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Writing Gamification

I have taken a week off, and am now working on the second 50K of my novel. It was difficult gettting back into the flow, but I needed the break. During my time off I thought about what motivates me to write and concluded that sprints help which led me to consider an idea I had a long time ago, games.
I have taken a week off, and am now working on the second 50K of my novel. It was difficult gettting back into the flow, but I needed the break. During my time off I thought about what motivates me to write and concluded that sprints help which led me to consider an idea I had a long time ago, games.

Long ago I tried building a role playing game (RPG) into my writing app, Auteureist, but my attempt didn’t get very far because I got mired down in making it overly complex. A couple of days ago I had a eureka moment. I realized I could tie my existing word count logic to drive a simple RPG.


I coded a very simple game to test out my idea. Here is a screenshot of the output.

IMG_5342


Each attack is started by typing a word. This proved the basic idea worked. The next step is to expand on this idea and build it into my iOS app. My primary concern was how to do this without making it intrusive and without distracting from the actual goal, which is to write. I decided the app which already keeps track of words would just feed the information to the RPG if the user requested it. If the user didn’t care about the RPG component, it would do nothing. If the user chose the option, they would get information on what occurred on their “adventure”. The story would be generated randomly. [I’d used this technique in the first game I wrote, one of the original Star Trek(tm) games.]


It still has a way to go, but I created the basic user interface this morning.


Here is the main menu.
menu





And the core RPG screen.




IMG_5345

I’ll post more as I actually create the functionality.


Word up!