Up Your Game: Advice From Your Peers.

I wouldn't mind some feedback to help me improve. If anyone has suggestions, I would gladly consider them.

 

@BlanqSl8 Well, some basic observations first - The Endangered Gender is a fun concept, you have a fairly strong concept for the world and characters, and the chapters are all of a healthy length. You avoid a lot of the general issues with formatting, spelling, and grammar that are common, which is all to your credit. Occasionally you leave the internal thoughts in plain text instead of italics, and there are a few broken formatting marks (happens all the time with me too), but not that often. The only thing I might suggest is you watch out for pronouns, which can get pretty repetitive in first person. For example:

A lot of "she's" and "her's" especially leading sentences - find some variety. Alex, his new boss, the buxom brunette, whatever works for you.

At the moment, the progression is strictly linear - which is fine, you're pursuing a single plot thread - but it aside from not having any branches, it also doesn't have many natural points to branch; every chapter ends with the default "What's Next?" with no real framing of the end of the chapter as a potential decision point, should you or anyone else decide to create a separate branch. I think you might consider going back through and reworking at least a few of the questions - figure out where it might be fun to have John's life to go left instead of right.

For example, in The Sidewalk, John is standing outside the office building...and the next chapter is "The Lobby." So the question might be:

- Where Does John Go?
- Where Do They Go?
- Where Does John Follow Her?

Etc. The question almost has to be "where" because your one answer given is still a location, but positing the question makes it a decision point - maybe she takes him into the bathroom. Maybe they go to her executive office. Maybe she gives him a tour of the building, letting all the workers get a look at him. There's lot of potential for either small branches that loop back into the main branch, or which continue on their own - and even if you don't want to write those branches right now, they still might be something you want to write in the future. So, something to think about.

You've only got one real sex scene so far, taking up most of Task Complete - and it's good! I like that you didn't take things too far too fast (granted, there's been a lot of flirting and playing coy building up to this chapter). If I had any recommendations, it might be to focus more on how the narrator is feeling - cock straining against his pants, hands sweaty or dry, heart thumping, flashbacks to porn they've watched or wet dreams they've had - since they are the POV character for the audience. Also, don't be afraid to make him work for it; women don't always orgasm during sex (despite what porn tells us)!

 

@Zeebop Apologies if I murder this response... still very new to posting on forums.

I began writing in Word and have pasted over to the site. This has produced a few issues with consistency between the two platforms, which I will certainly look back at once more and ensure to make edits where appropriate!

Excellent point. Your suggestions for alternatives to strictly using "She", "Her", etc. are good and now that I've realized this is something I should address, I can certainly look at different ways of indicating perspective/individuals.​

The idea is to have a linear story, at this time. That may be subject to change as I come up with new ideas that could take place along any point in the story. I can certainly see the advantage to having real questions which would in turn prompt several different potential directions the story could branch off to. I think when I'm ready for that stage of story development I will take your advice and go back to do that.

Thank you for the compliment. It was actually far more difficult to write that than I thought it would be, so that means a lot. Your advice on providing more feedback on how the first person is feeling is really good, I can certainly see how that would be beneficial to the reader! Patricia's eagerness and eventual orgasm is certainly an intentional character specific attribute, I certainly don't expect every one of the females/miles John encounters to be so easy! But, I thought it made sense for an introductory sex scene.

I truly appreciate your review, I'm looking forward to continuing the story and learning from the process as well as (hopefully!) entertaining the readers that happen to select mine to spend their time on.

Kind Regards,

BlanqSl8.

EDIT: Aaah! I tried editing my response after I posted it... everything went blue... spacing is all whack... I'm sorry for the poorly formatted response!

 

I think there are add-ons for Word which allows you to export your file in markdown syntax. If you then disable the RTE on CHYOA, you can copy your chapter straight into the form, having all formatting which is possible with markdown.

 

Thanks, I'm going to look into this. Much appreciated.

 

I'll finally put myself out there, and ask for some feedback here, if anyone would be so kind. Links are in my signature.

 

@8inchesandcounting First off, I want to congratulate you on the work so far with your games, you've obviously put a fair amount of work into not just the number of chapters, but setting up the link chapters and variables to work correctly, and it shows in a smooth gameplay experience. If I had a quibble with the gameplay elements of any particular story, The Brothel has an odd thing where it tracks "Females Fucked" and "Women Fucked" separately - not sure if that's intentional - and there's a double-Virgin variable that gets flagged around the Elven Bartender.

You also have quite a number of images in The Heir - that isn't necessarily bad, especially when you're introducing a cast of characters, but it can get repetitive when restarting. I wouldn't recommend you change it at this point, but maybe if you do a future game have a separate "Cast of Characters" chapter or "Take a look at your cousin" chapter which then loops back to the main storyline, so those who want to skip the images can.

Obviously you've put a lot of time and effort into attention to detail, right down to adding little warnings about what's involved with certain choices - perfectly legitimate design decision, and one I've debated on...some people think it ruins the surprise, but I think you handle it fairly well.

Writing criticism - you've got a few chapters that are really short. I'm looking at chapters like Women's dorms[/quote] which are less than 100 words. I appreciate that these are essentially probably spacer chapters, but they still feel pretty perfunctory. In a hardcopy Choose Your Own Adventure book the sections can be incredibly brief because you're busy flipping back and forth and the reading level is usually pretty low to begin with, but in a story for adults where pace and size are less an issue, it wouldn't kill you to expand on things a little...add a bit more detail and description to the scene, who is there, how the main character is feeling, etc.

One issue with your style you may want to work on is pronoun repetition. I really noticed this in Fuck the frozen lesbian duo, but it's apparent in other chapters as well. Some of your text in that chapter reads:

Three out of four sentences start with "You" or "Your" - and it gets worse when you look at the whole chapter, because five out of the six paragraphs start with "You." Even granted that this story is told in the second person, and a sex scene, you might want to mix it up more. A lot of it is pretty easy to re-write (if you're so inclined); the difference is putting the emphasis on a different subject. So for example, using the snippet of text above:

The sex scenes themselves are workable. I like it when you take more time to set up the scene, to describe positions, feelings, unusual situations. Time Control for example has a number of remarkable scenarios set up, but you don't always take strong advantage of them. Try Some Dick for example, could have gone a couple of different ways (and might in the future) - but it's a little light on details. You have this section for example:

Now, your normal person might not go straight to sucking dick, and there's a lot of room for emotional vacillation here - "No one will ever know" versus "Burning curiosity," that kind of thing - but that's a matter of taste and plotting. More directly, there's not a lot of description about what sucking a time-frozen dick is actually like. Is it warm? What does it smell and taste like? You can't feel the pulse, probably, but does it have any give to it at all, or is it like fellating an iron bar?

That's not to say that you have to figure out all the rules of time-stopping in advance, or even that the rules have to remain consistent throughout the story - the trick is that for suspension of disbelief to work, you need to establish the rules and then abide by them from that point on.

The key to a good sex scene is generally a solid build up that leads to some kind of payoff - usually but not always a climax - and a lot of the sexual encounters in your stories so far seem to be almost perfunctory. That's not always the case (and some folks like wham-bham-thank-you-sir-or-madame); Fuck Her Right There (pussy) is a nice example of a solid one-and-done scene with decent length and detail - but that doesn't seem to be usual.

And as long as we're on that scene in particular:

This is me being a little nitpicky, but the dialogue in this scene is a bit of a mess. If you break it out a bit more, it's a lot easier to read:

Which maybe doesn't cover everything, but might give you an idea on points for improvement. I'd like to reiterate that I love the amount of work you've put into the stories already, and hope you'll be able to spend more time continuing to develop them.

 

Amazing feedback, and thank you for spending so much time responding and being constructive. This is the sort of thing I'm looking for when getting responses, versus blind praise or dismissive complaints with nothing added in the way of suggestions.

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to poke and dig through my stories. I'm just glad someone is reading them, more than anything, but to have someone pay real attention is both flattering and extremely useful to me as a writer.

With the variables in The Brothel, it's one of my older stories, and there were long gaps in writing due to lack of interest in continuing at first, and events in my personal life/work that didn't leave me much time for writing CHYOA. It is deserving of some love, and the variables especially need tidying up. The two variables tracked separate was a mistake due to these gaps.

With the images, I wanted to do something like this, but more wanted to make sure the pictures of the character are right there to remind the reader what the person looks like. In hindsight, your suggestion was probably the better idea. I might do this in the future, or just have their name link to the picture instead. If CHYOA had a "spoiler" tag option like other sites do, this would be a perfect solution.

I do need to fill those chapters out, even if they basically serve as a hub to allow the player to make different choices. Still, it can get quite difficult to fill out what is essentially a few seconds worth of events, but that's a challenge I'll need to overcome with good writing. I have some plans, but it'll take some time to locate all the chapters that need a little love.

I absolutely need to go back through some chapters with a good thesaurus. When it comes to sexual actions and body part descriptions, there are only a handful that don't sound too cringey or technical, which is why I avoid things like "boobs" or "penis" most times. Still, I'm sure I can work through this and make the wordage less repetitive.

"Try some dick" is a little rough for me, as I'm not gay, so it's a little hard to get into that mindset. I should've made a bit more of a believable choice, but my intent is to generally have a "just fuck" option, and a more believable, story-driven option at the same time to appease those that just want a quick fap and those that want immersion. I like to have options, but sadly I don't get around to fleshing all of those out in a timely manner. Still, your points absolutely stand firm.

I hope I don't sound like I'm making excuses for mistakes I've made with some of my writing, I'm simply attempting to explain why I've made those mistakes. Again, thank you so much for the detailed and useful feedback, and you've given me a lot to think about. Glad to be here, too.

 

Oh, and I am glad that most of the issues with my chapters seem to be mostly isolated to things I've written months or even a year ago I'm getting better, it seems.

 

I don't get the point of that.
You won't please everyone and offering fifty-fifty of both ways means to always confront readers with fifty percent of options they likely don't want to read.
So I'd rather focus on one style.

 

The option is there for someone that just wants to jerk it, and the option is there for someone that wants to get immersed in the story. It doesn't take very much more effort on my part, and I feel it adds to the story, keeping the impatient from becoming bored, but rewarding those that want more of a story. Even something as simple as allowing the character to go visit a brothel between story elements keeps things interesting, rather than having 20 chapters in a row with no sex scenes.

Additionally, nobody is required to read any of my chapters. If it's something you don't like, there's almost always another option to take. Some people don't like gay scenes, some people don't like a lot of wordiness, some people don't like furries. I don't want to force players to have to take these options, and allowing more options is kind of the whole point of writing on CHYOA versus Literotica or something.

 

I know I like to give feedback to folks looking to improve their writing, but I don't pretend that my own fiction couldn't benefit from some feedback. Any insight would be welcome. So please, if anyone has anything to say....up my game.

 

Do you also have something which isn't Fan Fiction? (because it's not my thing and I don't know the world and canon characters)

 

That's all there is on CHYOA at the moment. I want to finish it before I move on to something else.