As many of you know, I want to be a game writer/narrative designer. To this end, I have a project planned out this summer. It's sort of like a very complicated choose-your-own-adventure novel in which you run for election (think Alpha Protocol but bigger and without the action game attached). I told a friend in Computer Science about this, and he convinced his group to do something vaguely like it as an end of term project. I also promised to write a big chunk of it, as it seems like good experience and gives me a chance to try out some ideas for my own project.

The game that they are working on is really a simple strategy game, in which the player puts some points into 3 stats (charisma, knowledge and intelligence). The player then plays some scenarios in which they get to make a series of dialog choices based on those stats. Different provinces (we are Canadian) will respond strongly to different characteristics, so that's part of the strategy. There are some other elements, but ultimately this is not going to be an especially deep game. It's a first year CS project being done in about a month, don't judge.

Here's the problem: This game involves a huge amount of tedious writing (much more than mine does, given the projected length of the game). Each line of dialog has to be written at least 6 times, once for each stat and then doubled based on whether they have more or less than 50 points in it. Then I have write more dialog to make sure that there is an appropriate line for each political position the player could have picked at the beginning of the game (left, center and right). And all of those lines need to start and end roughly the same way, so that the next set of lines will flow naturally. This is a great exercise, but it is incredibly tedious and I'm kind of sad that I don't actually believe that the end result is going to be a particularly great game.

I have to have 30-40 of these lines done in a week. I presently have 2, and that took 10 hours (though I have figured out ways to make it go faster). I also have exams. Worst of all, I have writer's block and LoL-itis.

I guess I don't need any advice, just wanted to vent and maybe offer a peek into this process. I also think writing this might have helped warm me up a little. Back to work, but if you have any questions I would happily answer.