My philosophy in game design has always been to create the game first, the story is merely a passenger in the video game car. I value gameplay above all else.
The story/plot in my game has never been set in stone. It is all vaguely anchored around the format of an exploration-based game with 8 dungeons + 1 final and some number of side/bonus/mini dungeons, with a wide variety of tools to make exploration easier and open up more of the world. Combat being primarily sword and shield based. Also a variety of environments/biomes. Finally, some semblance of difficulty. Both in combat, and puzzles
The "plot" just boils down to "whatever I think is cool and could feasibly fit a middle fantasy world that's vaguely medieval. Some grand quest to save the world that is not immediately revealed and the protagonist has some connection." By "middle" fantasy I mean something along the lines of, "yeah people can potentially throw a sloppy fireball but it's very intensive and even the best ones at it put forth great effort to do so", but fireball is just an example.
Finally, I have restarted from scratch. I'm still going to use the previous quest file and its contents as a sort of guide, but with the advent of more features in ZQuest 2.55 and my realization that the screen-by-screen format was heavily influencing my map designing, gonna start fresh. This will be an "evolution" of what existed before but still be based on the previous incarnation. If you want to see some portion of what previously existed (although to be honest, it's most of what existed), see here:
https://youtu.be/K7Y5hpQKHs4(also comment!)
I don't know how frequently I will be able to update, but I'm forcing myself to work through this. Not that I hate it or anything, I just really want to make a video game.