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plan was to work on more graph embedding stuff but i ended up just not touching that code at all, whoops. maybe that'll be the back half of february.
what i did end up working on was the new twine game i'll be making. specifically, a lot of the "engine" parts. you might ask 'what does a twine game need with an engine'.
so this game is gonna be a bit more mechanics-focused than the last one, which means i need to think about how to lay out and run that mechanic. really a "game mechanic" is just the short form for "this is a thing that the game will repeat over and over with a fairly uniform interface", so, i gotta put together that uniform interface. it's gonna be something like a detective game, so the first thing i put together (before these two weeks) was a modular dialog system heavily inspired by sentient. (my first exposure to sentient was actually this video). and the thing with sentient is that it really highlights some of the drawbacks of having a modular dialog system. so this is definitely not done, and i think a big part of having the dialog system be workable and fun involves doing a bunch of tweaks and fixes as people play various demo versions and complain about it. but for any of that to happen i first did need a working prototype, so that was what i put together first. (that was this version, which was also incidentally the first version i posted to patreon as part of the development direction poll)
but then after doing that i realized, well, this game isn't just gonna be talking to people. it's kind of implied that there's some kind of map, since all of these people will be in different places, and also maybe some kind of physical inspection of locations, since, detective work also classically involves looking for physical clues. so i was like, well, i probably need some kind of map.
in the prior twine game the 'world map' was just a 7x7 box with some 'go north' 'go south' etc links attached. even though that was the simplest possible space, that was still really disorienting for a lot of people, so with this i kind of wanted to try something a little more visual. i also didn't really want to go with "the map is a big grid and every room is square", since, that kind of had a renaissance in porn games and then immediately went out of fashion when people realized how repetitive and prone to making giant dead areas it was.
also, i recently downloaded a playstation emulator and started playing old playstation games.
so, enter the 'vagrant story minimap' map system. this was kinda thrown together from a bunch of the existing svg+javascript 3d render code i had sitting around, so it wasn't even that difficult to implement -- the data entry aspect of making the map is a bunch bigger time sink than the actual underlying programming.
(i'm considering seeing if this map setup is standalone enough to split it off into its own macro set, but tbh twine code has changed enough that i have no clue how to e.g., make this into a sugarcube macro, given the different ways in which sugarcube works.)
all the demos, in order:
this still isn't fully complete. i mean, obviously, this is a big game project and will take a while to finish. but nearly all of the fundamental Interface stuff is done, and mostly what's left is writing a billion lines of dialog and description and sex scenes and the like. mechanically, i still need to add in some more special-casing support for dialog options, and at some point i want to add in blocked exits and secret exits to the map. and of course if i want there to be investigation sections i'll need to add that too. but for the most part, the game has enough of a skeleton that it's kind of clear how it will be played, even if there's basically no content in it yet.
anyway so that's the 2-week project for these two weeks: 3d map interface code in twine, or, more specifically, doing the initial setup for the werewolf twine game
i'm really gonna need a name for this so i'm not just gonna be calling it "the werewolf game" like i did for the prior twine game, which was "the locust porn game" up until basically the very end.
what i did end up working on was the new twine game i'll be making. specifically, a lot of the "engine" parts. you might ask 'what does a twine game need with an engine'.
so this game is gonna be a bit more mechanics-focused than the last one, which means i need to think about how to lay out and run that mechanic. really a "game mechanic" is just the short form for "this is a thing that the game will repeat over and over with a fairly uniform interface", so, i gotta put together that uniform interface. it's gonna be something like a detective game, so the first thing i put together (before these two weeks) was a modular dialog system heavily inspired by sentient. (my first exposure to sentient was actually this video). and the thing with sentient is that it really highlights some of the drawbacks of having a modular dialog system. so this is definitely not done, and i think a big part of having the dialog system be workable and fun involves doing a bunch of tweaks and fixes as people play various demo versions and complain about it. but for any of that to happen i first did need a working prototype, so that was what i put together first. (that was this version, which was also incidentally the first version i posted to patreon as part of the development direction poll)
but then after doing that i realized, well, this game isn't just gonna be talking to people. it's kind of implied that there's some kind of map, since all of these people will be in different places, and also maybe some kind of physical inspection of locations, since, detective work also classically involves looking for physical clues. so i was like, well, i probably need some kind of map.
in the prior twine game the 'world map' was just a 7x7 box with some 'go north' 'go south' etc links attached. even though that was the simplest possible space, that was still really disorienting for a lot of people, so with this i kind of wanted to try something a little more visual. i also didn't really want to go with "the map is a big grid and every room is square", since, that kind of had a renaissance in porn games and then immediately went out of fashion when people realized how repetitive and prone to making giant dead areas it was.
also, i recently downloaded a playstation emulator and started playing old playstation games.
so, enter the 'vagrant story minimap' map system. this was kinda thrown together from a bunch of the existing svg+javascript 3d render code i had sitting around, so it wasn't even that difficult to implement -- the data entry aspect of making the map is a bunch bigger time sink than the actual underlying programming.
(i'm considering seeing if this map setup is standalone enough to split it off into its own macro set, but tbh twine code has changed enough that i have no clue how to e.g., make this into a sugarcube macro, given the different ways in which sugarcube works.)
all the demos, in order:
this still isn't fully complete. i mean, obviously, this is a big game project and will take a while to finish. but nearly all of the fundamental Interface stuff is done, and mostly what's left is writing a billion lines of dialog and description and sex scenes and the like. mechanically, i still need to add in some more special-casing support for dialog options, and at some point i want to add in blocked exits and secret exits to the map. and of course if i want there to be investigation sections i'll need to add that too. but for the most part, the game has enough of a skeleton that it's kind of clear how it will be played, even if there's basically no content in it yet.
anyway so that's the 2-week project for these two weeks: 3d map interface code in twine, or, more specifically, doing the initial setup for the werewolf twine game
i'm really gonna need a name for this so i'm not just gonna be calling it "the werewolf game" like i did for the prior twine game, which was "the locust porn game" up until basically the very end.
