I have been working on a visual novel titled "Lord of the Manor" for some time now (link here, if you're not familiar: https://zaggynorse.itch.io/lord-of-the-manor). I'm the sole developer, which generally suits me. Various other people handle the art, which means I need only focus on the programming and the writing. Mostly the writing.

What I'm looking for today, I hope, is people interested in getting involved with the project's narrative side. I have gobs of backstory, character breakdown and worldbuilding written - enough that I forget even key parts of it sometime. Making retroactive changes to a VN is just as possible as with a novel, but the branching narratives mean that the cost of doing so can be expensive if you overlook something important.

I need people willing to read what I've written, become at least somewhat familiar with the world and the characters, and participate in a group chat where I spew ideas and random thoughts, plus writing samples. Ideally, I would like people familiar with narrative structures; I don't need professors, but I do need people who can converse on the merits of a given trope or plot thread, given context. You *don't* need to actually do any writing; I just need to bounce ideas off of you. This is also not a fanboy club; if all you want to is be helpful, that's better served by supporting the project on Patreon. Without trying to be mean, I need people who are primarily interested in learning about the game from a storytelling perspective and engaging with it in that way.

My expectations would be:
* At minimum, reading all my internal worldbuilding and character codex documents, and also reading the current 300,000 words of script to establish full context. Not overnight, but within a month or two.
* Being willing to join the private Telegram group I use for spit-balling and comment on ideas I post there about storylines, characters and other narrative elements.
* Identifying potential issues with how characters are portrayed, holes in the plot, inconsistencies or conflicts, suggesting new ideas, etc. Basically anything linked to narrative.
* People who can catch up on messages every day or two consistently. I don't expect instant replies, but to keep the process flowing I need a solid cadence of response times.

And in return, I offer:
* Unpaid (?) effort. If you think your skills are enough to deserve payment, I'm happy to discuss! But otherwise, you'd be doing this for the other benefits only.
* The satisfaction of helping me bring this rather unique project to full fruition. Also your name in the game credits.
* None of the work, all of the fun: you just get to be an Ideas Guy! Indulge in the actually fun part of gave dev and leave the hard work to me.
* Discussing narrative with me. I'm pretty decent at writing by now and I think I have useful experience to impart if it's something that interests you.

If you have further questions or want suggest your services, you can message me on Telegram: https://t.me/bucephallus. Thanks for reading!