Hey there gang! I’m giving myself until my birthday next week to relax and recharge from the contest, and then it’s on to the next thing. Trouble is, I’m having a bit of a tough time deciding what that would be. One thing I am sure I will pick at, a hopefully unique item I’m holding back for a potential future contest. But in the meantime I want to try something else for a HG release. Some background on the options:
-TriviArena would be a game in which characters would engage in trivia contests to gain status and rank, in order to qualify for a chance to compete in the great TriviArena and prove yourself to be the best around. Character tropes will be your opponents; a jock to challenge you for sports trivia, scientists for science, and so on. Hard part here is figuring out how to bring stats into play, as well as making it challenging without being so tough they just Google every answer and don’t bother playing legit. Though some will do that anyhow, I suppose.
-You’re Gonna Die! is something inspired a bit by the day off work game from last year. Few to no stats, just death around every corner. You die over and over, with dozens of endings. Might use achievements to give actual progression to it. Could be fun, but the downside is that it might not have enough meat on it to justify purchase.
-Wil and Ben are characters I started using years ago in a play by post D&D game. Well, ‘characters’ is a loose term. Wilstaff is a very unhinged necromancer who firmly believes his skeletal companion, Bennett, can talk (for alignment purposes, Wil is Chaotic Evil, whereas ‘Bennett’ tends to Lawful Good). The pair bounce around, bantering and generally wreaking havoc. Would have to decide how much should be premade and how much should be a blank slate, but the main thing here is this would be a whole game full of choices similar to the Insanity paths in Nuclear Powered Toaster. Could be several short and loosely connected games featuring the pair in differing realities.
-A Sterling Reputation would feature Drace Sterling, a soldier referenced in NPT. It takes place after the first Clysm but before the second, and would be a military narrative focused on his efforts to bring down a villain known as the Sky Marshall.
So, which of these sounds the most interesting as a sophomore project? And please post as well as vote, I’m trying to get as many thought-out viewpoints as I can.
TriviArena- A vaguely Pokémon-ish RPG/trivia game
You’re Gonna Die!- The potential world record holder for most death scenes in a CYOA
Untitled Wilstaff and Bennett project- Turning the Insanity up to 11
A Sterling Reputation- A short Nuclear Powered Toaster prequel, set mid-Clysm
This one sounds interesting. I think two of the main issues with this would be a) how are you going to make it different from the endless other trivia games out there? The characters would probably have to be comic(ally tropic) and/or well-developed to differentiate it; and b) the trivia questions shouldn’t be ridiculously esoteric. As in “Who won the Super Bowl in 1909?”, because idk, but I don’t think many people would know the answer to this question since baseball isn’t very popular outside of certain areas? So there’ll probably need to be a balancing act there as well.
Another downside would be that these can get annoying pretty quickly. I found the day off work game quite irritating. Don’t know about others, but from what I’ve seen not many people like replaying games enough to make this work.
Where does the reader fit into this, what do they control? (Sorry, haven’t read NPT.)
I think the characters will be amusing; I have plenty of weaknesses as a writer, but I fancy myself at least passing fair at comedic dialogue. As for the questions themselves, that part worries me not a bit. I wrote about 5,500 trivia questions during my years working with a restaurant trivia company, question sets designed to be both accessible to the masses and challenging to the hardcore crowd. Getting back into question writing, even after a few years, does not intimidate me. My concern is more balance for the game itself. As for distinguishing, I’ll be hoping the RPG mechanics and actual storyline will set it apart. Just hope no one expects a Versus Mode with real people.
Sorry, NPT is Nuclear Powered Toaster. My contest entry.
No pokemon…PLEASE NO!!!
Besides there’s aren’t enough voters to really decide on what to do you can’t make a decision based off of…8 voters at the time of this post. You’ll need more feedback.
I won’t solely base my choice off of this poll; after all, whatever I pick I will be working on for half a year at bare minimum. That’s a big decision to leave up to a bunch of semi-strangers. But y’all are still creators of IF, consumers of it, or in a lot of cases both. Informed opinions carry weight.
I have not heard of that, actually. I created these characters in 2010 or 2011, and I think a lot of the influence was Venture Brothers, one of my favorite shows at the time (I mean, it still might be, if they would ever make another season. To anyone who complains about Rick and Morty or Game of Thrones, Venture is proof it can be worse). Without going into spoilers for anyone who has yet to watch this excellent show, around season 3 or 4 one character starts to talk a lot to the skull of a deceased one.
New poll! I jettisoned the two lowest options, not just due to lack of votes but because my death option likely lacked marketability (after all the game that inspired it, A Day Off Work, got jettisoned to the freemium area to likely make not much money), and there is no sense spending my time on a prequel to a story that could very well bomb completely, doubling both my and CoG’s losses in time and money, respectively. I replaced them with two other notions I want to evaluate:
Blood, Sweat and Oil would see you as the head of an up and coming garage in the Ultimate Robot Fighting League, which probably needs a more clever name with some sort of goofy acronym. You will manage a small stable of robots and see how well you do against the heavy hitters. More Battlebots than Real Steel, I expect. But old-school Battlebots when the designs were a lot more varied than they are today. A lot of one on one combat, some teams as well. And naturally we will get a couple of large-scale melees. Combat-heavy, hopefully still room for character development with your coworkers and rival garages.
We Come in Peace…? is inspired in part by @Eric_Moser and his invaluable poll thread. An alien ‘protagonist’ sounds delightful, a la the classic game series Destroy All Humans. But peaceful options would also exist, leading to vastly different playthroughs depending on how often you try to conquer and subjugate the fleshlings you encounter compared to working with them and getting to know them. Might be a y’all order to make, but has some potential to be quite fun.
Untitled Wilstaff and Bennett-Insanity maximized
TriviArena-Gotta quiz ‘em all!
Blood, Sweat and Oil- Bot smashin’ fun!
We Come in Peace…?- Human smashin’ fun! Or human-savin’ fun, that’s good too.
God this response is so telling in your knowledge of sports … I spit my drink at the computer screen as I read it.
I hope this was meant to be funny or do you really not know that the Super Bowl is football and the World Series is baseball, not to mention that the Super Bowl didn’t come into existence til the 1960’s.
Let’s not forget that in Europe for example baseball and football aren’t so popular as it is in the USA. And I’m pretty sure Europe isn’t the only area where these sports aren’t all that popular. It’s not a big deal if someone doesn’t know stuff about those sports which seem trivial to you, I’m sure they also have knowledge about things you don’t know much about.
My comment was basically saying you probably shouldn’t use an example that you know nothing about. I still think that like @hustlertwo said, @Retrovirus was trying to use an outrageous example and more than anything it caused me to laugh my butt off. Sorry if that came off as harsh. I just found the comment so outlandish that I had to comment.
By the way as an American, I still try to keep up with the European football(soccer as we call it). @Cari-san, my comment from just from a sports fan being amused, sorry if I was offensive.
Honestly, even though football as we know it is not big outside of our country and Canada, the Super Bowl itself sorta transcends borders in cultural awareness. It would be hard to fathom someone unaware of what it is at this point.
