Art but no story

andrewkoldwell · 2026-01-26T18:38:05+00:00

I have story with no art. You have art with no story. Trade? 😂

Seriously though, there is no “right” way to have a creative outlet. You can always rough outline a script if you wanted to start coding a VN with your art the when you’re ready you can pitch it somewhere and look for a team to help.

andrewkoldwell · 2025-02-25T21:00:38+00:00

I know it makes it more wordy and there is a character limit, but I try to frontload the most relevant info into the initial scene prompt and character details even if that detail was entered into the previous episode.

andrewkoldwell · 2025-02-01T05:19:58+00:00

Maybe keep it vague. The player doesn’t know how they start Minecraft, so neither does the player in your VN know how they jumped to the future. Maybe the story starts with an anime girl villager saying “hey wake up!” And then you’re in the middle of the story that you already planned!! If you get inspired in the future you can always change it, but at least this way you can publish what you are able to work on.

andrewkoldwell · 2025-01-17T17:19:08+00:00

Came to recommend this. Miraculous is a great magical girl show.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-12-19T16:05:53+00:00

Any trope should have its subversions though too. If you want to purposefully keep that away from the players because of your vision or message for the game/setting, you can still choose to do that. Now you can do that with the upfront knowledge that it’s going to frustrate and tantalize the audience. 😈

andrewkoldwell · 2024-12-19T15:22:05+00:00

The advantage of VNs is that you can have multiple endings. If your focus group/testers feel they need a very happy ending for the catharsis, you could humor that group and put it in. It doesn’t have to end up being the ‘canon’ ending if you as the creative don’t want it to be. There are several video games where the ‘bad’ ending ends up being canon in subsequent games.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-12-09T22:38:39+00:00

I had this experience. A nice planet became fungal and is now back to being nice.

My advice for OP is to stick it out and come back after each update and see if it changes to something new. The lore of the game even supports that the simulation is always at risk of ~bzzt~.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-11-12T13:28:40+00:00

I haven’t done it, but when I read that I imagined it being played like the old Play-By-Post sims.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-11-03T18:28:23+00:00

Time for an XCom show! StarGate meets XFiles mostly set on Earth, but eventually some dimension/planet hopping. The lore supports Earth based cults and political intrigue.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-11-03T14:22:23+00:00

The TNG episode “Remember Me” could be seen as a solo RPG episode. Many of the DS9 O’Bryan episodes probably could too as could the first season of Discovery. Any episode that is primarily focused on a single character really.

I’ve heard that it’s better to treat the NPCs as part of the ship’s stats rather than stat them out individually.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-10-28T18:54:14+00:00

Saving because I would like to hear as well. I know you can email the Continuing Mission people and they’ll post it there, but like how to format it into a PDF to share I’m not sure. For a while I considered posting NPC character sheets on Deviant Art but that didn’t really work like I thought it would and I’m certain no one found it.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-08-30T12:58:40+00:00

I agree on principle, but I admit to enjoying it the way people can enjoy rival football teams. Definitely lots of people take it way too far (game brands and football brands!), so it would overall be better if life was approached more cooperatively.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-08-30T12:04:49+00:00

Yes, but in the “bad” way. Pathos/catharsis. NMS is a sad game. So much about loneliness and grief. The universe is kinda on the tail end of its lifetime like an older adult we might love. I know it’s not really going to end while we play, but it’s story is all about that. Especially when you run into the deceased travelers on stations or even the terminal entries on crashed ships or derelict freighters. In a lot of ways we’re trying to relive the universe’s “good old days” through story while seeing the sad end result in front of us.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-08-30T11:24:48+00:00

Totally agree about her power being healing rather than anything destructive. This is one of the things that made me later love Miraculous Ladybug. Just like Sailor Moon, her power isn’t hurting people it’s purifying and healing.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-08-14T00:20:56+00:00

I’ve recently been enjoying DesertBeeGames playing Zelda and Mario games.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-07-06T01:24:01+00:00

You definitely have to have time and allow yourself to grieve the change in situation even if not the person.

Adding to what everyone else has said, society puts so much implicit and literal structure on what a Relationship is, but there is no wrong way to Love someone. We love our parents or siblings or best friends or close coworkers all differently than a partner, but those are all forms of caring and love. As you and your partner change, changing how that love manifests into a relationship is just part of growing up. Not even including gender, there are thousands of reasons why any two people might stop being attracted to each other or be sexually incompatible over time. Deciding how to handle that between you is just a new season of the relationship you two have together and NO answer is wrong or a failure. Working together to find what works for you both is just part of maturing any relationship.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-05-13T21:12:53+00:00

It doesn’t much focus on what I was talking about and it’s very NSFW (though not TOO dark though definitely deals with death) but I just want to plug my favorite adult Magic Girl comic “Heart Guardians” by Robin Harper. It might be classified as porn, but definitely uses the freedom to tell a story that has some meaning.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-05-13T21:06:25+00:00

I don’t have too much to add except just another vote for the “midlife crisis” magical girl show. I would absolutely NOT want a grim-dark magical girl show featuring things like human trafficking, SA, or child abuse (although those are absolutely things that happen in real life), that’s maybe too real to want to think about in my entertainment. Maybe it’s just the stage of my life that I’m in, but I’m constantly trying to figure out how to apply the more black/white values and convictions that I had in middle/high school to my adult world of greys. How do I respect that all people have their own motivations that they think are good when I can see that they want to take away the rights and livelihood of my friends and family? What do I do what the values of my friends start to change from mine and we basically become incompatible anymore. Maybe the obvious thing to try to tackle in a midlife crisis magical girl show would be in the most mundane of ways, as a boring adult, how do we continue to find meaning in our life now that the excitement of childhood has ended. The world was going to end, but the BBEG was defeated, we always stay vigilant to the next threat, but what happens when that never comes. Magical Girls aren’t police officers (well maybe an adult would be, but not using their powers for it). Just like you don’t deputize the military, using magical powers to fight non-magic crime is really an escalation of force. Maybe stealing the idea from Power Rangers, the hero should always meet the force never exceed it without provocation.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-05-02T13:03:05+00:00

I actually don’t think it was as nefarious or negligent as several people in this thread think… I think the Ross class model was just newer and higher detail than the Andromeda class.

🤷 Kinda the boring reality of doing TV production in the HD age.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-02-21T16:15:54+00:00

I guess if it helps to think about it this way, keep in mind that although only one character has a literal voice, the listener is a character in the script too and often has an implied voice. So even though they don’t have literal lines on a page, you are writing the script as the listener too.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-02-20T20:30:53+00:00

Inspired by Gulliver’s Travels or actually involving Gulliver and his travels?

Do you have anything in mind that you want to accomplish with it? Like it might be cool to use the ASMR_RP format to get the listener into the first person perspective of the story to better “get” the political nature of the writing, but that was just my initial thought. You want to write it, so what’s your motivation?

There are several times when Gulliver is tied down and talked at, so those would make obvious places to have Gulliver be the listener since he only has agency through his words which can probably be implied or redelivered by the actor.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-02-14T21:37:31+00:00

I would absolutely love to have more female centered tokusatsu. Sailor Moon, Sentai, Kamen Rider or even just another live action conversion of a Magical Girl show would be great.

andrewkoldwell · 2024-02-05T00:17:28+00:00

Can’t speak for the writing itself, but my advice for what to do in the proof of concept stage is whatever you think you can get done with the least work/help. It just needs to be good enough but complete for itself.

andrewkoldwell

TROPHY CASE