Organization help

[SaynoSin]

Well let's face it I am not well suited in organization and I was wondering if anyone can give me tips on how to organize and plan projects. For example I am trying to get my ideas for a game down and I always seem to get stuck.

Example: In the land of (?), you play as (?)

Ok even with this little bit of info I get warped in circles. Let me try to break this down, Ok as I begin to write down the synopsis or storyline I come to these little points (town names, characters,etc) to where I feel I have to backtrack. Should I make a detailed list of every region or visited point in my game before everything else as well as characters or should I just continue with my writing and jot it down later when it comes to me. I don't know lol. If someone can give me some examples of how they keep track of things it would be appreciated thank you

 

[Muffins .org]

Personally I have a problem about this too.
although when it comes to naming, I give it a cool name with a meaning.
For example, since I live in Israel and my Hebrew is my mother lang, then I give it a hewbrew name, sometime change it abit so it'll sound cool. something like 'Tower of the Esh' (Esh=Fire,flame,)

 

[Sarkilas]

You might want to write a basic background about the names. Depends on what it is though. For instance, a city. Defining its scale, inhabitants, language (if multiple languages are present), special events (like, has anything special happened that links to this city? Does it keep anything safe? Has it had a great war? Did they lose?). Stuff like that. It doesn't have to be a huge background, just something that tells you what exactly this city is about even without having made anything physical in the game yet. It helps a lot.

 

[SaynoSin]

These are some nice examples thank you both does anyone else have some pointers?

 

[Venetia]

I would recommend that you keep tables and logs and maps containing all the pertinent information on your game's world, so you can reference them later. You don't need to show them to anyone. They're for your reference.

What do you think's in my private subforum here? Threads and threads full of information on the game and the game's world.

If you don't log all this stuff in a place you can easily reference, then you're bound to start opening up holes in your plot or having to rework areas.

 

[Perihelion]

I use a note tree thing called KeyNote to organize all of my creative projects. It's very useful. This is an early screenshot from one of my novel files:

Spoiler

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/ViridianMoon/keynote.jpg[/img]

There are more sophisticated programs like this around, but they cost moneys. (Not that this usually stops me, but I'm lazy and am used to KeyNote now, so whatever.) No spellcheck, but it never bothered me because I spell very well anyway.

As for names, I'm terrible at them too. If I were you, I'd use placeholders and keep going. That said, names are important--they should reflect the culture and language of your setting, and the more distinctive they are, the less generic your world tends to feel--but you can go back to them later. I also tend to keep a glossary in a NotePad file, which includes all the temp names I need to remember to replace later. Like, I'm eventually replacing all of the names in the above project with pseudo-Italian stuff, but I need to get off my lazy ass and edit it first.

For idea generation, I usually just open up KeyNote and start freewriting about whatever comes to mind on my current problem. Like, okay, I think this happens with the plot, which implies this, but then it contradicts the other thing, so how do I resolve it? And once I've been doing this for a while and have everything more or less straightened out, I write it up in a more organized fashion and move onto outlines and such. Works pretty well for me.

 

[dadevvtsvre]

Perihelion, that's an awesome program. I think I'll try it! :D

What always helps me though, especially when I'm not around a computer, is a journal. I often think about my game, so when a sudden idea pops into my head, I quickly scribble it down in the journal. That way when I get home I can put it onto the computer. Before I had a journal, you have no idea how many times I've had an awesome idea but forgot about it later. It's a really bad feeling.

 

[SaynoSin]

Definitely a lot of help. I have Microsoft Word but I like how Keynote organizes your writings. I was also wondering if certain formulas work for people for example when planning to write your character do you provide age, race, class etc? What are some formats I can use to keep my World and Areas organized. I have a detailed character info sheet I put together that I believe is satisfactory but I am clueless about how to make one for my world. Thanks again

 

[Perihelion]

When I'm coming up with characters, I start by figuring out their role in the story and their motivations and goals, which segues into history and personality. Everything else is less important, imo, so I come up with it later.

As for your world, how you develop it depends on whether your game is plot-oriented or setting-oriented. In any case, I'd establish the major locations and figure out religions, governments, cultures, histories, etc., but beyond that, I think one of the best ways to keep your world from being static and boring is to figure out how everything interacts. This includes stuff like trade, cultural/religious/lingual influence, wars and their causes and how they change things, etc.

 

[SaynoSin]

What I meant by formula when it comes to writing is like in your Keynote example you have geography, history, religion etc. Just some tabs or notes to help me put my world together more efficiently and to make it more detailed.

 

[Perihelion]

There isn't a formula for good writing or worldbuilding, but yeah, the stuff in my KeyNote file is good stuff to hit when working out settings. But if you have multiple important settings, make sure you consider how they interact in as many ways as possible. So I guess hit those things and then consider how each of those things influences/is influenced by other locations?

 

[Kaminosai]

Organization is one of my biggest faults too, although I'm now at an age where I really have no choice about improving it. As far as projects like making an RPG or something goes, I've learned to embrace the chaos of my own attention span. Typically, this results in me having a lot of separate text files floating around, which eventually need to be organized into some sort of cohesive order. I usually wait until I have a decent amount of stuff to work with before I worry about this though. Once I get to that stage, I skim over everything first and get an idea for how i need to separate the information. Then I start cutting and pasting everything into new text files so that all the information on a certain aspect is in one place. Sometimes this even results in bits of info being pasted into multiple places. For example, in an RPG info on how magic works in a setting would probably go under both the background info on the world itself, and my notes on the game system.

I also favor typing my stuff into draft's on my g-mail account, as that way I can easily access it at home or at work. Although I did just buy an 8gig flash drive, so we'll see if that works better.