Perhaps a morality choice could be placed in as such:
“You begin to pack your bags for college, clothes, toiletries and the like. When done with that, you think that it’d be wise to pack a book for the plane ride there.”
Choice A-“Can’t go wrong with John Stuart Mill, consequentialism always seemed more pragmaticin regards to morality.”
Choice B-“Immanuel Kant always appealed to me, deontology provides nice solid rules for morality.”
Choice C-“Eh, a plane is no place for philosophy, I’ll just go with a fun mystery.”
Choice A would add some points to deontology, B to consequentialism, C would have no change, the options would provide a bit of explanation for those unfamiliar with the philosophical concepts. Plus it makes you look smart for namedropping philosophers.
“Awareness” is how generally aware of your surroundings you character is.
For example
***SPOILER***
One of the cases you are sent to a house where a vampire has murdered a family.
If your “Awareness” is high enough your character will notice that most of the photos show mom, dad, and two children but the police only found three bodies - this will let players try and find the missing kid if they wish to. Players with a low “Awareness” won’t notice it.
***SPOILER END***
“Rapport” is how well you work together with your partner.
Normally when you have a new partner it starts of at 0% and changes depending on how you treat them. The higher your “Rapport” the more help your partner will be.
I know, but it doesn’t just end, I says I have an error. I got to the end another way and it just showed the screen with no choice, but this way gets me an error.
Question: To keep with the 'TV series theme ie “Episodes” instead of Chapters I am considering a “Previously on ‘Unnatural’…” bit at the start of each episode which gives you a recap of what happened in the previous episode, would that be a feature you’d like? Also any suggestions on how to code it? I’m thinking of having a bunch of variables which i can tag as the game progresses,
for example.
{name} {surname} is the newest member of the S.R.T. A survivor of a {monster} attack that killed his family. {he/she} is about to start ${his/her} first case…
This way I just need to name the variable when players make choices and it should be able to give a brief recap on the previous “Episode”
I think the "Previously on . . . " bit would fit very well with what you’re aiming for, bearing in mind that when watching multiple episodes on DVD that’s the bit you always fast-forward through because you’ve only just finished watching it, it wasn’t last week! Reading through multiple episodes of the game would, to my mind at least, be more like watching the DVD than a once-weekly episode . . . If you see what I mean. For this reason I’d keep the recap fairly short, otherwise the player might get into the habit of ‘fast-forwarding’ past it and thereby perhaps miss a vital clue or useful reminder.
For the implementation I’d also be inclined towards using a separate bunch of variables, for the most part, just to make sure these are updated precisely to serve this single purpose so would always be accurate and are not changed again by something else unrelated. This probably comes down to personal preference though–I find it harder to keep track of everything if I use the same variable for multiple purposes.
Unless you are going to separate Unnatural into many small games (each contains 1 Episode) having actual Save feature, I don’t think the “previously on…” style recap would be necessary. If there is no Save, the game must be played through in one time, therefore don’t need a recap.
Assuming each Episode contains one case, a “Mission Report” style recap might be nice.
I see you used my morality question, this tickles me greatly. But you spelt Kant “Kent”, and I also can’t seem to get past the scene where I’m told to head to the armory, as this error pops up:
line 1373: It is illegal to fall into an *else statement; you must *goto or *finish before the end of an indented block.
Also, I think the mission report, if done well, could clear things up if the events get complicated, but if done poorly it could get rather redundant.
Basically there is a variable called ‘clue’ that is randomnly assigned a number between 1-4 in each room there is a check if you have a ‘clue’ you find something and you lose 1 clue otherwise you find nothing.
For example say the player goes through the game and is randomnly assigned 3 ‘clue’
There are four choices
boxes 1-4
player chooses to open box one as he has 3 ‘clue’ finds something inside but ‘clue’ is reduced to 2.
Player chooses to open box two as he has 2 ‘clue’ finds something inside and ‘clue’ is again reduced this time to 1.
Player opens box three and as he has 1 ‘clue’ he gets an item and ‘clue’ becomes 0.
Player opens box four but as he has 0 ‘clue’ the box is empty however if he opened it before box 1,2 or three he would find something.
Have a playthrough and let me know how it works, in theory every player should have at least one choice where they find nothing.
