Re: AARs - How do you track progress?
Dude with the Food's idea of 'play a bit, write a bit, play a bit, repeat' works for me.
I recognise the problem of trying to record everything, producing overwhelming information and removing your enjoyment of the game.
Here are some things that help me, in case they're of any use. I'm sorry if I am saying things which are obvious.
- You can work out whose story you are telling, and what your story is about, before you play and take screenshots. If, for example, you are telling a 'coming of age' story of a young person who joins a unit as an ordinary foot-soldier, then you only need screenshots of battles and events when your main character's unit was present.
- You can keep plenty of saved games. If you are playing a game which allows you to save a video replay of battles after playing them, you can use that feature (ideally, recording the year and location of the battle in the name of the replay.) For me, this reduces the feeling that I need to take screenshots of everything, because I can return to the saved game or watch the battle replay.
- You can play a separate 'just for fun' campaign. This might even be a campaign in which your faction is an ally, rival or enemy of the faction you are playing in the campaign for your AAR. If you do that, then your 'just for fun' campaign might give you ideas for plot-lines in your AAR - provided that you don't end up taking notes while you're playing, removing the fun element.
- You don't have to tell all of your story at the same level of detail. You can (metaphorically) 'zoom in': you can have five chapters about a particularly exciting/important battle and its aftermath, all of which happened in two turns in the game. You can 'zoom out': you can tell the story of the next twenty turns in the first paragraph of the following chapter.
- Not everything in your campaign has to go into your story; not everything in your story has to come from your campaign. A lot of the events and characters in an AAR can come from your imagination. In my previous Ireland AAR and my current Haiti AAR, most (if not all) of the characters don't exist in the game (except, in some cases, as nameless soldiers). My characters sometimes do things which reflect my campaign (for example, they could go on a dangerous mission to set up a trade agreement and, as part of that, acquire some new technology, reflecting what my faction is doing in the campaign) and sometimes act in a way which has no equivalent in the campaign.
Last edited by Alwyn; August 15, 2015 at 12:07 PM.