Months are such an odd measurement of time when you think about it, which might be prompted by doing things on a monthly basis. Such as these monthly reports.
More importantly, I’ve been working on a collaboration with
of Adventure Snack, another substack publication. And it is now live for you to try out. We combined his chose your own adventure quests with my fake fighting game stuff to create a short text adventure fighting game with three different opponents to pick from.
Plans For This Month
Battles Beneath the Stars is bringing an odd milestone to the Warthog Report this month, the first post too long to fit into an email. But it’s not a chapter. In real fighting games characters tend to have ‘win quotes,’ lines they say after winning, with some unique ones for specific battles. A classic way to represent them is with a text box in front of some art after each battle.
And I wrote win quotes for the entire main cast of Battles Beneath the Stars, with everyone having unique lines for winning against everyone. This includes when a character faces themself, so if I’ve calculated correctly that’s 196 lines.
What I like about win quotes as a narrative tool is how they can get you curious about the wider narrative of the game from a small glimpse. Piecing together the story through them is a bit like putting together a puzzle. When I first started playing Merfight in early access it was the win quotes that got me interested in the narrative.
I haven’t thought of a way to keep the aspect of discovery with hunting for win quotes, but some games have wikis that will list all of a character’s win quotes, so the presentation is still somewhat like the fighting game fan experience.
Getting an extra like this done makes me feel more confident about being able to pull off other ideas I have for extras. Though I need to be careful not to pursue too many at once. I never lack for ambition and potential scope creep on a project.
Recap of Last Month
The idea for this came out of nowhere but was written rather quickly and fluidly, letting it beat out all the other blog post ideas I had been struggling with. It occurred to me how comedically passive aggressive it would be to send a link to it to my writing professors with no context. Which is why I didn’t do that, unlike some people I don’t suffer from delusions of being a character in a comedy.
I’m happy that it got some thoughtful comments, which inspired further thinking about giving feedback. There are things I can do to help increase the amount of constructive feedback on substack, efforts that go beyond just leaving feedback on pieces myself. It also made me think of better ways I can solicit feedback.
The reason I do discussion prompts for chapters of Battles Beneath the Stars is because giving feedback is generally easier if people have some sort of sign post for what to focus on. Though based on the results the discussion prompts could probably fill that role better.
The hardest part with writing about Witch on the Holy Night was setting the scene to explain why it’s so important to its genre. It was also difficult to get screenshots of certain things even with the Switch’s built in screenshot feature, since it gets disabled after a certain point.
I think it might do well for other substack authors interested in playing around with formatting to give various visual novels a look in general. They’ve been able to pull off things that books can’t replicate, but a substack could. Maybe I’ll write about 428: Shibuya Scramble sometime, as that’s another one that I think could spark ideas for substack writers interested in fiddling with its features.
Also, I’m contemplating dropping the no spoilers policy for writing about fiction so I can get more detailed in my commentary. But I feel that’s contrary to the goal of trying to get people to try things out. I’m not averse to spoilers, don’t think they’re that big of a deal really, but I try to respect people’s preferences with spoilers.
And that’s all for now. Thank you for continuing to read the Warthog Report.