Edited, and fixed all problems. Link will be updated.
Seems off to a promising start. @Eos Is there a reason why you have only a paragraph per page? You might want to see about formatting the story a bit.
Incoming wall of text:
Summary
Suggestion:
You feel as if you are on fire. Your skin burns; every ragged breath sends shards of searing heat through your body. You don’t know how long you’ve been like this. Your entire world consists of you and the blazing heat in your chest.
Occasionally, you can hear whispers dim conversation at your bedside. “They’ve got the Plague of Ides. Poor thing.” Poor thing indeed. It’s as if your soul caught fire.
-Then Next PageAfter what feels like an eternity teetering between torturous wakefulness and blissful slumber, the heat begins to recede. The whispers grow more excited. “It’s a miracle!” They say. Eventually, you begin to make out shapes again.
You wake to the smell of ashes. And… honey? White curtains flutter in a slight breeze as you sit up. You groan. Everything aches. A crimson and white-robed priestess of Liriel, goddess of nature and life, hurries over to you. “Ah, you’ve awakened. Liriel has truly blessed you. Almost all who catch the Plague of Ides succumb to its heat. Stay here; I’ll fetch you some water.” A few moments later, she returns, with a pitcher of water in her hands. “Drink,” she says.
-Then Next Page
Also, there is one part where it’s really blocky. I would suggest breaking it up like so:
She parses through the massive stack of papers for a minute. Your heart sink as her face falls.
“I’m so sorry, Jade. Your family was not as lucky as you.” She continues talking, but it all fades into a blur of color and sound. Consolers, family friends, priests all come and go.
Eventually, you are discharged by the temple. It is time to find work.
There’s another section like this as well, but I hope you get what I’m pointing at with the formatting. I think it’ll read a bit smoother that way and allow the reader to get into the story more without having to press “next” every few sentences and not getting lost in the bunch of information that gets “crammed” together.
It also seems like I can keep working until I want to finalize my character, and I don’t know how you will have your stats work, but you might want to limit it, else players will abuse it to get a lot of money and one of their stats really high. On a side note, when you gamble and get 50 coins, it does not register on the stats page.
note: I do see that if your stat is above 20 when working, it stops it at 21 until you get a promotion. but again, I only have the option to raise one stat. Maybe offering the chance to switch jobs instead of taking the promotion might be a good compromise.
And before the festival, I can loop back and go to the bank and withdraw 6000 again. that sent me into a loop where I had negative numbers to the day of the festival, and I could not reach it after that.
Also, since the work the player picks affects their stats, would it be possible to change jobs in the beginning? Someone who might want to play a strong/combat character might not want to get stuck with agility or cunning with a bonus in the beginning. Or maybe you could give the player a heads up when you list the jobs as choices by saying what the stat is on the choice line next to the job. I know there are people out there who want to know as much as possible before picking a choice that has an effect like that.
Other than that, I know this is the beginning and you’re working on a lot, so the only other pieces of advice I would offer is that:
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I wish you could paint a little more of a picture in the beginning. What does our family home look like? What do the surroundings of this temple look like? Are there other gods besides Liriel? Is the temple of Lirirel where everyone with the plague goes? Can you give more of a description of the festival? I would like a bit more world building info I guess.
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I’d also like to be able to choose my dialogue more instead of it being the “next” button. I think it can add to immersion if you give the options for differing responses when talking to someone. But I guess that depends on how you structure your story.
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I would like the option to “just work until the festival” instead of having to keep picking that choice over and over. I already explored everywhere, but it took a long time to get to the festival.
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I want my choices to mean something. right now, I don’t really feel like when I actually get to pick anything, that my choices matter. An example of this, when I go to the pet shop, my character has to help no matter what. Another example is when you do the games. you only win at the one where you’ve been doing your skill with, so it makes no sense to do any of the others.
I never got to the end of the demo. After getting through all of it, when I picked “family” choice at the ceremony, an error came up. I will try it again later, but having to go through all of that again with no save feature is a bit much.
So my last piece of advice is to get the save plugin going. It’s easy to install and will help you with testers and players giving feedback.
I did like what I saw so far, and I think this has potential.
First, thank you very much for taking the time to write all of this. You’ve also pointed out two important inconsistencies, so thank you very much for that. The “correct” version of the Festival allows a visit to the Temple district, where I introduce the rest of the pantheon. I chose to cut the ability to change professions because I had some trouble implementing it and I plan on including other locations (accessible from the ship) where the player may improve their stats.
As for a game design standpoint, I’m planning to have many, many other locations with other main storylets accessible only through certain combinations of stats. Right now, this is the starting area (planning to make it the demo area), so I’m just introducing characters, world, and mechanics. Also, could you kindly include a screenshot of the error message? It helps immensely with troubleshooting.
About the questions you have at the beginning, I left most of it for the player to infer, because the exposition dump at the beginning is already cumbersome and I don’t want to add to it. You can infer that most people with the plague go to the temple because the priestess mentions “temple records,” when you inquire about your family. I will expand social interactions, but this being a glorified character creation/introduction to game mechanics scene, most of the heavy social stuff will be relegated to other locations.
Hey friend, I recommend you take a look at CSIDE if you are not using it already; with it you can run QuickTest and RandomTest to help out fixing bugs and problems in your game.
I’m glad to see people helping you on this project
Still running into the problem where you can’t go past the
Festival_of_Lights line 1940: Invalid expression, couldn’t extract another token: .5
Issue
The elf writes, then seals a letter, and hands it off to a courier, which sprints into a side passage.
who sprints
Label bubble_209836008 produces error. If you have #choice text in *if body, you always need to put brackets around vars and their values.
*elseif @line 1227, bubble_209834136 is missing a *goto.
*set speed .5 @line 1823, bubble_208519032.
If that’s a float, it’s missing a zero before the dot.
Could you tell me where that turned up? What choices did you select before the error message showed up, and what choice made the error show up?
I donated at all the temples played all the games then just clicked on one of the three options and it occurred my occupation was as a porter / bouncer
Fixed everything and updated link. Thanks!
Thank you and this is a awesome project
I was just checking on this wip and this popped up when choosing your age for character creation. I tried the character creation in all careers and the problem persists in all of them.
It seems like errors such as this …
… are pretty prevalent for this project. Are you running quicktest each time you introduce new chunks of code?
Yes, that error was probably due to me attempting to convert a text variable into a numerical variable. Age will be 0 in stats screen until set by player.
I am a very impressive baby
this is good story you made
Uhh, found somemore errors. Picking elf race for your inheritance means stuck in page and value 0…
(Pls fix this asap.)
Yep, I’m currently troubleshooting that problem. I’m using chronicler to help organize it visually, I’ll try writing the code out myself.
me crying. Cant switch profession at all.