Working for the chance to explain why the other person did better.

Oftentimes, you find that people of similar interests or abilities group together on the internet and off the internet. By and large, #LD, where Barnox and I got together on this project, is a place where coders hang out. It's not DESIGNED that way, it's just how it works. The best artist we had for a long while has terrible parents, and is away for great lengths while he finds other ways to hack into his own computer. We're still a creative bunch, and come up with plenty of wacky ideas. At one points we wanted to make an MMO, another time we wanted to overhaul a game we all played. Both projects were failures - we elected leaders too fast and tried to be too organised about the whole thing, so nobody ended up with any work to do and so nobody did any.

This idea came out of similar origins. Jokes in instant messaging clients have a fabulous tendency to run away with themselves, and Barnox had recently played a lot of the Steins;Gate VN and we'd both played quite a bit of Kanon (on his recommendation) and Katawa Shoujo. Up to this point he has been writing over a thousand words a day into our design doc, and I can barely keep up with the various appendixes he's been putting in (we're up to appendix F, and the section NOT called appendix makes up less than a seventh of the total).

The way it's worked out, as Barnox mentioned, is that he's written pretty much all of the story so far and I've messed about with the engine and written music. I'm not going to pretend writing in RenPy is a difficult task (it really isn't, it's easy as hell, go try it), but there is a tendency to run away with yourself when you use it. I've been re-transcribing our story document into the engine, mostly for practise but also because it could well be the basis for what we do later.

Music-wise, it's coming as and when I make each piece, and nothing is written for a specific moment in the story, since it's all still very fluid and I wouldn't want to write for a scene that disappears later on.

Here are the ones I've written so far:

The last thing I want to mention is the motivation Barnox and I have had to put the last week or two of effort into such an undeveloped idea, and this relates to the title. Every time we've come to compare our work so far, it seems to be a praise contest for what the other person has done in comparison. I quite like it, in a strange sort of way that on a reasonably regular basis we spend five minutes explaining why what the other has done is better.

I'll be posting here as and when I've done some things, which at the present rate is pretty often. I appreciate how few people we have here so far, but I want to put this here just in case we do well some day.
~RV