Sunday, February 15, 2015

Rebuilding efforts

So, after writing several lines of somewhat boring dialogues... I realized they are boring. Shocking, right? I felt the kind of topic the NPCs could possibly bring up with Celeste (who is basically a stranger) didn't feel interesting enough, and the time frame didn't allow for more in-depth conversations to be had. So after pining over it for a while, I decided to re-make the dialogues, and make them more mechanic driven. I think I have a somewhat interesting idea for how things will work, to make up for the lack of proper dialogues (you'll get just some generic filler text, instead of actual lines and exchanges, but your relationships in the small ecosystem that is this quest, will play on each other, and making friends or enemies with certain people might help/hinder with others). I feel kind of bad for wasting most of my efforts last week, but I believe this is for the best, and should be both easier for players to grasp (no guessing what the right answer might be to a certain question from an NPC, just straightforward time management), while also allowing me to do some interesting stuff (likes/dislikes among the characters affecting your standing with the others, traits affecting just how quickly you can make friends, that sort of stuff). Making dialogue-related gameplay is usually hard, and I feel having some abstraction is actually useful in most cases (at least I hope this is the case, considering this is the option I am going with :p).


In other news, I got an astonishing 150 € donation from M.B. which means I'll probably have to be his manservant for a month, at least (just kidding, but if you are reading this, know that I sent you an e-mail, you should check it).

This should wrap things up for this week. It always makes me a bit mopey to scrap systems or dialogues, but such is porn text-adventures game development, or so I am told. At least now I feel much better about the flow of the gameplay, and I can also more easily add/subtract days from the adventure, since I am not restrained by a need to write more dialogue if I want to add more days, or having to cut down the requirements for progress if I decide to shorten the adventure. I personally don't love generic text, which is another reason why I was resistant to the idea at first, but you can't always have interesting things to say, especially for characters that are, for the most part, throways, to be frank (I can't imagine any of them really returning, at least in any important capacity).

Anyway, this is really everything I have to say at the moment (maybe I even talked too much, I am ruining all the mystery here! ;p), so I am going to call it quits for today. Until next week! ^_^

6 comments:

  1. I stare at my freakish eyeball, gaze into the distorted pupil until it expands and fills the monitor, fills my brain and I’m rushing through vacuum. Wide awake and so far at such speed I flatten into a subatomic contrail.

    That grand cosmic maw, that eater of galaxies, possesses sufficient gravitational force to rend the fabric of space and time, to obliterate reality, and in I go, bursting into trillions of minute particles, quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed.

    Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand.

    Reduced to my “essential saltes” as it were, I’m the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the Ouroboros swallows itself and this weeks post is made.

    The cycle begins anew with a big bang.

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    1. ...the fuck? Is this another apocalypse today thing? >.>

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    2. You mean like that video that YouTube keeps recommending to me, "Yellowstone supervolcano to erupt in 2 weeks or less," which was uploaded 3 weeks ago?

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    3. I am starting to think my comment section actually is a weird crossover with someone else's, and nobody bothered to tell me about it. XD

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  2. Cutting work is hard but if you weren't happy with it then it was the right choice. I quite like the idea that NPC relationships will effect each other
    & really appreciate your weekly updates. Good luck.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you, I hope you'll like it when you finally get to play it as well. :)

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