The Excellent Adventure of Gordon Abel - Interest Check

Good day. This is actually my first post here on this forum, so I’m happy to say hi to everyone. It’s nice to meet you.

For a brief explanation, I originally intended to make a short, basic text adventure. It’s a part of our university’s curriculum - to have a text adventure finished or at least mostly finished by the end of this semester - and among other two worktools, ChoiceScript has been recommended to us. Then however I’ve had a look at some of the text adventures gathered here, both ChoiceGames and HostedGames and… frankly, I had an incredible amount of fun with just the teasers. The way the system works, the interesting stories that had my attention from start to finish (or at least until the free teaser version had run out, though I did click through the entire Choice of the Dragon almost breathlessly), the works.

I don’t consider myself much of a writer in English. I simply don’t quite feel confident with my knowledge of the language to write big, proper stories in it, but at the same time, I have figured I could try and make something out of what I have. The genre of text adventure intrigues me, and I would like to see if I can make something out of it.

Thus, I have this idea I’ve had for a while now: using a universe me and my friend are slowly putting together (for the shortest of explanations; it’s an urban fantasy where humans are almost extinct and other fantasy races - classical ones like dwarves and orcs or stranger ones like the varieties of beastmen - are hanging around. It’s a bit of a salad bowl) I wanted to depict a story of a fresh-out-of-school detective, one Gordon Abel, who gets assigned to Supernatural Division of Geneva together with a veteran and a bit of a loose cannon Lucy Cane, then gets swept along into a larger crime at work within his first days of work there.

I’m still getting the hang of ChoiceScript, so i don’t really have any demo I could present, but I’m open to any questions that concern the worldbuilding that I could answer or anything about the plot itself. I think I have the stats figured out for now, but that likely remains to be seen yet. I also apologize in advance if this is a wrong category to put such a topic in, but I wasn’t really sure where to go with it.

In any case, it’s nice to meet you all and I hope we can get along swimmingly.

EDIT

https://dashingdon.com/go/1276

Here’s the first draft of the game; available are a small intro and a bit of Chapter 1. c:

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Sounds like an interesting universe that you could do a lot with.

I’d say the only concern is the fact that you’ve already chosen a main character, and his name is included in the title. A lot of the Choice of Games/Hosted Games fans prefer to play games where you get to create your own character, and like to choose their character’s name, gender and sexuality.

Giving players the option of choosing these things will probably make the game more popular, but at the end of the day it is your game and you should write what you want to write. :blush:

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I do fear the popularity of such a text adventure may be smaller because of that, but at the same time I feel somewhat more comfortable writing a character that I already have established. (if only in the everbigger “head library” >.> )

As for the name, that’s mostly a placeholder for now. I imagine the adventure might not turn too excellent if a bad ending or a bad choice are chosen. ^_^;

For that matter, I also fear that there might be too much infodumping involved. I’ve seen that making additional pages to stat charts as a sort-of-encyclopedia could work, but then again, some probably should be put in the story proper for those that might not want to read through mostly optional content (even if some of it could help in choosing the right answer, i.e. the settlers of Avalon - think fair folk - cannot lie, at least directly).

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Well, no worries. In IF, there’re to kind of MCs (AFAIK): player defined and pre-determined. I think both terms itself are self-explanatory.

If you plan to use a pre-determined one, feel free to go with it. IMO, there’s no difference between player defined and pre-deter as long as the story’s enjoyable. In fact, some of us here prefer pre-deter since using player defined MC mostly gives you a “blank-slate” character.

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While I’d prefer to be able to choose more (aka gender, name etc) of my MC, @Avery_Moore is right; it’s your game, and your choice. But your story and your universe sounds interesting enough, so I’d play this. I hope you make that demo.

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The universe being modern era in technology but with all of the traditional (D&D) fantasy races around is certainly intriguing. The last such effort was of course “Modern Majesty” and I was a bit sad that one died as the concept had tremendous promise.

Well sure, pre-determined of course never feels like “our mc” and I would like to point out that depending on the game-world’s naming conventions and gender roles the name Gordon does not need to mean it’s gender locked to male, just name locked. Even if it is gender locked there’s still the possibility of being a trans man, much like @iris’ game “Beast in the Castle” allows the player to be a trans woman. Nor does it have to mean player customization in terms of appearance etc, necessarily needs to go out of the window, as all we’ve got right now is a masculine sounding name.

That said if this game has romance and we’re going to be locked to straight male and said romances are non-optional to the story I’d appreciate a heads up warning, just so I know this game won’t be for me.

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I presume that romance, if there will be any, is going to be a secondary matter, but I’m not averse to making Gordon interested in any given number of characters, male or female. I might go for the Choice of the Dragon approach where you could simply express no interest in romance.

There’s definitely going to be some backstory that can be modified (i.e. why was he picked out for the unit and what he exceled in during his stay in the academy). I might have a “canon” version of Gordon in mind, but there will be nothing stopping the player from altering that as they please within the provided options (there’s definitely going to be an option to stumble into morally questionable ground, and current mutually exclusive variables I had in mind were By-The-Book/Cowboy (which represent how much he holds onto rules and how often he’d rather defy them for a greater cause) and Charm/Respect (good cop vs. bad cop, I presume), alongisde a few stats representing his growth in respective skills.

As for the name, I presume changing a name into something else shouldn’t be a problem once I get a hang of the ChoiceScript. Gordon Abel just happens to be the “canon” name (like Tidus in FFX).

As for the races, we went out of the way to try and apply some sort of differences to them so they don’t get too cliche, i.e orcs are born sailors and wage war for the sake of a good fight (rather than to maim, pillage, rape and burn), solar alfar (or high elves, since they originally were that) have a matriarchal society with notable dimorphism between the sexes etc.

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Sounds interesting can’t wait to try it

Felt it might be good to report some progress. I’ve got the action in medias res intro done as well as Gordon feeling introspective as he recounts his way from a kid to his position as a detective, on top of some actual extra plot unveiling past that introspection.

Would you say that the intro and the introspection alone would be good to give out for people to review what they think of the technicalities, the characters and the writing style? (it was about 6.5k words, code included) Or should I rather finish the first chapter before I put up any teasers?

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I believe the intro is good enough, at least in my opinion. It’s enough time to get us used to your writing style and the general setting and characters.

Is there magic in this world or perhaps racial abilities such as going berserk as an orc or being able to glamore as a fairy?

Certainly. c: The universe is generally made for a RPG system that we’re trying to devise and make something out of.

Magic also exists, in varying forms. It can be taught or it can be done “naturally”; there’s that D&D influence showing. ^_^;

https://dashingdon.com/go/1276

Alrighty. I’m happy to announce the first bit of the game for you guys to check. There isn’t much there beyond a couple choices and two skill checks, it’s mostly something to familiarize you with the world, the characters and the narrative. :slight_smile:

Current Known Problems: One of the *choices is not working at all, not sure why.

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This was fun (well, until I got that *choice error…)! I really like your writing, and even though I’m not the biggest fan of playing as a male, I’m really interested in seeing where this is going. Keep it up :slight_smile:

Oh dear. Where’s the *choice error located? I’ll set about fixing it.

And thank you. I was hoping to see chiefly if the writing style and the characters are agreeable, so I’m glad to hear the first reviewer being positive. :slight_smile:

I got one after I chose my partner to be a girl, and that the relationship soured after a lot of arguments.

I like it so far, cant wait for more, seems really interesting.

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Hello again.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I apologize for not doing much - or anything - in the way of updates or letting you know how it’s been going, but the progress wasn’t the best. That said, I expect to find more time for writing and planning the story after my exams and finals are finished.

As I’ve mentioned in the opening post, this project is for the class and thus supplemental material has been required of us, among it the protagonist’s overview (in this case, Gordon’s), the antagonist’s overview and the general plot overview. If anyone is interested in the former two (at the pain of possible spoilers, of course) and later in the plot overview, I would be more than happy to send those to you through a PM or put it in here, if there’s enough interest. c:

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Love the demo so far