I just stumbled upon this, thanks for mentioning narrat :D

It's funny, when I did the recordings and started making that game I didn't even realise I was making an FMV. It's only when someone else asked me about a feature to play videos that I realised I could insert videos I had recorded... Never really thought I'd make FMV games but I suppose I made one :o

Narrat 3.4.0 has been released

• Mastodon thread
• Twitter thread

Narrat is a game engine for making all sorts of interactive fiction games, visual novels and more with optional RPG mechanics and a very easy, intuitive and fast dialogue writing system.

Here are the new features in 3.4.0

Animations

There is a new animations 1 feature which lets you animate pretty much anything.

Narrat Editor

The first step to a future narrat editor is here, there is now an interactive narrat playground where you can play and edit a game at the same time directly in the browser.

This required a few changes to make it easier to integrate narrat within the tool, which would make it easier if anyone wants to make advanced plugins/integrations, or run narrat directly inside other websites.

This base proof of concept will be expanded on in the future to try to move towards having a proper desktop editor for creating/managing/editing/publishing narrat games

Breaking Changes

Not a breaking change, but as part of working on the narrat editor, narrat now can be inside custom containers in the page and doesn’t necessarily listen to inputs on the window object.

This doesn’t seem to break anything in my testing so far

Features

• New options to style portraits of individual characters 1
• New options to control when the dialog panel appears

Documentation

• New Dialog Panel 1 page
• New Animations 1 page
• Improved Inventory 1 docs
• Added Narrat Overview 1 page with explanations of elements in a narrat game

Well, making it feel like this is the point so thanks, it's kind of fun to asynchronously connect with other people via a sort of message in a bottle/extremely basic simulation of myself.

I already posted a comment on the game, but to reiterate here this was very cool. Also fun to discover the you used the new video feature that barely just came out :o

I loved this demo

Seriously it's cool, the art is really good and the game is stylish. I liked the little animated part, and the two masks are cool character ideas. I wanna see where this will go

ok this piqued my interest, I'm curious about the rest now :o

I liked this, it's viscerally relatable, and showing a Tumblr profile is a fun idea

I liked this, it's viscerally relatable, and showing a Tumblr profile is a fun idea

very normal use of narrat

Well fuck that was painfully relatable, and pretty good.

Over time I've learned to quickly detach myself from people who act like that. Boundaries and all that. But it's weird to be reminded of what it can be like when you let people get too far into this... however we call this phenomenon?

Yes I really like how that porcelainflower looks, the flowers are individually cool but I also like the way they cluster idk it's really nice to look at

🍂A walk through the forest 🍂

My Narrat Jam 2 game is released!

Playable on browser and PC

🌸 Walk through the forest with me, discover flowers and identify them. It is not at all a game about random ramblings of my brain. I promise 🤫

🕒The game is relatively short, depending on your reading speed and if you explore side paths I would say maybe up to 30 minutes? It contains about 10,000 words.

🍂 A walk through the forest is made with photos, videos and audio taken during a real-life walk through the forest 🍂

If you want a better experience with video buffering you can also download the game and play it on your PC

Content Warnings: There is a part that goes into hard topics, but that part has content warnings before it starts and is optional (trans topics and discussions of sexuality). The rest of the game is mostly discussions of various thoughts.

Play it on itch.io!

This game was made and submitted for Narrat Jam 2

It was written all in one shot in a weekend, with a bit more work on the side to polish and finish details.

I wanted to make something small to submit to the Narrat Jam, though it got out of hand and ended up a little bigger than expected. It's still a pretty small game though. Using real-life photos made developing this a lot quicker as I didn't have to make assets. This game goes into way more personal and intimate thoughts and ramblings as I normally do, so I hope it turns out well.

Do you know about Narrat?

It's the game engine I created to help people make narrative games. It can make all sorts of visual novel-type games, or narrative games with RPG mechanics in general.

It's made to be very easy to use and get into, and has a very natural feeling scripting syntax to write your dialogue in. If you want to try narrat, it takes just a minute to create a game. In fact, I bet you'd have time to create a Narrat game and write a story, then release it in time to submit your project to the Narrat Jam 2 before August starts. It's very quick and easy to use, and a good occasion to make your first game if you haven't!

I like how this is written, and how much it conveys. The one choice is also a pretty good one

aaaa thank you this is such a nice review :o

I was hoping to create a kind of peaceful reflective mood, so it's good to know that it worked, too

Hey, that's cool, thanks for posting this.
I'd advise posting this on the narrat forum too if you want more people to find you as your post is more likely to be noticed by people doing the jam

just to let everyone here know, the Narrat forums are available to discuss the jam, projects, get help, recruit teams etc.

Hello,

I just posted a new devlog about the narrat game engine for interactive fiction/

Here's some screenshots of recent games made with narrat:

Thanks <3

Oh thanks ❤️

And 12 is good 😈

uwu

is this after restarting the game or something?

hasanabi would have done a fundraiser for trans rights if only you hadn't been so stubborn, u ruined trans rights

Personal beliefs shouldn't infringe on the freedom of others or harm them.

people can believe whatever they want but religion or beliefs aren't excuses for hurting people no matter what

You don't have to respect the "opinion" of people who have decided that a certain category of people doesn't deserve to exist

The answer to most of those questions is that this game is a shitpost originally made in 3 hours and slightly improved since.

I might spend more time on improving it more soon though so I might fix some of those things

Saves are automatic, I should add a message at the start explaining how it works. There's no manual save because well it's a 5 minute game

(also it's intentionally not subtle because I do not trust gamers to understand the message and I don't want to accidentally make people think the point of the game is to endorse Hogwarts Legacy)

oh shit I never thought about that, I guess those tweets by JK Rowling were all misunderstandings and there's a reasonable reason why she decided to call all trans people and their allies that:

I guess it was also an innocent disagreement when the TERF friends she hangs out with literally quoted Hitler in their speech and none of them even called it out or seemed to find it weird  https://twitter.com/northumbriaiww/status/1614690987145576453

This is probably just reasonable disagreements too https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/11/23/jk-rowling-libs-of-tik-tok-twitter/

Of course there's about hundreds of over things that could be used to illustrate this

haha so true you're so funny sweetie you really owned me there you're so cool do you want to be my friend

I saw your edit and, idk I'd summarise things by saying it's a satire game and not meant to be completely taken seriously. Obviously buying the game won't literally translate to an anti-trans bill appearing, but keeping her relevant and engaging with HP does help her keep having influence and as queen of terfs she definitely has an impact on how popular anti-trans legislation and hate crimes etc are getting.

Showing the news headlines appear as you play is just a way to exaggerate it to a comical effect to make cis people think about the two things together

Now whether it's better to do that or to ignore the game completely, I have no idea. It's a game we can rarely win when we have no power.

wow that's so sad I guess I wasted my life... 

that must be so hard for you

tbh it was really hard to balance and since I made it last minute in half a day, most of my time was spent tweaking balancing to try to make the first life hard and next life easier. I don't even know if the balance ended up good by the end

I like the cool UI look and sounds

Fun little game, and I like how it looks

Theme revealed

The theme is "Finite Resources". The jam has now started, good luck with your games.

Feel free to post about them here, or on the #NarratGameJam hashtag, or anywhere you want

Welcome to everyone participating in this game jam :)

This post is just an intro post to say hi and wish everyone good luck with making their game. Feel free to introduce yourselves or your project or post whatever else you feel like

Also a reminder that there is a Discord server for narrat where you can get help or give suggestions (I will often reply quickly unless I'm not around, and will try to implement suggestions if I can)

Also please don't hesitate to send suggestions on the engine or on how the game jam is being run

What is narrat

Narrat is a game engine for making narrative games combined with RPG features like skill checks, inventory and quests. It is inspired by games like Disco Elysium and is made to allow creating complex narrative RPGs easily and efficiently.

Narrat games run on web and desktop.

Narrat uses a custom script system, inspired from ren'py syntax. There's an example script in the demo if you want an idea of the syntax.

Features

(Non-exhaustive list from the top of my head)

• Easy script syntax for writing games without "real code"
• Branching, conditions and variables
• Multiple characters with configurable poses
• Themable UI (with CSS, explained in the docs)
• Skills and skill checks (dice rolls against skill levels) system
• Interactive visual screens alongside the dialogue
• HUD for currency or other stats
• save/load
• audio
• notifications
• Exports to web or PC
• Inventory
• Quests

Narrat just reached 1.0.0

I have finished adding all the main features and documentation I wanted to have in narrat before officially bumping its version to "1.0.0". It has already been used by two games that I know of. One released (not by me), and a bigger one in development (also not by me), on top of all my personal experiments with using it.

So this engine has been decently battle-tested and should be fine to use to release games.

I've written a devlog update detailing the recent changes and new features that led up to the 1.0.0 release (which is already 1.2.1 now).

How to use it?

There's a website, or you can go straight to the Getting Started docs

Hey, sorry I don't check itch.io very often and only noticed your comment now. I don't know about a bug in the jump function, but I've been making a lot of changes and fixes to the engine over time so it could be worth updating your engine version as that could fix the issue (especially if you downloaded the zip from itch, that's out of date. I'm going to change that download to link to github to avoid giving people an outdated version I think!).

A lot of the more recent changes also make it clearer what the error is when there is a bug, which could help diagnose what's wrong with your game.

I haven't really documented the process to upgrade narrat version yet, but generally the only thing to get an updated narrat version for your game is to go in the `package.json` file (at the root of the game folder) and in this file in "dependencies" change the version of "narrat". Current version as of writing is 0.8.4 which I'd advise using.

Once you've changed that you can run `npm install` again and it will pick up the new version.

Important note though: There have been a few breaking changes in how the engine works since older versions of this engine so you might have to change some things in your game if you do update.

Something helpful: The narrat repo has a test game that I use during development which contains a bit of every feature that I use while working on it. You can see its config and code there. That should help you compare and see if there's any new feature or change I missed (in which case I'm interested to know!)

If you have issues upgrading, you could also make a copy of the latest narrat template, and then simply copy all your `.rpy` game files and other assets into it + modify the config to match what you had before. This way you already have a setup that's known to work with the latest version.

Another thing is you can look at the changelog which should also give you an idea of what to expect when updating to more recent versions. I've been trying to list bugfixes, breaking changes and new features there.

A little list of known breaking changes if you're upgrading from older version:

• If your game uses music or audio: The format for adding them to your config has changed, they're all in the same `audio` part of the config.  The new docs on playing audio will show you how it works.
• You probably have existing code using `DATA`, `SKILLS`, `STATS`, or `BUTTONS`. All those things have been changed to be in lower capitalisation, so you can replace in your entire project `DATA` for  `data`, for example. I was generally making things more consistent for the future, but had to break existing code for that.

Also final note, if you have issues with the engine I'm way more likely to notice a Github issue

npm is a package manager to install libraries in javascript, in this case used to run and build the game. If you install nodejs (https://nodejs.org/en/) you will have npm with it and should be able to run the commands to build the game in your terminal.

The electron build command worked for me when I tried it on Windows but if you have issues with it you can always post more details about what's happening 

Also probably a good idea to use the latest version of the template from github Narrat template to make your game, I'm not sure the download on itch io has the latest version. (If you had already started, copy pasting your game scripts and images etc into the template should work fine, the structure of the data hasn't changed. Only thing is there are more values in the game config now so you can look at the default one and make sure you keep everything that's there and just add your own changes to it

There are also narrat docs there https://docs.get-narrat.com/

And electron docs if you want more about info about how to customise electron for your needs (the setup for electron I included is just a basic setup, you can change the electron config and code to do whatever you want really) https://electronjs.org/docs/latest

I've just released Narrat, a new open source game engine I've been working on for narrative games. You could make a VN, text-based RPG or even a point n click adventure in it.

Narrat is inspired by games like Disco Elysium where an interactible world is on one side with dialogue on the other side. A lot of the standard visual novel formats are based on a background image with dialog boxes appearing on top for individual dialog lines, but I find it more enjoyable and easier to read the text when it consistently stays in a vertical panel where you can read the context of the previous lines and without it going too wide.

On the practical side, the way games are made with it is inspired by ren'py. Narrat uses a homemade scripting language that has a very similar syntax to it (so anyone used to ren'py should be able to pick up narrat very easily), but deviates to become its own thing.

Narrat is made for the web though and implemented in TypeScript (also uses vue.js for the UI). The games can be built as static websites that you could host anywhere (including itch) or a desktop app with Electron (already included in the template). It also supports responsive layout for desktop/mobile.

It is very new and is currently being used by one game being developped within it. You can also see the website for more info and how to get started using it

Some of the features:

* Flexible dialog writing with branching and conditions

* Multiple script files support with labels and jumps to organise script writing

* Skill check rolls for branching or in choice options (Feature still early, needs a UI for viewing skills and creating characters)

* Multiple speaking characters support with icons and poses

* Custom variables in scripts to create flags or other data the game needs to track

* Seamless saving and reloading

* Visual game UI on the side of the dialog with buttons that can be used to trigger scripts (this effectively allows you to create game maps, or point n click style gameplay

* Sound and music support

* Delays between script lines for effect

* Electron build to turn the game into a pc/mac/linux app (the template already has it setup and ready to use)

Ah, thanks. I ended up making functions for the things I needed to change but that's easier

I just got "Parser error: Unexpected assign" in Godot when trying to write to a global variable in an execute block.

My execute did this:

G.player.relationships.pharmacist.value += 5

Is this supposed to not be possible, or is there a bug?