Quality Control
ROUGH LAYOUT - NEEDS TIDYING
- Check for typos! A browser with a built-in spellchecker (like Chrome) is helpful.
- Keep up-to-date quality notes on all qualities. Specify story effects, value (for tradable qualities) and how the quality can change.
- Review your content and specifically look at each quality requirement and effect:
- When spending a resource, double-check effect is correct.
- Remove gratuitous quality requirements and effects. They add complexity.
- Be extra careful with any quality changes that use Set To Exactly. It can be Satan.
- Look at the content from the player’s point of view, including:
- Make sure all unfamiliar terms are glossed so they're clear.
- Make sure if your game has a To Be Continued break while you write more content, that it's clearly signposted to the player.
- Make sure if they have to wait for an opportunity, change area etc., there’s a clear note.
- You can put text in square brackets to make it render in red italics in the game - this is useful for giving out-of-fiction explanatory notes.
- Make sure people know when the next sweetie (secret, quality bump, plot point) is coming.
- Playtest all content. As well as dedicated playtesting sessions, playtest each chunk of content as you go, correct typos and quality errors using the live editing function.
- If text is longer than a sentence in a branch or a paragraph in a root or result, try to trim it.
- Check headlines are pithy and appropriate. Make sure they’re not identical to any other headline (unless you don’t want players to tell them apart) - meaningful headlines make it easier for you to navigate content too.
- Double-check content is in the right area and setting. It's easy to miss this. Make sure Key of Dreams and Impossible! quality requirements keeping content from going live.
- Did you just OK the word ‘strange’? Are you sure you meant to do that? What does it add?
Add in a point about getting someone else to sub-edit for you
page revision: 1, last edited: 16 Jul 2012 20:02