descriptions, like contemporary documents, pseudo footages, ID cards, related to the main stories. I've also drawn lots of space stations, planet biospheres, nebula resorts... But really, they're just here for my own fun ^^;

But I think that's because I have a photographic memory, that's why I need to picture a scene before writing it. A frind once told me that he needed to talk to himself while writing dialogues, to test if his story was believable.

I think historian writers are quite good at writing descriptive scenes, that don't even need a real background for the reader to be able to imagine the whole scene. Take Robert Jordan, he was once a historian writer and when he began writing his fantasy tales, he had a way to convey things, emotions through his words.

I think that maybe it was because he had created a whole world, a universe where he simply began to move his characters according to a moment where a crisis was beginning to erupt.
This also reminds me of Tolkien, who introduced his characters at a precise time before the story we all know about.

However, I don't really know if it's useful if you don't have a plot driven story but a character relationship driven story. Maybe you'd need to retrace the characters background and that wouldn't take centuries.
Well it depends because you might have very aged youthful characters, like in the japanese folklore...