Summary: looking for people with narrative skills to help deconstruct and improve my game. Contact details at end.

I have been working on a visual novel titled “Lord of the Manor” for some time now. I’m the sole developer, which generally suits me. Various other people handle the art, which means I need only focus on the programming and the writing. Mostly the writing.

To that end (and to the greater purpose of bringing my world to life to the degree I want to), I’ve written so far somewhere over a quarter-million words for it. This is spread across the six major and ten minor characters. The character stories themselves are embedded in a world with its own history and mysteries, and a large portion of my effort is spent threading all these components together in an interesting and enjoyable way. There’s a shit-ton of eroticism and flat-out sex as well, because porn is a core pillar of the game, but I’ve done enough writing to know I’m decent at melding porn and narrative.

One of the other core pillars for the game is “step into the sort of stories I’ve been writing for years”. I have a style (though I couldn’t pin it down) which people enjoy, and which (I hope) helps set my VN apart due to the atmosphere it creates. I use various custom tools to let me work as fast as possible, and I aim to do fifteen thousand new words each month. I don’t always hit that goal, but it’s there anyway. That’s plenty of words even for a normal story, but for a VN with branching plots, multiple potential character states and a relatively large cast, it ends up feeling like much more from a complexity perspective. I have systems and lots of pre-planning to help me manage all this, but I remain at heart a pantser, and there are always off-the-cuff ideas that crop up during routes which can either complexify or improve things. Getting third-parties to weigh in on whether that sort of stuff is actually good…that’s the trick.

While I’m not interesting in seeking additional writers, that doesn’t mean people with narrative experience can’t help. What I’m looking for today, I hope, is people interested in getting involved with the project without the need to deliver content of any kind. In the novel world they’re often called “beta readers”, but that undersells what I’m after. I have gobs of backstory, character breakdown and worldbuilding written - enough that I forget even key parts of it sometime. Making retroactive changes to a VN is just as possible as with a novel, but the branching narratives mean that the cost of doing so can be expensive if you overlook something important. The best way to avoid that is to be double-checked by other informed people.

I need people willing to read what I’ve written, become at least somewhat familiar with the world and the characters, and participate in a group chat where I spew ideas and random thoughts, plus writing samples. Ideally, I would like people familiar with narrative structures; I don’t need professors, but I do need people who can converse on the merits of a given trope or plot thread, given context. This is also not a fanboy club; if all you want to is be helpful, that’s better served by supporting the project on Patreon. Without trying to be mean, I need people who are primarily interested in learning about the game from a storytelling perspective and contributing to that.

A bullet list of desired activities may clarify any remaining questions:

• At minimum, reading all my internal worldbuilding and character codex documents.
• Ideally, also reading the current quarter-million words of the game to establish full context.
• Joining the private Telegram group I use for spit-balling and comment on ideas I post there about storylines, characters and other narrative elements.
• Identifying potential issues with how characters are portrayed, holes in the plot, inconsistencies or conflicts, etc. Basically anything.

This is not nominally paid work. If you feel your skills are impressive enough to require payment, we can talk about that, sure. But nominally it’s a volunteer position. I don’t (and can’t) expect immediate responses, but it would be ideal to get feedback on things within a day or two. I am actively writing the game, and hearing feedback on an idea after eg. a week usually means I’ve committed to something already and moved past it. So people that are relatively available are preferred.

If you have further questions, or wish to suggest your services, you can message me on Telegram at @Bucephallus. Thanks for reading.