Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Arts & Talents => Topic started by: stuart133 on October 03, 2009, 04:57:01 pm
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Right, having made my brain hurt doing my board game I thought I would write some flavour for it. This probably isn't going to be very good but all feedback is much appreciated :)
Commander Alex Temple breathed a sigh of relief; he had never liked having to sit on the bridge when his ship the GTD Lovecraft jumped through subspace, staring at the endless swirling clouds of the tunnel wall, constantly feeling as though it was about to crash down on top of them and swallow them into is unfathomable depths. He flicked his eyes over the bridge, surveying the crew diligently working away at consoles spread around the bridge, prepping the ship for the intra-system jump that would take them to their new posting, the GTVA mining base Contrail, not really a task Alex was really looking forward too: Sitting around doing nothing but training exercises for weeks while his comrades were fighting and dying on the front lines.
“Sir, we’re picking up some strange readings from the direction of the mining stations.” The voice of his head sensors operator wrenched Alex back to reality.
“Right, alert the other ships, launch a couple of extra fighter wings and raise fleet alert level to orange.”
“Yes sir!” At that moment an image flashed up on the main display screen
“Squadron Leader Wilson here, I’m gonna take a couple of wings to see if we can pick up the source of this disturbance.”
“Negative, do not leave the main convoy. We are prepping a scout mission now; all other fighters are to hold station around the Lovejoy.”
“Roger that,” grudgingly replied Wilson before shutting off the comlink.
“This is Alpha wing; we are now holding station 500,000 km from Cygnus prime. The main source of the signal seems to be the mining station, but our sensors seem to be degrading badly so we can’t get a clear picture.”
“Roger that Alpha, see if you can push up a bit closer, your Pegasus fighters should be able to get to about 500m before you are detected.”
“Copy you command, engaging subspace drives now.” And with that the fuzzy image of Alpha 1 vanished from the main screen, leaving behind nothing but a deadly silence. There was something very wrong here and all the officers on the bridge could feel it. The seconds ticked by, one by one, and not a word was spoken. Then without warning the screen flashed into life:
“Oh my god, Jesus they’re everywhere.”
“Alpha report, who are?” The entire bridge was now filled with activity, operators trying to make sense of the deluge of sensor data from Alpha.
“Oh god, Alpha 2 is down, we’re not going to last much long...” The screen switched to Alpha 3’s cockpit.
“Switch to external view,” barked Alex. The screen cut to a fuzzy picture, tiny craft were everywhere, bright laser light flashing out followed by a bright orange ball as Alpha 4 exploded. Alex looked deeper into the picture, something was terribly wrong. Then a slight movement caught his eye and he saw it fully. A flash of terror filled his stomach: They knew he was here, and then knew why...
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To be brutally honest, in the style of NGTM-1R, kinda cliché... But still fun.
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To be brutally honest, in the style of NGTM-1R, kinda cliché... But still fun.
Well I know it's not that original, but I was expected much worse, my writing has never been great :)
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Work on your punctuation. As with everything else, (theoretically, at least...) the more you write, the better you'll become. Well, if you're passionate about your writing, that is...
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It's overly short.
Then again, everything not completed is. :P As a small sample, I can't really give much input, except to note that the web eats proper paragraphing so it's probably best to abandon it.
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Needs more white space. Black space, I guess.
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Needs more white space. Black space, I guess.
Call me a n00b but I don't think that I understand that
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More paragraphs breaks. More gaps in the wall-of-text.
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I'm not sure that's a problem. On a strict formatting level more space between paragraphs would make it easier to read, but with all the dialogue the actual paragraphs are quite short enough already.
Some of the sentences, however: He flicked his eyes over the bridge, surveying the crew diligently working away at consoles spread around the bridge, prepping the ship for the intra-system jump that would take them to their new posting, the GTVA mining base Contrail, not really a task Alex was really looking forward too: Sitting around doing nothing but training exercises for weeks while his comrades were fighting and dying on the front lines.
Try reading that aloud—it's quite a mouthful. You might consider breaking it up into three or four shorter sentences, just to make things easier on your readers.
"Strange readings" is a little vague. You'll probably want to give us something a little more concrete to justify the resulting alert and scouting mission. "Strange" alone doesn't suggest a course of action, and it's not at all clear what kind of "disturbance" they're detecting. They could be seeing ships that shouldn't be there, there could be unexpected interference, they could detect a transmission that isn't one of theirs. Specificity will do a lot to pull this out of cliché territory.
In general, you might want to try trimming some adverbs and adjectives to keep things moving more quickly, and work on grammar and punctuation. But there's some good urgency toward the end, and I'm interested to see where this is going. It's a good start!
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Ok working on the part 2 in my gaps between my board game schedule.
Thanks to all who have given feedback :) :)
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Dude dont know anything about the grammer but the story was good keep at it!