Scales&Tales

Hosted Games Works In Progress
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When your childhood sweetheart runs away with a handsome prince the week before your wedding, suddenly you don’t know what to do with your life. But a letter from your Great Aunt, leaving you her cottage provides the opportunity for a new start. You knew your Great Aunt Edith was eccentric, but the last thing you expected to find waiting for you, on the doorstep was a giant egg.

Hatch the egg, take care of the baby that emerges, deal with being a parent for the first time, while trying to find love and begin a new life. If the other parents comment that your baby has scales and a tail, it’s only because they’re jealous their children can’t fly or breathe fire. Not that yours can either… yet.

Scales&Tales was originally going to be a raising sim/tamagotchi type game until I figured out that choicescript doesn’t do those very well and I’d have to learn a lot more coding to make it work in an interesting way. So instead it’s just going to be a simple, story-based hatch a creature, help raise it while trying to find a career and love.

It’s a really rough draft of the first two chapters. I know I’m telling instead of showing but I do plan to go back and fill in details later. My actual notes have lots of *comment INSERT STUFF HERE in them. Stats aren’t implemented yet. A lot of responses to choices aren’t implemented. It’s in drastic need of being fleshed out but I’m shooting for the end first, then once I hit the end it’s back to the beginning to fill in all the stuff I can.

This is my attempt to create a game in a week. I plan to do work on it every day this week until it’s finished. The most important thing for me is to write it. I’m making no guarantees on the quality of the writing, or the game, or that it’ll even make sense. I just want to get another project finished.

The plan is to have five different dragons that can hatch and each of them having their own story. Plus a handful of love interests. Jobs! Who knows! I’m sure they’ll happen too. Random scenes!? I have a huge list of them and I was going to have random encounters. I’m starting ambitious but it’ll likely get pruned down to manageable as the week goes on. The dragon hunger/tiredness/bored meter was the first to go.

Demo: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/154988802/scales/web/mygame/index.html

If you get an error on the game at any point chances are it’s because I’m updating things. The demo is extremely short.

15 Likes
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Ack, sorry for the late reply! And sorry for making you explain all that to me. It’s definitely better for your mental health to avoid repetition, and if it makes the experience more enjoyable,even better C: And God, I know what you mean by adding lots of choices–'Tis certainly tempting, but easy and slow ensure finished projects in the long run. Sadly. If only our brains could handle all that information and customization… Orz

…That being said, judging from that coding alone, Aqua is just so askjldalñ, with Lilac being a close-second. /Maternal instincts kicking in.

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I love where this game is heading. Having a goal of finishing a short project is a great thing to aspire to - it can help gain confidence when tackling the larger ones! Keep going! You definitely have my support. :slight_smile:

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And mine as well. Wish you luck on your endeavor

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@Looshi Thank you! You’re so kind! A week! Hahhaaaa! It will be insane but I’ll try. I’ll be curious to at least see what I can do in that time. If I can hit the end and then make something playable.

@Scrivener Thanks so much!

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The premise is most certainly very interesting! I will definitely be keeping an eye on this one, keep at it! :slight_smile:

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I actually had this menu. It had, Feed, Clean, Play, Teach, on it. The dragon was meant to evolve depending on what activities you engaged it with, then each evolved dragon has a different personality.

There was a hunger scale, a love scale, a cleanliness one…

Then there was also going to be different random encounters to break up the monotony of the whole feed dragon, clean dragon, play with dragon, teach the dragon routine. But that was the problem, it wasn’t fun, it was monotonous. I think it’s more fun if you have a cute picture of a dragon and can interact with it. In just plain text it’s terribly boring. Even raising your stats so that you could participate in contests felt boring to me.

So I ditched it and if I do anything like that it’ll be a lot more simplified. Or I’ll look to make the jump to another platform once the choicescript game is done.

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I really really like the idea! Though, thought I’d mention, in a number of places (if you chose Ross, at least) it says his instead of him. Didn’t know if it was in issue with a gender variable but I thought I’d let you know.

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@Babisko Oh! Yeah that’s an issue with the gender variable. Her, His, Him… I’ll fiddle with the gender variables and sort it out.

Thanks for pointing it out. I hope that fixed it.

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Yep, didn’t see it again.

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I decided to use female pronouns for my variables because I remembered there was a difference between her and hers but not his and his. I forgot that her and his and him are all the same too. Hmph! I’ll fix it properly later but for now I’m using a mix of gendered pronouns.

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Dude, I loved tamagotchi. I was a really negligent caretaker though, so mine would always die within a few days. Hopefully this will go better!

The game seems fun and lively so far, and I’m sure it’ll become richer through development. I think it’s wise focusing on story over simulation/stats; choicescript seems to lend itself better to that.

Also, writing a game in a week? Crazy! But a great motivation tactic. Do you have a wordcount goal?

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I chose to me a man but i seem to get the options of being a woman
But still, i like it very much

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@FairyGodfeather This seems great! I love the whole idea behind this! So you said earlier (I think; I skimmed through your first post again but couldn’t find it and can’t focus long enough to read it again thoroughly) that there will be five different dragons that would each have their own paths? That sounds awesome! I have to ask though: is the dragon going to be based on choices, or is it going to be a randomized hatch? I think I would personally like it better if it is randomized so that you never know what to expect with your pet! Another question: are the dragons going to be different colors? So far I played through it twice picking different options and actually reading the whole thing and then I spammed through it about four other times, and the dragon that hatches is always purple, so I was just wondering if that was supposed to happen. I can be forgiving on the grammar mistakes right now since this is basically a first draft with the demo. Anyway, this sounds like it will be great, and I can’t wait to see how it turns out after just a week!

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@Port3r Man, woman, it’s all the same. You’re stuck with the same options for now. Men can do wedding planning too. :slight_smile: You can want to run off with the Prince for Adventure! Be his second in command. I will add to that choice, make a suggestion and I’ll put something in.

The only gender determined option so far is the “you never knew Ros liked men” and that should be greyed out if you’re male. I’ll be working on adding stuff.

@Galador

The original plan was to have an egg hatch with a grey hatchling (the colour you get if you crack the egg) and for your various actions to provide points towards each of the different dragon types. Each of the different dragons had different diets, different likes and different methods to hatch the egg.

So try and cook the egg, feed it candles, let it play with fire, and it’ll turn into a fire dragon. Throw it into the pond, feed it fish, give it lots to drink, take it swimming, bathe it a lot and it would become a water dragon.

I was thinking of implementing it as a puzzle so players needed to work out what to do in order to get the various different dragon types, and that you need to stick with a strategy, otherwise you just get a confused little dragon. However it’s complicated so that idea got ditched for now and currently your dragon type, and its colour, is determined solely by how you decide to hatch it.

There’s six dragons hatching currently, since I might implement the feeding thing on the grey dragon as a trial.

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@FairyGodfeather Oh! Okay, that sounds good! That way you can be sure that you don’t end up with the same dragon on every playthrough, but you aren’t railroaded into the type of dragon you want deciding half the choices in the game for you! I guess I missed the part where the color of the grey dragon is mentioned! The only color that I ever saw was when I let it hatch in the nest I made by the fire.

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So for a lightning dragon… Dragon babys are tough right?

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@God_of_Demonz Get your kite ready for when that storm hits! LOL!

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No lightning dragon. :slight_smile:

The aim for today is to get each dragon introduced and hooked up to a feed/play/bathe/teach menu, with a few interactive options. Still not planning to add stats mind you, that’ll be for later in the week, but you should get an idea of the different dragon personalities.

Once I put the dragons up I’ll ask if people want to be able to name their own dragon or just get the generic names for them all. Actually implementing the names will be something for later though.

I did do a bit of work on the plot and the romantic options earlier but that’s not ready to go up.

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I decided to cook the egg. Why? Because I wanted to see what Dragon Omelette would taste like.