Saturday, January 26, 2013

yWriter - uses for Game Play and/or Scenario Design?


One of the blogs I follow is Dariel Quiogue's "Hari Ragat Games" - I love the setting and am looking forward to the Vivid game set there. Anyway, Dariel is a writer and he just posted about this software package he uses when he is writing:

yWriter

It's a free download so I thought I'd check it out. Not least because my Dad is doing some writing and I thought it might help him out. I also was curious about what other uses it might be put to like game play and scenario design. Many games - for example, Mythic - define the game as a series of scenes and that seems to be how this yWriter organizes the writing process.

It seems to me it might be possible to enter the characters from a scenario into yWriter as if they were characters in the book you were writing. You could then treat each scene in the scenario as a scene in the book - or vis versa. I haven't gone too far into this experiment as of yet, but I think it might have potential. One benefit is that the scenes would already be set up in a format set to be published and a "Wargame's Diary" is often a good thing to have, though hard to accomplish.