Seeking video game writers

If you’ve been reading this blog, I’ve been posting about my efforts to create my own game, Hypnagonia. While technical and game design has seen good progress, I am still thoroughly struggling to come up with a storyline and other similar concepts such as short stories for non-combat encounters and so on.

While I’ve pinged a number of people in the past and some have expressed an initial interest, I haven’t seen anyone yet show any initiative, and I’m not the kind of person who pesters people to help me for free. I don’t even know if that would help or not, but I just can’t do it. If someone to whom I’ve talked, doesn’t show any initiative afterwards, I just drop it.

To that end, I am making yet another attempt to find writers who want to collaborate in making a free software game with a surreal theme and psychological concepts. I already have a barebones idea of how the overarching story should go, but I am incapable to fleshing that out myself.

Due to the scope of the game, I have space for both writers who want to put a lot of effort, as well as those who only want to provide something occasionally.

  • I need a lead writer who will take over the overarching campaign concept, and build upon in their own style. You will have almost full creative control of the main storyline.
  • I need writers who will contribute short stories which to be injected into the game at various points. These include
    • Non-combat encounters inside the dream, which provide multiple-choice options for the player .
    • Storylines around each Injustice objective (example: Write the storyline events through which the player character will breakthrough out of their abusive relationship).
    • Ideas for new Torments and Character Archetypes.
    • Naming for cards with existing effects.
    • Thematic ideas for cards which I (or we together) will translate into game mechanics.

The important disclaimer is that this is a voluntary position, with full ownership of the end-product. You will be contributing your work into the Commons as the game is Free/Libre Software. This means not only will you retain ownership of your stories and ideas, but you will also have ownership of the final game product to showcase your talents elsewhere.

If this sounds interesting to you, please join my discord server and let me know in the #story-design channel. I repeat, I am not one to chase people around and I have a no-pressure approach to collaborators. If you want to help, I’d love to have you, but you need to provide your own drive to create! 🙂

I really want to create a video game that will truly enrich the commons. If you want to be part of this, join me!