Hiring Writer for Commercial VN (CLOSED)

[Googaboga]

Thank you again to everyone who took the time to apply. The position has been filled! There were many fantastic applications and going through the samples sent in was great. We’ll have more writing positions open in the future. Please feel welcome to reach out again, if you’re still interested in working with us.


Hello!

We’re looking for a second writer for a VN we’re developing called Our Life: Beginnings and Always. It’s a modern day, slice of life, comedy, romance, drama. The main character’s gender is decided by the player (male, female, or non-binary) and the love interests are all male. The rating is 16+ for swearing and some crude humor/suggestiveness. It uses dialog and second person descriptions with a narrator explaining what ‘you’ are doing.

We intend to commission 50,000 or so words. Possibly more. Please only apply if you’re certain 50,000 words is a doable amount for you. A payment will be sent through Paypal whenever a scene has been finished (scenes are generally around 3,500 words long). The price rate will be set by you.

The deadline to apply is April 27th, 2019.



There isn’t much of a plot in Our Life. The MC, default name Jamie Last, starts out as an eight-year-old child. During summer vacation the newly single Mr. Holden and his son move into the neighborhood. Mr. Holden is afraid his oddly named child Cove will have to spend the next couple months all by himself until school starts again. Cove is the same age as Jamie, so Mr. Holden decides to offer Jamie twenty dollars to be friends with his kid. And that’s it! After the inciting incident the rest of the game is made up of mostly lighthearted, though some are more serious, everyday experiences without any overarching story. The fun comes from a highly customizable experience and the fact that the first summer as a child is only the beginning. Once it ends the game skips ahead five years to when Jamie and Cove are thirteen, then it skips again to eighteen, and then once more, ending the game with them as twenty-three-year-old adults.

OL doesn’t feature a traditional structure. The different time periods are called Steps. Each Step consists of an opening scene, a closing scene, and 10+ Moments. Opening and closing scenes establish the situation/characters/what’s about to come and happen at set points. Moments are the bulk of the game, and what we’re hiring for. They’re disconnected scenes that are selected directly from a screen and can be done in any order.

The scenes in Our Life have a high amount of choices and variations, especially in later Steps. Almost everything about Jamie’s behavior, appearance, interests and so on is up to the player. Not only that, but the main love interest Cove is also highly flexible. He’s got a set way of being as a kid, though after that his personality can shoot off in various directions based on his experiences in previous Steps.

Some of the work needed is in the child phase, which is less complicated. However, more of it will take place during the teen and possibly young adult stages. Those are pretty heavy with personality/interest/relationship based alterations.

We’ll send finished scripts and give access to the beta version of the demo to the chosen writer. Reading those will be required as part of the job to make sure we’re on the same page.

The way we tend to go about things is by giving the writer a list of Moment concepts and then allowing the writer to choose which one to write, or if they want to combine multiple concepts into one, or if they want to suggest entirely new concepts. We don’t have highly strict outlines of what the scenes need to be. If you work best with a lot of direction, this may not be an ideal job for you.

If you apply please include:
-Writing samples
-Rate per word
-How many words you believe you’ll be able to finish per month
-Previous experience writing for VNs (if applicable)

You can send us a PM here or email us at gb.patch.games at gmail. And feel free to let us know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns.

Thank you for reading this!

And if you're curious, you can see art and screenshots of the project on our tumblr.
https://gb-patch.tumblr.com/