a schizophrenic former rabbi and prophet-to-be, his stoned witch best friend, three-dollar-bill twin necromancers, a shabby mentor with a secret and an eldritch being keeping the czar in power. and then the messenger-judgement of death, samael himself, turns up.
hey everyone! i’m back and i’m still working on this thing. i had a thread about it last year, around this time, but life kinda got hectic for me and progress stalled. but things have settled now and i’m working on the story again.
you can play the first scene right now, just go to the link above!
i’ll be posting updates, devlogs, process chatter and so on in here. also answering questions about the story.
some notable changes since the last time i updated people:
the story got a rehaul and a rewrite
there’s only one narrator now, lev/lyubov morgenshtern
i got a lot better at ink and there’s a small investigatory aspect to the story now, though you’ll still get to progress if you fail to find anything interesting, too.
so those of you that have played it, please tell me what you thought! i don’t have an editor and this is the only way i get feedback and know what to improve on!
so!! just thought i’d update people: i’m working on the longer demo right now.
if anyone has feedback/commentary/questions, feel free to post them in this thread! i very much want feedback right now, so i can make the longer demo (and the final game) the best it can be.
First impression: This is really, really pretty, from a visual perspective. The colors and fonts and soft transitions are kind of beautiful. I sort of want to switch one of my projects to ink now.
after getting to this point, there were no links, and I was unable to continue or click reset and had to clear local storage to restart. The console said “Error: ran out of content. Do you need a ‘-> DONE’ or ‘-> END’?”
I like the writing style and prose a lot. It’s hard to describe but it’s an interesting feeling: slightly unsettling, a lot of bouncing between the mystical and the mundane. There are a lot of unfamiliar (to me) concepts and words thrown around, which is not a bad thing. I don’t think I’ve seen a setting quite like this before, Russian Jewish urban fantasy?
The game structure seems to be parser-inspired, with the prompt-looking thing and branching look/talk actions. Will there be a lot of state tracking/branching? I’m wondering what’s the prompt to advance the scene so that anzu arrives. Is it after all the talking interactions are exhausted, or after a fixed number of turns?
that should be fixed in the version that’s up now. i don’t know, some people just had weird issues with that part. clear your cookies and saved site data and try playing again? to avoid this kind of bullshit, next demo is going to be a standalone app.
thank you! and yes, russian-jewish with lovecraftian and new weird influences! i’m russian and jewish and though i live in the west now, i always wanted to write about the old country.
yeah, doing a sort of … parser-style structure with CYOA was the goal, bc i like what parser does with the world model and so on, but i find parser mechanics (typing things in, having to guess at commands sometimes) to be less than ideal.
it was a stylistic choice! i wanted to convey lev/lyubov’s voice somehow other than just the prose.
thank you! there should be a new, rewritten demo up on january 19!
