Inspiration?

Just a general question to the community, where do you find inspiration? What grabs you as an interesting idea for a game/scene?

Also do you come up with the ideas for characters totally from your own mind or are they inspired by celebrities/real people?

As I only have a couple very small games under my belt I haven't put too much of my inspiration actually down on paper but they've been inspired by a mix of things, corny sex tropes (oooh, sexy neighbor moves in next door), or things from IRL (I started going to a gym, realized there had never been an AIF set in a gym), to movies, literature, art, etc.

Breakthrough!

So, I had hit a wall working on my As Yet Untitled Gym Game, and I found out what the problem was.

I was paying too much attention to plot! I think in my mind the story had worked out more like a regular erotic story and not a GAME. I had a complicated relationship in mind with the player and the main NPC and I was really struggling with making that line up with the game aspects (solving puzzles, collecting items, etc). I was just kinda spinning my wheels, writing descriptions of like, desks and not really making progress. Trying to write something that merges plot and game like Goblinboy games or other classics is just above my skill level at this point.

So I've ditched that project, and I'm sure no one really cares about all this, they just want authors to finish games! Which is fine, but I've started something new that is more of a plotless romp in a very old school vein and I'm already farther along in that than my previous game.

As a brief teaser, you play as an older gentleman reliving some exciting memories from his past as he tracks down a series of photographs that are lost in his house. 

Also, as a note on my previous blog post, I didn't mean to criticize any current AIF authors that are using images, and I hope no one took it that way. I was being critical of the countless "Succubus Rape School Quest 5000" sort of games that use stolen anime art and still earn a ton of money on patreon. Looking back on it it's not too clear what I meant, hopefully no one was irked!

Are pictures mandatory now?

Back when I first got into AIF there were ZERO pictures, I can't remember when they first appeared but it was definitely Goblinboy that was the first to implement then in a large way and popularize their use.

Personally, I don't care for them unless the game is visually focused, if there's text descriptions along with pictures I'll turn the pictures off, and let my imagination do the work. It's not like I hate when a game has pictures, not at all, just given the option, I'll go without.

That's just my preference, and clearly I'm in the miniority. But my question is, how much am I limiting myself by not including pictures? Is any AIF game without pictures doomed to obscurity? As has been discussed recently, all the stuff on patreon is very picture heavy (and largely crap), and if people are willing to spend actual money on frankly awful games solely because they have pictures where does that leave games that go without?

In my case, as an author, I have no interest in producing pictures myself, but I did enjoy the image that Lost Trout made for my game from the AIF Minifest - http://adultinteractivefiction.blogspot.com/2016/09/aif-minifest-2016.html (and it uncannily nailed the image I had in my head for the character!)

Back at it

I didn't have much time at all to work on the game over the holidays but my schedule is back to normal now and I hope to pick up the pace a bit.

I've decided against using Inform, the time it would take to learn a whole new programming language could be better spent on finishing up what I've already started in Adrift. Maybe in the future, but for now I'm sticking with Adrift.

Should I switch to Inform 7?

I like Adrift for it's ease of use and visual representation of the game but I'm finding it limiting and it seems like it's one of the least popular formats for AIF these days. I've been looking at Inform 7 and it looks full featured and relatively easy to learn but I have ZERO programming experience. Am I biting off more than I can chew? With work/life stuff etc I don't have a ton of time to work on AIF stuff anyways and I worry that learning a new programming language will make it even harder to get stuff done.

That being said though, Inform is probably my 2nd favorite format to play AIF in and I'd be much more satisfied with my work if it was in Inform than Adrift so maybe it'd be worth it? There's also the work being done by Fictitious Frode (https://informedaif.wordpress.com) and Green Double Aught (http://doubleaughtgames.blogspot.com) which looks promising even though I don't quite understand what I'd do with it yet.

Progress!

So, I started the game over from scratch and made a bit of progress beyond what I had already. So far I've gotten the character descriptions and the room descriptions done which not counting the sex scenes is the bulk of the writing. Slow going, but things have been busy here in my personal life (Civilization 6 was released) but now that I've got things back on a solid base the pace should pick up.

Unbelievable.

So, I was in the midst of working on the game and suddenly, my computer crashed. No big deal, I had saved recently. So after the restart I start up Adrift again and... my game is suddenly password protected. The game I had never password protected. I tried my regular passwords, thinking maybe I had set it and forgotten but, nope. No luck. And when I try to open the game with the runner, it says "this is not an ADRIFT game" so my guess is it's corrupted & totally shot.

I'm totally stumped at what to do, I can't think of any way to break the password protection or bypass it in some way. It's not like the game was 95% finished and I lost EVERYTHING but still! A few weeks worth of progress is gone. Not really sure on how I'll continue forward, having to redo all of the basics, character and room descriptions, etc really saps the motivation.