Hong Kong Blood Opera Updated 16th January

I’ve lived in England for 16 years and I know some “interesting” people irl so it’s subject matter I’d like to use. I wasn’t here for the early days of the rave scene but I’ve heard all kinds of crazy stories. I think it would be a good setting for a Choicescript project.

5 Likes

Not a fan of female genderlocks in general but at least she’s a more preset character and not one I’d have to create and she would be consistently referred to in the third person, as if reading about her in a newspaper or police report, instead of really looking out of her eyes, correct? If so it might be tolerable for me.

This would be a sequel for our Blood Opera MC that happens in the future compared to this game right?
Without a main plot for our primary mc it would certainly be a unique experience and I admit I’d be curious to see how viable the concept proves to be.

Still this would all be a more straight up sequel and not the British Blood Opera, right?
If you want to connect the Hong Kong and British Blood Opera’s later on I still think going back into the Hong Kong one after the British one is finished and expanding Hong Kong with a “director’s cut DLC” would be the best way to connect the two.

1 Like

I like your Directors cut idea. But it would mean consolidating a lot of wildly divergent endings into a coherent sequel which I understand is a common problem.

The good thing about the combo idea is I can have multiple beginnings for the Modern day “you” MC which is entirely dependent on your Part 1 playthrough. But the 1990s “She” POV can give a main “trunk” structure that ignores the Part 1 endings completely but still has relevant consequence to your “You” MC in Part 2.

So basically the 2 POVs is a structural gimmick that enables Part 2 to have lots of different “beginnings” but a common “trunk” that appears later. I understand most Choicescript games start with a “trunk” scene and then diverge into branches later. It might be fun to turn that upside down and begin with a “branch” scene and introduce the “trunk” later.

2 Likes

It’s true, I did.

Now I exist in a non-corporeal form, something more than a memory and less than a man. I may interact with this world only when summoned by the arcane @, and only then for a short while before my soul is dragged back down to the great cauldron beneath the crust of the world.

Oh the agony! The endless nihilism of the Damned as we toss and weave among the black waves in the dark!

Heed my advice, @Jose_Garcia! Do you see these iron fetters upon my broken body? I wear the chain I forged in life! I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it!

Or would you rather know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this seven Christmas Eves ago!

You have laboured on it since. It is a ponderous chain!

Also, hello. Nice game you have there.

7 Likes

Wise words I have stopped thinking of the Next Project and am focused on finishing this one.

Thank you for your kind words.

5 Likes

Christmas Past prose prove prolific perfidies personifying promises parlaying prior premises.

@Moreau we miss your humor and creativity. Perhaps one day he shall return!

In the meantime take care.

5 Likes

Howdy everyone just a quick update to let people know where I am at.

I am restructuring the beginning a little. As it stands the player can Choose not to meet major characters. That causes too many problems later on that I am having to go back and change that.

After the funeral the game becomes as sandboxy as I can make it.

I am fleshing out character arcs which include romance but also subplots and dilemmas associated with the NPCs. I am intertwining the romances into the main plots a bit better.

I am fleshing out the writers path which is currently under developed.

No more thoughts/work on a sequel. I am all about getting to open beta.

Gay love personalisation will have to wait til after Open Beta. At that stage I will copy paste and rewrite romantic subplots to reflect same sex dynamics / description.

I would love to develop an asexual homoerotic bromance ala John Woo’s the Killer even for straight players but that will be a massive writing challenge that will have to wait til after Open Beta or probably a sequel as I don’t think it will work as an afterthought.

The project is at 183000 words at the moment and I am adding 1-2 thousand words a day (mostly love scenes and filling in plot holes).

10 Likes

So question, why dose this thread say that chapter 1-9 are playable when the games cuts off before chapter one?

2 Likes

And I’m running into a big that goes into male clothes and then choosing guns, knifes, and something else

Oops that’s a good question. The game doesn’t currently “tell you” when you’ve changed chapter. Another possibility is that I have introduced new bugs while updating it so it cuts off early. I am going to update the post title to demo only

1 Like

I am in talks right now with a potential collaborator for British Blood Opera. If successful this would free me up to work on a sequel to Hong Kong Blood Opera while someone else writes British Blood Opera (and I do the coding). I’m laser focused on this WIP though and won’t begin work on another project until this project is finished.

British Blood Opera as currently envisaged will cover the birth of a pivotal gay positive club night (Club Shame in Brighton) which is where the Rave Scene and the ecstasy craze started. It was also connected to the beginnings of Pride (originally they weren’t marches but ad hoc parties in public spaces).

This game will cover the traditional London East End/Essex gangster culture (think Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). But notably it will also cover the gay party boys who became huge drug kingpins sort of by accident by starting the rave scene/ecstasy craze.

Club Shame wasn’t an exclusively gay scene. Straight people “joined in” en masse. The whole rave culture began in that nightclub and the idea is the set a game during the “birth” of that era.

5 Likes

Thank you for the Saves! I started again, then had another browser burp, apparently hours before you updated. lol

I did get a bug where I got hit by a car after falling out of the ambulance, but I got a ‘Next’ option and was then at my father’s place.

I’m enjoying again, btw.

1 Like

Oops. I was still cutting my teeth on coding when I did chapter one and it’s riddled with embarrassing mistakes. I am not going to iron them out until next month. I am on a crunch mode to get a working open beta asap.

Thank you for the kind words.

1 Like

Thank you. Fixed it.

1 Like

I just passed 193 thousand coded words on this project. That’s not reflected in the dashingdon version available via the link yet. Real Soon Now there will be an update which will be a much expanded version of the game.

The main plot is complete and I’m currently fleshing out and weaving in friendship, romance and writing paths.

There’s are gaping holes in the project but most of them are in the ending sequences. The ending should make a large number of end states possible. I divided the ending into three stages. At each stage there’s a lot of possibilities. I’m hoping to have a very diverse range of endings.

This project is bigger than I thought it was. Initially I was aiming for 200,000 words but this project is going to easily blow past 230.

Thanks again for all the feedback. I can’t express my gratitude enough. You guys have been fantastic.

7 Likes

Sort of like mr. White but younger, cuter and sexier and much more gay. I hope the mc can start out as one of those gay party boys. :grin:

Yep, that’s why I first commented, it is particularly egregious in the youth flashback. But it will be changed in the end I hope so we can be a teenage boy crushing on other boys or a teenage girl crushing on other girls in those flashbacks, hopefully.

3 Likes

you have to be careful with all that text that suppose that player is male and loves girls.

1 Like

It would be silly to code a game about the birth of the gay scene and prohibit players from playing as a gay man. When I originally envisaged Blood Opera I hadn’t considered the gay scene angle, that came up in the research. So the genderlocked to female idea is out.

This is still very much up in the air as it hinges on a collaborator and I currently need to write another ten to twenty thousand words to get Hong Kong Blood Opera to open beta plus lots of debugging.

I am doing research into the history of Club Shame and the start of the rave scene. Mostly that just involves me reading but I’m also talking to Brits who are familiar with that scene. It’s very interesting material and I think it would dovetail into Hong Kong Blood Opera nicely. It’s currently more interesting than a straight up sequel to Blood Opera.

Maybe if I don’t get a collaborator I’ll go with @idonotlikeusernames idea and work on the British prequel after I finish this WIP. Then afterwards do a sequel that ties both games together.

5 Likes

@poison_mara That’s an interesting point to consider. I’m a straight guy so if anything my writing gravitates towards that perspective. Addressing other orientations is one of the most challenging aspects of the project. It’s an interesting challenge though. It’s not something that most writers have to deal with.

6 Likes