Bro!! I’m so happy I found your channel! I truly enjoy how you break concepts down and provide examples. I’m in the middle of writing my first novel and got stuck building out the world 😅 struggling to make my world feel full and lived in, and not so character-centric. Anyways, these vids are helping to the ol’ wheels turning again. Yeet! Verisimilitude” is the word of the day!
Bro!! I’m so happy I found your channel! I truly enjoy how you break concepts down and provide examples. It’s super helpful and I’m learning a lot (just subscribed.) I’m in the middle of writing my first novel and got stuck building out the world. I’ve been struggling with making my world feel full and lived in. Anyways, these vids are helping to get my wheels turning again. Yeet! Verisimilitude” is the word of the day!
I've scrolled through a bunch of channels with this kind of subject matter, but it's clear you've got the guts. Some of your specific problems that you mention or the way you emphasise them are close to me. I will watch all your videos when I have the time. One question - can I read something you have created somewhere? I've looked for it but can't find it
Give yourself and your world rules and boundaries. Nothing like having to tell yourself no, only to figure out a workaround that makes sense within that universe. The classic, "No I can't do that..... but maybe this?"
I noticed that. A dude that uses an ability to just "move anything that can have a momentum" i.e (Telekinesis) in a unique way to cut something is cool.
You have a wonderful voice and are greatly intelligent. Plus, I love seeing people of color in worldbuilding discussion. I've only been watching you for a few days, but I've quickly fallen in love with your channel. Keep it up!
I’m looking to write a short story or a series of short stories that interconnect. I can’t afford an illustrator at the moment, but I would love to. In the meantime, can anyone recommend a text to image generator?
I came across your channel after watching "Worldbuilding Mistakes You Don’t Know You’re Making" and I'm hooked. Your videos have been a tremendous help with the comic series I'm making. Thank you!
this is a really good thought prompt. i'm not sure i agree with the message. but constructing plotlines which shaped the the culture up until now, even if they are just plothooks for prequels, do seem like they would be better embellishments than trying to fix the magic system to the world and the population having perfect knowledge with no speculation about it.
i find that to make a world interesting its best to flood the story with details, and then build up by connecting them, like if you wanted to itroduce a new race, then start by mentioning there delicacys at a market
I'm the kind of history architect, more than world builder, and just let me say that, at least for me, it's not really a faster process, because finding an idea that is worth building a history (and then a world) around it usually means long days of thinking about it almost 24/7 and looking stupid or at least extremely distracted 😂
Tbh if your making supposed "science fiction" id rather hear some space-magic fiddling for worldbuilding reasons than some misconstrewn "quantum physics" crap about how they can doo what they do
One thing I have noticed that you can abuse is "technobabble". Technobabble is fake science beyond the readers comprehension... Take for example Marvel, it's full of fake science that makes zero sense and could not possibly be real, it's also really lazy with it too. Because it's a part of your world, readers can't comprehend how it works and thus it's taken for what it is at the expense of the consumer's intellect... which all science fiction abuses blatantly and people lap it all up because they don't care. This is because for science fiction to be a thing, you need technobabble and "fake science". My biggest way of culling critics when they start talking about how "X wouldn't actually work", I tell them that "photon blasters" and the like are not real, no one knows if one is possible to make, and all science fiction cannot exist on real terms. Magic is the greatest use of technobabble, it's... magic... you just accept it for what it is. Poking holes in magic is like boxing with shadows. Take for example yinka's use of "evolution" to explain how creatures change. In reality evolution is a random mutation that gives a living thing an edge that lets it out compete others of it's kind. Evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years to millions of years and yet magic allows things to mutate instantly with an instant edge. A creature could undergo an instantaneous mutation from magic warping it there and then. It's not possible in reality... but it's possible in his magical system and as long as he doesn't provide an excerpt on how it works to the dotted line the lack of knowledge from this construct gives it merit.
The first movie was great; hints of things let your imagination fill the world, like a dream in Inception. But the next three feel like im watching the layer seasons of Lost; far too many threads and questions were created, and by thrn I'm not even interested to know the answers, or able to be immersed into the story.
It seems i am that good in everything about that, that everything tastes 1/10 and compare to infinite/10. I am not good in many things but it seems i found something i am best in... i kown why artist reach there limit, why GoT truly didnt got any good or all movies are bad. Hollywood should pay me... but i am a nobody and i wont tell anything before payment... and nobady trusts me and i trust nobady.
My biggest problem with coming up with alternate universes is to figure out an alternate path of technological development, because the more I know about how things got invented, the less I can think of any alternatives. It's almost like any different scenario was impossible. For example, in human world, there's gunpowder, and we discovered its formula pretty long time ago. It's quite hard _not_ to discover it if one fumbles around with minerals and alchemy. Granted, it takes some experimentation to come up with the right ingredients and right proportions, and it still just burns violently instead of exploding, because you still have to discover that you have to put it in a closed container to increase the pressure of gases. And there's also a long way from inventing black powder, through bombs, grenades, flares, burning arrows, flame lances, to muskets, cannons, and finally guns. So there's multiple ways this can go wrong. But still, things will get invented eventually, and I don't see any way around it. So if, for example, I would want a world in which gunpowder was never discovered and there's no guns, it would be hard to explain what stopped people from making those discoveries and still having other things discovered, perhaps even more advanced. If you have chemistry or alchemy, you have gunpowder. And it's not just that. Every invention, even the smallest one, has some impact on the rest of the world: its culture, politics, even architecture. Medieval castles were good protection against infantry and cavalry, but not against artillery. Star-shaped forts were a design solution against artillery, because their slanted walls were better at deflecting cannonballs. Metal armors were good protection against swords and arrows (from a distance, not necessarily from up close), but they wouldn't withstand a bullet. So once guns were discovers, horse-riding armored knights were gone. Once cannons were discovered, castles were gone. Later on, when flying machines were discovered, neither castles nor forts would be a good protection anymore. Walls or moats wouldn't protect against something that can fly. A radar would though (or at least would allow to detect approaching airplanes soon enough to countermeasure them). So this seem to be a constant arms race of discoveries, one outdating another, one dictating another; an intertwined web of mutual dependencies that doesn't seem to be possible to be made in any different way (not in any significant way at least, well, none I can think of). And that's really bad, because for that reason, I can't think of any different way technology could have evolved in a fictional world, and everything else that surrounds it. Any ideas how this problem can be overcome?
"world building" as a trend just pushes out a lot of shit contend like this. no one who ever made a video about "WoRlD bUiLdiNg" wrote one book that sold big. period
Bro, world building is not just about writing books. If you're a game master, and you want to create a nice game for your role players, you need to be good at world building. Same with video games if you want to create nice worlds for your players (or levels). Or if you're designing a theme park. And some people are into world building just for the fun of it, because they like stretching their imagination and coming up with fictional worlds to explore different ideas.
I think a big example of this is the original 1997 final fantasy 7; yes there was good worldbuilding but anyone that played the game or knows ANYTHING about it can confidently say the actual lore carried that shit to infinity
i was gonna make multiple conlangs.. quickly settled for making writing systems, some basic grammar, naming conventions, common phrases and just making up random words that sound like they fit into xyz language i made up. and even then half this stuff is only relevant cuz my 2 MCs travel to another civilization and they can barely communicate with the locals at first.
The Iceberg Theory in world building is great, one of the best examples that many probably know of would be Soulsborne lore. Miyazaki clearly has a complete narrative and world built behind his worlds, and then he gives the players tiny fragments with which to try to piece something together.
Yes, and it's equally useful in video game design. Because video games are finite, so they will always have limitations to the size of the world and the things you can do in it. But if you apply this iceberg trick, you can make the world seem bigger that it really is to the player, and even if the player cannot explore certain areas, he or she would still feel like they're part of that world and not just ruses.
Brandon Sanderson's "hollow iceberg" analogy is the best rendition of the classic iceberg. You create the illusion that there's more depth to be explored, and also leaving room to expand on those hints you left later if you so wish.
An interesting puzzle is writing a post industrial world where it's assumed most or all of the world has been explored and documented, it's easier to fog up the edges of a pre industrial world as even the inhabitants aren't entirely sure what's going on outside their own region, and only have dubious accounts in books and hearsay to paint a picture
That's probably because it's all that you know and it's limiting your imagination, because you cannot imagine things that you've never seen before*, especially if you're unaware of them. Meet people from different countries, talk with them, learn about their culture and history. Then your horizon will expand and you will have more material to work with. (* = you can still come up with new creations though, by mixing together the stuff that you know in new ways; what I meant that, for example, if you never experienced a taste of a Lychee fruit, you wouldn't be able to imagine how it tastes)
