The Event: A Collaborative Community Experiment

I’m just a little apprehensive about having too indepth stories. We’re asking the player to care, not commit. I think a good length for a short story in general is anywhere up to 15k words, but given the nature of this particular project, keeping it down to about 1 - 5k might be prudent.

My reasoning is that the stories aren’t a continuation on each other at all. They are scenes taking place in a larger narrative universe. While they should be meaningful and effective, they should also be concise. Like a montage, of sorts.

Perhaps we can say, for the first few contributions, that we’ll forego the playthrough word-count as a requirement, do some playtesting and then decide when we see how the stories function together?

Yeah, I agree. More people will be wanting to write a story if there isn’t any requirements about length yet.

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Check it out at: https://dashingdon.com/play/timberwoolf/the-event/mygame/index.php?cb=21644

I put up my example. Be sure to message me if you want to add your scene.txt files.

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Currently playing the game. It’s quite hard to get it right, and see what choices are good. I’ve tried five times, but there’s always some variables that aren’t good enough.

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Honestly, I just selected randomly and this was my result:

You stop at the train depot, and Sarah thanks you. “I promise to call when I get there,” she says. With a final little smile, Sarah says “Goodbye,” then heads off to the station. You haven’t managed to find out what Sarah was so frightened of. You’ve managed to deposit Sarah at the train station. She’s promised to call when she can, but you’re not certain of her safety. Sarah trusted you, and your presence helped to considerably calm he situation.

You were compassionate toward Sarah, but managed to keep from feeding her panic.

You were too sympathetic toward Sarah, and fueled her fears.

Being honest, though, the scene is horrendously unbalanced.

[Edit to Add]: It’s totally just my example scene. It definitely shouldn’t make the final cut.

[Edit to Add, pt II]: Next runthrough:

You’ve discovered that Sarah was delusional. You’ve assured Sarah’s safety by taking her home for the night. You’ll seek help in the morning. Sarah trusted you, and your presence helped to considerably calm he situation.

You were compassionate toward Sarah, but managed to keep from feeding her panic.

You were sympathetic toward Sarah, and she trusted you

I think we should try to come up with some suggestions for what kind of event The Event is, so that it’ll be easier to come up with stuff to write about.

I posted some stuff on the google docs document.

Guys you should probably contact cog about this before you go too far. There are extra considerations to submitting a group game if you plan to have it published through HG. You need to make sure everyone meets requirements (country, age, resedency certificate for outside USA for tax etc).

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Aren’t those the requirements for a CoG game? I think HG doesn’t require those things.

Yes they do as well. COG needs appropriate permissions from everyone involved. It gets a bit more complicated for them to manage with group games. I’d check the requirements with them otherwise it might affect your game if someone doesn’t meet them or doesn’t want to supply things like tax certificates. It also helps to know to get them early. I had lots of delays getting some of the information needed from my country’s tax department.

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That’s a good spot, thanks. I wonder whether CoG would need the same information for a free game, but agree that it’s definitely worth checking in first.

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You may not be able to make it free. As I said it gets complicated with group games :slight_smile: But definitely ask them about it.

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Good point. I’m guessing that CoG might not want to spend too much time and effort on a game that isn’t going to make them anything (which is obviously fair enough: they’re a profit-making company after all). So they might not consider it worth their whole releasing it as a phone app.

I’d hope they’d at least be willing to host it on their website but, if not, there are plenty of other sites that host free interactive fiction so we could always approach one of those.

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Interesting concept. I often like those sorts of stories that come in from different angles like steven king and heroes. I had a quick read, I think you might need some balancing in your stats. I told Sarah she was hysterical and on another occasion that she needed help, and I was still told that I was too compassionate and fueled her fears.

You’ve discovered that Sarah was delusional. You’ve assured Sarah’s safety by taking her home for the night. You’ll seek help in the morning. Sarah trusted you, and your presence helped to considerably calm he situation.

You were too compassionate toward Sarah, and it only fed her panic.

You were too sympathetic toward Sarah, and fueled her fears.

If I push her more to talk and think she’s delusional however, it tells me that she doesn’t trust me and I don’t learn anything. I also got the same screen multiple times where I seemed to be picking the same options over which I’m not sure if is intentional or not. Anyway, good luck with it :slight_smile:

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I think the nature of the event should remain obscure. Pretty much anything goes - if you want to write something about zombies - go ahead. It’s perfectly fine if that has nothing to do with the two assassins having lunch in the city - or Sarah having a mental breakdown.

The event, however, should probably remain undetermined, otherwise it takes away from that freedom to write about anything. Declaring that the event is “leaking of nuclear waste into the water reservoirs”, for example, would make the other stories not fit in the narrative world, which defeats the purpose.

Ok. I guess I’ll try to figure something out.

@TimberWoolf I’ve got to wholehearted disagree- I think making the event a specific thing will allow for more depth and cohesiveness to the disparate stories. There’s no need to necessarily come right out to the player and say “this is what happened.” Instead, it would be significantly more interesting if each chapter shed a little light on the event so that by the end the player could piece together what had happened.

My two cents anyway! Good luck!

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It’s not my project so feel free to ignore, but I also agree that having at least a rough idea of what the event and consequences are, is a good thing as it allows more focus. You basically let people drop hints if they want, but write their own stories and make sure no one gives the plot away until at least the final scene.

When we set up starship adventures, we decided on the general tone, main characters, who these chars were/how they would act, who the biggest baddy would be and then went off and wrote our own little episodes. While you don’t have to worry about the main chars so much unless you want them to turn up in linked “episodes”. (Like you could have a scene with a news reporter being given a weird script to read she knows is wrong and being made to read it anyway, and then reference it in a later section where someone comments how weird the newsreader was acting, like she was being watched,) knowing what the problem is will help. In through the pages, they had a common goal/achievement for each episode, even though the stories varied wildly from book to book. It just gives your writers focus and helps stop “bad” conflicts in the writing. (Deliberate misleading might be ok such as Sarah’s yellow raincoats due to delusions, but you’d need to somehow convey why she’s delusional. Did she just have a break down herself? Was she on the brink due to other things before this even happened? Or are lots of people acting the same as her now.) It doesn’t have to happen in her story. If say you get more accounts where people are acting paranoid, the reader can make their own opinion.

Anyway, in your demo, a central theme isn’t of utmost importance. Sarah is clearly delusional. Anything she says could be taken with a grain of salt apart from she says “that thing in the city” where the MC agrees that he/she knows what she’s talking about. If you getothers writing about a very specific singular event that has nothing to do with something in the city however and don’t contain people like Sarah giving the information, you’re going to have to explain the difference somewhere or get bogged down with a lot more editing at the end. And you do want some reliable people in your story as well IMO (even if it is from their own perspective which is unreliable in itself). I’d like to be able to try and put some pieces together if reading something like this :slight_smile:

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The public makes good and fair points.

Being the lovable and kind dictator that I am, let’s get discussing ‘The Event’.
@moskus4 proposed the following:

Ideas
  • Lots of people getting hypnotized. Someone evil is behind this. The influenced ones will probably act in several ways. This makes for some chaos, but not result in something extreme.

  • Hackers have attacked the state, and all televisions in the city/country is showing national secrets. This could include several conspiracy theories.

  • A zombie attack. Zombies should have decreased infectivity or lethality, so that we won’t see a post-apocalyptic society. People will respond differently to this.

  • A radioactive explosion causing a selection of people to develop mutations.

  • Suddenly several people mysteriously disappear. For example all police officers/garbage truck drivers/intelligent/poor/government leaders.

Any other suggestions are welcome and if you see something that interests you, be sure to scream at the top of your lungs. We’ll poll ourselves when we’re done idea-ing.

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