Elemental Alliance (WIP)

Hosted Games Works In Progress
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Find love and friendship as the royal heir while building alliances with other nobles.
When the monarch is poisoned, can you protect your kingdom—and your heart?

You’ve known you would inherit a small kingdom ever since you were a child. When you reach the age of adulthood, you are crowned as the official heir and told that you must form alliances with eligible scions from local nobles or other royals. Luckily, your kingdom is hosting a yearly summit with the four neighboring lands, so you have many opportunities to meet the six young scions looking to form an official alliance through a marriage or committed friendship.

Partway through the summit, your parent is poisoned. Can you find the would-be-murderer without neglecting your important task to form alliances?

Updated 1/11, 16.7k words. Prologue and Chapter One are finished!
Current version: www.dashingdon.com/play/beesquared/elemental-alliance/mygame/
Tumblr (Please send me asks!): www.elemental-alliance.tumblr.com/
RO Poll: Elemental Alliance (WIP)

You can direct message me on this forum/tumblr or email me at elemental.alliance.novel@gmail.com if you find any bugs (I don’t want to crowd this discussion again when something inevitably breaks).

This is my first game (and my first writing project…), so I’m open to any criticism/suggestions. I’m fairly knowledgeable about coding, so feel free to discuss any code questions/suggestions with me as well! I don’t have a posting schedule and I’ve only barely begun writing the actual story, but I wanted to post my story on DashingDon and get a forum topic started so that I can start accruing feedback on the story idea before I get too far in.

This is meant to be a character-interaction-heavy romance game, with a touch of mystery for an overarching plot. I was actually working on worldbuilding and came up with my five main opposed stats and five countries that aligned with five elements (fire, water, earth, air, magic)… and everything just kind of came together for a story. My five countries are vaguely based on the cultures of the Iraqi, the Inuit, the Swahili, the Mongolians, and the Nahuatl (Aztec). I have plans for 6 ROS (one for each element + your oldest friend), who will be gender-changeable at any point in the game. You will also be able to change your own gender/name at any point.

Current Features

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; cis, trans, or genderfluid.
• Alliance options’ genders can be randomized, set to one gender, or set as you meet the characters.
• Choices can be labelled with stats that will be changed or tested; this setting can be changed at any time.
• Stats can be displayed with numbers and charts or with descriptive phrases; this setting can also be changed at any time.
• Choose your kingdom from five different lands—based upon the cultures of the Iraqis/Kurds, Inuit, Mongolians/Mongols, Swahili/Bantu, and Nahuatl/Aztecs.
• Change your gender at any time.
• Change the genders of alliance options at any time.

Planned Features

• Play as gay, straight, or bisexual; monogamous or polyamorous.
• Build alliances with six different characters; including aristocrats from your land and royalty from neighboring lands.
• Access an in-game encyclopedia with more information about magic, the neighboring lands, and the Houses you are considering for alliances.
• Random culprit and order of events for a different story in each play-through.

Code can be read at www.dashingdon.com/play/beesquared/elemental-alliance/mygame/scenes

284 Likes
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Looks interesting and bookmark worthy…

10 Likes
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Sounds interesting I’ll play it know

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I enjoy the story actually brings my beliefs of that the ruler of a country should listen to the voices of their people no matter who their status is rich or poor you must understand both sides of the coin before making a choice about your kingdom so I pick the winter Kingdom pretty much because it has idealistic tendencies

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The story is superb and I like the magical kingdom very much plus the situation and the characters are so nicely written. I am already in love with the game. All the best

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Love that you included the Nahuatl :sunglasses: already love it!

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Happy that I get to be a royal and that the friend is a girl, all too often stories have some dipshit boy as your childhood friend. Also, while there is little here yet it already feels like a lot of possibilities will be coming, I can’t wait to see more.

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Romance and court intrigue. Sounds like my type of game! Your writing so farvhas been very good so just keep up the good work and we will see how this story goes

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Interesting, when more is here I will look forward to reading it

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Very interesting plot, and I really wanna meet all the characters now :kissing_heart:

Gotta keep an eye on this one :stuck_out_tongue:

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Wondering if there could be an option to say no to the friend?

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Love the diversity in this world you’ve built! All the 5 nations seem super cool, so it was difficult to choose one! I appreciated you using elements from these cultures in your story, as they don’t really get as much representation as they should!

I would have never known this was your first! Even in the brevity of your demo, I found myself drawn to our character’s story and the world they live in. You did a great job of keeping me engaged!

Very interested to see where you go with these! I’m looking forward to read what you have for them soon.

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I love the concept. I love all the diversity of different cultures in it . I love Avatar the Last Airbender so this is right up my alley

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I thought about it, but your friend is kind of a political appointment by your parent. They’re meant to be your right-hand person some day. Plus, I always feel weird when a story tells me that someone is my friend, but I can choose to say they’re not, and I wasn’t sure how to write that. I did try to give options for why you’d feel you had to say yes, so I’ll add an option that’s more based on political necessity.

(This is why I uploaded pretty early. It’s nice to know what types of options people think are missing).

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You caught me, that was definitely an influence. Just finished rewatching that not too long ago.

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Maybe saying no will be a start to slowly ruining our friendship and give people kinda a way to set how they want this friendship with this character to go, and if we have to go with them and we pick a reason that isn’t a good one or that doesn’t have to do with them being our friend we could let tell them which would negatively impact our relationship? Im just never been a fan of preset best friends in games lol, I know I’m weird.

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What you have so far, :+1:

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I love the inclusiveness but I am curious and slightly concerned about if you do include parts of the different cultures will the traditions and such be accurate? I’ve seen some games like yours that I use real life cultures and they either end up being very good due to the authors diligence in portraying the traditions correctly, or they end up very bad where they just use the cultures without really understanding them. Now I’m not saying that your story will be bad if you include the cultures traditions but just in case you do include the different traditions I’d make sure you really understand them and aren’t just using them to progress the story.

Ok now that’s over I think this story is really good so far and I look forward to future updates.
Also I apologise if I seemed a bit brusque in my first paragraph I’ve been told I’m not very good at sugarcoating things.

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So, I’m doing my best to research so that stuff will be accurate. The five cultures are still fantasy cultures, so it won’t be fully accurate and there will be stuff that I added in to fit my fantasy world. But the whole reason I picked actual cultures in the first place was because I noticed my temptation to go with an “Aladdin faux Persia” for the fire land, and that would have been awful. It’s a lot harder to fall back upon (often racist) tropes when you can research actual cultures, so I’m trying to include as many truthful snippets as possible. For example, I referenced Nowruz (Nowruz - Wikipedia) for the little blurbs about the spring equinox in the Iraqi/Fire and Mongol/Air nations.

Plus, I’m trying to use https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/ as a guide when possible. I’m unfortunately ridiculously white, so I’m trying to be as respectful as I can, and I’m always open to comments. I am LGBTQ, so I understand why representation is important, and I want to do this right.

15 Likes
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I fixed the game so that you can choose not to spend time with C. Sorry, if the wording seems awkward, it felt weird for me to write about turning them down when C is partially based on my current relationship :sweat_smile: Plus, I was trying to make sure that you still had the same options for stat changes as if you had went with C.

2 Likes