bug findin' & fixin'

I decided to do some work on the quality of the code and discovered a bunch of random little problems. First I setup some unit tests... a year into the project, but hey better late than never. The majority of things seemed to work as I expected as I was writing tests, but I found myself refactoring quite a few classes along the way. I made some changes to a few storage classes to pass tests, then ran into a critical issue with json importing/exporting. The library I'm using to handle json isn't unit tested (by me anyway) and I was lost with a silent error that I couldn't for the life of me find. I resisted the urge to throw my computer out the window and found the issue by randomly reverting all my changes so all in all, good progress.

I also worked on the tools for designing games. Here is Next Door Girl April imported into Unity.

That is something like 300 passages in total. The conversion makes 300 rules and 300 responses, then each response has a text piece along with options and context so around 1000 game objects all together give or take a hundred. The editor runs a little sluggish with everything labeled but without labels it speeds back to normal.

Here you can see how options (magenta boxes) point to rules. 

I would like to write some kind of code to automatically sort passages in a pretty way on import, but I have more important things to do right now. My hacky Twine code doesn't parse nicely, so all of these passages need to be cleaned up a lot. Still without changing anything after an import it at least tries to run.

 Testing this out to see how far I could get lead me to another issue that I hadn't thought of.

I want to have all the text in the game be viewable in a big ass scrollable list ©. So far I had no reason to believe that this wasn't working, but after playing through NDGA I ran into an issue with the vertex count within the main panel view. I'm using NGUI to do the interface and the way it handles text is to create meshes. Normally this isn't a problem and it's actually an optimization over the built in OnGUI system (I think). Thing is once you get to like 60k vertices on a single mesh you have a big ass problem ©.

label

label under x ray vision

I'm hoping that the solution will be to just break apart the big ass scrollable list © into separate labels per passage and per command. Then just have them clipped when off screen. If that solution doesn't work, then I guess I'll have only one passage displayed at a time or some kind of limited amount of text. The good news is that this is the last major bug that I know of and now I have pretty much everything I need to make stuff.

Interface rebuild, check.

I'm not 100% happy with the look, but it works. I have a few more important tasks left for the world editor and then I'll finally be able to put together a game with this system (I hope).

It's been almost a year since I first downloaded Twine started working on Next Door Girl April. Looking back on the year I'm generally happy with what I've been able to do. I've learned a bunch about making games by building a text system in Unity. Aside from technical knowledge, I picked up a lot of good experience with writing and design from Next Door Girl April and Midnight Room. I remember being really miserable about life when I wrote NDGA, but I definitely feel happier as a person right now.  Maybe there is something beneficial about writing absurd text based games. I hope that by this time next year I'll have done something really amazing.

Midnight Room Dev Update

Hello, thought I'd make an update post about my current project The Midnight Room. I'll keep this post spoiler free, but I will discuss some of the technical stuff about the game. My primary goal is to improve the way I made Next Door Girl April. There were a lot of lessons learned making that game, and hopefully I will be able to make better games because of it.

NDGA stat system

The first thing I thought about improving, was the stat system in NDGA. So stats, or stat, in NDGA was really simple to manage for players and me developing the game. With just one thing to keep track of, there wasn't much difficulty in playing the game. Every choice that you made had a single effect on this stat, raise it, lower it or do nothing to it. The problem with this is it was just too easy, especially since I didn't prevent using the back button to change your mind. In order to add challenge, I put in a few tricks that rewarded following up on 'bad' choices with higher gains than you would have gotten had you made 'good' choices. The tricks worked, but they were only bandages to cover up a structural problem. So for Midnight Room, I knew I would need more stats.

MR stat system

One option is to just break down sex appeal into different stats, like attraction, physical attractiveness, mood, etc. The problem is some of those things are difficult to change with player choices, or just mundane like taking a shower. The addition of taking a shower in NDGA v 035 was kind of a joke, and I don't think it added anything to the overall experience of playing the game. What follows is my new approach, so don't continue reading if you'd rather wait to see it in the game.

Next Door Girl April Version 035

New project

After a lot of work on Next Door Girl April, I have decided to put it on hold.
I honestly thought I could rebuild the story in 3d, but it turns out my assumptions were wrong.
It just wasn't fun to play and building it felt more like a chore than I'd like.
The core of the issue is finding out what the game should actually be.
Displaying all of the text of the original story along side of characters acting it out is just strange.
Removing the descriptive part of the text and leaving only the dialogue felt very empty.
Having the models just act out various sex scenes isn't really a game at all, but more of a simulation.
It is incredibly easy to criticize sex scenes in video games, until you are actually the one trying to create one yourself.

Version 28 of Next Door Girl: April

Download Here

This is a minor fix of some of the rules towards the end of the story.

What is this exactly?

I forgot to actually talk about the project ... here goes.

Next Door Girl April

Widowed after a loving marriage, Donald Hardeman leads a quiet secluded life in a big empty home. Donald maintains a small electronics import business to fill his otherwise misery filled days. He wakes to a large empty bed, goes to his home office to tend the daily orders and then cries his memories away at night. Donald longs for the feeling of a woman's warm touch, but he hasn't yet recovered from the tragic loss of his wife Nellie and subsequent disappearance of his adult son Raymond. Donald's world turns upside down with the sudden appearance of a familiar face from the past, that of the next door girl April, who has blossomed into a beautiful young woman.

Version 27 of Next Door Girl: April

Updated things: DOWNLOAD

So the poll results are pretty clear, art is the winner. Most of the feedback that I have gotten is about making art so I guess that will be my next step. Part two of the story along with other tasks are going on hold for quite a while.

I am likely going to use a lot of freely available resources from various places online. I welcome any artists that would like to contribute to the project, but I don't anticipate lots of interest. There is a lot to be done and I don't want to talk about how long the process will take.

I'll just go step by step. First, the environment. Here is a quick look at what I have mocked up so far. NOTE: you will need the Unity web player to view this demo. I am only posting this because ... well ... not sure, but here it is. As a side note if anyone knows of a place to host the game online, I'd appreciate a tip.

[experimental thing removed]

Thanks!

NDGA 25 Twine graph

Here is a look at the twine graph of NDGA. You can see part one on the top and part two near the bottom. The story follows a single branch, with lots of options along the way (Especially around the end). Organizing all of the passages is actually kind of fun for me, and it paints an interesting picture.

Twine graph for NDGA

Version 25 of Next Door Girl: April

Version 25 of Next Door Girl: April
Download

Version 17 of Next Door Girl: April

Version 17 of Next Door Girl: April
Download