To apply to be a writer, read the guidelines below and submit an example of what you can do here: http://www.playlewd.com/tryout

What I’m mainly looking for from a writer right now

Someone that excel at writing interesting characters and dialog, such as characters that are quirky and/or endearing, and someone that can write interesting stories and not just sex – but writing good sex scenes is still super important, of course.
Writers are often afraid of giving the player character a voice, and you shouldn’t shy away from that.
What you write shouldn’t be too padded. It should flow well, be easy to read, and people should want to read it.

It may take a few hours to get a grasp of these guidelines, the tutorial, and to complete your submission. This is not meant to be super easy (though the tool is far easier than what’s used for similar games of its capability), and that’s it is very rewarding.
If creating completed, scripted content is too involved for you, feel free to submit writing and story ideas on the forum!

What you should write

Just make up something, or make something that’s an extension of a character that’s already in the game based on the content you can see in the tool (or the game if you’ve played it).
There’s also some ideas here: http://www.playlewd.com/blog/?page_id=477

If you need to play the game to be more of an idea of what to write, you can redeem: DEV0-TRY0-OUT0-KEY0 on your account page. (Please do not abuse that key, it’s meant just for people to try out to game because they are interested in writing)

• Your writing should be at least as good as what’s already there. (Check the female quest taur, bbot, goo, in particular, I suppose …) It should be a similar style, as in second person, present tense, limited perspective, but it definitely doesn’t need to be the exact same writing style; you’re free to put character into the writing for the character you’re writing.
• Make sure it is a complete, final draft. You can edit your submission in the dev tool by overwriting it. I can’t consider someone who can’t self-edit.
• Your submission should be 5000-10000 words in total. Any longer, and well that’s quite a bit to read.
• Each “Scene” (each white text box in the tool) shouldn’t be larger than 400 words to flow well, and there’s no minimum. If you really need to write more than 400 words in a scene, you can, but try not to.
• You need to have some sex scene(s) in it to show you can write erotic content. But I really need better story content, too!
• Show you can do various options and make content considerably dynamic and interesting.
• Look at the content there. Format should be similar. You aren’t doing academic writing, so don’t be afraid of putting a sentence on its own line and such if it reads better or fits the character of the writing.
• That means no “furry” stuff. There’s aliens, but yeah. There aren’t dog anthros there, so submitting something like that wouldn’t be fitting with what’s there now.
• Again, and I’ll repeat this a lot, don’t worry about mastering the tool completely and just show you grasped what the tutorial on the writing tryout application tells you, as well as that you can write strong, interesting stories.

Responsibilities and compensation

If accepted…

• 50% of the money from Patreon is put into a rolling reserve to ensure writers are always paid a more than fair amount. Each month, a portion of that reserve is paid out to writers each month.
  • You’ll get a consistent base line of $15 per thousand words written each month.
  • You’ll get bonuses for reaching milestones, paid out from the extra of the reserve.
  • You also get paid for content you’ve written the past 11 months. As the reserve grows from more supporters, your older content continues to generate a bit of revenue each month.
  • In all, you should generally get at least $20-$40 per thousand words over the course of the quarter and year, though it may grow with more support to the game.
  • You’ll see a more detailed contract if accepted, but that’s the jist of it.
  • If you find something not agreeable in the contract, you can bring it up to me, but it’s extremely likely I’ll want to stick to the contract.
• You will of course also get access to the test server.
• You will be expected to write at least 10,000 words of content each month, at the very least. More is obviously better, and you get paid more that way.
  • Missing some months is excusable, repeatedly doing so is not.
  • If you do not have the time and commitment for the work involved on being on the writing team, you may instead submit content on the forums.
• You will be expected to interact on the private dev forums occasionally, give input, and brush up on the LEWD bible that you’ll find there.
• You will need to test your content in game to make sure it works as intended.
  • Debugging is fairly straight forward. On the dev tool, content is added to the game just as you submit it, so you can immediately try it out without any recompile or whatever with most games. There’s some tricks to add special private dev testing stuff that doesn’t interfere with the players, too. This isn’t on the tryout tool because that content isn’t expected to really work.
• You will need to cover a variety of kinks and fetishes. Not every one, but I’m not sure I want someone that only does overly vanilla stuff. They can be mundane fetishes, but there still needs to be a lot of variety that you can do.
• You will be able to write a lot of what you want, but there are still some key things that need to be made to fill in areas before moving on to others. Storyboarding is important, and fitting things into a dynamic evolving story that the player explores and takes part in.

Other things not in tutorial that might be of note

• There is some formatting markup there, that you may notice from other content
  • **bold** = bold
  • //italics// = italics

  • --- = —

  • [[random selection 1,,random selection 2]] = either “random selection 1” or “random selection 2” will show randomly.
  • %chest = “fit chest which is clad in a jacket” or something similar generated psuedo-randomly. There’s lots of these and I can’t list them out, but just guess if you don’t know. Don’t worry about your application actually working perfectly when you can’t even actually test it in the tryout tool, just make it look right to show you understand.
• (if variable){result} is psuedocode parsing that’s done on the client based on the player viewing it. Look at other content and it should be self explanatory how it’s used. This is simply a matter of “if a condition is met, show what’s in the brackets. Otherwise delete it”. This is how content is tailored on a smaller level to different players.
  • You can check for either variable (if hasPenis||hasVagina){this text here will only show if the player has a penis OR a vagina, but not if they have neither}
  • And you can check if there is both of something (if hasPenis&&hasVagina){this will only show if the player has a penis AND a vagina}
  • Or you can use OR or AND, ie (if hasPenis OR hasVagina){…}
  • If you use both the ANDs are grouped before the ORs. (if 1 == 1 && 2 == 2 || 1 == 2 && 2 == 2){even though 1 does not equal 2, this will still show since the first conditionals pass}
• There is a lot of really complicated stuff that you just don’t need to know. I made this so that I could do anything I want with content to deliver stories in interesting and new ways, like multiplayer content, content that changes with the world around it, to make procedural content tailored to the player, etc. However, the majority of its use is pretty simple and straight forward. Don’t get bogged down with the crazy possibilities and simply show you understood what the tutorial told you and that you can write well.
• This is just a small part of the tool, the part for creating the main written content in the game, that you’ll probably spend 95-100% of your time on as a writer. The other parts like the map editor, item editor, etc, are all taken out to simplify it as a tryout application.