Revolution Diabolique - WIP

Choice of Games games CoG Works In Progress
62

More li’l things.

Is it WAD that I can take Bourgeoisie, then Former Slave, and get both relevant bonuses when Former Slave locks me out of Peasant and Itinerant bonuses? (I didn’t realize Black Power was quite so literal :stuck_out_tongue: )

Trying to “connect with the military” in Ch. 4 does nothing and just leaves me doing research.

I fired the guns on a British fleet off Egypt, and got:

line 7007: Can’t fairAdd to non-percentile value: 110

I get the feeling that my exceptional military abilities broke something :slight_smile:

So, I refuse promotion, and get this:

Brûlé shrugs. “I’ll… put the word through, then,” he says.

When they hear of it, most of the soldiers will appreciate what you’ve done. This grandstanding certainly won’t endear you to the higher ranking officers, however.

So, how will you approach this?

Approach what? I go straight into the fight-against-the-Federalists choice, except somehow I’m commanding the war on Lyon as a Soldat.

(After Lyon, I’m promoted to Caporal, and then go straight to General de Brigade of the Army of Italy, because prior ranks don’t count for crap. :stuck_out_tongue: I’m intentionally exploring a corner case, as you can see.)

Playing a political game now…

The table likes your plan. No one dissents, and your proposal is immediately adopted without incident.

The plan is a huge success. You outmaneuver the republicans, showing they’re not so strong as had been believed. Your group then sees a huge influx of cash and new members.

I’ve had enough of this group. I want to meet with and potentially join the republicans, instead.
Oh, well. I’ll keep working at things here.

Why am I getting reactions like this after a successful anarchist attack on the Republicans?

“I wish to speak freely, Monsieur,” you say.

Brûlé hesitates. “Speak,” he says.

You lay out your argument: how his plan will harden opposition among the towns and cities, turn the greater population of the region against the central government in Paris, and create a whole new cadre of opposition from previously neutral citizens here.

Brûlé listens to your words, looking out at the last wisps of fog hugging the edge of the forest, dissipating as they are licked by the rays of morning sunlight. He sighs. “You’re right, Renárd,” he says eventually.

And he calls the whole regiment together to regroup and move to a more defensible position.

“Ha!” Brûlé’s eyes are wild, looking around at the others gathered with you. “Anyone else want to weigh in?”

There is no one else here with you.

“Good,” he says. “You have your orders. Now carry them out.”

What now?

Wait. Didn’t I just talk Brûlé down? Then,

You hear some rumblings of complaint within Command over what happened to Général Brûlé, but it doesn’t seem to amount to anything in the end.

…happened?

So, I have a bit of a complicated situation regarding the National Convention, which I just couped. I was allied with the monarchist rebellion, but the sans-culottes also got involved - I think because I’d raised an SC revolution in Lyon.

First, is that a bug?

Second, if not (or if there’s another way to get sans-culottes and royalists on the same team - that’s the definition of a Clusterfuck Coalition)…

The foreign officers and victorious returning émigrés are clearly incensed by this decision.

The foreign officers and victorious returning émigrés have had enough of your schemes. They eject you from the planning process.

You’ve been shut out.

How can the royalists shut me out if I have the support of the sans-culottes?

And afterward, apparently my army fights in Italy and is then an independent force that I can attack Paris with. But I don’t get another shot at the Constitution…

When talking politics with my faction leader, apparently it’s repeatable.

Though there are few disagreements among ideological lines, many republicans have taken to sniping and personal attacks, and the problem has grown to epidemic level. A few have attempted to mediate, but things are starting to grow heated. It’s threatening to tear the group apart.

They have the right idea. I’ll push the position in meetings and committees to make it popular and accepted within the wider group.

How can the latter be an option when the Republicans have an ideological consensus?

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63

So who exactly are the RO’s in this book because of what I have seen already there doesn’t seem to be any?

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No, there are several.

Your friend (though I need to add more on-ramps into this than what’s already there)
The various faction leaders (most likely limited to whichever faction you actually join, so probably one, maybe two per playthrough)
And then military only: Dacier, Paule, and Luc (though Paule I still need to actually add an on-ramp to,
and D&L are generally mutually exclusive)

65

Not quite sure what you mean here. The only station precluding a slavery background is nobility.

Ooh, that’s a good find. You’re right, that flag is only supposed to carry over to the next chapter if you were fighting on the other side in 6.

But:

Can you give more details about the events in this case? I want to try to track it down, if it is a bug.

Which chapter is this, or other context?

Thanks for finding all of these issues, as well!

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66

As someone else here said, I’d love an option to originate from Eastern Europe. But anyways, so many choices! Is this only a demo?

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What I mean is that if you play a bourgeoisie, you immediately get to select your business and get the bonus from it, and then take the Freed Slave background, and you get the Freed Slave list.

So, for example, I can take Furniture Maker, then Stowaway, which gives me Brutalitie 7 and S&T 11 before I even touch my demon. By contrast, if I’m a former slave peasant, then I don’t get the table which asks how I’ve been faring for myself, and if I’m an immigrant former slave, I don’t get asked my job.

Will try to reproduce the other specific bugs when I have more time.

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I am trying to finish for a release this year.

Working on the last chapter now, which is shaping up to be a… strange creature.

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Appropriate, given the game it’s in.

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Also, I’ve heard this “choices” comment once before, and I’m not quite sure what it means. Are there too many options visible on some pages? Or are there too many choices, total, across the whole story?

And yes, adding Eastern European options is a good idea. Adding some non-gendered default names is proving trickier, though. Russian at least offers a few ambiguous nicknames; but Polish seems to need to gender every name. Does anyone have any ideas?

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Well, by ‘so many choices’, in meant it’s a good thing :sweat_smile: And for names well, Slavic names are very often gendered, including last names as well, in Russia at least. I’m afraid that, aside from the few gender neutral nicknames in Russia, there aren’t any :confused:

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Yes, those are exactly what I did for Russian (and the gendered last names are actually already in). But Polish seems even stricter in that respect.

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So when I said this, I think that what I was really getting at was the fact that you can choose to do one thing, and then immediately take five separate actions that directly contradict it. For example, I can self-identify as a Catholic and as a royalist, and then talk about how I don’t want to see peasants revolting. In the next scene, I’ll then get a choice to talk about how the whole rotten monarchy needs to be toppled. That’s one part of the choice issue.

The other part of the issue is that there are many choices in the game, as it currently is, that I can choose with little to no effect on what actually happens. In one playthrough, I ran off to Austria, raised a private army… then somehow snuck back into France in the next chapter, where I was given the choice to start a demonology school. It’s stuff like that that needs to be ironed out. I really don’t want to be negative, and the game has taken strides since the original demo, but it really just needs a good deal of polishing.

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74

That’s what we’re here for. Find every dangling subthread, all the corner case chaos, every bug. Drop them in Chris’ lap for fixing.

I remember, after my beta of Choice of Robots, I swore that I’d never mock Obsidian for making buggy games again. RD is at least as complex as CoR.

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75

More bugfindings:

Okay, so. It’s after I just set off a leadership election in Ch. 5, and I hadn’t seen Rioux much. I invite him to dinner for business, then say “Citoyen Rioux.”

I talk politics with him.

Politics should be safe enough. You mention empiricism and Rioux’s eyes light up. He launches into his feelings on the Enlightenment and recent scientific developments.

You find you have much in common with Rioux on your shared support of Revolutionary ideas and the progress made in recent years. By the end of it, he sounds hopeful and excited for the future.

I talk politics with him. Repeat. This is probably boosting a stat…

I got this after leading a Federalist victory:

France is rocked once more by news of yet another coup in Paris. This time, members of the National Convention have conspired to have Robespierre and his allies, both in that chamber and in the Paris Commune, arrested. Having been declared enemies of the state, they existed outside the law, and so were immediately executed without a trial.

After this, the newly purged National Convention turned to domestic matters, releasing nearly all political prisoners arrested in recent months, as a gesture of reconciliation and to alleviate the terrible overcrowding of the prisons. They then sought peace with the foreign powers, and embarked on the creation of a new constitution. The old Jacobin constitution, never implemented, was too tainted by association with Robespierre and his allies to ever be considered.

How do you feel about these new developments?

This was a Federalist coup, not a National Convention coup. The NC were being reordered at gunpoint.

I triggered a sans-culottes revolt (in Paris this time) to support the Feddies, which was partially successful (I had to go into the streets myself). The SCs did not, however, get involved in the new Convention. Shouldn’t they?

Some of the policies that will be pursued by the government are already clear. The Co-Federation

Did you mean Confederation?

If I win a revolution for the Federalists, is that supposed to abort all the other military conflicts that would occur afterwards (like Italy and Ireland)?

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76

Thanks Ramidel! I’ll look through those soonish.

I want to address this. I think this comes down to, basically, a difference in approach or philosophy of game design.

If I understand correctly, you don’t like that the main character can express certain strong political opinions, and then is successively asked again how they feel about new developments, and might pick the opposite alignment? My feeling is, well, that’s fine.

I don’t want to second-guess the player’s understanding of their character. I don’t want to tell them, the person who created and is directing this character, “No, you’re wrong about what you think your own character believes.” What you see as inconsistency might just be the player picturing a different arc for the character; maybe not just a simple smooth transition from holding position A to position B, but something more zigzagging. Many of the influential figures of the French Revolution held radically different positions over the course of that ~decade. Or, maybe they’re just purely reacting to continuing events, without holding fast to any strong ideology. Hundreds of national representatives, for example, in several different phases during that time, found themselves transformed from radical reformers to ascendant darlings of the Revolution to reviled reactionaries, even if their own politics stayed about the same; instead, the political landscape shifted around them, leaving them behind. Or, maybe the player is just goofing around and doesn’t care about the issues, and that’s fine too (although I generally tried to provide “I’m ambivalent on this” options); they do bear some responsibility as well for the story that results from their own actions.

A big part of the appeal of these games, after all, is that the player defines the main character, top to bottom. It’s not like in other types that pre-define the main character in exacting detail before it ever begins. And I feel that an important aspect of that is allowing the player to choose how they want the character to move and change over the course of the story, or not, and trusting the player to make those decisions for themselves.

What I absolutely don’t want to do is to lock certain personality-or-political-opinion-stat options to only characters having particular minimum or maximum values in those very stats. In the first Vampire, there’s a moment where the main character feels betrayed by another and can plot revenge—but only if they’ve been emotional up to that point. I found that infuriating, completely backwards, to take that control out of the player’s hands, even just to answer (to the narrator) how they feel about what should—or could—have been a defining moment in the character’s life. (Err, unlife.) And a person I played it with later was also very confused why that option would be grayed out. By all means, such an option could provide a strong swing to that stat; but locking out characters who until then have been the opposite type precludes them from changing in that direction even in response to a drastic event, which if anything should be more likely to provoke such a change, not less, let alone prevent it entirely.

So, I don’t want to gate thoughts-and-feelings options behind certain target values in that same stat. And I certainly don’t want to gate tangible action options behind values in those stats, either. As a rule, I generally only gray out options if it’s one you’ve just tried and now you get another attempt, or it’s a line you’ve already said in the middle of a dialog tree. And I generally only hide options if they’re physically impossible, like they involve characters who are dead or no longer present, or you haven’t done some prerequisite necessary to set up and allow you to take a certain action.

Would this paradigm make more sense to you if these options’ texts were more responsive to the main character’s having more extreme beliefs? So, if they’re a strident monarchist, say, in response to “how do you feel” they could say “Of course, I still believe X” about Bourbon restoration or opposition to the social changes of the Revolution; meanwhile, the other options would be something like “Hmm, maybe these peasants have a point” rather than something more enthusiastic.

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77

While I didn’t see a problem with the way you currently have it and love the WIP (super excited for the finished launch) the alternative you just listed sounds amazing. Different reaction choices or different wording choices based off of previous decisions or current beliefs would add nice flavor but I don’t see it as a necessity. The current formula works well enough to me and that might be complicated to change if you chose to go back and rework it.

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I appreciate that, but all it took was one or (rarely) two multireplace substitutions per #option to handle some of these special cases. It wasn’t as much work as you might think, just took some consideration and alternate phrasing.

Anyway, I’m putting the finishing touches on a final draft. I haven’t updated this WIP in a while, and now it’s getting ready for beta at this point. Hopefully I’ll get it done so that can start soon. Thanks for the support and feedback, everyone!

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79

Awesome! I hope beta goes well and we’ll see it out soon!!!

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when i click the Demo Link it became 404 Not Found

Not Found

The requested URL was not found on this server.

Apache/2.4.29 (Ubuntu) Server at dashingdon.com Port 443

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Yup, it’s in beta now. See here: Révolution Diabolique — BETA TESTERS NEEDED

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