@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
- Magic powers are extremely common, and
- 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…