#and slowly-building-in-complexity urban fantasy worldbuilding

[philcoulsonismyhero]

I found a new book series a while ago, btw, and I'm planning to be obnoxious about it now that I'm caught up, or at least I will be when I have some actual spare time. Feel free to blacklist 'rivers of london' if you don't care, I'll be tagging all posting after this with that.

[evertidings]

Hi! I'm the anon who was staring into the abyss of No Interactive Fiction Idea- I have managed to claw my way out (thankfully- I thought I would spend a billion years in there/jk) I have decided on the genre being a mashup of Steampunk, Gaslamp Fantasy and Urban Fantasy though! and am slowly working out the worldbuilding details and trying to find plot ideas-😅

eeek i’m happy for you!! wishing you the best ! in case it might help, some other bits of advice i have for starting out:

you don’t have to plan out your story too heavily. as long as you get a grasp on the main plot points and build a solid foundation, you’ll be okay—details can come when you’re writing

if you’re a visual person, making mindmaps might be helpful !

especially when writing fantasy, don’t skimp on worldbuilding. it doesn’t have to be complex, but if your plot relies heavily on the politics of your world or the way it functions, if you don’t explain your world well enough, you’re going to leave your readers confused

don’t go overboard with stats. you might find that you won’t use them all

develop your ros first and foremost as characters before deciding their relationship and dynamic with the mc. this helps flesh them out as an individual and makes them more interesting as a whole

unless you’re already confident, don’t complicate things with a bunch of branches at the beginning. ease yourself into it; it’s okay if things are a bit linear at first

in the same vein, form choices out of the existing narrative, rather than making your story bend to the will of your choices

when creating choices, make sure you acknowledge the mc’s answer. even if it’s something small like picking what to eat for breakfast, it’s gratifying to see the text notice what you picked

take breaks :))

also, i’d recommend not making a blog/posting about your wip until you’re closer to launch. making people wait for a game that’ll come out in six months or might never exist isn’t exactly fun. the closer the launch, the more sneak peeks you’ll have, the more anticipation you can create. good luck !!

[thethistlegirlwrites]

💟: how is your style different in this work compared to previous ones? has it more shifted for the story or just developed in general?

For all of your projects in connection to the others. E.g. to other OG projects you might have had and the ones you have now.

How did you know I wanted to yell about this?!

I can tell the difference a little between the style of my first attempt at a novel, The Art of Being Human, (sitting on a shelf for a while while I think about it), and Magic & Silver, which was my next. The first one was trying too hard to be something 'relevant', and it sacrificed story and character integrity for saying something I felt like it had to, which was a good lesson for me. Magic & Silver was all about the characters themselves, and while its overall atmosphere isn't too different from The Art of Being Human, it has a definitely more nuanced and complex feel.

Aside from that, The Art of Being Human had a heavily dystopian worldbuilding, which lent itself to a complex cultural structure, and a sort of 'ecological variety' dystopian cityscape, where the buildings are often covered with plants and used for self-sustaining gardening projects.

Magic & Silver has some of the same 'nature in urban areas' feel, but it's a little more contemporary. Less roof gardens and more sidewalk dandelions. It has a grittier, almost film-noir kind of atmosphere, of dingy bars and neon lights.

Between the Trees is its own kind of unique project, because of the fine line between science fiction and fantasy that it walks. It starts out feeling very Grimm's fairy tales and then becomes a lot more modernized and 'evil scientist' vibe, in some ways I get a feeling I picked up that setting switch from the first Maximum Ride novel.

Written in Ink, while it's set in the same general universe as Magic & Silver, has a hugely different tone. The best way I can think of to compare it is TV show genres. While Magic & Silver feels like a sort of police procedural type story, with high stakes villains, lots of investigation, and an intense plot line, Written in Ink is slowly but surely giving me more vibes of a network TV fantasy/urban fantasy geared toward teens, ala Shadowhunters or Teen Wolf (no I'm not just saying that because I have werewolves). There's more worldbuilding, and the characters have a slightly more upbeat, less world-weary sense to them. The worldbuilding is all designed to draw someone into a culture that's foreign to them but that they'd want to feel like they could be part of, with the kind of little details someone who's really into the world would be able to remember and include for themselves if they were imagining themselves in it.

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