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More coherent stuff about plots...

The Snowflake Method is a way of producing a "design document" for a novel. It's an interesting way to look at things, and it highlights an important method of developing ideas. Also, I have NaNoWriMo on the brain. In fact, I'll probably have it on the brain for all of next month, too.

When you're working on the world for a game, there are two ways to design it - from the top down or from the bottom up. If you work from the top down, e.g. starting from cosmology and creation myths and working down to continents and history, you get a more coherent picture of the entire world, and it will often feel "deeper". On the other hand, it's a whole lot more work. If you work from the bottom up, you develop areas as needed and stitch them together later. Consistency can be a big problem, but it's definitely less work.

However, I do advocate the top-down method for plotting, if only because that's the way most of us think. Actually, I think I like a work-from-both-ends approach, but that's because I'm weird like that. Work-from-both-ends means that you have a general idea of the overall plot, and some more specific ideas for quests or scenes. So what you need to do is write a slightly more specific version of your plot summary that takes into account the quests, and then maybe build up the individual quests some more, and then expand the plot summary, and... It's not the most efficient way to work things, no, but I like it.

This post has officially gone nowhere.