Magium - WIP - Interactive novel

Thanks for the compliment regarding grammar and spelling.

The thing is, when I create a story, I always start with the characters. I first estabilish what the characters act like, what their motivations are, their beliefs, their moral code, and the events that made them into what they are now. After I do all of this, I think of various situations and plots, and think how my characters would act and interact with each other in each scenario.

I am currently at a point where I can’t really change the fundamental traits of the characters anymore, because I have a lot of the story in my head already, and it all revolves around these two characters, and all the other characters they will interact with.

I can’t make Flower be more afraid of danger, because her bravery/foolhardiness is a key aspect of her personality. She had to become this optimistic and brave in order to remain sane after all the hardships she’s been through in the fallen utopia she comes from. If she weren’t this strong, mentally, she would likely have become pretty broken by now, and that would be a story I would not like to tell.

This girl has been a pickpocket for a gang of hoodlums at the age of 5, and she’s been forced to do various jobs along the years, like scrubbing the decks of ships, doing cleaning duty in the army and even participating in the circus. Orphans like her are exploitable resources in her city of birth, and she’s probably been through more hardships and seen more tragedy than most normal people see in their entire lifespan. These kinds of things mature people beyond their age, but in her heart she still remains a 9 year old girl (actually she is almost 10, but will never really reach that age because the soul fusion stops the aging process) .

This is why the girl will constantly switch between childish ideas and well thought-out plans, because she has matured more than other people in certain aspects, but remains a child in other aspects. Her naivety will also play a role as the story progresses.

Furthermore, the girl is also highly interiorized, which can be seen by the fact that she practically lives in her own mind, and considers the real her is the one living inside her own mind, and not the one in the real world. This is one of the reasons she was able to confront the banshee, and why the soul fusion occured. Highly interiorized people tend to mature at a younger age than extroverts because they spend a lot of time with introspection.(although they will be more awkward with social interaction)

The fact that the banshee is a malevolent spirit is a reasonable assumption to make, given the fact that she possesses creatures every few years. The reality of the matter is a little different, however. Banshees are basically like parasites. They are magical beings that have been cursed to live in the material plane (most other magical beings live in the magical plane of existence). As they do not have a body of their own, they cannot live in the material plane unless they acquire a body. Had she known how to do soul fusion in the past, our banshee may have considered doing so in order to not kill the host. Until now, she didn’t know of any other way to survive except taking over other bodies completely. There was only one documented case of soul fusion in the past, and that was about 600 years ago.

If I were to classify Illuna’s alignment on an Evil-Neutral-Good axis, I would place her somewhere between neutral and evil, but leaning more towards neutral. She does not actively desire the harm of others. She is ruthless, and will not hesitate to do what is necessary in order to survive, but she also follows a sort of personal code of honor. She wasn’t ruthless and cold for all of her life. It’s a direct result of having been hunted by humans for decades, and also of having been betrayed by her mentor figure a few years back.

Now, you say that you have trouble getting invested in the girl’s character because you don’t really know anything about her. But think about this. In what story when two characters meet, do you immediately find out about their background stories? Don’t you usually get a chance to see them act in various situations and find out their history bit by bit as the story progresses? Would you normally stop reading a story because you don’t find out soon enough about a character’s backstory?

I think this is less about not knowing about the girl, and more about not liking her personality. And I have no problem with that. I got into this knowing that this is a hit or miss kind of thing, and that there will probably be a lot of people who won’t really like the writing style or like the characters enough to consider finishing the game.

I just hope that this won’t be the general opinion after I’ve finished the first book.

As always though, thanks for your feedback!

I will have to agree with thoose above me. I think the whole plot as a banshee is great but i find the whole already set character with a pre-defined backstory, not for my taste because experience wise from other games were i feel like the Mc, here i dont feel like the banshee at all.

I just feel forced to play a Banshee, that i dont even have the control over with either its name or gender. Actually gender locked isent a problem initself, nor is the namn locket. Just look at the Guenevere (WIP). However what does bother me is that i am already a water Banshee. And that my options for character growing is so limited and bland.

(I ment no harm, just giving my options xD)

Either way good luck with youre game @Nemeean_lion and have a great day!

What I’m going for with the opening chapters is not really to make the player identify himself with the main character or get attached to the main characters. It is more about keeping the story, the characters and their interactions entertaining enough to keep you going. It’s not supposed to get you emotionally involved at first, it’s supposed to make you curious enough to want to see what’s on the next page.

Once you find out more about the characters, and once you see how the main character will start to change the more choices you make, you may start to actually get attached to the characters, which will catch you by surprise.

You can’t just expect a character that’s lived for more than half a century to instantly start changing her personality at the beginning of the story just because you get to make some choices. First of all, as in every story, you first need to find out about the character more, so that the character development of that character actually means something to you. Secondly, in order for her to actually develop as a character she will need to be pushed to her limits, and be conflicted. How she acts in those key situations and how she develops as a result will mostly be up to you.

The same goes for the girl. Once you get back into her town of birth, she will be forced to confront her past and make decisions based on that.

I think, as you say, that one of the main problems I’m having here is that almost every single one of the other interactive novels available has you, specifically as the main character and there are no real examples out there that allow you to make choices for a predefined character.

I am going against the current here, and that’s always rather risky and dangerous. Regardless, I’ll keep going in the hopes that people will give this a shot out of curiosity, and gradually get captivated by the story as they read on.

Thank you for the encouragement.

The only actual interactive novel I’ve seen so far that gives you a somewhat predefined character is Wizard’s Choice, by Delight Games. I am curious, did anyone here play or like that game?

firstly, i would like you to know that you are by no means ‘going against the current’. that simply isn’t true, considering most interactive fiction works have a predefined character. yes, most. cogs, in this respect, are the odd one out, providing more customization in character development than most other works in this genre ever do. so, while a lot of people on this particular forum might have some difficulty adjusting to the way your game is played, that is simply because it’s not what they’re used to seeing on this forum. it’s not because you’re daring to tread new ground.

you want a captivating read and you do have that, but the format you chose makes the story nearly unreadable for me. the font is unnecessarily massive and touches the edges-which is both distracting and irritating-and, in combination with the straight black-and-white color scheme, the ui is less clunky and more plain hard to look at.

interface issues aside, i honestly think you’d get on better if you likened it to cyoa books, because that is essentially what it is. people go in expecting something similar to cogs, when cyoa books and cogs are very different in their approaches and nuances.

story-wise, i think it’d be much more appealing to younger folks than someone like me. i find the story charming, though incredibly silly, and i honestly can’t invest myself in the events that happen to either of the main characters. i also feel iffy on flower’s development, because it just seems like you railroaded her into being the character you want her to be. the reasoning, to me, seems underdeveloped at best, and the way it’s presented seems… arrogant? like you’re talking about things you have a limited view on. that said, i am generally biased against ‘x happened so she’s like this’ as a presentation for a character to begin with.

i commend your attitude regarding the feedback you’ve received, and i appreciate that you clearly know what you’re going for, as well. that’s valuable, and it’s refreshing to see someone so driven, but right now i really think you need to consider who you want your audience to be and tailor your presentation to that audience. i hope none of this came off too harshly; that is not my intention, and i apologize that not much of this was about your actual game–there isn’t enough content for me to say much about it.

3 Likes

the Girls quite iritiating. i can only hope that in future this game will no push you into certain choices so much.
Also possibility of evil route ?
Also as for making decisions for both girl and bansee.
have look and this old game of thrones RPG.
it shows how dialogues between two PC can be done.
http://www.gameofthrones-rpg.com/

Could it be that I have finally met someone who writes longer posts than I do?

You’re probably right about keeping Flower’s backstory out of the game. Backstories are useful for authors, but they have little to offer readers.

So I played through a couple more times (after a bit of sleep), and I realized something: I like the banshee just fine. Maybe I don’t actually like the banshee because it has an unpleasant personality and it just tried to kill a little girl, but I understand the banshee. It has feelings and goals, and its actions make sense in light of those feelings and goals.

Consider a character from a different game with a similar premise as yours (strong female protagonist is possessed by an Irish spirit and lives a hard life in a dangerous world): Beyond Two Souls, chapter 3. We meet adult Jodie Holmes for the first time. All we know about her backstory is that she is possessed by a spirit and was subject to a lot of scientific testing as a child. In other words, we know practically nothing about her as a character. But this game has some extraordinary writers. It takes them exactly 55 seconds to establish her character (video).

Bam. Fifty-five seconds. Now you know Jodie Holmes. She’s a complex character with a lot of backstory, but that can wait. They’ve captured enough of her personality to establish the character. Now you can play.

It might be that the issue I have with Flower is not that I don’t like her (I don’t dislike her either), or that I don’t know her. It might be that her character isn’t established in that first impression. If I only use the information available in the game itself, I get a different picture of Flower than the one you offer in her post.

As you stand there, frozen, the girl shows you a big grin and says: “Phew, That was a close one! I thought I lost you there. I’m Flower, by the way! Nice to meet you! What’s your name?”

Flower’s response to the invasion of an alien force is to engage it, welcome it, and ask its name. This is a girl who is extremely trusting of strangers, and who feels no need to protect her own privacy. She has lived a sheltered life, and has probably never been hurt or betrayed by anyone.

“People don’t call me anything,” you tell her bluntly. “I never talk to them.”

The girl appears shocked. “But then, don’t you feel lonely?” she asks you, concerned.
[…]
I don’t know what that means[,]" you tell her, starting to get annoyed. The girl mistakes your statement for an invitation to explain the term to you.

“Loneliness is that feeling you have when you have no one to talk to when you’re sad, and no one to help you when you’re in trouble.”

This is probably my favorite part of your demo. It shows a very human side to both characters. The banshee is a loner and an extreme introvert. Flower is an extrovert. She does not understand the appeal of avoiding interaction with others when you are sad or in trouble. She probably has supportive parents and a lot of friends. She is open and comfortable sharing her feelings. Shy children probably find her intimidating.

“How are you here?” you ask the girl.

“Pardon?”
[…]
“I’ve done this possession thing dozens of times before, and I’ve never encountered any sort of resistance. You almost had me dragged out of your mind, and then you appeared here, in front of me, like it’s perfectly normal.”

I’m sorry you almost got dragged out…it wasn’t intentional.

She Pauses.

“You are the one that gave me all these magic powers aren’t you.”

Flower reacts to her possession, with its attendant magic powers, in much the same way she might react to an unexpected guest offering her a new hat. This means that

  1. Magic powers are extremely common, and
  2. Unlike the banshee, Flower sees nothing wrong with this situation. She has complete faith that nothing bad can happen to her. A response this extreme implies that nothing bad has ever happened to her. She has lived an extraordinarily sheltered life, after all.

a few dozens of trolls and goblins start emerging one by one from behind the trees.

This is not a chance encounter. These creatures approached stealthily en masse, revealing themselves only when they were about to strike. This is a coordinated assault by a presumably armed band of roughly fifty monsters. They must be attacking the girl’s home. (You never established the physical setting, and Flower’s demeanor suggests she is in a safe and familiar place—most likely her home.)

This makes sense. Someone as sheltered as Flower probably comes from a wealthy family. The fact that Flower is unfazed by this indicates that such assaults on her home are frequent, and never have negative consequences. She lives in a very safe, secure, well-defended place. Flower has never been in serious danger.

As much as you hate taking orders from a little girl, her logic is sound, and her plan is exactly what you were about to propose.

Flower is smart, and probably well educated.

You can see why it might be hard to relate to a character like Flower. After a first impression like this, any attempt to to portray her as introverted or troubled may risk coming across as inconsistent writing (rather than depth or complexity). Keep the personality, but maybe tweak the first impression. Let us see some hope, motivation, or feeling. We don’t have to like her. (We know she will develop as a character.) But we do have to care.

Absolutely. Other authors have posted demos here, ignored requests for more customizable characters, and still produced successful games. Customizing characters is a CoG thing.

2 Likes

@OfficerRattlesnake

Yeah, I think I might have underestimated the overall unreadability of the web interface when I uploaded it, and looking back, I think it may have caused a lot of people from here to just take a glance at it and then turn away. On mobile the font scales accordingly to the screen and the writing doesn’t actually hit the border like that. I will also add a dark mode, with white writing on black background later on.

I will try to remake the interface when I add chapter 4.

I don’t know how old you are so I’m not sure what you mean by “younger folks” . Do you mean people in their twenties or teens? The story gets a little violent later on, so my PG rating may turn out to be a bit high. The story sort of alternates between lighter and darker tones as it advances. Which part of the story do you find silly? How the girl acts, or the fantasy and the combat part of it?

You’re right about me railroading the girl’s personality, because I first thought of her character and then her background, which explains her character. I needed her as a comic relief character who is naive but intelligent at the same time, and who is the strong optimistic type to contrast with the banshee’s cold cynism. Perhaps there wouldn’t be any realistic person in the world that would have the necessary character traits to end up how she did. I probably couldn’t find any way to prove it if I wanted to, so maybe it’s best I close the subject. I didn’t mean to come off as an arrogant know-it-all. Most people will likely stop at the “I like the girl” or “I don’t like the girl” and won’t think any further anyway.

But thanks for the encouragement and the honest approach.

@CaesarCzech

It depends on what you see as an evil route, really. I don’t think there will be obvious evil/good choices like you see in most rpgs nowadays, but there will be several options that could be considered evil. Even now, in chapter three, you can decide if you want to leave your attackers alive or not, and if you want them to suffer as they die or no.

Depending on your personal moral code, and where you draw the line at being evil, there may be several options of interest to you. You will get to break your promises, betray your friends, kill the girl and take her body, smash through a city’s defenses and conquer it, kill other different characters, and join the villains at the end for your own benefit, with the option of betraying them at the last second in order to try and take all the power for yourself. I think there may also be an option to help the dragon that’s been terrorizing the lands somewhere in there. So there will be choices that can be catalogued as evil. As I write all of this and remember at which point the story is now, I realize I have a very long way to go.

As for making decisions for the girl, I’m not sure if I’ll do that yet, but if I do, it’ll probably only be for one chapter towards the end.

@BabbleYaggle

Wow. I can see you put a lot of work in your last post, especially since you can’t copy paste any of the words from my site, so you had to write all that by hand. Looking at our two posts, I’d say it’s a close call, but I think yours is still longer. You’ll need to work hard from now on if you want to hang on to your title, though!

Flower’s response to the invasion of an alien force is to engage it,
welcome it, and ask its name. This is a girl who is extremely trusting
of strangers, and who feels no need to protect her own privacy. She has
lived a sheltered life, and has probably never been hurt or betrayed by
anyone.

I can see why this comes off as the first impression, but I’m not sure exactly how I would work around this. You only get to see how the girl reacts to Illuna, and that is not a good generalization. The girl is currently in her own mind. She’s never had someone come visit this place before. She is really excited to finally have a visitor in here, because this is her favorite place in the world, the only place where she truly feels at home. And she is not wrong to feel safe here either. In all of the instances where you try to fight the girl in the first few chapters you will fail completely. The girl is very confident about her powers and the degree of control she has in this place, and has never treated the banshee as a real threat. If you try to fight her, and keep fighting her in the beginning, you will see the girl treats this all as a game, which infuriates the banshee, but she still can’t really do anything about it.

The girl acts rather goofy most of the time, but when things get really serious, she knows how to act serious too. I tried to evidence this in the first chapter, where you have to fight the goblins, after you’ve exhausted yourselves fighting each other. It’s a bit difficult to show all of the exposition in this CYOA format, so some of this info will get lost on the way.

I tried to summarize all of this at the beginning of chapter two. If you chose to talk with the girl in the first chapter, you will get this dialogue sequence:

“Girl, do you spend a lot of time here, inside your own
mind?”

“Oh, I do! This is my favorite place in the world. It
does feel a little lonely, at times. But not anymore! Now you’re here with
me!” she grins.

This must be why she was able to fight you in this
conceptual realm. Look at her. Look at this place. She’s practically living
here. No wonder she can interact with you inside her mind.

“But not anymore! Now you’re here with me!” → This is where I try to show that the girl is really happy to finally have a companion in this lonely place she calls her mind. She’s wished for a companion in here for so long, that she is willing to delude herself into thinking the banshee is actually a good person, and that she’s just acting how she is because she is grumpy, or socially awkward. There will be more discussions between the two of them that will put emphasis on this, but a bit later on.

This is probably my favorite part of your demo. It shows a very human side to both characters. The banshee is a loner and an extreme introvert. Flower is an extrovert. She does not understand the appeal of avoiding interaction with others when you are sad or in trouble. She probably has supportive parents and a lot of friends. She is open and comfortable sharing her feelings. Shy children probably find her intimidating.

Flower is by no means shy, but being introverted isn’t really all about shyness. I’m not sure what your experience with social awkwardness is, but there are certain kids that can’t manage to really make friends no matter how much they want to, and how long they try. They would love to make friends, and are very open with other people, but somehow they are always misunderstood and alienated. That is the case of Flower. She would like to consider all the other orphans she’s talked with her friends, she calls them her friends, but deep down, she knows none of them really are. Despite the fact that she acts the way she does, being constantly alienated by others, and going through all those hardships has led Flower to add more and more substance to her little home in her mind. She made her own room, the room she knew she would never have, she decorated it, and soon she started considering her real self to be the one in her own mind, and the body to be some sort of puppet she controls with strings (there is a sequence in the first chapter where she fights the ogre and pretends to control a puppet on strings and not her own body).

Flower reacts to her possession, with its attendant magic powers, in
much the same way she might react to an unexpected guest offering her a
new hat. This means that

  1. Magic powers are extremely common, and
  2. Unlike the banshee,
    Flower sees nothing wrong with this situation. She has complete faith
    that nothing bad can happen to her. A response this extreme implies that
    nothing bad has ever happened to her. She has lived an extraordinarily sheltered life, after all.

Magic powers aren’t “extremely” common, but they are common enough that everyone in the world knows about them. The girl discovered her magic powers a few weeks ago, so she had a lot of time to test them. She’s been very surprised when she got them at first, but she has been practicing how to use them pretty much nonstop from the moment she got them, so there’s no reason for her to be shocked or reticent now. She knows she is in full control of them, she knows the full extent of her powers, and is confident that she won’t hurt herself using them(actually the fire is magical in nature and can’t hurt its wielder, but that will be explained later on). She is acting so calm about it, because the only thing that was missing from the puzzle for her was how exactly she got her powers. She finally gets it now, after she’s met the banshee, so she asks her just to make sure.

The banshee is shocked by this because she’s been in a dormant state for all this time. She hasn’t really possessed a human in a long time and she’s forgotten that getting magic is one of the side effects. This wasn’t really of much consequence to her in the past, since she’s never had any trouble with the awakening process, so she hasn’t really paid much attention to this side effect before.

This is not a chance encounter. These creatures approached stealthily
en masse, revealing themselves only when they were about to strike.
This is a coordinated assault by a presumably armed band of roughly
fifty monsters. They must be attacking the girl’s home. (You never
established the physical setting, and Flower’s demeanor suggests she is
in a safe and familiar place—most likely her home.)

This makes sense. Someone as sheltered as Flower probably comes from a
wealthy family. The fact that Flower is unfazed by this indicates that
such assaults on her home are frequent, and never have negative
consequences. She lives in a very safe, secure, well-defended place. Flower has never been in serious danger.

Ok, now you’re taking stuff out of context to fit your previous assumptions. I did not estabilish the setting. I only did that in the second chapter. They were fighting in a clearing in the middle of the forest. I’ll have to go back and edit that in when I first describe the pillar of flame and water, because as you imply, it is a bit confusing for the reader.

But it’s going too far to assume the girl is at home from the lack of description. If it were the case, then the pillar should have completely obliterated her house and left only rubble around her, with maybe the corpses of her family lying somewhere around there. Even if she weren’t inside her house but in her front yard, there still should have been some sort of charred remains of her fence, at least some people running around scared, her dog whimpering in the corner. Something… The complete lack of description on the effects caused by the pillar should at least hint that she is in a place relatively far away from civilisation.

The monsters did not approach stealthily, they came from within the forest. I’ve already stated in one of the previous paragraphs that something as large and unnatural as that pillar of flame and water is bound to attract some unwanted attention. Looking back, I didn’t outright state that the monsters came there out of curiosity to see what generated the pillar. I stated it clearly in the path where you fight the girl, but here I guess it could be understood that they just randomly popped out of the forest, with no link to the pillar you just made disappear. I’ll edit that in too.

So, no, it is not a chance encounter, because they didn’t all just happen to be there, but it wasn’t an organized assault either. It was just a bunch of monsters that were minding their own business in the forest, who saw that pillar from a great distance and approached it to see what was going on.

Flower is smart, and probably well educated.

Flower is indeed smart, but I wouldn’t really call her well educated. Her plan comes from the fact that she’s fought these kinds of monsters before. She’s done a lot of that in the past few weeks while she was out testing her powers. That’s why she knows trolls are vulnerable to fire. Before she had her powers she was forced to hide, and make use of her acrobacy skills she got from the circus to escape from the monsters and stay alive in the wilderness.

So Flower has been in serious danger, only enough time has passed that she is now confident she can handle a few lowly monsters with her newly acquired powers.

So in conclusion, I am not sure I can change the first impression Flower makes except for the few minor tweaks I need to edit in to make the setting more clear. At first, her purpose in the story is mostly comic relief. The only thing I’m banking on for the first chapters is that the readers will not be bored, and will be curious enough to keep on reading up to the chapters where things get progressively more serious. And that’s where I hope they will start actually caring for these two characters, without realizing it.

Maybe that is a bad idea. Maybe most people will decide they don’t really care about either of the characters and they will quit the story because of that. It may certainly be the case judging by the few reactions I got on this forum. But then again, it may also be that some people from here that might have liked it were driven away by the horrible interface. I cannot know. I’ll try to fix the interface by the next chapter, and will continue posting here on the off chance that there are some people here who would actually like to keep reading but have not made a comment.

I am also thinking of writing another story with a character that’s lost his memory and tries to find out who he was. Since he won’t really know much of himself, he won’t have previous events to base his decisions upon, and there will be a lot more freedom with the choices he makes. I could then ask the player how he feels about certain things, and make the game more akin to other COG games. I am probably going to keep the gender, appearance and name locked, though. I don’t really feel like making a character creator sequence in a text game.

I’ll have to decide if I’ll write this second story while I write the one with the banshee, or after I’ve finished it.

And with all of this said and done, I believe I may well have unknowingly won the title of most verbose poster…

fantastic, that would help the readability immensely! also, thank you for elaborating on how it appears on mobile.

and, in this case, i don’t mean ‘black-on-white’ literally–that is, i don’t mean that you should simply change black to white and white to black. i mean that you should change white to a light color and black to a dark color, and then add a mode that reverses the new colors, instead of straight #FFFFFF or #000000. i recommend you look through and/or try out a few two-color palettes, see what you like.

i’m 33, so yes! young adults and adolescents.

the premise, the tones and themes–so… all of it, really. but more specifically, it is primarily the fantasy and combat parts of it, yes, though flower’s attitude also plays a part.

i figured that much, but i would also like to say it is entirely possible for someone to realistically end up the way flower did. @BabbleYaggle outlines one way she could, in fact! a lot of children end up like her–their naivete comes from their lack of experience and very limited view of the world, even if they are academically and practically intelligent. and, you know, optimism is just her general disposition toward things. spend a bit more time thinking on it if it’s important, because i think there’s a lot you could do with this.

by the way, the reason i said you came off as arrogant is because the things she has been through don’t necessarily have to have been bad or difficult for her to go through, and, once more, the presentation of ‘x happened so she’s like this’ is very unappealing.

also, this particular line came off as disrespectful and ignorant, considering the examples you provided as being tragic.

i’m going to ask you some questions on this–if she’s been a pickpocket:
-how did she feel about it? how does she feel about it now?
-was she forced into it? did they manipulate or threaten her? did they just ask her and she complied? did she willingly join? did she willingly steal things before and get away with it, and the gang was just like ‘kid’s cute and good at this, let’s get her on board’?
-what did she do to be successful at stealing (and thus useful to the gang)? or did she need assistance? was she the assistant, rather than the doer? i mean… you’d have to be a freakishly tall toddler if you’re reaching into adult pockets.
-did she trust them and enjoy their company, or did she loathe them? were they like her family? did she feel safe around them? did she have mixed feelings on any of these things?
-did she, at that point, know stealing is wrong?
-did she hate stealing from people? or did she love it? (optimistic people can still be amoral or immoral, and i find a little that more interesting anyway) why or why not?
-did she need to steal, or did she do it of her own accord? did the group need to?
-did she have a code as to who she stole from, and rebelled against the gang when they asked her to break it? did she break it, deciding not to rebel?
-how, when, and why did she leave? or was she kicked out/abandoned?

depending on the answers, she could have had the time of her life. i don’t know! it doesn’t need to be a bad experience in her eyes and memory, even if pickpocketing and child labor/exploitation are awful things. and i could go on! i could tell you how she might have loved cleaning up the decks of high-class ships and meeting so many different kinds of people, or how she devoted herself to cleaning simply because she loves it and she really needed the money and she got free meals and the army men were really nice to her. i could tell you how she knew orphans are exploitable resources in her home city, and made the most of it, working hard and using her cleverness to stay out of bad situations, keeping the other kids out of bad situations, becoming a hero.

let me say it again, none of the experiences she’s had need to be bad in her eyes, and if they can’t hurt her she doesn’t need to be strong to live through them and be okay. at this point, it’s entirely possible that a girl whose parents told her they ate all her candy has had a harder life than flower because that girl knows what betrayal and disappointment feels like.

and, in a similar way, being an introvert does not necessarily make her more intelligent, more mature, or more socially inept/awkward. it makes her introverted. she could just as easily be less intelligent or mature than her peers because she spends all day in her own head, daydreaming. she could also be a real charmer when it comes to social interactions! we just don’t know.

also, though you weren’t addressing me, i want to bring up some points in contest to yours–

  • if flower has never had anyone come to her headspace, is she
    necessarily right to feel safe? how does she know things will be
    fine, that she has everything under control, if she’s never
    experienced this before in her life and presumably doesn’t know what
    banshees do, or, in general, what mental illnesses do? how does she know that meeting a stranger in her mind and meeting a stranger in real life is different?
  • would it be necessary to work around this, if what you’re trying to convey is that she’s naive? it shows that pretty well!
  • along those lines, perhaps you mean to show she’s overconfident, rather than brave?
  • almost anyone can act goofy most of the time and get serious when
    things are serious. all this is really telling me is that she is capable of expressing herself in more than one way, and that’s sort of expected of most people.
  • if she can control everything in this place and it all feels real to
    her, why hasn’t she imagined up a companion for herself? is she smart
    enough to know imaginary friends aren’t entities of their own and
    thus can’t really be friends, but not smart enough to understand what
    a banshee is and does? she seems a bit young for an existential
    crisis, even if she is in a constant state of dissociation.
  • if her headspace is essentially just a room of some sort (or it appears so, from what i’ve read), why isn’t she working toward recreating it as best as she can in real life and then invite a friend over?
  • why don’t any of the other orphans like her? she doesn’t seem that
    hard to get along with or socially awkward, for a child, and she
    seems to understand well enough what’s expected of her in certain social
    situations. when i think of social awkwardness i think of things one
    would legitimately cringe at. i mean, i was the definition of a
    socially awkward kid, so i know! i can empathize, but i have nothing to empathize with. what’s
    the deal with flower?
  • i suppose there is a difference in how we define ‘extremely’ and ‘a
    lot of time’–which is fine, but makes communication a bit difficult.
  • if everyone in the world knows about them then they’re probably
    extremely common, particularly with a fantasy setting not having the
    ease of finding information that real life has. if absolutely
    everyone knows about them, then they’re probably as common as…
    trees! or something similar!
  • well, really, how many subjects are there that you can master within
    a few weeks, especially something as complicated as magic has the
    potential to be? how does a little orphan girl think of and test
    every single thing that is possible with pyrokinesis within the span
    of a few weeks? how does a little orphan girl have such extraordinary
    control? how does a little orphan girl get as good as a legendary
    battlemage within the span of a few weeks? i mean… it’s… okay?
    but it shouldn’t be a surprise i find the story silly and think it would appeal to a much younger audience.

i would also like to let you know that constant comic relief can make a story unappealing, or yes, even boring. i personally was with the story until flower came into the picture, in fact. you should never make a character appear to exist just for comic relief, because even though your intended audience is probably relatively young, they’re not children. i would say a fair few are likely to tune flower out, and that pretty much kills your story since that’s them completely ignoring your deuteragonist-who is there for large portions of the game-and not caring about anything that happens to her. make her important, not just a literal vessel to carry the story forward. there is a difference between someone not liking a character personally (‘i’d dislike/hate them if i met them’) and not liking a character as a character (‘this is just a bad character’).

I think I may have oversold it with the tragedy and the hardships. I didn’t really mean it in the sense that she has underlying trauma and that she has matured by overcoming it. When I was talking about the fact that she’s seen more tragedy than most people, I was referring to the place she lived in, and the things she’s seen, not to the fact that tragic things happened directly to her. She’s seen orphans die of exhaustion because they were overworked, she’s seen people die of hunger on the street and she’s seen slaves being beaten by their masters in broad daylight. You probably haven’t personally witnessed any of that stuff unless you’re living in one of the really bad third world countries, which is why I made that comment. I didn’t want to get into too much detail as my wall of text was big enough as it was.

Some of those things, she processed, some she didn’t. Not sure if you managed to play it till the end, but at the end of the third chapter, the girl suggests breaking both legs of their attackers so they won’t bother them for a few days. When questioned by the banshee, she simply answers : “That’s how they did it back in my gang, when they wanted to teach people a lesson.”

As you say, Flower is a bit amoral. She hasn’t really had proper education. Actually much of said education comes from this gang. The rest of it comes from the little time she spent with her parents before they were killed. So she can have very strong morals on one side, and on the other side be completely oblivious to the immorality of some of the actions of her gang. She is strongly opposed to killing people, because that is one of the things her parents taught her, but she still believes some of the justifications used by her gang when they did immoral stuff. They said they just stole stuff from the rich people because rich people didn’t really need it. They broke people’s legs and waved it off as if it were nothing more than a slap on the wrist, because you could simply get it healed by white mages. And she believed most of that. That’s where her naivety comes in.

The gang sort of took her in after she lost her parents. They took pity on her when they saw her scrambling through the back alley dumpsters, and they taught her how to steal, and how to survive. So I guess she kind of sees them as some sort of a family. Some of the members she likes more than others. I’ll admit I haven’t really worked out the technical details of how she picked the pockets, how she stole stuff and whether or not she was more the assistant than the doer. She got separated from them when she got captured by some guards when she was out stealing. Since all orphans that have no home or parents are required to work in this city, she was sent to the army, at first, then the ship, and then the circus. She liked the circus most of all, and when they wanted to take her out of the circus and get her working for the ship again (which she loathed), she fled the city in her circus clothes and started living in the wilderness, occasionally sneaking back into the city to get some food.

So she liked her gang, she kind of liked the army, she despised the ship and she loved the circus. She’s seen some bad stuff, been through some bad stuff, but she didn’t let it affect her. She managed to keep her cheerfulness and naivety despite all of it.

I didn’t really make up all of this story just to explain her personality. I already knew what kind of stuff happened in the city she was born in, I knew she was an orphan who ran away from her city, so I sort of filled in the rest of the details. It’s not a perfect story, but it gives me something to work with when the two of them will enter the city.

Now to address your other points:

  • Personally I don’t think the girl was right to think she was safe. She was right in hindsight, because she had blind luck. She had no way of knowing 100% that she would best the banshee, even if she were in her own mind. It just happened to play out that way. Half of that is attributed to her little home sweet home inside her own mind, and the other half is attributed to her natural talent. I think there’s a very fine line between bravery and foolishness. Bravery is when you understand the risks very well, know you’re at a disadvantage but decide to go in anyway. Foolishness is when you go in without even bothering to weigh in the risks. The girl crosses the line between bravery and foolishness quite often, which is why I used the words brave/foolhardy when I described her. The fact that she thinks herself stronger or equal to the banshee before they actually clash is indeed because of her naivety and overconfidence(although overconfidence may be too strong a word here, since the end result is that they were evenly matched after all)
  • about the imaginary friend thing. To me, this isn’t about being smart or stupid. She is both smart enough to know that imaginary friends aren’t real, and smart enough to know banshees can be very dangerous. The key word here is can be dangerous. She knows full well that imaginary friends can’t exist. It is impossible. The banshee being good is however not impossible. She has, after all, her own personality, and can make her own choices, so she can choose to be either good or evil. The girl understands the banshee, and the fact that she needs a body in order to survive. When the banshee attempts to leave, the girl stops her and asks : “Leave? But where?.. You have nowhere else to go…”. She wants to think the banshee is, in her heart, a good person, and that she just needs someone to be her friend. This takes some level of self-delusion, but in my opinion, not as much self-delusion as would be needed in order to convince yourself an imaginary friend you created yourself is in fact self-conscious. Plus, the banshee isn’t all bad. She doesn’t do anything out of malice. You get to choose how bad she actually is as the story progresses. The banshee is neutral enough that she could actually become the girl’s friend by the end of the story, And most of the stuff she did couldn’t really be classified as evil. I mean, she’s possessed humans before, which ended with them being killed. But she has to choose between animals and humans. To her, animals and humans aren’t all that different(especially since animals and monsters are pretty sentient and can actually talk in this setting). Just as we humans don’t really make much difference between the animals we kill in order to eat them. Survival is survival. Nothing less and nothing more. Or at least that’s how I see it. And the banshee doesn’t really have the option to become a vegetarian.
  • Flower never really had her own room, which she could decorate at her leisure, she’s mostly slept in crammed places with lots of people sleeping in the same room, whether it was the gang, the army, the ship or the circus. As for the socially awkward part, girls tend to be less cringy than boys with their social problems. They won’t say anything out of place, they seem to act normal when you talk to them, but something about them is off. Something minor. It’s usually something in their facial expression, their smile, their tone of voice, the look they have in their eyes, their movements. Small things that can make you completely misunderstand a person’s intentions. It only takes a few of those blunders to get completely alienated from people. The banshee is completely blind to human social norms, so she has no such problems with her. She doesn’t really look at obscure body language like most people do subconsciously, so there is less risk of such a misunderstanding. Since the narration is being done from the banshee’s perspective(and since I myself, like the banshee, am rather blind to these kinds of social norms), all of the little things the girl is doing wrong are not shown in the story.
  • The reason I said “not extremely” is because they are not as common as something like trees. It is a well known fact that mages exist, because you can usually find at least a few in most cities, and many of them tend to travel a lot, so even if a city lacks mages, the people within it will have seen, or heard of them in their lifetime. The mages don’t form some sort of secret society, and they are not burned for witchcraft. They are quite powerful, but most cities have the means to kill them if they ever go on a rampage. Some of them are mercenaries, some go on trips around the world to help people, some go on adventures, some just try to live their lives as normally as possible.
  • Call me lazy, but a big part of the justification I’m giving for the girl’s extraordinary aptitude with magic is her talent. She is literally a genius regarding magic. There will be a certain point where a very ancient spirit demonstrates to the banshee and the girl how to make food out of thin air, which is a spell that only said spirit and a few others still know how to cast, and the girl simply mimics the spell with absolutely no effort at all, leaving the spirit and the banshee dumbfounded. When asked how she did this, she simply answers: “Well, I just looked at how she did it, and did the same thing…”. In this world, you can either become proficient with magic through learning and a lot of practice, or through sheer dumb luck. The girl happens to be one of the luckiest members of the latter group, having been born with latent magical talent that rivals that of very learned mages. She is nowhere near the level of legendary battlemages, however, and there are many extremely powerful mages in the world that have not yet appeared in the story.

You may be right about the comic relief thing. I’ll be honest here. At first, I didn’t really plan for this to be the first story I write. This was supposed to be a prequel to my main story. It happens some twenty years before the main story commences.

The main story is about a normal guy named Barry who’s had an obsession all of his life to become a mage. Unfortunately he does not have the tiniest bit of magical talent in his veins, and you can’t become a mage in this world through pure willpower and determination. So after a lifetime of research, he finally manages to find a way he can become a mage. It is by accessing “Magium nodes” that can be found on the continent the girl and the banshee were born in. (the concept of magium nodes will be explained in the 4th chapter of this book)

He finally finds a way to access one of these nodes. The catch? In order to be given access to one of these nodes, he will have to win a tournament against the most powerful mages in all history. The kings of Varathia organized a tournament and invited all the mages in the world. The Magium nodes are legendary enough that even the strongest mages will be tempted to join this tournament in order to gain access to them, as they will greatly enhance their powers. And in the middle of all of this is Barry, this simple guy who is willing to sacrifice everything for his obsession to become a mage. Even if it means joining a tournament against the most powerful mages in the world. Crazy though he may be, he is not completely stupid, and he goes in with at least some idea of how he may win. Mostly he’ll be using the incredible knowledge he’s amassed about mages from ever since he was a kid, and he’ll bluff that he is a part of the stillwater race, the legendary, very powerful mages from whom you could sense almost no magic, and who were very hard to differentiate from normal humans.

Because, all things considered, if you see someone with no magic in front of you in a battle royale magical tournament, which of these two possibilities seems more plausible to you: that some random guy was crazy enough to enter this competition suicidally to gain something that is thought to only be of use to learned mages? Or that what you see in front of you is one of the legendary stillwaters, who could obliterate you with one flick of their fingers?

Flower and Petal are two of the characters Barry meets during this tournament. The main story seemed a bit long, because it will also revolve around stats you can level up. (you will have a magical device that enhances different things like your strength, agility, speed, and even gives you premonition), so I decided to start with a prequel of how two of the side characters met each other. Turns out this story is running a bit long as well, and the two main characters aren’t being so well received. Flower will be a bit less comic reliefy in the main story because she’s grown up a bit (even though she still retains the form and the demeanor of a 9 year old because she doesn’t age anymore), and Petal is a bit less grumpy.

So I’m thinking maybe I should start writing the main story first, and continue this as a prequel, later on, as I had originally planned. I’ll think about this.

Thanks for taking the time to read and write all these comments. I really appreciate it!

i mean, i’m fairly certain i’ve seen two of those (unless i need to stare at someone dying of starvation or exhaustion until they take their last breath to be considered a witness), but i guess i do live in one of the ‘really bad third world countries’! as a somewhat off-topic (and thus, it’s completely fine to ignore this) tidbit, i’ve never really liked the term ‘third world country’, since that’s pretty much just a way of saying ‘those countries them brown people live in are shitty and obsolete’. like, it’s not impossible to find people starving to death or dying of exhaustion in other places, y’know–most people are just desensitized to it.

i’ve seen more homeless amputees than a lot of people might in their life, but see, it’s hard to truly be affected when it happens all around you, even if you do feel awful for them. if this kind of tragedy is all she’s ever known, i doubt she’d need all that much mental fortitude to go through it, or even an optimistic outlook. it just becomes a fact of life after a certain time, and for some people it’s just been a fact of life all along. in that situation, you focus more on living than on mourning the tragedies that happen to other people–and really, mourning is a privilege, in this case. having the luxury of sympathizing instead of empathizing is a privilege.

so, what i’m saying is, unless she had a very cushy life that she remembers before pretty much living on the streets, she doesn’t really need to have an optimistic attitude about life to forget all that misery. it’s just life, as she knows it. it’s normal, even if it’s not good. and, i’d like to ask, how long had she been with her parents? i mean… after her parents died, the gang was her family–but what circumstances lead to the parents teaching a toddler that killing is wrong? i personally think it would be more interesting if she learned for herself that killing is wrong. maybe, as sadistic as the gang is, they don’t like to kill people. or maybe she’s seen them kill people and experienced that cognitive dissonance–they’re family, and i understand why they do the things they do, but is it really right to slaughter people like they’re monsters? death isn’t like a broken leg, after all. when you’re living like that, it’s not unthinkable that stealing from the rich seems justifiable, and it’s not unthinkable that hurting another person seems okay, especially when it’s all you know.

thank you for taking the time to answer the questions! that explains a lot–and don’t worry, the technical details don’t really matter, they’re just a point of curiosity for me. you also answered a question i didn’t really ask, since i just sort of assumed that children as young as her wouldn’t get arrested, but wondered what would happen if she did. but, in that case, it is a rather strange thing that she’d go into the entertainment industry (or what essentially is that, in this world) instead of more labor, considering that’d probably be considered more useful. i’m curious, is it because you need her to be proficient in acrobatics? and, if so, why?

  • fair enough. i agree with you on a lot of this!
  • absolutely, but how does she know that the banshee being good is not
    impossible? i mean, think of, say, sharks–think of how many people
    only focus on the fact they occasionally kill or injure humans. sharks technically need to eat to survive, too, but people aren’t so
    understanding of that then, are they? now think of banshees, who are
    parasites (a word with negative connotations regardless of what the
    parasite is actually like) and their existence has most likely lead to
    many, many human deaths, a lot more than sharks could ever do. most
    tales involving banshees have them be sympathetic but not necessarily
    good. so, with that in mind, would a little girl be so understanding of a banshee, if all she’s heard about them is bad
    things–especially a little girl that doesn’t really consider other monsters to
    be sentient beings? also, i would say, if it is possible for the
    banshee to survive by only killing animals, then it’s not unlikely
    she’d be seen as being ‘good’ in the eyes of at least some humans. anything seen as
    a threat to humans, humans are most likely to see as evil. so even
    though the banshee herself isn’t necessarily evil, the humans in that
    world probably wouldn’t be so understanding.
  • … i think, without being mildly uncivil, i can only express my
    thoughts on this in question marks: ??? i mean… i’m
    wondering if it’s a cultural thing, because i’m fairly certain that girls
    that are cringy are equally cringy as boys, and generally in very similar ways. i don’t think gender really has anything to do with the levels of cringe. i
    just don’t get it, particularly since i have no idea what kind of
    body language would cause someone to be alienated. and, because you
    haven’t actually written down her strange mannerisms, i have
    absolutely no clue if what she does would reasonably cause her to be
    alienated. you’re telling rather than showing something that really
    needs to be shown rather than told.
  • ah okay. so they’re… about as common as travelling markets (which
    are still very much a thing here, which is cool). which, i mean,
    still seems pretty common from my perspective. but at least they’re not as common as i initially thought. thank you for clarifying.
  • i’m calling you lazy! not actually, but… it’s hard to say anything
    else about it, i guess? for one thing, it makes her seem massively
    overpowered and sue-ish (which again, is acceptable, but generally only in juvenile/ya fiction). i feel that this kind of
    thing really undermines actual work–talent and a natural affinity
    can absolutely help someone in their area, but it can’t possibly be
    the one thing that determines how good they are. have i known a
    lot of extremely talented artists? absolutely. did it take a long time and years of hard work for them to get where they are? absolutely. i simply cannot accept sheer luck as being such a powerful force, and, i’m sorry, but to be brutally honest, i personally think
    it’s an awful idea and it just sort of rubs it in that you’re railroading.

the idea of the main story appeals to me far more than this one does, being honest. sort of reminds me of the ballad of edgardo. it’s clever, and i’m very curious to see how the story would go. but, and i cannot stress this enough, you don’t need to change a thing about this game. you just need to push it toward an audience that would appreciate it more–i might be wrong, but i don’t think this forum is very good for that. hell, everyone seems fine with the banshee, it’s just flower that’s iffy.

thank you for doing the same!

Lol This WALL OF TEXT is so big even Deadpool couldnt break it.
This is Like the Fifth Wall.
Anyway You got me interested. Your World looks kinda like Witcher or Shadowrun in terms of morality. If you need betatesting im at service. I Betatested Several Cog games. Throught they were mostly complete so the feedback i could provide was reduced. Anyway aside from betatesting. If you want Poem in your game i can help with that too.

Also how do you plan to have Connectivity between prequel and Main story if you dont do Prequel first ? you know you want to simply have Canon way how the story ended ? IMHO this one seems somewhat more interesting that the Main game and you could use some experience. Well i would suggest getting this done first then Focus on barry. But your call.

It’s kind of strange that you make the kid’s mind a “place”, makes it a little difficult to understand exactly what’s happening on the outside while these two are doing things on the inside, but overall it’s pretty good.

One thing that will probably help with this (whether you’re still working on the prequel or have started the main story) will be to devote at least one paragraph to establishing and describing the main character’s surroundings.

This is what my favorite text games do. Every time the main character enters an area, the author stops the action completely and takes time to set the stage. Then the action has context, and and a lot of potential for confusion is avoided. The reader will not, for example, be confused about whether the goblins are coming out of nowhere in the woods around a forest clearing, or whether they are sneaking up on a well-fortified wealthy household.

Guilty as charged. Any gaps in description are going to be filled in with readers’ assumptions. Over time, those assumptions can snowball into bigger and bigger assumptions. The trick is knowing what to describe in detail, and what to leave to the imagination. Since I’m still working on my first game, I’m still figuring that out for myself.

One thing I have figured out, though: in choice games, clarity is a lot more important than in other forms of fiction. Players need to feel confident in their choices, and for that they need as much information as the author can reasonably give them.

Alright, time for another wall of text. Here goes!

@OfficerRattlesnake

I think there’s two groups of people. First there’s those that accept the tragedy around them as a part of life, and start ignoring it. And then there’s those that can’t bring themselves to ignore it, and will need to develop an optimistic attitude to cope with it. Flower is part of the second group. But you bring up a good point. It’s not like any kid in that situation would have had to develop an optimistic attitude. It’s that she had to do it, because of the character I made her to be.

I haven’t really worked out the exact details of her life with her parents yet, because I haven’t really worked out how they were killed, and why. I’ll decide later if I want to use this as a plot point as they reach the city. Depending on their manner of death, Flower will have been affected by it in a different way.

But I do know that her gang didn’t kill people either, so she didn’t have any quarrels with them on that subject.

Yes, the circus was inserted there because I needed her to have skills in acrobatics. Since she’s so small and fragile, I needed her to have a way to survive in the wilderness with all those monsters, before she got her magic. I also needed her to be agile in order to not rely only on her magic when doing battle, since she’d have trouble against enemies that don’t get defeated in one shot. I couldn’t really have her running the marathon, and I figured the circus would be something Flower would like, and would be enthusiastic about.

As for the events that brought her to the circus, I imagined it was something like this:

There was some guy who was assigned to be in charge of her placements, and he sent her to the army first. She kinda liked it there, but her superiors from the army complained that she wasn’t of much use to them, so then assignment guy sent her to the ship. She hated it there, but that doesn’t mean the captain of the ship didn’t hate her too. Just when he was looking for a chance to get rid of her, because he also thought of her as useless, the guy who was in charge of the circus saw Flower running effortlessly on the rope tying the ship to the pier, and he thought she’d be a good addition to his circus.

He asked the ship’s captain if he could take her, and the captain was happy to get rid of her. They both talked to assignment guy, and they made the switch. After a while, the ship captain had a mutiny in his crew, and needed any help he could get. So he asked assignment guy for Flower back, and since he had more priority than circus guy, they were going to move her back to the ship. That’s when she ran away to the wilderness.

Flower differentiates between banshees and regular monsters. The difference being that banshees can talk. It is a well known fact in their world that banshees can talk, and are sentient. Some monsters can talk as well, but that isn’t very well known by people in general, and it’s usually only the really smart ones that know the common language. That’s why Flower kills monsters with ease. She doesn’t see them as ‘people’, because as far as she knows, they don’t talk. Sharks don’t talk either. It’s the same concept. If sharks would talk in our language, maybe they’d be treated like banshees as well. (which is to say, not much better)

Sure, banshees are generally considered to be evil since they kill people, but the fact that Petal is an intelligent, sentient being that can talk is enough of a reason for Flower to be able to delude herself into thinking she is a good person.

Maybe the body language thing is a cultural thing. I’ve heard that it isn’t really a problem in Norway, for example. But from what I’ve read, it’s a problem in most European countries and most of USA, and I know for certain it’s a problem where I live. I’m talking about stuff like smiling too widely, or not having the look in your eyes match the motions of your mouth properly. Or not controlling some inflections in your tone of voice. Some girls may get labeled as creepy by the majority of people, even tho for you and me they’d seem perfectly normal.

But even without showing any body language, she’s already been described as weird, annoying and irritating by different people who’ve read this, so I must be doing something right. Because people who say that about her are most likely complaining about her personality, and not that I wrote her wrong, or that she’s hard to relate with and care about.

About the talent thing, I’ve seen some pretty unfair stuff of this nature in reality too, even though admittedly, not of the extreme caliber that is pictured in my game. There’s people that go to the gym all of their life, and can never dream to be as big as many of the pro wrestlers or bodybuilders. That’s because they were born different. Some people will have better results after going to the gym for a month, than others will have in a year, and I’m talking same exercises and same food intake.

It took me weeks to learn how to ride a bycicle, and I can still barely ride on it, while it took some of my friends a day at most.

It took me exactly five minutes to learn to use a snowboard well enough to be able to descend from the top without falling too much, while some other people couldn’t manage to stand up on the snowboard for the entire duration of our vacation. And I’d never used a skateboard before either.

These kinds of unfair things happen all the time. Sure, I probably made it even more unfair than it would happen for most things in our reality. But it’s not like she’s suddenly the most powerful mage in the world. There are likely other mages that learned just as fast as her, tho probably not many. And it’s also likely that relying solely on talent will bottleneck her potential, and she’ll stop at a certain level of proficiency. Which means there will be plenty of other mages that are stronger than her because they’ve dedicated their entire life to honing their skill.

I’m still hoping that introducing Flower and Petal in the main story first will cause some people to have a change of heart about their personalities in the prequel. The reality is that Flower and Petal were designed as side characters in a bigger story, and maybe giving them the spotlight so early on was a mistake. Hopefully, some people will want to know more about them after they’ve met them in the main game, and then they’ll happily welcome the prequel.

@CaesarCzech

Yes, there will be a canon ending for the prequel which I’ll use in the main story, even tho the prequel will have several possible endings.

@Doctor

It’s a bit difficult for me too when I write it, because I try to make the switches between the two environments as clear as possible, and I’m not sure if I always manage to do that. This is how I chose to illustrate the idea of their fusion. Maybe it’s not the best idea in terms of clarity, but it’s what clicked with me the most.

Thanks for the thumbs up!

@BabbleYaggle

I tried to be more clear about the physical setting where the action takes place when I wrote on the main story. I’m hoping there will be less problems this time around.


I just finished writing the first two chapters of the main story (~10k words) and I’m starting to code tomorrow.

I am curious to see if the main characters will be better received this time around. I am also curious to see what everyone will think of the stats mechanic I’m introducing, since I haven’t really seen anything like it in other choice of games. It is relatively similar to the skills mechanic in the game Long live the Queen, only more simplified. You just level up some stats, and in certain scenes, if a certain stat has the appropriate level, a certain thing will happen. Sometimes a failed check will cause you to die. Other times, it just means you missed an easter egg.

I will post a new thread with the first 2 chapters of the main story when I’m done.

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i’m withdrawing from this discussion, but the time and care you took into explaining this to me is much appreciated, and i mean that. thank you. and i thank you for your rather pleasant attitude about the whole thing.

i withdraw because, after starting to write up an attempt at a response, i know i wouldn’t be able to remain civil (as in, talking strictly about the idea, not the person), at least not for very long. i leave you with these thoughts:

to summarize my opinion on flower, i would honestly have to say you really are railroading like crazy. everything, and i do mean absolutely everything, about her is ludicrously contrived to serve your story, and i just don’t personally don’t find that to be a good way to go about it. i don’t find her weird and irritating because you intended it that way, i find her weird and irritating because she is hard to relate with and care about (which, by the way, is partly because of her personality). i’m probably not the only one that thinks so.

i can’t relate with her because she doesn’t really have many traits that are relatable.

  • she’s taught about morality as a toddler.
  • both her parents are killed, leaving her homeless. a gang takes pity and decides to make this toddler shoving garbage
    into her mouth a pickpocket and take on the responsibility of
    caring for a small child.
  • she gets arrested between the ages of 5 and 9 and gets put to work
    in the army, on a ship, and in the circus.
  • she’s ostracized by the other orphans (despite there probably being
    other children who can tolerate her, because they’re children)
    because of an uncanny attitude the readers don’t really know anything
    about beyond a very cliche optimistic outlook on life.
  • she is, for some reason, one of the first picks when a ship captain
    wants to hire help.
  • she runs away to the wilderness and survives because of her agility
    and acrobatic skill, despite the fact that everything that happens in
    a show at a circus is carefully manufactured and practiced and nature is
    not like that.
  • she’s got awesome powers she essentially masters within a couple of weeks (by the
    by, i strongly feel that magic as a whole is not like riding a bike or snowboarding, and it’s even less like working out)
  • throughout all this somewhat cliche manufactured tragedy she is infuriatingly optimistic about everything, selectively afraid of monsters, and insanely lucky. it’s like you’re using electronic scales to measure out the balance between her flaws and strengths.

i can’t care about her because, as you’ve said, she’s clearly comic relief and she’s got an irritating personality. it’s like if i suddenly formed a deep emotional attachment to olaf the snowman; it is certainly not happening for someone at my age with my tastes.

so, to sum it up more succinctly, i personally just don’t think she’s a good or particularly interesting character. i absolutely do think there is potential there but the railroading is choking the life out of it.

Well, here’s hoping you’ll give the first chapters of the main story a try, for curiosity’s sake!

Thanks for sticking by!

(Just to be clear, Flower and Petal won’t be making an appearance in this book until much later in the story)

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Hey Nemeean_lion, great book. I was just wondering how you developed this app. Did you use software or did you code it from scratch? Thanks!

Wow, you managed to dig up a really old thread. The main thread for Magium is currently at Magium - The mage tournament - Now available on Google Play and App Store

I think it might be a good idea to have this thread locked, to prevent forum clutter, especially since this thread was about a prequel to Magium, that is no longer available, and will be remade after the main series is done.

To answer your question, I used a game maker called Clickteam Fusion 2.5 to create the game, although I wouldn’t really recommend it for making text games, since at its core it is a game engine for making 2d platformers. I only used it for this game because I’ve programmed a fair bit with it before, and I was already familiar with all of its quirks.