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)))
2014-12-07
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).
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).
2014-11-06
Sigh
8951 words right now. I fell behind working on code instead of writing the last few days. I'm committed to catching back up though.
I've been stressed out about the limitations with using Unity for text based games. I knew the problems before I started all this, but I hoped that I could figure out workarounds. My biggest concern is with the user interface and accessibility.
Ideally I could hook up games in the system to accessibility features provided on each platform. I believe this is possible with Unity on mac, win, ios and android by making plugins. Unity has nothing built in to access these features. Actually Unity's stance on accessibility as far as I can tell is basically good luck. The problem for me making these plugins is that desktop native plugins require Unity Pro and my current project budget is nil.
That brings me to search for alternative multi platform game systems where I can port the system.
Xamarin would be the easiest switch since the core of Fate is already in C# without dependencies on Unity. The downside there is that it costs to develop for mobile and I would still have to write accessibility plugins for each platform's accessibility apis anyway.
Cocos2dx looks promising as a cross platform/open source engine, but I would need to convert Fate to C++ (no small task). I also haven't dug up any clear answers about how or if Cocos2dx interacts with the various platform's accessibility apis.
I've looked into Haxe as a potential solution, but couldn't find anything about accessibility with OpenFL, haxepunk etc.
There is of course Java or cpp with qt/whatever or c and gtk? or javascript/html5/css. I just hate/haven't used those. Yeah, my current outlook on all of this is kind of negative. I'll figure it out eventually (I hope).
I've been stressed out about the limitations with using Unity for text based games. I knew the problems before I started all this, but I hoped that I could figure out workarounds. My biggest concern is with the user interface and accessibility.
Ideally I could hook up games in the system to accessibility features provided on each platform. I believe this is possible with Unity on mac, win, ios and android by making plugins. Unity has nothing built in to access these features. Actually Unity's stance on accessibility as far as I can tell is basically good luck. The problem for me making these plugins is that desktop native plugins require Unity Pro and my current project budget is nil.
That brings me to search for alternative multi platform game systems where I can port the system.
Xamarin would be the easiest switch since the core of Fate is already in C# without dependencies on Unity. The downside there is that it costs to develop for mobile and I would still have to write accessibility plugins for each platform's accessibility apis anyway.
Cocos2dx looks promising as a cross platform/open source engine, but I would need to convert Fate to C++ (no small task). I also haven't dug up any clear answers about how or if Cocos2dx interacts with the various platform's accessibility apis.
I've looked into Haxe as a potential solution, but couldn't find anything about accessibility with OpenFL, haxepunk etc.
There is of course Java or cpp with qt/whatever or c and gtk? or javascript/html5/css. I just hate/haven't used those. Yeah, my current outlook on all of this is kind of negative. I'll figure it out eventually (I hope).
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