Katewing's Adventures (WIP) Looking for betatesters!

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Disclaimer: This book contains profane words, violence, blood, mutilations, torture, death, nudism, and maybe some racism and sexism (but not even taken seriously)

Katewing’s adventures is an interactive fiction game/novel where you play as Katewing, a girl with some peculiar traits trying to find her spot in the land of Bastion.

Features (not all included on the demo)
  • Play as Katewing, a girl sent by her most trustworthy companion on a dangerous mission.
  • Choose what attributes to train and make the most out of them to survive.
  • Try to save a new friend from the monsters that threaten both of your lives.
  • Discover the network of assassins that runs under the city, and maybe give it an use.
  • Bet some coins and the answer to your questions playing twenty up with your comrades.
  • Make your first steps towards your possible slow-burning love, or keep it at bay.
  • Work together with the crew to survive the storm.
  • Sail to another dimension and fight giant monsters to defend the ship.
  • Submerge yourself with your partners to get the reward, would all of you return?
  • Met the voice inside your head and let her show you the truth about those who you trust, or shut her up and make your own mind.
  • Learn about your past and the powerful object you find on your mission.
  • Fight for control or give it to the spirit so she helps you try to escape from your captors.
  • Try to save your most beloved companion from the impending threats.
  • Make friends and start to grow relationships that will continue along the series.

Disclaimer 2: This is my first time writing ever, and I’m not a native English speaker. With that out of the way, you can expect some misspells and weird pronunciation, so feel free to point those out to help me improve them.

This is the first book of a series that will contain a total of five books. Each progression will continue the story from the last point and it’ll keep developing the plot, relationships with characters, challenges, and stakes until the end.

The first book is roughly 330k words w/code, but you can play the demo here that’s around 75k words.

Dashingdon: Katewing’s Adventures (Demo V1.4)
Moody.ink: Katewing’s Adventures (Demo V1.4)

Do you want to betatest the complete game? Leave a comment below or PM me! It’ll help me a lot!

Revision Log
  • 1.4 (23-9-2022) Added option to choose imperial/metric units. Added option to choose the main character’s name and shortened name. Corrected some spelling and grammar and improve a few expressions.
  • 1.3 (20-9-2022) Expanded a tiny bit chapter 0
  • 1.2 (05-09-22) Updated post cover art. Completed: Chapter headers, icon, stats banners.
  • 1.2 (03-09-22) First grammar correction, modified chapter 0
  • 1.1 (31-8-22) Implemented Dashingdon save system.
  • 1.0 Initial release.
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Looks interesting :+1:

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Thank you! There’s much more to come, I’m working hard to finish this project soon.

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I’ve skimmed through the code to get an idea about what the game is like, it looks like you’ve put quite some effort into it, I’ll start reading it and come back with feedback when I finish. I’ll drop a comment even if I stop reading it and will tell you why.

Edit: Save slots would be very useful since the demo is pretty long

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Thank you! I’ll really appreciate it! I think that the fact that it lacks what is common to see here for customization around most projects, has allowed me to play more with other things, but we’ll see. I’m eager to read what people thinks about it, really have no idea what to expect.

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Just finished chapters 0 and 1, I looked through the code afterward to see what I missed and what stats were changed where.

Story/ Characters

When starting the game I was very confused, I was not very sure how old the protagonist is, what’s their relationship with Othan (with the limited playtime up to that point I assumed he is some kind of mentor). Since the character is gender locked, I assume they have a more fixed backstory, I would have liked to know more about her before being thrown into the action.

After that, I was thrown into a training flashback with a character (Kylee) about which I know nothing (temperament, appearance, age, gender, etc). Overall, I think fleshing out the characters in the first few pages is important.

Writing style/ prose /grammar/ word choice in general

I would strongly suggest you run the text through a grammar checker (Grammarly is free and would do just fine in your case). There are various typos and awkward phasings which makes reading the story very difficult. 70% of these will be fixed just by using a plugin, the rest are kind of unusual word choices which you will be able to detect and improve as you read/write more.

I think it’s key to improve your writing skills because you need the prose to shine in order to gain more readers since you are gender-locking and not adding any physical customization to MC (which is what most people are looking for in these kinds of games).

You don’t have to have the last two in order to succeed, but your writing and mechanics have to be stellar to compensate for deviating from the norm so to speak.

Game mechanics

Judging from the stats and the choices, I get the feeling this is going to be a mechanics-heavy game, I like the inclusion of hunger and thirst because it adds an extra layer of complexity which can be fun.

I see the potential in this kind of game, but you will have to give a clear indication to the player about what their choices do in a safe way at the start of a game.

For example, in the first flashback, I had no idea that the choices would increment the stats (I chose to take the full hit, but I didn’t interpret it as a constitution/ endurance choice, but rather a silly one which I was curious what it would do).

Looking through the code I’ve noticed some choices change self-control, but it is not visible in the Stats screen. Also, looking through the checks it seems that it’s an important stat that changes a lot of important decisions, I would suggest making the player aware of it.

My next point links in with the characters not being fleshed out. In the choices when talking to Othan or Kylee it’s impossible to determine beforehand how the relationship will change with them depending on my choices because I don’t know their personalities.

What you should prioritize in my opinion
  1. Run the whole game through a grammar plugin
  2. Add more details to the characters
  3. Signal to the player how the mechanics work early in the game

I’m going to continue my playthrough another day, overall I see the potential, but there are still things that need improving.

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Wow, thank you for that.

Story /Characters

Okay, I’ll try get a bunch more details about those things.

The chapter 0 was the last thing I made, I guess I rushed it a bit cause I was wanting to publish it out once and for all. I’ll try to get it better.

Writting / prose / grammar

Yes, I agree with that, it’s one of the hardest things to get it right for me. But I’m glad you didn’t see the first draft. I guess I’ll have to keep trying.
I’ve used a few times a grammar check but even then I end up realizing that most of the times it only ended up making my sentences shorter. Or maybe I don’t know how to use it properly. Still a lot to learn there.

Game mechanics

Yes, the stats are mildly improved on the first chapters but then there’s a training one that is explained on detail and you can choose how to heavily modify them.

I guess that it’s a subtle way of improving by how you manage the roll-play instead of choose strictly what to improve. Anyway, I didn’t thought it would be hard to notice, but it’s true, with so many other games and stats out there you don’t know what you’ll be encountering.

I thought to put the training at first, but I’ve read here on the forum that doing that without giving the reader a sense of what’s gonna be all about, and choose stats without knowing anything is not recommended.
Besides that, I wanted to try to catch the reader from the beginning with the story instead of throwing a stats form to complete before it even begins to read.

You’re not supposed to be looking through the code :rofl:!
No, but really, that self control that you’re talking about is something that the player shouldn’t know until it’s explained in the game. That’s how it’s supposed to be. You’re not omniscient, you’re playing a character and only know what that character knows. Believe me, it’s all part of the story.

Okay, on one of the previous draft I explained who is Othan, but then I realized I was telling, not showing. A bad thing to do I’ve heard somewhere. So I changed it, but I see I didn’t do it that good. I think I’ll have to redo chapter 0 to properly flesh out the characters and address those problems.

Thank you a lot. I already knew my grammar is one of my strong weak points. That and anything related with social skills, like fleshing out characters and that stuff. I’ll keep bashing my head against that wall. Thank you!

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Longer sentences aren’t always better, in most cases it’s quite the opposite. You should use “wordy” sentences when you want to say something complicated. Short, powerful sentences are most of the time better than long drawn-out ones. Besides, there are other things that the plugin can catch in a millisecond that might take a human a lot longer.

For example, I saw that you had quite a few dialogs that ended with “.” instead of a “,” when you use dialog tags. For example (not from your game, a general one):

“Yes, I will go.” she said. → is incorrect.
“Yes, I will go,” she said → is correct.

I haven’t gotten to the places where I can die, but you have to decide if your stats are for role-playing or for fail checking, because they are totally different experiences. If a player goes into the game with the expectation that the stats are only for cosmetics and flavor texts and then loses the game because they should have been building towards an archetype, then it will be a pretty sour experience for them.

It’s not as black or white as you think. You can create a scene where you are in training, give some context and then have the player choose a bow, sword, or whatever and it will be pretty clear what those choices will do. Maybe after combat class, you get a choice to go to the library or practice speeches to increase other stats, which will also set the tone and the setting of the game, but it’s not the only way to do it, at the end of the day, there is an infinity of ways of implementing this in an immersive fashion.

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I’ll like to know more about that. The one I used I had to copy a short section of text each time cause it’s limited. If there’s a way to make it automatically correct things I’ve never seen it.

Can’t a death be used to let the player know there are hard fails in the game? And let him/her know not every choice leads to success? Is that too bad of a thing? Or it makes things more interesting cause they’ll have to think twice next time they encounter a challenge?

True, I’ll try crank my imagination gear when I start correct those things.

Btw, I’ve implemented a checkpoint save system in game at the beginning of almost every chapter. I’ve been on top of this project so long I didn’t thought it was going to be too long for a demo as you said.

Thanks a lot. Wonderful feedback.

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Just get the Grammarly plugin (I don’t think I’m allowed to post a link), but the way I use it when I write in CS is I paste bits from CSIDE in a notepad or something, and then it highlights with red the mistakes and after I correct them, I paste them back in CSIDE. Sometimes it gives you the wrong solution if the sentence is a bit more complex, but 99% of the time it works.

It depends, I’m not a fan of dying in single-player video games, that are not skill-oriented, but that’s another rabbit hole. The issue with dying when you choose the wrong stats is that you have to ask yourself how back should the checkpoint be so that the player can make other choices so that the outcome changes. I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say I’m playing a game and I have a check point at the start of chapter 3. My stats are 15 strength, 15 dexterity, and 15 intelligence. At the end of the chapter, I have choices that require either 30 str, 30 dex, or 15 intelligence. On the way there I can increase one of my stats by 10. I am now in a scenario where it is impossible to finish the game because there are not combinations to pick my stats so that I pass the checks.

It’s fine if not all paths lead to success, but you have to ask yourself why are you offering those choices in the first place. Is it to make the game harder? If so, where does the difficulty come from? If not all builds are viable, then you are essentially punishing some players for making certain choices while rewarding others for the same seemingly arbitrary choices. You would have to telegraph which choices are “good” or “bad” before the player chooses so they don’t feel cheated. But if stats get in the way, you may have made the bad choices 5 choices ago without even knowing. This is the design problem I see with “fail” states in Interactive Fiction, you have to have a clear objective with them besides making the player go back x pages.

Those are if you die, what I was referring to is the Dashingdon plugin saves, where you can close the tab and continue the playthrough later. Now if I close the tab, I can’t go back to where I was.

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Ohh sh*t, I’ve coded myself everything inside the game. I’ll take a look at that and see what I can do.
Edit: Do you have a link where I can get that save system? I can’t manage to find it.

I understand what you say. I think I have balanced the game well enough, but I’ll have to see what the players say about that.

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Sorry, I just saw your edit now. In order to add save slots, you have to use this command in your startup file

*sm_init {game_id} | {number_of_saveslots}

So, for your game, it will be something like this

*sm_init katewing | 8

Next time you upload your game to Dashingdon, the save dropdown will appear. You also have to comment/delete this line when running quick test and random test because the interpreter will not recognize the command and give you an error.

I just played chapter 2 and a bit of 3 and all I have to say is THE MC HAS WINGS??? . This feels like a very important detail that should have been presented in the first chapters and it seemed like a useful ability to use in the first chapter in certain encounters. Unless, of course, the MC has to hide this, but it has to be clear from the story if that’s the case.

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Oh, it was that easy. I found some things about a save system but it wasn’t this. Also, I realized (after I tried and nothing happened) that you have to enter the “edit details” on the Dashingdon page and enable the plugin. Thank you, the save system is implemented now.

Yes, She has wings and hides herself from almost everyone. There’s a way in chapter 1 that if you mess it up there’s no other way than to use them. I thought it could be fun to show she is so used to hiding them that the player finds out after the first chapter.

I’m currently working on the artwork and correcting the grammar as you’ve advised me. I’ll make a revision log on the post to keep track of everything. Thanks!

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I find the mechanic of the player not knowing about something that is core to the MC a bit strange in the current format, and that is mainly because you are narating in the 2nd person:“you think”, “you feel”, “you hate”, etc. This implies that I, as the player am Katewing, during the game I am not only looking through her eyes, but I am her.

Taking this into account, I find it weird that I wouldn’t know something about myself. It could work in the 3rd person “Katewing does, Katewing thinks”, etc. This poses other limitations as well, but it’s the only solution I see if you want to conceal information like that. All of this is only my opinion of course.

Coincidentally, I want to do a similar mechanic in the game I’m working on (it’s not yet implemented), where the MC has hidden information for the player, but I use 1st and 3rd person naration and there is also a player character in the game that is separate from the character you are controlling.

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Okay, I’m glad I’m not the only one doing something like that :joy:. I hope it doesn’t ruin the game or I’ll have to do something about it.

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Hello everyone. I don’t want to be annoying, but I was wondering (besides the two people that already commented) if someone else has read something, or stopped at some point for whatever reason (or if you are still going, keep going, I didn’t want to interrupt).
I already did the first pass on Grammarly, but I’ll love to have some more feedback to learn from you and keep trying to improve. Ty!

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Im back and gunna read!

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Hello there, I’m not the best at helpful commentary and things of the sort but I hope this helps! English is also not my native tongue so take some of the suggestion and corrections I offer with a grain of salt.

Comments

I liked the story so far and am looking forward to see where it takes us. I was quite intrigued by the “great door” and what you’ll make with it. I’m also curious to see why Kate is the way she is, as in, why the wings and all that entails, but I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

I can’t believed Ben pushed us, what a meanie. I won’t forget it >:(

I liked Hal (the stranger we find in the woods) and hope we see more of him.

I did not like the bard we find at the inn. I can’t tell you why but he just made me a bit peeved. But that’s more of a me problem rather than anything else.

Some Questions

First of all I was wondering, how old is Kate? And what sort of world does she live in? As in, is it a medieval setting or a bit more modern than that, or is it something we the players will have to wait and see?

Also what is sanras? Or is it something we aren’t supposed to know just yet?

Another thing I couldn’t help to wonder about is why is this story locked to Kate considering what I’ve seen so far. I don’t mean to say it shouldn’t be or anything of the sort, I’m just curious. And what I mean by this is that, as is standard for this sort of games, I can’t understand why not let the player pick their own name or even their gender, as so far it doesn’t seem like the story needs for it to be a girl named Kate. I’m not saying to make the MC a blank slate or anything of the sort, as they can be a set character with their set personality, backstory and goals that you, the author, define, whilst nevertheless allowing the player to customize the character a bit. I feel it would help gain a broader audience to the story as well as help people relate a bit more to the MC. From what I’ve seen in this forum, people like creating a character of their own, looks wise at least, even if the personality, goals and backstory is locked. I hope this doesn’t come off as rude, and if it does my sincerest apologies, I really don’t mean to impose or say you should do this. It’s just a sincere question and suggestion. In the end, the story is your own and you should do with it as you like.

Small Errors

Sorry I can´t upload pictures unfortunately so I can only point out errors in text form. Anyway, here’s what I’ve found:

  • “#look for an in.” → This is in a choice where the look should be capitalized;
  • “…what you already felt, But it is…” → The But shouldn’t be capitalized;
  • “#Threat him.” → In this choice it should be “Threaten him”.
  • “…you stop it! are you deaf skinny…” → I believe the are should be capitalized (not sure).
  • “…you find a clear without many…” → I think you meant a clearing?
  • In the stat page: Charisma is missing an a.
  • “…and objects on the closing tents.” → I think it should be “in the closing tents” since the objects are inside and not on top.
  • " He laughs whit his…" → With is misspelled.
  • “… really good on been stealthy…” → Should be “…really good on being stealthy…”
  • “…think I’m stupid or you are stupid enough to believe I’ll believe you?” → “…or are you stupid…”
  • “…Ben is nowhere to find…” → “…Ben is nowhere to be found…”
Suggestions

“Considering that-.” He cut mid-sentence “Oh forget it.” → For me this sentence sounds a bit odd, in specific the “He cuts mid-sentence”. Maybe “he stops himself mid sentence” would be better?

“You nod and tranquilize yourself as you think of another subject to talk about.” → Maybe instead of tranquilize use calm? You use this term a couple times and some of them, like this one, feels a bit stiff and formal, at least for me.

“…fewer problems traduce to more safety…” → I suggest using “translate” instead “traduce”, I think it’s more appropriate.

“…finding ways to get you annoyed.” → “finding ways to annoy you” sounds more fluid in my opinion.

A minor code suggestion I offer is to, when talking about miles vs km and things like that, you tend to say, for example, “…this is x miles way (y kilometers), and…” which can cut a bit of the immersion considering what’s in brackets is not something I presume the character actually says/thinks. As such either keeping one or the other or creating a variable for it.

For example:

*create meter false

*fake_choice
   #Use meters.
       *set meter true
  #Use metric.

"The town's square is @{meter x meters|y miles} away from here."

With the multireplace function you can keep the either metric or not based on players choice, not needing to put both. This of course is a very minor thing, but I thought it might be helpful because it shows how the very handy multireplace feature works! I don’t know or not if you are aware of it, but if you weren’t before now you are I guess :)) ( Here’s the link for it if you want to check it out better: Multireplace | ChoiceScript Wiki | Fandom )

And that is all. I hope I didn’t come off as rude or anything of the sort, and that this post actually helped.

I’ll be sure to keep an eye in future updates. Hope you have a good day!

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Hello, Thanks a lot for taking the time to read and go through all the things you’ve mentioned! And no, it’s not aggressive, offensive, or anything remotely like that, after all, I’m releasing this to get criticized and pointed out the things I’ve screwed up so I can try to improve. So, thank you.

Ok, let's start with some answers…

I’m really glad you liked it! Yes, believe me, there are a lot of things other than the “great door” that’ll come as the story progresses.

One point for less for Ben and one up for Hal I guess?

You didn’t like Degor? Really? I thought he was gentlemen enough.



Kate is around the age of a grown-up teen, not that small to need a trigger warning sort of thing, though in the flashbacks she is a lot younger. And the world is a fantasy world, let’s say, kind of medieval yes, there is a lot of world-building done behind the curtain, but I guess I didn’t want to bore the readers with it. I think my biggest inspiration regarding that is TLOTR. And I still have to draw the map now that you mention it.

Sanras is the name given to the “magic” of the world, like in star wars is called the “force” one could say. It’s also an entire language that’s spoken to use its powers.

As for why it’s locked: When I started with the idea a long time ago, I was trying to put my time and effort into other things than MMORPG games, and computer games in general, that didn’t get me anywhere cause I always ended up playing alone. So between all the things that occur to me in which I still could keep using the computer I decided to try to learn to write, from 0, cause I didn’t knew a thing back then, and my creativity was horrible whichever way you look at it. I also tried to learn programming to make my own game and release it to the playstore (which I miserably failed).

But back to the point, at that time I was trying to focus on learning the basic things and learning the choicescript code. I can’t recall all this thing about pronouns and how people identifies with them even being much of a thing. Adding to that, my main language doesn’t officially approve grammatically the pronunciation for someone other than she/he, so it’s something that I don’t know how to manage, I have no experience with it whatsoever, and never got the opportunity to even discern what’s the difference between all that, and even less on how to portray those things in a character so it can fill all those buckets. I guess I’m more like an “old school” if I could say, and well, the project kept growing and growing and I kept focusing on the story and plot more than anything else, on how to tell a story, and how to express something through words, which for me, is already super hard to do, besides also the language barrier I had to keep learning beyond the little that I knew. In the end, the story started from Kate’s eyes from the beginning, and that’s what I kept working on since then.

So, if you ask me, of course, I would like to have gender choice and customization and all that, I’ll love to please all my readers and have a broad audience, besides the income this project could possibly generate, it’s obviously a good thing to achieve. But in the end, what I was trying to do is to tell a story, like any normal book, and learn thousands of things in the process and know that are thousands more to keep learning.
I’m happy if at least people give it an opportunity, but I kind of know beforehand that it won’t gonna be a top tier cause of that. I’m not complaining though, after all, this started out more as a personal project, but it grew more than I could have ever imagined back then.


I hope I could answer your questions, if not, just let me know and I'll try harder. I'll take a look at all those errors you've mentioned and get them fixed, along with the strange words I picked.
Btw, I'm still not offended so you'll have to try a lot harder than that :rofl: Thanks, really, for all you've brought up to my attention, it helps a lot.

Edit: I took a look at all the errors you brought up to me already (didn’t update the files yet) I’m gonna take a look at the multireplace thing tomorrow and get that sorted out too before updating. Thank you, it’s all really helpful.

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Interesting…

I like Ben enough, but man he sure did just throw me off a cliff ahah.

Oh he was, he was. It’s more of a me problem, one of being very mistrustful. A stranger being awfully nice for no discernible reason just raised my suspicious flags. Really no fault of the character. And that reminds me, I did find quite the scene where we made him start playing when we wanted to hide quite funny.

Ah yes I certainly can relate, it’s the bane of my existence: wanting to lore dump but not wanting to annoy the readers. My solution for this was 1. have skip-able lore dumps, as in, the player will only learn if they want to ask and the section will be skipped if they don’t without penalties; 2. in the stat page have an option to check general world lore that is common knowledge for the people of this world. If this works or not, I’m not sure but it is what I’m doing.

Oh, very neat. I am always a fan of a language based magic system.

I see, that makes sense. In the end you should write something you enjoy writing and reading, and if it doesn’t become popular so be it, especially if you only intended it as a personal project rather than one set for publication.

It did! Thanks for taking the time to reply.

It’s hard to convey tone in messaging and I was afraid of sounding too authoritative with my suggestions, but hey glad to hear it didn’t come across as that!

As someone who is currently writing an IF story of my own and uses multireplace a lot I couldn’t recommend it more. It’s so so helpful, especially when there’s a lot of small variables at play.

Oh just remembered (and sorry if I’m being to annoying), but how much does player choices alter Kate as a character? Or is her personality more fixed, the player being more of a guide to her actions rather than a guide to her thoughts and goals.

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