[REVIEW] Drafting Tales

 

I like to write. I write for multiple blogs, I write fiction, and while I’ve never been published in a “I made good money from this!” sense, that doesn’t stop me from continuing to write and to hope maybe someday, something I write will be good enough to go that extra step.

What, you mean there’s a simulation game that’s entirely about doing just that? Well sign me the hell up!

 
Drafting Tales is what seems to be designer Istotex‘s first and only game, launched in early 2019, and is a simulation game in which your goal is to become a successful full-time writer. You are a writer, seemingly trapped in your small apartment, glued to your chair, as you work toward your goal. You start small, writing articles for magazines and whatnot, and with time and experience you can progress to writing full novels.

Hearing about this game for the first time, it immediately ticked some boxes for me. Simulation game? Yes please! Indie game? Also yes please! The ability to simulate a job I’ve always wanted but currently lack the experience and skill to do in real life, thus feeling like wish fulfillment every time I loaded my save file? Oh hell yes! From my perspective, there was nothing about the pitch of this game that was unappealing.

(Bear in mind that these screenshots are from an earlier version of the game, and there have been many updates and improvements to the game since I took them. The gist of the game, though, remains the same, even if I didn’t get some newer images.)

LIKE GAME DEV TYCOON FOR WRITERS

 
You’d be forgiven for being reminded of Game Dev Tycoon while playing Drafting Tales, because there are a lot of similarities in format and structure. But while Game Dev Tycoon started off with you making games in your garage and then progressing to running a company with multiple employees, Drafting Tales remains a solo venture throughout, with you in your apartment working away at your writing. You don’t go on to run a publishing company in the end, because that’s not the goal. Your surroundings might change a little bit over time, such as with the purchase of a typewriter or computer, or moving from a bathroomless apartment into your very own house, but in the end you’re still writing alone.

But there are still many similarities between Game Dev Tycoon and Drafting Tales, and if you enjoyed the former, you’ll probably enjoy the latter too. You have an initial pool of money to support you while you write, from which your monthly expenses are paid. You write small at first, starting off with short nonfiction articles to sell to magazines, eventually gaining the ability to write longer pieces, fiction in either short or long form, and be approached with offers of commission. It mirrors the journey many writers take, starting small and working your way up.

Naturally, shorter pieces are quicker to write and have faster turnover and payment. Articles can be written, edited, and published within a few weeks, whereas full-length novels might take you the full year to go from beginning to end. The longer the piece, the greater the eventual pay will be, but you’d better have enough money to cover your expenses during that time, because once you start something, you can’t really stop. If that novel takes a year, it takes a year, and you will write nothing else during that time.

I’d fault this game on its lack of realism in that regard, but really, what’s the point? Throw in the real-life complications of writing as a full-time career and you basically get something so complicated it may as well be The Sims. There’s no dayjob to make ends meet while you’re building up your writing resume, no working on smaller articles or stories while you put the finishing touches on your novel, none of that. It’s representative, but not realistic.

Which is fine, and as I said, sometimes when I play simulation games, I want that wish fulfillment. Wouldn’t it be great to actually be able to devote my life full-time to doing something I’ve always wanted? To hell with a dayjob, to hell with multitasking; I’ve got $20k and a dream, baby, and I’m going to live it!

VARIETY AND REVIEWS

 
I’ve been a reviewer for well over a decade at this point. I’ve been the one giving my critique and commentary to other peoples’ creations. Drafting Tales flipped the tables on me and let my in-game writing be subject to reviews too, which positive or negative publicity affecting my popularity, my fanbase, and subsequently the number of publications or publishers willing to take a chance and buy my work. Write something that people want to read, something that matches what’s popular at the time, and the reviews will be good, and you’ll get your name out there more.

The game does offer market statistics from year to year, purchasable for in-game money, which give you insight into what’s trending and what you should focus your writing on if you want to make the most money. You don’t have to, of course, and you can do what I did and just write whatever you want, whenever you want, but that brings with it the risk of your piece not being published, or being published but receiving negative reviews. You can get around this risk by only taking on commissioned pieces, but again, similar to Game Dev Tycoon, it’s a balanced system of risks and rewards. Commissioned pieces offer guaranteed pay so long as you meet the deadline, and you’ll deliver exactly what was asked for, but there’s always the possibility of making more money by writing something independently, even if doing so and submitting it to potential publishers also brings with it the risk of rejection.

And rejection, in this case, means that you spent time writing something that brought you no money, while your monthly expenses continue to deplete your bank account.

You do have the option of querying before submitting, which is a fantastic option because sometimes you pick a genre and topic that you think would be awesome, but it turns out that it’s not as awesome as you want it to be, or nobody’s interested in it. Again, think Game Dev Tycoon, with the ability to analyse a game after release to see how it did and what you can learn for future games. But to be honest, I never bothered with querying. It seemed to me like a waste of time.

Allow me to explain, and I’m sorry for continuing to reference Game Dev Tycoon but it really is the best way I can think of to illustrate certain points. In Game Dev Tycoon, you can put effort into making a game that doesn’t sell well, and you’re out a lot of time and money in doing so. But unless your game sells 0 copies, you can and will make some of that money back, in addition to learning more about what worked and what didn’t when you do an analysis. In Drafting Tales, you can put effort into writing something that might not sell at all, and querying doesn’t change that. It will tell you what not to do in the future, which genres and topics don’t go well together, and that’s definitely useful, but you can also find that out by submitting a piece for publication and just getting it rejected. Querying only delays the inevitable; your writing will either sell or it won’t.

CREATIVITY KNOWS NO BOUNDS

 
For each piece you write, you can allot a certain number of points into certain stylistic fields. Do you want your writing to be fantastically-edited? Do you want to put in a lot of research? Do you want to focus on characters? Great, there’s a skill for that, and you unlock more as you go. Naturally some skills aren’t worth focusing on depending on what you’re writing — a short article about cooking isn’t going to need much focus on plot or characters, for instance. There are also some items you can purchase that will give you automatic points in certain fields, without using one of your limited manually-assigned ones, which allows you to spread things around and get the best piece of writing you can get.

And while finding the right genre and topic combos can be fun and while trying to maximize my effort and skill is definitely entertaining from a gameplay standpoint, my greatest enjoyment while playing this came from the meta-commentary in my own head. Get commissioned to write a journalism piece about the mafia? Great! “The Dinosaur Mafia and You!” is ready to be published! Coming up with titles for your pieces don’t affect how something sells or is reviewed, they’re purely for the creativity and enjoyment of the player, and I found them to be the best part. A short horror story that’s also about cooking may not sell very well because that’s a weird combo to use, but I sure am curious about what, “Elder God Soup,” is about!

 
LIVING THE DREAM

Drafting Tales is the sort of game I can, and did, play for hours, and I had just as much fun at the end as I did in the beginning. The style and pacing of gameplay stays relatively consistent throughout, which makes sense of this sort of simulation game, and as someone who enjoys writing and wants to get further in that field, it was great to see it combined with video games — obviously, another passion of mine — into an experience that was honestly as simple or complex as I cared to make it. I could take risks and maybe earn big rewards, or I could play it a little safer and earn money more steadily but also risk keeping my publication options more limited. There’s opportunity here to try different playstyles and tactics in a low-risk setting, to gain random ideas for stuff you might actually want to write in real life, or just to have a good time with another well-put-together sim game.