Well you can litteraly turn into Champagne, so I guess you can shapeshift in almost whatever you’d like.
The only limit il that you can’t change the shape of your brain.
DEVLOG #9: Programming Notes
Hello, been quiet recently but work has been steadily going on. I keep thinking “yeah I wanna release the next update, but this scene doesn’t really make sense without the one after so I’ll write that one and then drop it”, and I also kept adding things and details and mechanics, and repeating all that to the point this update is about 1/4th the size of the game as it currently stands. My estimated release date for the second major update turned out to be a gross understatement. Right now I’d say it’s 60/70% of the way there, and should be out in the coming weeks, but I’m not gonna set a date unless I’m certain about it.
This Saturday I’ll update the game with what I’ve got so far - there’s plenty of character moments and player choices I’m really proud of, and a fighting scene that was so, so fun to write. That’s not the major update quite yet, but a pretty robust beta build. Here’s a sneak peek:
Additionally, I’ve been working on Cassandra’s Sight, a prose prequel to Infimus. It’s focused on the rivalry between the Timemaster and Aurelius, the world’s most boring supervillain and the world’s greatest superhero. I’d call it a Batman and Joker relationship, but that’s a bit of a cliche comparison and this one has even more gay subtext. I’ll also share the first chapter of that on Saturday. Sneak peek:
But then Aurelius happened, transcending mortality. He had slid so perfectly, so effortlessly into the collective unconscious. Everyone had been waiting, had always been waiting, for a hero. Seth realized that he, too, had been waiting for him. Aurelius was beyond human; he was all too human. Aurelius had awesome powers, he had a mildly weird form of precognition. At every point in his life Seth had been plagued by indecision, doubts, fears, anxieties, and had steadfastly refused the call of ambition. Aurelius did not know the meaning of hesitation, and wanted to save the world. Aurelius completed him, and was his perfect opposite. So Seth’s hate for him was pure and petty. Hate mixed with fascination, David wishing he was Goliath and also that his stone would pierce the giant’s skull. The Timemaster closed his eyes and fantasized. How would it feel to break Aurelius? What lay behind his stony grey eyes, and could he scoop it out with a spoon?
Finally, on a somewhat unrelated note, every day I budget some time to play games and read books and in general consume good media primarily so that I can steal from be inspired by it. I’ve worked through my backlog of Alan Moore comics and body horror Twine games, so I’d like hear from YOU what your favorite things are, ESPECIALLY in the interactive fiction genre. Loosely defined, of course. Doesn’t necessarily have to be made in ChoiceScript, or even to be strictly text based. I want to make Infimus the best game it can possibly be, and a friend once told me that creativity is like cooking: you can’t make anything good if you don’t start with good ingredients. Those ingredients, those tropes and archetypes and techniques of the trade, are what I hope to find every time I start a game, or open a book, or experience any kind of artistic work. Now my friend actually used a slightly different metaphor, based on a much cruder bodily function than eating, but the point still stands. Reply in this thread or DM me or contact me in any other way you prefer if you got any good recs, is what I’m saying.
TL:DR
On this weekend, just before Halloween:
- Biggest Infimus IF update so far
- First chapter of Cassandra’s Sight
Starting this weekend I plan to resume devlogs, and actually consistently crosspost stuff to Tumblr and the newsletter like I meant to. Flowerboy character portrait if I can find time for that, maybe?
Recommend me good interactive fiction games. Even WIPs, even not ChoiceScript ones. I want stuff to steal fro- I mean be inspired by.
I’ve been listening to Brian David Gilbert’s Abba cover album, in which he pretends to be a different kind of halloween villain for each song. It is, like the chtonic beings depicted in the works of H.P. Lovecraft or any news about the British Royal Family, strangely interesting in a sickly way and also strangely fitting to Infimus’ vibe.
10 Likes
@Mithrandir has it, pretty much. You’re only limited by your imagination and by the fact that you cannot fundamentally change the shape of your brain. That’s not to say you’re omnipotent: it requires serious skill and creativity to fully realize your vision of what you want to shapeshift into, and this process will be represented ingame as your character getting a better grasp of their powers during the course of the story. Levelling up, put bluntly. This is tackled, partially, by the introduction of the Mausoleum Of Shapes in the coming update, so stay tuned for that.
2 Likes
Interesting! But eh, much less choices in here than I’m used to, which is a bummer since I prefer creating an MC I know I’d like instead of a preset character. It feels like I’m reading a novel rather than an interactive one but yeah the good thing is the play through felt longer than what I expected from a 22k words WIP.
Oh, and I find it odd that some of the clothes don’t have black and white colours since those two are the basic ones. Will you be adding more options for the costume?
Also, I personally am not a fan of the wall of text and info dumps but it’s interesting enough. Good luck with your WIP 
2 Likes
Thank you for the kind words.
Interesting! But eh, much less choices in here than I’m used to, which is a bummer since I prefer creating an MC I know I’d like instead of a preset character.
Yeaah, I’m not satisfied with this either. My initial draft for this game was definitely much closer to, say, Bioware RPGs than Bethesda or Obsidian ones as far as character creation goes. But, this is my first full length IF game, and as I’ve gotten more used to the format I’m more and more convinced that kind of technique doesn’t work here. Or, at least, doesn’t work for the kind of game I want this to end up being.
What kinds of additional character customization options are missing? Otoh, the biggest one is not being able to decide your backstory, and I want to revisit that at some point.
Oh, and I find it odd that some of the clothes don’t have black and white colours since those two are the basic ones. Will you be adding more options for the costume?
That’s an oversight, definitely. Will add that to my to-do list.
1 Like
Ok, here it is. Proper post tomorrow, maybe. For now, the largest Infimus update ever is live.
Play it on the beta branch here. Please be aware it’s likely to be quite buggy. I’ve run it through a lot of quicktests and randomtest, but there’s things those tools can’t catch.
https://dashingdon.com/play/josephferrante/infimus-beta/mygame/
Known issues:
- Haven’t updated the splash page at all. Probably won’t until next part’s release proper.
- Rolls are…wonky. They should work, but I’ve rewritten the system about fifty times and will likely rewrite it again. I’ll be surprised if at least one or two aren’t broken in some weird and hilarious way.
- I haven’t edited anything for pacing. In other words, there might be parts that are just text walls and others that pass by too quickly. This is a time consuming process and I usually prefer to do it as late as possible.
6 Likes
I think the backdoor doesn’t work, because when I click on it, the page loads endlessly.
Should be fixed!
1 Like
Yes, great work by the way!
3 Likes
DEVLOG #10 - Of Heroes And Men
Since the next update will include your character’s first face-to-face encounter with an actual hero, let’s talk about superheroes in Infimus’ world.
A “superhero”, broadly speaking, is a morally good fictional character with supernatural abilities. “Super” means the latter, “hero” the former. There have been a million riffs and subversions and meta-subversions of that trope. Through all of them, what usually interests me the most are the experiments. The weird one-off series, the idiosyncratic stories that don’t quite fit with the rest. Comics where “being a superhero” becomes a tool through which to explore various interesting ideas, where the genre itself goes beyond its trite stock formulas and familiar masks.
In short: my favorite superhero is Superman.
Okay, that’s not true. My favorite superhero is Hellboy. But you could at least place an asterisk next to Hellboy’s entry in a list of superheroes, given how Mignola’s work draws more from the pulp genre than the superhero one proper (at least in my opinion). Out of the characters who are traditionally, undeniably, absolutely superheroes…it’s Superman. There’s many Supermans. The one that I really like is the simple, classic, goody two shoes Superman.
I’ve talked a bit about why in devlog #4. To elaborate: Superman, on the most basic level, is a ridiculous oversimplification of the various ethical and moral complications inherent in having a single being with awesome powers decide what’s good and what’s bad. This Superman, if you don’t think too hard about it, is essentially the archetypal Benevolent Himbo (this archetype is opposed by the Dastardly Himbo, which you will see a lot of in this game).
Go a level further, and you start to think well, what if there actually was a Superman and we tried to put that into a world that functions similarly to ours? That’s how you get all your Evil Superman stories. All your Homelanders, Dr. Manhattans, Omni-Mans.
Go even beyond, and you have good old Superman again. The contradictions inherent in the idea are not danced around, mishandled, waved away with plot contrivances. They’re instead embraced and accepted as part of the myth. This is a Superman who, despite the world being horrible and cruel, believes in it. The superman of All-Star Superman, of For The Man Who Has Everything, and so on.
Superheroes in Infimus aren’t really like this last Superman.
Three kinds of heroes
First, let’s define them in Infimus’ world too. By “Superheroes”, here, I refer to beings with supernatural abilities that outwardly present themselves as something called a “Superhero”. They usually, but not always, receive their powers as a gift from an extra-dimensional force known as the Monument, and are as a consequence required to uphold its philosophy and its eternal struggle with another, competing entity - the Black Dame.
The main difference, here, is that there isn’t a direct reference to morality. For this story, I wanted to play around with something like the order/chaos axis of certain roleplaying systems, more than a traditional good/bad one. As the Fox puts it in the intro, it’s about change versus stasis. The status quo vs the new.
Neither side is inherently “good” or “bad”. It’s not Superman against Lex Luthor. They simply have different ways through which to see the world. That’s not to say I don’t have a preference - I’m certainly not unbiased in the telling of my own story. But my intent, here, is for both villains and heroes to have the same degree of depth and characterization.
In Infimus’ world, I’d say most heroes are the first Superman above, some are the second, and very very few - Aurelius, for example - the third. Most genuinely believe they’re the unarguably good guys, and either ignore or aren’t aware of the inherent contradictions of their role. Some are aware of them, but simply don’t care. And very few, the best of them, try to work through them to create something they believe to be a better world.
Obvious choice for song of the day:
6 Likes
Sheesh, I just discovered this and peeped at the stats page; the skill descriptions immediately reminded me of Disco Elysium! This project looks promising, I’m raring to play it :)))
So that means that in Infimus, superheroes can be either lawful good, lawful neutral or even lawful evil, while supervillains can be chaotic good, chaotic neutral or chaotic evil?
That’s a pretty interesting way to think about morals here in this story.
By the way if it isn’t spoilerly, does every villain get the masks like us or is it just us.
And do heroes get masks to or is it different for them?
1 Like
Disco is a massive inspiration, yeah. Thank you for the kind words.
That’s a good way to put it, yes.
This is touched on at the beginning of Cassandra’s Sight, on my Patreon. Both the Dame or the Monument try to give their Gift in the way that they think is most likely to attract the person they want to recruit. So there’s really no set procedure. It greatly varies from person to person. The Manifold Mask received a sentient mask, the protagonist of Cassandra’s Sight met a well dressed man while drunk out of his mind, others might have seen an angel descend from the heavens or a crow on their window.
All that matters is that the emissary makes an offer, and that the recruit accepts.
2 Likes
Hey sorry I keep asking questions I’m just interested in the story and plus this question was in my head for a while.
If the mc wanted to turn their whole body into water would their brain be water too or just the body?
Or if the transform into an object like a gumball machine would their brain still be there too?
2 Likes
No problem with asking questions.
Per the training with Olaf:
You can completely change all of it except your brain. More specifically, you can remove extraneous tissues until it is nothing more than a somewhat orb-shaped lump of flesh. But nothing more: Olaf theorizes that your brain is where your powers are managed from, and that any further modification to it could result in serious damage. So your powers don’t let you do that. Apart from this, you are limited only by your imagination and your skill.
You wouldn’t fully become water or a gumball machine. There’d be that “orb shaped lump of flesh” somewhere in there.
1 Like
Infimus Beta Update #12: 24 Karat
It’s out. Sorry for the delay, it was so horribly buggy on Saturday as to be basically unplayable. That’s what I get for writing like, two different roll based scenes with ChoiceScript’s rather limited functionalities. My hubris is unbounded and I don’t know what consequences are.
To the people who were like “ok when do we get to punch superheroes in the face?”: this update is for you.
Play it on the beta branch here. Please be aware it’s likely to be quite buggy. I’ve run it through a lot of quicktests and randomtest, but there’s things those tools can’t catch.
https://dashingdon.com/play/josephferrante/infimus-beta/mygame/
Known issues:
- Haven’t updated the splash page at all. Probably won’t until next part’s release proper.
- Rolls are…wonky. They should work, but I’ve rewritten the system about fifty times and will likely rewrite it again. I’ll be surprised if at least one or two aren’t broken in some weird and hilarious way.
- Specifically, the parts where you regenerate and where you fight Karat are still WIP and not fully tested. I’ll give them another pass before the final release.
- I haven’t edited anything for pacing. In other words, there might be parts that are just text walls and others that pass by too quickly. This is a time consuming process and I usually prefer to do it as late as possible.
4 Likes
Just found this and I haven’t played yet, will do in few hours, but I just want to point out something. Dr. Manhattan isn’t evil, while this isn’t important per-say I just thought I should say it since I understand where you’re coming from. He is a neutral character and I understand how neutral beings can be seen as evil especially in but fiction there is a difference. A neutral character acts without prejudice or compulsion, something that the doctor has done time and again. Like I said its not important.
3 Likes
I can play a villain ^^/
But I want to beat up the heros so I hope I have a chance to absolutely master my powers
Secondly I tried male and female option of course and I have to ask
Why do combatstilletos hinder me I mean it hurt to get kicked with that and if the tailor made it with metal or something I belive you can do much damage with it by the way ist about style
And poking an eye out while looking good doesn’t seem like something negative for me ^^
No no, you’re perfectly correct. Manhattan, much like all characters in Watchmen, goes much beyond conventional “good” and “bad” morality. While writing that message, I was thinking of when Manhattan himself is painted as the classic Evil Superman archetype in Watchmen itself by Ozy’s machinations. Framed for things he didn’t commit, made to look like an uncaring monster. He is, of course, a very complex and very compelling character that, when analyzed, shouldn’t be reduced to such a trope. That was unclear in my message, I apologize.
2 Likes