This is a project I have been working on and off for years on my free time, but now it's finally shaping up to be a "real" game and I feel motivated to finish it.

Blackout is a Choose Your Own Adventure game that takes place in the 90's, with a mood that takes inspiration from whitewolf's World of Darkness (yes I played a lot of Vampire RPG), Lovecraft stories and weird series like Twin Peaks.

This was the most important change on the last update, we rebuilt the whole UI to make it PC friendly (the project started as mobile, but recently shifted to PC).

If you want to reach out, you can find me on twitter @robsonsiebel.

You can check out the current version of Blackout here. It's only the first chapter so far, the whole game has 10. Depending on your choices, finishing the first chapter can take 2 minutes, or 20 minutes.

Not a lot of fancy stuff to share, lately I've been collecting all the feedback we're getting from the early access version which has been really cool.

I also created a newsletter, to people who are interested in becoming beta testers for the final version =)

A lot of my time recently has been spent finalizing my CYOA framework, since I'm not using twine or ink I had to do all from the ground up. I chose to go this route because it gives me more freedom to implement the features I need, like adding interactive elements at a specific place within a passage. Maybe after the project is done I can clean it up and release to see if other people find it useful, I designed it in a way that it makes really easier for non programmers to use.

I'm also doing taking some time to do a revision on the text, there are many typos and gramatical errors. There are also some parts I'm not happy with, I started writing this story many years ago and my writing has improved since then.

See you next time!

Monthly report - June.

Between E32018 and the World Cup, June has been a month full of distractions, specially since I make my  makes on my free time.

Despite that, I still managed to get a good amount done, and a very important part of Blackout, even though it might not be the most exciting: text revision. It has been a long time since I wrote it, and some of the later chapters have never undergone a true revision.

In order to make this task easier I decided to change  the tool I was using to keep the text, which wasn't really a IF tool, it was just google docs, which is better than what I used  when I originally wrote the story:  two small notebooks.

So I decided to move the story from google docs to Twine, even though I'm not using twine for the game implementation itself (I'm using my own framework, which I'll go into more detail on next month's post) making it easier to have a good overview of the flow of each chapter, easier to find a passage and also easier to test.

This chapter has almost 8k words, if you're the type that is interested in numbers, this is the average for most chapters, some are bigger and some are smaller. If you played through the preview that is currently up, you saw that the writing style is very simple and direct, I want the player to move fast through the story, and do this several times over, so it can't be some Tolkienesque thing where I describe every small rock on the way.

The revision is taking a long time because I'm changing almost every single passage, fixing errors, adding and removing stuff here and there. Bus I should be done with it soon!

That's it for this month, next month I'll go into the framework I've built (and am still building) for Blackout.

Cheers!

@robsonsiebel

Hello again!

July was a bit of a short month for me in terms of gamedev. I took a 9 day vacation since my brother was visiting me, it was very hot and we went to some nice places around Greece. Also spending 9 days away from my computer did wonders for my tendinitis =)

So in the end I managed to dedicate only about 10 hours to Blackout (half the time I usually work on it in a month). I've been trying to increase this time but my life has been a bit chaotic, and also sometimes is very hard to find the strength to work extra hours when you already have a 8h/day programming job. And what did I do with these 10 hours? I almost finished the text revision! In fact, as of writing this, I already did, so I decided (right now as I write this) to change the focus of the post and talk about the revision instead of the CYOA framework I'm using, like I promised on the previous post. I want to do a detailed post about the framework, that's gonna take some time, and the text revision is fresh on my mind since I finished this weekend.

The Revision

It took me almost 50 hours to go through the whole text (around 65k words), making changes in almost every single one of the 600+ passages and also writing a bunch of new ones. I also "translated" the text to twine, as I mentioned in the previous post, separating every chapter as a single twine story, in order to be easier to visualize it.

The so called "chapters" is another point I'd like to talk about. After handwriting the first draft of the story, years ago, I first put it into google docs, and as it still felt convoluted (with things like big numbers "Go to passage 534" or similar passages with weird numeration "Go to passage 41.2"), I decided to divide the story in Chapters. Well it seemed very easy and straightforward to do that, since the story spreads across several different locations I could simply make every location a different chapter: Alley, Taxi, Hospital...

All good.

The Problem

But what about the names of the chapters? I had kept the location itself as the name at first, but as we approached the preview version release, I tried to come up with better names. It proved to be a very hard task, first because what the character does in each chapter can vary a lot. If you played the preview (The Alley), you probably know you can have an encounter with cops (which can go many different ways); you can find some weird stuff in the alley; you can also see none of that and just leave.

The second thing is I can't do numbered chapters either, because the order of the chapter changes depending on your choices, so it would be kind of weird if one person's chapter 2 was the hospital, and other's was the taxi.

So when we released the preview version, this is what the "chapter select" screen looked like.