Minor writing tasks are moving along again

Hope all of you are finding a way to stay safe during this pandemic. Programmers like me have it easy, but if you’re working in something like retail, or especially in the medical field, you have my full respect for dealing with whatever you’re going through now.

If there’s anything positive to come from this, it might be that there’s a bigger focus on distributing goods online now, which is generally good news for Western Touhou fans. For example, Touhou 10-12 are going to be released on Steam soon, marking the first worldwide releases among Touhou games that ESR is based on.

Moving onto ESR talk, here’s the progress since January:

• Pass 1, main writing: 83% (+0)
• Pass 2, scripting: 72% (+2)
• Pass 3, effects: 38% (+0)
• Pass 4, minor writing: 30% (+3)

Last time, I said I wanted to take a serious look at working on Pass 4 myself, so I did. Overall, I’d say results have been positive: I made some real progress (5 scenes’ worth), and the minor writing tasks feel pretty doable so far. If I can keep that up, then it really boosts the chances of eventually completing ESR, since this can significantly ease the workload on our main writers who are more busy.

Even though I’m just writing side segments (Koishi advice, stat boosting, and story path variations), it’s slower going compared to scripting. But I think that’s natural – first, I’m a programmer by trade, and I figure I need some time to get the hang of creative writing. Second, those side segments honestly take up a good portion of the game’s word count. When you play through it, it doesn’t feel that long since you only take one branch out of many. But when you do a repeat playthrough, those branches really help to keep things fresh.

Provided that they’re well-written, of course. We all have our strengths and weaknesses in different aspects of writing. Some areas to consider:

• Coherence. Does this Koishi advice segment match the details of the upcoming scene Koishi is talking about? Does it consider previous advice segments and previous related scenes? Does the timeframe of events throughout the day more or less make sense? If there’s a scene that doesn’t always happen, do we account for that later by branching the dialogue accordingly?
• World immersion. Are Marisa’s words and reactions consistent with her character through the rest of the game? Do we have our basic Touhou facts straight? Are we making enough use of those facts, or does the writing feel too generic? Are any characters or settings appearing too often or not enough?
• Writing quality. Are any word choices, sentence structures, or dialogue patterns getting stale? Do the sentences flow? Do the event transitions and dialogue progression seem natural or forced? Is the overall mood what we want it to be? Are the jokes, references, etc. clever and varied?

I’m best at the ‘Coherence’ area because I also need to get my story straight when doing technical writing. The other areas need more experience and creativity to do well, so I’m trying to work on that. I start off by writing something that kind of works, and then I’m generally making many rounds of edits (or rewrites) to the same scene – hours later, days later, weeks later. Hopefully that’s a sign of improvement!

Later, as time allows, the main writers can look over what I did and make more edits. I hope they can, since as I re-read what they wrote up to Demo 3.0, I have to admire much of the variety, wording, and references they came up with. But my goal is to make that edit job significantly easier than writing every segment from scratch. So I’m going to continue plugging away at the minor writing tasks, hopefully bettering my skills in the process.

Don’t forget to participate in the Touhou popularity poll! It opens June 7th in Japan time. Screenshots to cap things off: