I've put Lady Wukong vs. The World on hiatus by accident via nasty procrastination, but that one is still going on. I've reread the entirety of Journey to the West and the original Dragon Ball to get my head into it. On top of that, I've been watching cheesy martial arts and wuxia movies with increasingly esoteric names like Legend of the Liquid Sword, The Butterfly Murders, Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain, and Child of Peach— which features an actual goddammned mecha-peach and I'm not joshing with you. So I'll continue to do the 500-to-1,000 word short chapters when I feel like it. Besides that, I've also got a few others. One's concept is simple and will probably be a shorter story, such as a novella: it's some players of a quasi-MMO (more like GTA Online) who have reached the endgame and now do nothing more than enjoy the scenery and fool around. Which is basically what I do in GTA 5 nowadays. Another is set in that same gameworld and involves someone playing through the story and also messing around in the open world. This is based on an idea/daydream I've been having, combining the likes of Just Cause, Saints Row, and Dragon Ball Xenoverse. And then there's Rage of Angels, which I'm going to power through eventually. Of all these, it's the second one I'm most excited to write. It's essentially my "perfect open-world game" idea in narrative form, the kind of game I desperately want to play but the tech just doesn't exist for yet.
So my ideas are a bit more focused now. I'm probably going to actually release Astral Falls at some point this year because I've been working on it a bit more in recent days. Rage of Angels hasn't progressed very far past what I've already written when I created its thread. Mostly due to procrastination. It's a "real life turns into a game" kind of story. There's still the open-world game concept, which I am definitely gonna do. I have everything I need for it except an actual story (and even then, I actually do have the start of a story because the beginning's heavily ripped off from GTA: Vice City). I mentioned a protagonist named "Vash" in a status update. That's for a new story as well. I've been fascinated by tournament-style games and e-Sports recently, so I thought about combining that into litRPG. The beginning's a standard litRPG story with leveling up and progression, and it all goes towards winning a tournament with clear rules established at the start. I know there are other tournament-based litRPGs out there, but I wanted to try it out. Tournaments tend to be very popular. I mentioned Dragon Ball in the OP— would you believe me if I said that the series only became popular when Toriyama did tournament arcs (and then shifted to pure action)? Tournaments are a good way to properly showcase progression and the results of growth & cultivation and it's hard to make them boring, so why not? This is the story I think I'm gonna write in April. It's fairly safe and I can do some good with it, and the concept behind it interests me. Should be a good 80,000 to 100,000 words to spend. Here are some other stories I've been throwing around... Homeless Brain: the Clockwork Orange-esque psychological horror story rooted around Descartes' Demon and litRPG mechanics we take for granted. Big Brother Online: Rooted around RTSes and town-building mechanics, I decided to create a 1984-simulator story. I didn't actually come up with this from George Orwell— if you were around on Reddit back in the day, you probably heard about the Eternal War....That's the idea here. Some dude plays a nation-building/RTS game and accidentally becomes Big Brother, leading a totalitarian superstate forever at war with two other totalitarian superstates for thousands of years until the world is a nightmarish piss-soaked hellhole and he's gone mad with power. Olympic Wars Online: If the previously mentioned tourney-litRPG takes off well enough, I'll do another series of them. Clash at Demonhead: Working title for that litRPG fantasy story that had Greco-Roman catgirl goddesses, if you recall. No longer "Nightmare Online". Pyramids: Social credit-based gamelit. It's A Wonderful World: Gamelit repurposing of a very old story of mine. 58th State: Gamelit concept I've been toying with for half a decade now. The "style" is the same as Astral Falls, Rage of Angels, and It's A Wonderful World.
^ At this juncture, it's just an alternate title for Homeless Brain since they both deal with social credit. But it's still in the early stages. With so many ideas on the brain, it's hard to pick just one to work with.
I've decided to resurrect an old idea of mine in order to use it for Big Brother Online. For The Love Of Brother #1: The Panamerican Horror - Fictional Future It's a story I wanted to write for some time now, but I couldn't figure out a good way of making it work. It sounded too cartoonish. But never had I considered crossing this concept with The Eternal War. Now it sounds like a good case of a future RTS/simulator game gone wrong...
For Vash's story, this article I read some time ago made me pause: What are eSports? A beginner's guide to pro gaming | Trusted Reviews It sounds so beautifully GameLit. In fact, if I didn't link to you the article and instead claimed it was an excerpt from a litRPG, would you have believed me? But that's just the world we live in now. The major problem I'm trying to figure out is how to translate "tournament" into "litRPG". A lot of MOBA-type games could translate well to litRPG, but MOBAs, by their very nature, have less in the way of in-game progression like MMOs and RPGs do. That's not to say you can't have an MMO esports game: Can MMO games become eSports? And litRPG doesn't always have to follow an MMO— a lot of litRPG I've read recently are almost indistinguishable from fantasy with game stats but in a way that suggests that you're just jumping straight into the MMO without any IRL faffing about. But tournament gaming is the one style that absolutely would necessitate a real world section. What's more, some of the things that define MMOs, like loot and EXP grinding, don't lend themselves well to esports. The reason why we don't watch "super football" where athletes dope themselves up and use whatever augments they can is because of sportsmanship, where the only difference in abilities should come down to skill and training, not what equipment you have. As you can tell right off the bat, that flies completely in the face of the appeal of MMOs. So forgive me if my first effort here isn't as fleshed out as it could be. I could write a "litMOBA", but I do want to do an MMO setting. I just need some way of making it work.
Might wanna check out the book Arena. Kinda deals with this a bit. Haven't read it, but the reviews basically say its a MOBA in book form.
How far are you going to go with it Yuli? I'm still torn between AI, virtual world (implying LitRPG/GameLit), cyborg, and android. Technology in my work, simply put, blurs the distinction between them: A powerful AI might be able to 3D itself an meat space avatar to give itself a physical presence for certain tasks that simply require human interactions. I skip holograms, mostly because I consider them silly, and they don't call along until much much much later: during the "Medieval Scifi" story arc. I'd mention on the CY forums too, but my work has already evolved quite a bit from "Gibsonesque Cyberpunk." I've also been really interested in the OpenCog project.
I say sure. long as i know when something comes out. as an incredibly avid reader i would like to have a place for authors to post release dates, giving readers an option to know about new books beforehand (if its put out for preordering that helps as well) and for authors to inform a few more people about their books. but dont worry im not someone who will give one star on anything ever( or even rate unless it is great and theres no reviews) but seeiously, roll adice or something. cant say i see a bad idea or a clear best one. its midnight now so ill stop and go to sleep.
