hellgodsrus
Actual Real Game Dev!
- Location
- Behind You
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ok, I'm not the best at doing criticism, so apologies if this comes across as too harsh. But while you may have good ideas, they're kinda buried under mountains of not great prose, and that's a pity, because I'd love to read this - but I can't. Let me show you what I mean.
First off, this is a run on sentence. There should be a full stop after 'empty earth', or some other kind of sentence break. For another, 'unnoticed' is not attached to the right noun- it (I assume) should be attached to the shard, but the way you've worded it makes it sound like it's the exchange that went unnoticed. Secondly, this whole introduction is very... bald. While I don't suggest doing the sheer amount of buildup Wildbow put into Worm for the entity reveal, think about how he sets up the start of the Scion interlude, or any of the trigger visions - or about how he introduces Taylor's plotline. Worm does not open with 'Taylor was a bullied girl who could control insects', because that is telling, not showing, and for the most part telling disengages the audience. Sometimes that's a useful trick, but when you're opening a story you want to show the audience why they should be interested.
Here you seem to be trying to introduce the idea of Abaddon having a kind of sleeper agent shard to preserve humanity (for some reason) - so think about how that scene might play out in a movie. We might get the Eden/Abaddon information exchange - then a zoom in showing an extra shard being discarded, watching it fall away to earth, observing Eden and Zion. Or we'd open more in medias res, with the shard already having landed and doing things, maybe thinking back to its arrival.
The other issue I've noticed is that the point of view is unclear. It's too involved to be third person omniscient (like a Charles Dickens book) but the titles used are all wrong for third person limited (the shard wouldn't think of the entities as Abaddon, Eden and Zion).
The same problems continue - the entirety of this first paragraph is a single sentence when it should be several, and it tells us what it should show us. Moreover, this section also shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the entities in Worm - their relationship is symbiotic with their hosts, it's just parasitic symbiosis... which the Apollyon fragment WB wrote shows Abaddon does too, if differently. If you're diverging enough to make Abaddon non parasitic, it might be worth referring to it by a different name, to indicate this is the primary point of divergence.
I could go on, but I hope this illustrates the key problems that continue to plague your prose. I'd take a few days, rewrite this, and post it again - maybe in the ideas thread, where there are a lot of people who can give you better coherent feedback.
First off, this is a run on sentence. There should be a full stop after 'empty earth', or some other kind of sentence break. For another, 'unnoticed' is not attached to the right noun- it (I assume) should be attached to the shard, but the way you've worded it makes it sound like it's the exchange that went unnoticed. Secondly, this whole introduction is very... bald. While I don't suggest doing the sheer amount of buildup Wildbow put into Worm for the entity reveal, think about how he sets up the start of the Scion interlude, or any of the trigger visions - or about how he introduces Taylor's plotline. Worm does not open with 'Taylor was a bullied girl who could control insects', because that is telling, not showing, and for the most part telling disengages the audience. Sometimes that's a useful trick, but when you're opening a story you want to show the audience why they should be interested.
Here you seem to be trying to introduce the idea of Abaddon having a kind of sleeper agent shard to preserve humanity (for some reason) - so think about how that scene might play out in a movie. We might get the Eden/Abaddon information exchange - then a zoom in showing an extra shard being discarded, watching it fall away to earth, observing Eden and Zion. Or we'd open more in medias res, with the shard already having landed and doing things, maybe thinking back to its arrival.
The other issue I've noticed is that the point of view is unclear. It's too involved to be third person omniscient (like a Charles Dickens book) but the titles used are all wrong for third person limited (the shard wouldn't think of the entities as Abaddon, Eden and Zion).
The same problems continue - the entirety of this first paragraph is a single sentence when it should be several, and it tells us what it should show us. Moreover, this section also shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the entities in Worm - their relationship is symbiotic with their hosts, it's just parasitic symbiosis... which the Apollyon fragment WB wrote shows Abaddon does too, if differently. If you're diverging enough to make Abaddon non parasitic, it might be worth referring to it by a different name, to indicate this is the primary point of divergence.
I could go on, but I hope this illustrates the key problems that continue to plague your prose. I'd take a few days, rewrite this, and post it again - maybe in the ideas thread, where there are a lot of people who can give you better coherent feedback.
