When the author gives up or disappears.

>>317004
>Grifl needs suggestions, badly!
>clearly, the author gave up.

Apathy. Be it on the part of the author or readers, it all comes down to people not caring.

RL issues?

>>317008
Or at least that's what happened to Poke Quest.

That and when I finally got everything sorted out I couldn't really remember what I was doing anymore.

Coupla non-exclusive eventualities.

1) The author giving up (obviously)
2) The quest doesn't seem appealing enough to attract participants. Art's a factor.
3) The quest gets complicated faster than it gets compelling. Or it gets complicated and stays complicated. Sometimes people would be happy to suggest something, but doesn't know that the real Crystal of Fryystich has thirteen facets, not eleven, and so cannot be compatible with the Nanobiotic Prognostication Engine without first talking to the hermit Spirit Cutter from Chapter 2 and trading him five kilos of narcailect for his services.

...or it could be as simple as "wait, who's this asshole? I thought this quest was about a dude with a hat?"

PS: we don't really have a lot of traffic. If your quest will attract, say, 5% of people, and there are only 19 people, then you have a serious problem.

No quest ever truly dies.
They all live on in our hearts, and their continuances in our fevered imaginations.

Except DMC-Quest and Silence.
Those were shite.

Test Pattern 2009/12/06(Sun)17:26 No. 7224 ID: 51d0f5
File 126014920550.png - (107.76KB , 500x500 , im_confus.png )

On a less general note, things have gotten a tad confusing in your quest.

As I understand it, we're playing the voice inside the head of a voice inside the head of a kobold dude. Or possibly a voice inside the head of a kobold dude who also has the voice of your demon dude in his head.

At the very least, could you at least add ",said <charname>." to your dialogue? I get confused about whether greentext is quoted suggestions, or what the character's saying, or what the character's thinking about, or what the other character's saying, or what.

In all things questy, try to maximize situational awareness.

>>317024
Eheheheh....

>"This is a character saying something to Grifl, outside of his head."
This is him thinking.
"this is harumda speaking with him."
And this is actions being describedand whatnot. I'll try to maintain this format as reliably as possible.

sorry to butt in but, It seems more or less text based quests also have the issue of being easily killed off.

>>317025
I appreciate it, but the reader shouldn't need the strategy guide. It should be immediately and intuitively obvious who's saying what. The best, and in my experience, the only way to do that is to add a bunch of ", said Grifl"s.

Now, people CAN get used to a nonstandard format like that, but I recommend making everything as easy on the reader as possible, structurally speaking.

>>317010
What Test said, though numbers 1 and 3 are the primary culprits. A lack of situational awareness and visible options can frustrate and confuse players.

>>317028
>>317030
I'll try to be more consistent.

>>317040
Well, it's your call, but I maintain you should explicitly state who says what at least some of the time.

>>317026
A textquest adds another step (often more) between a reader looking at a post and gaining situational awareness. Also takes longer to catch up on, because they have more words per update. And it's harder to work with incomplete information if there's no pic to give you a quick grounding of the overall situation.

Shot's art isn't really very good (sorry, shot), but you can look at it and immediately see that a kobold is talking to another kobold, or a demon is fighting a monster in a throne room, or whatever.

>>317067
true, I try to include at least a few relevant pictures here and there. Though the first one was a series of light based abstracts which was me trying to help set up a trippy Experience.

>>317067
>Shot's art isn't really very good (sorry, shot)

Trust me, I know my shortcomings. XD
At least it's better than BeforeQuest 1, eh?

>At least it's better than BeforeQuest 1, eh?
Yeah. Shame you can't get a paint program with even reasonable barebones features.

>Though the first one was a series of light based abstracts which was me trying to help set up a trippy Experience.
I'm not speaking for everyone, but is that really necessary? Text quests tend to start off confusing, and then the authors try to be distinctive by making them even more confusing on purpose. It's a turn-off for me, though I guess maybe others like that.

>>317075
More than likely not but, this is also my first quest ever so I'm trying to get my chops down and learn the ropes.

>>317002

Lack of dicks, LawyerDog once told me. But at least I'll make his statement clearer.

It's usually the lack of interest, either from the participants or the authors themselves. Some things that might be appealing from the start might not be suited for a long-term goal, and sometimes it's hard to figure out which they are.

It could also be the lack of appeal. I'd have to agree with some people around here that (except for text quests) the quality of art must be kept in mind. However, I'm not saying that you should be a professional design artist who only does this as a hobby. A simplistic design might be suited for humorous quests. It's up to the quest author to decide, actually.

Lastly, the quest might just be too confusing. This tends to happen on quests that are divided into several parts, and it's kind of hard not to forget any essential information. Or maybe the theme's just too grotesque/random/offensive for anyone to understand. One must keep this in mind before and even after starting a quest; finding oneself into a metaphorical corner of a quest can be avoided with this.

Yay wall of text.

Let me say that "Lack of appeal" does not mean "Every quest should be about a hot chick that gets undressed a lot." Nor does it mean "Every quest needs a romance."

If you want to spice things up with a bit of nudity I think that Gobbo, Alien and, actually, Sanya do it best. The quest's main hook is not nudity or romance or sex, but there is some at least references to it, for humor, sex appeal or just purely entertaining reasons.

In other words, don't have nudity just for the sake of nudity and expect it to keep a quest afloat.

Also, add some personality to the characters, ESPECIALLY the main one. Alienquest was a bit revolutionary when it came to addressing the players and having the character remark on the comments themselves, later seen in Cutebold Slaughterfest and a bit in After too, if I remember right.

Don't make my mistake and just have a character be the quest suggestions and nothing more. Hatch had literally no character until very recently, and I think the quest was hurting as a result.

Also, learn from my mistakes and repeatedly draw the main characters for a few weeks before starting the quest so that you nail down their designs. If you look, the only people in my quest that haven't gone through extreme character redesigns are Ikar and Aruuchi, because I've literally had the design for Aruuchi down years ago. Both Hatch and Liam have gone from a miniature Dot/YunYung and a zombie-like old man to the more distinct people seen today. I've got another quest in the tubes that'll most likely run next summer/next fall the way things are going and I'm already experimenting with character designs for it and practicing how to draw the various main characters.

>>317218
>Draw the character a lot
Harumda is a character that's older than Rubyquest, and as such, his design is the only really solid one, even if his snout and the positioning of facial features seems to careen about the face as if he visits a plastic surgeon between updates. See also Nifl, whose scars I should really just fucking pin down.

How do I shot trip?!H508X.HbJ6 2009/12/11(Fri)02:41 No. 7457 ID: 6faa8c
File 126052807390.png - (12.98KB , 640x480 , Koboldfacialbones.png )

>>317256
Actually, I decided just now to draw the skull of an average Kobold, for reference. Huh. I should do this for all my races.

I don't read anything you make because it's clichéd and dumb.

I don't know if this helps or not, but honest opinions are always good to hear, right?

>>317289
but... how do you know if.. you.. grrk..

>>317298
This is only partially related, but I wanted to see if anyone else had this problem.
You know after you spend too long on the compy, your eyes hurt for a few days, worse if you try to read anything?
Have you ever done that and not been able to stop reading? Just as a reflexive action upon seeing any kind of text.

Grifl kind of looks like Beavis in kobold form.

>>317289
If you don't read it, how do you know it's cliched?

If you did read it, then you're lying.

TROLL PARADOX

>>317310
Maybe he did read your work, once upon a time, and decided it was cliche and dumb. So now, he no longer touches it.

>>317289
Honest opinions are only useful if I know more specifically you disliked. I'm fine with critisism, but something that's really only as useful as 'lol it sucked' isn't going to help me improve.

6/10 for making me respond seriously.

>>317368
It would help immensely if I knew more about your issue than that my quests are appaerently cliche. What is so unoriginal? What needs work? If you're going to offer critisism, be helpful, not inflammatory.