Posted September 29, 2020 by ZapJackson
For this one, I had an idea I wanted to try and found a jam that it would work for. Is this cheating? Is it even possible to cheat when you haven’t established any rules? I’m a little behind schedule, so this probably isn’t the last time this will happen.
Five years ago, I submitted an entry to a 200 word pen and paper RPG contest, and this game is based on that. https://200wordrpg.github.io/2015/rpg/finalist/2015/04/01/TwoWords.html I wanted to see if I could actually pull off a decent length game with those constraints. I took it a little further with this one, by deciding that I’d try not to use the “word word colon word word period” construction to cheat extra detail out. I also forbade myself from using things like gore-splattered or… I dunno… Once-in-a-lifetime.
This turned out to be more like Spooky Mountain than I expected, which is a little bit of a bummer, but I think it was worth the experiment to try to deliver an entire game in this writing style. I don’t really feel like I developed any new programming skills or techniques, either, but I guess practice is always good. On the design side, it was an interesting challenge to thread so many secret paths through it.
Simple game. Short postmortem.