I have now completed the ten years and I have to admit I'm not as good a general as Agamemnon! It felt repetitive in places but I expect that was the point, to give the feel of the war dragging on. Overall I enjoyed it and certainly it was an original idea. I'm going to recommend the game to someone I know who is interested in ancient Greek history and mythology.
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Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Interpretation of the theme | #3 | 4.047 | 4.714 |
| Writing | #3 | 3.801 | 4.429 |
| Visual design/UI | #8 | 3.556 | 4.143 |
| Personal favorite | #9 | 2.820 | 3.286 |
| Overall | #9 | 3.011 | 3.508 |
| Fun to play | #10 | 2.943 | 3.429 |
| Character(s) | #11 | 2.698 | 3.143 |
| Game mechanics | #11 | 2.820 | 3.286 |
| Emotionally impactful | #13 | 1.962 | 2.286 |
| Use of multimedia | #13 | 2.453 | 2.857 |
Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Content warnings
The horrors of war; male genitalia; see project page for full content warnings
Comments
I've played through the whole game. The level of detail and the quality of writing remains incredible throughout and really ramps up in the final years of the war. I spent more time in year 10 than the other 9 years combined (or so it felt). Anyone who stops after year 1 is really missing out, ha ha! There were a few bugs (the artist would return an error after the first time, and many of the "where are they now" descriptions just didn't appear) but they were drowned out by the sheer quantity and quality of work. Your intention -- to create the sense of weariness and nihilism of a general of an endless war, making mistakes and building regrets that we have to just push on through to bring this pointless war to a merciful end -- was absolutely fulfilled.
Speaking of the "where are they now descriptions" -- man can I APPRECIATE a lengthy and detailed epilogue, especially after such a lengthy and detailed game depicting such a lengthy and detailed war. There was a real sense of closure.
I have some criticisms, but I'd like to prepend them with the statement that this is my favourite game out of the whole jam. It's the best written, the most fun to play through, and certainly the one that demonstrates its author's historical and mythological knowledge the most. As for ways I think it could improve: Give us a "stats page" where we can see a summary of each of the key players! I had no idea who 70% of the characters were. I knew Menelaos, Achilles, Patroclus, Odysseus (my favourite), Hector, Alexander, and Helen, but the rest were new to me. You give them a summary at the beginning, but there are just too many to remember.
By how you've set out the game, I think switching to a different system like choicescript (perfectly fits your format and also includes a handy stats page) or a visual novel system like Ren'Py (as I think it would really benefit from extra visuals and some of the QOL features of a VN framework) might help the game achieve its best form. Then again, Twine can probably do all of that with the right macros and bootstrapping and whatnot. I think you've got something really special here that deserves to be the best it can be.
Thank you so much for your kind words! I'm so glad to hear you enjoyed it! I'm sorry about the bugs; this is only my second game, so I don't exactly know what I'm doing yet. (And I learned a lot in-process, which I had hoped to go back and apply to the early years after I finished all the writing, but then Years Nine and Ten took forever to write, so I ran out of time...) I spent most of the last day of the jam just playing and replaying, looking for bugs to squash, but with so many different combinations of events, I couldn't find them all. :( I'd like to be able to fix them up, though. I'm not sure what you mean by "the artist", but as to the endings, which ones failed to appear, and what scenarios had you gone for with the characters whose fates didn't show? The conditional statements dictating those passages are convoluted nightmares, I'm sorry to say, and some of them depend on checking the history instead of just looking at variables, which made checking if they work a particular nightmare, because I couldn't just use my variable-control testing page to just jump right to the end and check on different permutations. (I really should have just added extra variables...)
I'm not sure what choicescript is, but Ren'Py is definitely one I've been thinking of learning; I definitely want to remake this in a different engine that will make things like stat pages (and, for that matter, stats period) easier to incorporate than they would be in TWINE. I may update this version with a glossary including basic info on all the characters and some of the key archaeological, mythological and cultural concepts and terms before that, too.
I've only played the first year so I'll rate it when I've got a bit farther on. Up to now I'm enjoying it. A chart you can get at in game showing which leader has which ships etc. as in a strategy game would help.
After extracting the files from the .zip folder, I could see the images.
I might have a fix for playing in the browser without downloading. Try naming the .html file in the .zip file index.html. You might also want to select Click to launch in full screen in the Embed Options and enable scrollbars. I learned this the hard way myself!
Submitted
DecahedronThanks for that tip about being able to have visuals without requiring a download! I will definitely try that out! :)
The number of ships they have is actually rather irrelevant in the game as it stands; it was just a carry-over from the Catalog of Ships in the Iliad. I do want to make a future version that will have some kind of stats page--and actual stats to go with it--though I will probably migrate it to a different game engine for that. I may add a glossary to this version at some point before that happens, though, which would certainly repeat the info from the introduction, as well as giving a basic sense of "this guy's a bad-ass" or "he's a so-so fighter", which would hopefully help a little.
I'm glad you were enjoying the opening; I hope you enjoy the rest, too. :)
I've only finished the first year so far. It's clearly a very long game, and you've worked hard on it. I feel that I need to know a heck of a lot more about Greek military history to play it to the best conclusion, since I've only heard of half the names. I did love the line 'Shouldn't gods have a little more dignity?'
By the way, the images weren't showing up for me. I don't know if anyone else has had the same problem.
Submitted
LostI'm still very new to making games (this is only my second), so I don't really know how to troubleshoot things like images not working. They worked on my computer (on both Firefox and Chrome) and my brother's computer (not sure which browser he used, probably Firefox), both running Windows 10. I think they *ought* to work on just about any system as long as they're in the same directory as the main file and their names haven't been changed, but my knowledge is kind of limited to what was written in the tutorials and wikis linked to by the Twine site...
It is definitely a very long game, much longer than I really meant it to be. (My decision to put ten events per year was not a smart one...) Most of the names aren't even terribly relevant (some of them I only remember for silly reasons, like that Ascalaphos had the dumbest death in the entire Iliad), and a few might have been more familiar if I had used their Roman equivalents instead of the original Greek. (Especially in the case of Aias: everyone seems to prefer the Roman Ajax, but to me "Ajax" will always sound like a cleaning product...)
It could be the types of image files used. Some will only work in certain browsers. I presume you put everything into a zip folder, and that the HTML Twine game was called index.html? That's the only way I was able to get music to work. Unless you're linking from an image-hosting website, like imgur. That way, you can use internet links instead of computer directories, so any computer can access them. It could slow the images appearing, however.
If you go onto the Twine subreddit, you might be able to get help there. I've found the people on there very knowledgeable and always ready to give advice.
Everything is in a zip folder, yes, but I didn't rename the .html file. Since it's set to be downloaded rather than played online, I wouldn't think the name of the .html file would matter, though? Whenever I update it to add in a glossary and any corrections I can make, I'll be sure to rename the .html file then, just in case that was the problem.
Try unzipping the folder and then playing it. The images should work that way. It didn't occur to me until a few minutes ago that it was even possible to launch the game from inside the zip folder, but then I went and tried it, and sure enough the images didn't work that way. I'm a relic of an older time when the contents of zip folders were impossible to access without unzipping first; using files that are still zipped is completely outside my mental box, you know?
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