I did it!! I have a thing!!! My very first playable thing is on itch.io!! I feel awesome!!
A member registered Jan 01, 2016 · View creator page →
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Hey, sorry I've been so quiet--been working my butt off on the word count!
Coding
I know I said it was gravy, but keeping track of if a player has already seen a parallel passage ended up being really useful. I was twisting myself in knots trying to come up with a way to write neutral to whatever the player had already seen--which is completely unnecessary! This if/else bit checks if someone has been to a passage at least once--if they have, they get one piece of text, and if they haven't, they get the other.
When I can't decide on a setting bit, or a name, or some other ultimately useless fluff, I do this :T Voila, instant card game. It's not CRUCIAL to the gameplay or the story, but it's helping me by taking the pressure off picking the PERFECT line. I'll let RNG piece it together for me.
Writing
The good news is I'll definitely have act 1 finished as a playable demo by the deadline--if I really pound away at it, I might have act 2 done as well! I'm at about 5800 words (I wasn't kidding about the novel thing), and I have another 1200 to go to round out the first act. Granted, players won't see all 7000 words, the nature of the beast is they only get 1/3 of what's going on in an individual playthrough. But one of my goals is to make a game people want to play at LEAST three times..
It's been slow for me--I'm finding it hard to manage my time and I'm getting intimidated by the writing part. But as soon as I put even a single sentence down I know it'll start pouring out of me.
Coding
1/4 and 1/5 was tightening up the code further:
I have a couple sets of variables floating around that keep track of which heroine was chosen for which act, and how many acts total they were chosen for. This allows me to spruce up text involving these characters if the player is favoring one of them (or none of them!).
The "$heroine_scenes" variable is numeric, so I can check it with something like "(if: $heroine_scenes is 2)" and then have text that only displays if she's been in two of the three major scenes. The idea is if a specific heroine is with the villain for a growing number of scenes, they should be growing closer and progressing the romance arc, but if they've had one or even no scenes together there won't be as much of a "spark" yet. I didn't want to muck around with Affection Traits or anything--it's not that complicated of a story!
I also have the specific acts set up with "flags" so that the game will remember which acts they were in. If a heroine and the villain share a scene in act 1, I want them to be able to talk about it in act 3!
I puzzled out a way to have Twine remove story choices that had already been visited, using my very favorite rotating array of links trick! This uh, actually took a long time. I couldn't figure out why "$salutations.length is 0" wasn't working, until I realized 2.0 Harlowe has way more intuitive phrasing.
This is the entirety of the "1stletterchoice" passage that displays when someone clicks "Continue." All it does is check which heroine the player chose (it will be the 1st name in the array) and then redirects them to the appropriate passage! Each of these passages begins with a "(set: $salutations to it - (a: "Heroine's name"))" so it removes itself from the available choices. If there's only one choice left in the array, it appears as unchangable text, and if there's no choices left at all, a link appears to progress to the next part of the story. I'm using this for parts that require a "visit every location/character/idea" before the player moves to the next part.
I'm toying with the idea of having the story keep track of which heroine/event you visit first (it's really easy to have Twine check which passages have been visited already) and changing the text based on that, but it feels like gravy. I really gotta get started on the writing!
Writing
I'm tightening up aspects of the setting. I want to make sure I don't end up spending more than half of the game on exposition, so I started working on one of my favorite writing exercises borrowed from Seventh Sanctum forever ago. I'll have few if ANY visual assets for this, so it's especially important that I describe my setting with care.
Today I put Actual Real Words in my game. The first sentence is always the hardest, and I'll probably delete it anyway, but it's still a big deal D:
HEH
1/2 and 1/3 was spent solely on outlining the story, finding the branches, and building the code. I put placeholder text and summaries in place to help remember what everything is supposed to say. Then I had to put in all the links and triggers and variable checks to make sure that junk will work when I need it to.
I'm particularly proud of myself for figuring this out. When the user clicks on the activated text, it'll loop through the other text in the array, and on clicking "continue" (or whatever I end up changing that to say), a new passage displays that will check which text the player changed, and immediately forward them to the appropriate version of the story. Right now I have a very simple use for this (the player deciding which heroine to follow into the next act) but I'm brainstorming a couple of easy ways this can add flavor to less crucial areas of the text.
I don't have a lot of time today, but I'll use it to tighten up the last loose bits of my outline so I can be ready to start the fun stuff tomorrow! I'll post excerpts and bits of code I like as I move along.