2014-12-14

Scenes, too many of them

I should really know better than to start writing new scenes without finishing old ones. I just come up with ideas and start writing without thinking about all the work that it takes to get them done. I've gotten to a point where I have 20 scenes that are incomplete in different ways. There is no realistic way I can get them done by the end of the month. For now I've at least recognized the problem and stopped writing before it's too late. I'm in the process of testing the game to figure out what scenes are necessary to have for the demo.

A few other things. In the spirit of 'borrowing' I've decided to implement fair math from ChoiceScript to help handle stats. So far I'm liking it, but I worry that I might have problems managing the numbers later on. Also, I've added keyboard shortcuts for undo, redo, save, etc. My goal was always to be able to scrub through history super smooth like with Ren'Py. I think I'm getting there.

And last but not least a little info about the game. I'm calling it Ever Forward. You play as a 28 yr old guy celebrating his birthday. Yeah I could be more specific, but I don't like spoiling things.

2014-12-10

sample of stuff

Working on a few small fixes with the system. Here is a gif of the settings available and my poor attempt at responsive design.


I'm trying not to get bogged down with working on the system since I have a crap load of stuff to do for the demo. I'm working on a pretty crazy scene with a room full of androids. Onwards and upwards... or whatever.

2014-12-07

Sat on a stapler

Just finished writing my first DP scene. Today was a good day. The move to revive this project was a good one. I have a lot of work to do, but if I can keep up my current pace I expect to have a decent demo available by new year. The structure of the game encourages a lot of diversion in plot, so I can really go crazy with ideas (hopefully not too crazy). The downside is that I probably won't include any meaningful endings for quite some time. I have a few ideas for endings, but I want to push more content into the game before wrapping things up.

Yeah, reading this post back, it sounds like a vague description wrapped in a brief update wrapped in a questionable deadline. Basically yes, I'm having fun writing this one, and I think it's going to be real good like. I've decided to make a new town next to Bunkville called Cloverfield, where I can dump sci-fi stories. Why do I need to create fictional towns that border fictional towns you ask. Well, I have already explained this via clues hidden in everal previous posts. (hint: that last sentence is a lie (or is it? (it is)))

2014-12-02

Substance-less update

So yeah, my nanowrimo attempt failed. I got to a point where I just disliked where my story was going and didn't have the time to back up and rewrite. Maybe next year...

Instead I focused on Fate. I made a few porting attempts and long story short, decided to stick with Unity. Along the way I made a bunch of changes to the system, some of which broke the entire visual editor code. I also bit the bullet and redid the interface using Unity's new UI system. There are a few important things that I need to figure out how to approach, like embedded links and noun/verb display. For the most part it works.

More than anything I would really like to release one game this year. Just one. Something is far from ready, so instead of trying to rush that, I am dusting off one of my many abandoned projects. I gave up on the game I have in mind due to the heavy amounts of state involved. It was a pain to work with all the conditional statements needed in Twine. My hope is that the syntax Fate uses for branching will allow me to build a decent demo of the game while maintaining my sanity (or what's left of it).