I tossed and turned last night, which is not great for rest, but great for dreams. One of the dreams was that I got an in-office game dev job, and my portfolio included a Nancy Drew IF with a concert segment. Except now my bosses thought I knew how to compose songs and assigned me and another entry level person to create a Guitar-Hero style mini-game. They did not understand that IF allowed me to fudge my way through song creation because there are zero sound effects! I asked the other guy if he knew how to compose and he was like…“I just mentioned I liked rock n’ roll at lunch last week.” I’m glad I woke up because we were screwed
Damn, this sounds complex yet incredibly rewarding! Are you drawing inspiration from Jolly Good series? That final climax with the 3 events at once is like…the backend of the code must look like very precise spaghetti.
I am not! Surprisingly despite hearing endless good things, I haven’t had a chance to touch Jolly Good. I’ve touched fewer CoG/HG/HC titles than I would like to sadly. I’ve been through a few, though!
It’s definitely on the complex side. Not counting what you actually do/interact with/move within, there are 18 locations within Stones Hollow alone. Some will be more complex implementations (actual robust content, things like that), whereas some will be things like shoppes to buy/sell/haggle from which just requires the shop code, shop inventory table and some flavor text for the content. Those’ll take less time overall to put together.
Updates including major cities will take longer time, as places like the Maldian Capital of Iris will exceed 40 locations on average.
However, I’ve got no deadline here, so I’m content with the game taking ten years to fully build if it ends up in the scale of my vision.
I salute you! Taking the time necessary to complete the vision is one of the major perks of Hosted Games or non-commercial endeavors. With Moonrise, all my deadlines were self-imposed deadlines. Looking back, I could have eased up, but at the time I wanted to push a game out in order to prove I could.
Estheria has been more or less my dream, for a very long time. I dropped the ball as a fourteen year old kid who was way out of his depth, and have fallen too many times to count. I try to take a little piece from every failing and I think I’m finally in the right place with the right engine/language and right vision to execute on something tied to it.
While this isn’t the game that was my life’s dream/goal, this is the precursor title to it. Right now, I’m trying to be very tactical about everything from a code/systems perspective in A Realm Divided, because when this project is eventually done, the project I dreamt of when I was a kid is on the docket and will likely be my life’s work. (Not that A Realm Divided isn’t, but I would rather fall on my face here/learn from this while I gear up towards the thing in the far horizon).
Hopefully I can pull it off, but this headache I’ve been having for the last couple of days has put me in a writer’s block. If it doesn’t calm down tomorrow, then to the doctor I go.
Speaking of which, I wrote a short little intro/excerpt that I just did for a future project. Thoughts?
Summary
Being a hero is an interesting job, beyond protecting people and saving them. Your biggest job is to reassure people that it’s going to be alright, that you are going to save them. The easiest way to do that is to wear a smile on your face, a genuine smile, and not a fake or rehearsed one.
Even if you are currently facing certain death from an enemy you can’t defeat, even if blood seeps down your face and clouds your vision. You hold that smile to give hope to everyone else, hope that you will win and save the day. And your responsibility as the strongest is to make that small hope become the truth.
I’m curious. Have any of you written games with narratives that connect to each other, but which were developed with completely different systems/platforms/mechanics?
I’m considering writing a short parser game (in Inform 7) that would be a standalone spin-off from one of the chapters in my current ChoiceScript WIP. I don’t expect there would be much overlap in potential audience between the two games — they would have completely different mechanics, and probably some areas of narrative discontinuity. But I like the idea of developing my story world from different angles.
If nothing else, it could be an interesting writing exercise. And it might give me some ideas for the main WIP!
Ironically the game that I mentioned above, that I fell on my face on was an RPG Maker title. Surprisingly the old build still has about 30 hours of content.
Art was my blocker, and that game formed Estheria’s entire universe. That game is now being refashioned at 8 books, 3 of which are in the publishing pipeline, another 1 almost done being written, and 4 to go from that.
Then we come to A Realm Divided, which is my precursor title because I want to build all the systems of that story and have everything ready to go to build a colossal adventure when I then re-port those 8 books’ combined story into one massive IF. A Realm Divided will be massive, but is the starting point to delivering on ChoiceScript and ensuring I don’t fail fast on the other title being rebuilt as a game once again.
That’s my… long winded way of answering your question with a yes. Multiple mediums, all interconnected universe/stories in some capacity.
Yes, I’ve made short Twine and Ink games in the same setting as some of my ChoiceScript games. It can be fun to try out different mechanics, story shapes, etc.
God, people who write complex fight scenes frequently for their IFs must be like unto saints.
I’m in the depths of coding a ‘final boss’ for my chapter 2, and I’m 5k words in with no end in sight. Managing all the permutations is agony. Though I guess that part of it is that I’ve made the fight more dynamic than I should have. I’d be done by now if I hadn’t included branching for trying to evade the fight entirely and defeat it via what I can only describe as Shenanigans.
I can’t even imagine what trying to debug this thing is going to be like.
Never again! (I say, knowing full well it will happen again)
Yes, this right here – this is what I want for my WIPs . . . queue malevolent laughter
Dito – I am still of the strong opinion that combat, diologue, and spicey scenes are the three hardest things to write and code for these projects. I too am feeling the combat pain as I’ve been battling a pretty intense scene where the heroine and her party are ambushed by Ogre’s while they are sheltering in a cave. I’d add to the sheer difficulty of coding and writing these sections the emotional dings on seeing your beloved cast of characters take some pretty serious damage in these fights – but then I have much worse things planned for all these poor characters, so I guess I’d best get used to that. Also, misfired booleans usually turn out to be at least half of my bugs for combat scenes . . . how they keep happening is the painful mystery . . .
At some point I’d really like to try out Twine again. Love ChoiceScript as its relatively easy and seems less prone to errors, but I think I could do a lot more with Twine potentially. Also, I believe both twine and ink had pretty good interface tools to organise scenes visually, which seems like a nice touch.
I really like the earnest tone it seems to have, which, if this is going to be a superhero story, seems a good tone to pick. I kind of hope this flows to a choice scene where the prot has to decide whether to smile, frown, or make some other facial expression, as I can see some lovely irony oportunity here.
For my own nearly end of the month progress, I am still stabbing away at my goals, though its mostly been working on “Sense & Sorcery: The Throne of Thr’gran” excerpt. While on one hand I feel like I’ve had a ton of progress, filling in a lot of nearly empty sections and pressing the plot of it forward, its been a slog with perhaps too many possible actions for the prot to pick, to many tone variables to account for, and then a few plot problems – but its getting there. I’m optimistic that at least this excerpt is slowly getting closer to being completed than not done.
Now if I can just move the rest of my goals to completion . . . lost a lot of time to COVID and then it was a rough bit of time with some extreme cold weather (for us at least) going down to around -16 degrees Farenheit for a bit, where my car thought it would be a lovely time to succumb to a critical gremlin assault . . . but the lack of progress one day just is an opportunity for good progress another day.
Ink absolutely shines as a middleware in some other engine! Wish I had a project I could use that, but I’m not good with Unity and Ren’py isn’t supported.
Regarding combat: I’m terrified of when I’ll reach that part of my writing… I’ve done some action movie-y scenes before, but I doubt they were very good, and to do it in IF…
My Chapter 1 just got officially longer than the prologue today. I’ve finished most of the chapter, I just have to test the location I just finished, then write up two more locations you can visit during the first day, and finally write what happens at night. I’m hoping to finish the chapter and put it up in early February. I’m currently over 18.7K words (including code).
I also found some weirdness with Randomtest in CSIDE when my story finally got long enough. Instead of finishing the test with the default 10000, it just stopped in the middle of a word in #9962 or something. Reducing it to 9900 allowed it to finish and let me know that Randomtest passed, but I’m concerned that I’ll have to reduce this further as my story gets longer.
I have trouble with that too, but the computer I do my programing on is ready for retirement more or less. Pretty sure once I have a more functional computer dedicated just for my programing and such, it will be able to finish.
There probably is a better answer to this, but I feel like it depends on your project. I think as long as you can maintain reader interest a single branch with some tonal differences is okay, at least for a while. For myself I usually have a few jump off points that usually reroute to the main path, though I’m hoping to get away from that trend on some of my newer projects and coming updates. I don’t know that there is a hard rule that on this or that chapter there must be a branch, though there probably are trends where more successful games often do branch at a certain point – now I’m kind of curious – what do the rest of you think? Is there a thread out there somewhere on good branching technique/timing?
Good luck on the grinding. Hope we all get there soon. These scenes may suck to code and create, but if done right I think they can be some of the coolest to actually play.
Would the One Ring be his transformation object, or an artifact he (and his magical girl team?) is tasked to protect?
I do indeed have a more complicated branching project I’m saving for later. I’ve got a document for conceptualization and planning but officially it’s on the backburner until this simpler project is done (probably in a few years, at least). (Technically there’s also a hobby project I want to complete before tackling this big idea of mine, too. Wedding Crashers my beloved)
Personally, variables. To be fair, I haven’t tried the other way, I just think of variables as easier. It probably helps that I don’t plan on having variation/flavour text based on gender.
I vote good. Definitely good.
Two words, sorry, but perhaps “unarmed combat”?
Interesting! What I infer from this intro is that the player character is the top superhero of their region, and that trying to keep up morale and an indomitable spirit in dangerous/dire circumstances are going to be large themes in the story, as well as perhaps the weight of responsibility. The talk about reassuring civilians being part of the job makes me wonder if civilian interactions will come up throughout the story, and if civilian morale will be a stat?
Not me, and won’t be me, but it sounds like a really cool idea!
Is it a cop-out answer to say “whenever it fits best for your story?” xP But like genuinely, whenever it makes the most sense for the story you’re trying to tell. If you can and want to put in some earlier branching to some degree, go for it! But yeah you don’t have to do if it messes with the story. Plus, there are other avenues of interactivity (like exploration, character development, skill-building) you can make use of in the meantime if you so wish.
Once again, time sneaks up, huh? I keep wanting to lock in and actually spend a few hours a week seriously writing. My unmedicated ADHD self remains naive, it seems. Gotta focus more on job hunting too, now; as much as the process drains my soul, and as much as reading job descriptions on my computer screen drains my eyeballs, I really should start gaining income again.
. I shall pray for you.