I haven’t finished my first playthrough of the public demo yet, but I can’t help but comment on this. I’ve just returned to court so I was like oh let me look at my relationships. When I read “Your relationship is higher than I thought you’d get by the end of the demo” for Sentinel’s relationship I fucking laughed so hard I almost fell off my chair 😂😂
I will say tho that I love what I’ve played so far (this first playthru’s gonna be Luk’s but I’ll go back and play the others). The amount of world building is incredible really. I’m almost jealous since I’m still kinda stuck on my own worldbuilding (not an if but a book). Do you have any tips?
When I read “Your relationship is higher than I thought you’d get by the end of the demo” for Sentinel’s relationship I fucking laughed so hard I almost fell off my chair 😂😂
I'm glad you got a good laugh out of it. I figured if I needed a line there to track unplanned states, it may as well be funny.
I will say tho that I love what I’ve played so far (this first playthru’s gonna be Luk’s but I’ll go back and play the others).
I'm glad to see you're enjoying the game! I think a lot of people are playing Luk's route first. He seems to be the most popular which is probably aided by the fact that for a while, he and Tzesar were the only ROs who appeared in the text.
The amount of world building is incredible really. I’m almost jealous since I’m still kinda stuck on my own worldbuilding (not an if but a book). Do you have any tips?
I'm flattered that you like the worldbuilding so much! In terms of tips, I feel I should start with a disclaimer that I've been working on the world of Tarken since i was like thirteenish. I don't think worldbuilding needs years and years to feel complete, but I do have years worth of stuff to draw on.
Some people can sit down and just build a world from scratch, like my brother. I'm actually a little jealous of his ability to just design a world because he wanted to. But I struggle with sitting down and trying to think through a bunch of little details, especailly when it come to details that don't interest me as much, like food or fashion.
Personally, I do most of my world building through characters. I have some basic details about the world, like the rough size of the contintent, what species exist in the world, and a generalized climate for certain countries type vague concepts. But a lot of the specifics I've designed because they are important to some character or another who lives in the world. As an example, evles having very long names came about because a character I was writing once had a really long name, and when the main characer asked her about it, she said long names were culturally important to her, a detail I hadn't palnned until writing that scene, but it now very much a part of the world as a whole.
To me setting and characters are insperable. Societies shape the people who live in them, and those people then shape those societies. So if just designing a country doesn't appeal, thinking about it in terms of what about this country/city/region is important in shaping the main characters might help. If it's not important to the characters, and it's not important to you, then it might not be important to the story.
Another important thing to me with worldbuilding is that it shouldn't be static. In real life cultures and societies change, so fictional ones should too. This is mostly a problem with more "vaguely medieval" style words. Don't be afraid to have incidents or technologies that changed the word, whether these are important to the plot or existing in the background.
Lastly, I would say not to focus too hard on making sure everything 'makes sense'. A friend of mine really struggles with this, but in the real world we don't always understand why things work the way they do, and a fictional world doesn't always need to either. I've often see reviewers complain about worldbuilding (with magic systems especially) where everything isn't clearly explained, but I think worlds tend to feel flatter when everything can be perfectly explained. Life is complated, and people are especailly complicated. Anything designed, run, or managed by people is going to have elements to it that don't always seen consistent, but if that's acknowledged within the world it can make it feel more real than a world that doesn't have any internal inconsistencies.
I'm not sure how much of that is actually helpful. Those are just things that are important to me when I think about worldbuilding.
