Got a crazy idea for Storyist

[thealtruismsociety]

Are you ready to have you mind blown? Are you prepared to slap your forehead from the obviousness of my idea? Are you (Steve) ready to lavish kickbacks upon me for increasing sales of an already wonderful product?

 

I'm kidding on the last part.

 

(Or am I, Steve PM me)

 

Achievements. Yes add trackable achievements to Storyist to give people that little something extra.

 

"But Phil." You ask. "Why the hell would we want something like that in Storyist, it's a writing program for god sakes, not a game console."

 

Touché

 

If you will bear with me I will try not to make this too terribly long winded. But I got the idea writing my novel this evening. How the idea came to me is strange, I'm only able to write at night because I kicked my World of Warcraft addiction finally. I was playing that game for around 5 years and it amazes me how much time I wasted that I could have been doing other things. The fact of me quitting was the very reason I was able to write. (Of course now instead of writing my book, I'm posting a blog, meh.)

 

One thing they added a year or two ago in WoW was achievements. They could be for tough to complete tasks down to easy things. There were also seasonal ones. I remember I would spend countless hours doing repetitive tasks just to get some of these. I know on PSN and XBox Live, people are doing the same things. Shoot I'm playing Plants vs Zombies over and over now to finish up the achievement in that. Now you could say I'm just a crazy person, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you, but that's besides the point. What is the point you may ask?

 

People LOVE achieving goals.

 

This would be a fun additional to Storyist and I feel would really set it apart more from the competition. And before I go off with my ideas, it would be ever so simple to have them turned off by default and if turned on could be turned back off with a simple checkbox, people who don't want them could pretend it's not even in the code.

 

I imagine some sort of online repository would be needed to list achievements so everyone could see what everyone else is doing. Storyist would upload your achievement when reached coded to your personal copy perhaps? Or maybe a separate user name and password could be used for it? Not sure I'm not the programmer. But having a social aspect to this is key as well. Accomplishing something feels great, having it posted so everyone else can see what you've done is even better. This could really build off the writing goals aspect already in Storyist.

 

I imagine a separate twitter and FB could be set up to display achievements AS THEY ARE UNLOCKED. Again people could subscribe to these and join in or not and not even know they exist.

 

Having achievements that are varied is important. Everything can not be hard to unlock, nor should you unlock one every 5 minutes. I have thought of some initial ones but anyone feel free to jump in with other ideas. Bear in mind each achievement would need to have a catchy name, I won't provide one for all of these as I'm writing of the cuff here, I'm sure some will be absolutely horrid. Certain achievements could also perhaps be made into custom titles for the forums, these would be for some of the harder unlocks.

 

Easy:

Installing a trial of Storyist - Trial Member

Purchasing Storyist - Honored Member

Writing first 1000 words for novels (Or 10 pages for scripts) - First Steps

Writing first 50,000 words for novels (Or 100 pages for scripts) - Novelist (Or whatever the equivalent is for scripts)

Using every aspect of Storyist in a project (notepad, cork board, etc) - Completist

Update Storyist - Up To Date

 

Social:

Follow Storyist Twitter - Follow That Bird

Follow Storyist FB - Face-booked

Join Storyist Forums - Not A Troll

 

Activities:

Join NaNoWriMo - Insane Novelist

Win NaNoWriMo - NaNo Winner!

Join Script frenzy - Insane (Whatever the equivalent is for scripts)

Win Script frenzy - Script frenzy Winner!

 

Hard:

Have a Published novel that was created with Storyist - Published (Custom forum status)

 

I'm sure I and the community could think of a lot more. Again this is just an idea but it could be used as a fun way to encourage writing and enjoying the software. It could be made into a social aspect to connect users of the software outside of the forums. It could fulfill that little need in all of us to have SOMETHING, even an inanimate software package, recognize when we have achieved something.

 

So what does everyone think?

 

[Steve E]

I think everyone is going to be digesting this for a while.

 

But you're right. This seems to be a genuinely new feature for writing software. No one has anything like it. There could be a reason for that but, at the moment, I can't think of what it could be. Perhaps the overlapping with the gaming world has developers afraid of not being taken seriously (especially with regards to business sales. "Look Boss, I just achieved the Bejeweled Spittoon of Lord Fauntleroy for minimizing rewrites."). But I doubt it. Developers are made of sterner stuff.

 

Are the rest of you pondering what I'm pondering?

- Thoth.