Hi there! My name is Aubrey. My background is in writing fiction--I have a defunct self-published series and I've been trying to get traditionally published for a couple of years--and I've also been interested in game writing for a long time. To that end I took an undeveloped sci-fi story idea I'd had for a while--something incorporating influences from Metroid, Alien/Prometheus, Kameron Hurley, Sam Delany etc.--and began working on a Twine project tentatively called The Dive. A quick and dirty description is that you're a recovering agoraphobic, transgender space marine with a Venom symbiote, slapped into some power armor and dropped onto a planet orbiting a black hole to recover a mysterious Thing from inside a derelict alien structure. 

I've been working on it for about a week and it currently looks like this:

It feels like the trouble with tribbles. I chide myself for pruning out boxes that are bloating the conversation trees on the right side; "you're not cutting bloat, you're cutting depth!!!" As it stands, the stuff going straight down on the right is the introductory descent into the alien structure and the stuff on the right is an optional return to the ship orbiting the planet where you can get some character development and advance your relationships with the crew. That stuff comes really naturally to me; I'm a bit worried about when the ship trip is finished and playable and I have to stop faffing about with that and actually begin writing the adventure. 

At the moment I am picturing the trip through the alien structure as pretty linear. Much of the branching I have in mind has to do with how the player/reader handles combat, talking to the crew on the ship (both over radio and during periodic trips back), and encountering characters inside the structure. Already in the current build there is a seemingly minor choice which drastically effects the conversation you can have with the ship's doctor, and optional scenes you can look at (memories embedded as links in the narration) which then add details to future scenes which wouldn't be there otherwise.

In terms of games oriented around text I know we can basically go from "this is pretty much a short story with one player choice in it" all the way to Disco Elysium, so I think I'm keen for some advice on what would best suit this project. My goals are:

• 2-3 hours
• 4-ish endings
• Art, music, some SFX??

Recommendations for Twine or text games you really liked as an example of what can be done with the format are also appreciated. I know Depression Quest was one and I have played The Writer Will Do Something.

Thank you for reading this far! 

Two weeks!  It looks like this.

I got totally engrossed in writing the optional trip back to the ship. That vertical line on the left is the "main" adventure, the expedition into the structure. The ship section, aside from delving into some flavor and backstory, starts an important subplot which I intend to have an effect on your ending.

This was the most intense section to work on, the conversation with the ship's doctor. Mostly a relationship-building exercise, I want this to have effects on your later conversations with Aggie and the planned romance path. You can also begin an important subplot with the ship's captain that will shape later trips to the ship and determine your ending.

All of this at the moment is quite theoretical; I'm going to close up this ship trip and make it playable,  then return to the main adventure for a while, then at some point offer another chance to return to the ship. At that point I'm going to need to figure out how to have things from this first trip affect the second--if you even went the first time. If you didn't, I'd like to reuse some of the material here so that the player doesn't miss out on important story content.

I suspect all this can probably be solved with simple if statements, counters and some extra writing; it's just a matter of getting my head around it all, but right now it feels quite daunting.

Week three!

The optional quest back to the ship at the start is done... that's what all that shit over there is... it's closed up and playable. I need to close up the loops with my shiny new "hasVisited" command, maybe tweak a few things. I need to figure out how to make some of this stuff reusable if you haven't been back to the ship at the start but to continue off from it if you have. Not as much got done this update as I thought, a shame, but it's been cool to have something kinda playable to show people. Now I have to start doing the actual adventure, how daunting. 

I'm wondering when I should start thinking about getting a UI and some sound on this thing and making it more presentable. Is that something I ought to wait until I've written it all to worry about, or would it be best to start making a playable build sooner rather than later?

Merry Christmas! Here's a mid-week update, though I may still do some more before the weekend. See how it goes.

I wrote out the first combat encounter (not everything shown here, not enough room), and outlined a little after that. My brain went "hey, let's think about when this needs to start getting weirder, like your original story idea" and also that soon I should bust out the ol index cards and do a big plot outline. (So far I've been doing what's known in the writing world as 'pantsing'.)

I used a couple of new code tools this time; a return/respawn function on the game over boxes (gobackto) which I hope if I've done it right will also reset all the counters taking place during the combat, and a couple pieces of dialogue that react to how many times the player has been "casual" or "strict" with their marine jargon while on the comms with the commanding officer. 

This is a big project! I'm trying to gauge how long it ought to take me to get a first act done so I can make a preview download, and also how long I should be working on the whole game.  A full novel draft usually takes me a year; I expect The Dive to be considerably shorter than that, but we'll see how much it balloons beyond what I first expect.

Enjoy your Christmases, everybody.

Happy new year!

Progress slow and steady over the new year.  I have a broad outline of the plot, what endings I want, and how large I suspect the project to get. Looking at the full map of it now, I can roughly say "I want about five of those".

It's very sizable for a first game. However I feel like it's within my capability; the coding for the guts of the gameplay is very simple, condition and choice-based stuff, and I have several finished novel-length manuscripts under my belt, so I'm used to taking on writing tasks of this size. What I'm most concerned about is getting the UI, art and music. I have someone who's interested in doing music and will let me comb through their back catalogue as well as produce a certain amount of new material.  Very soon however--once this first leg of the story is done and Jessica has gotten back to the ship--I want to start putting some visuals together and showing a small alpha around. 

I have had a couple people playtest what's done so far and it takes around 45 minutes to an hour to read through the ship trip and the combat encounter, much longer than I anticipated, so what I thought might be a 2-3 hour game may run out to 5 or 6.

Thanks for looking! See you in a bit.

Doing an impromptu update! I almost said "small" update but then it turned out not to be small. I wanted to get a snapshot of this in progress before I do more of it and start filling it in with prose.

This'll probably be very basic and dull to anyone who's seasoned with making their own games, but it's fun for me to talk about after only being into game design as an observer for so long, and I've been sharing my devlog around to my non-dev friends and various discord channels.  :)

I'm employing what I've learned to call a 'bottom up' approach to designing this combat encounter, whereas the rest of the game up to this point has largely been 'top down'. What I mean by that is this: when I go into a scene top-down, I write the narrative first. I have the movie playing in my head. The first combat encounter was written around the grisly scene of Jessica having her arm shot off, and the player's choice to either regenerate the arm or strengthen her remaining limb. That set the tone and influenced completely the scenario going forward. I decided choosing to regenerate the arm would lead to slaying one enemy right away, and then wrote off of that, trying to maintain the tension while leading the story down to two eventualities--one where both enemies are killed and one where the remaining enemy gets away. I also threw in the possibility of a game over, to keep things feeling exciting and meaningful.

(You probably noticed I still had some gameplay goals in mind; I find you're rarely working purely in one direction!)

In this scenario above, I have to design a considerably larger encounter based on the various eventualities that can come from the player's *first* encounter with the Veese enemies; how many survived her previous skirmish, and also which direction the player is approaching the camp from. As a novice designer I felt a bit overwhelmed by all of the moving parts that would need to be addressed in the narrative, all the possibilities available to different players coming into this battle. So I decided I'd start by outlining, and then write the story into the panels when I had everything mapped out and coded.

You can see how the encounter starts you in one of two places based on how Jessie performed in the first combat. (Balcony-- Jessica advantage, or Veese advantage.)  You see the basic shape of the encounter and its choices, and how they all converge into the "Jump off the balcony" panel, where they will then branch outward again based on how many enemies were left. In two of the panels you can see I don't even know what Jessica is *doing* yet; I have simply called them options one and two because I want Jessie to have two choices, one that leads to a game over and one that succeeds.

This particular encounter will probably double in size by the time it's done, and then I need to approach it from a different angle, that of coming down the big stairs instead of from the balcony. Some of it may get reused or I may have the fuel for two entirely different scenes. So I think coming at this encounter bottom-up was the best decision. Whereas the first combat's intention was more to introduce the player to the rules of the symbiote suit and the Veese, this one is aimed to provide excitement, challenge and show the impact previous decisions can have on the future.

Gosh! These are all a lot of words that could have gone into Twine. Thanks for reading!

Just wanted to drop in and make an update. Some mental health stuff has been keeping me from getting as much work done as I'd like and I've also been putting in some legwork on my fiction manuscript. Some of these boxes are filled in now and I took a nice detour into a memory passage today. Next week I'd like to get this combat encounter fully outlined and functional, prepared to have the prose filled in. 

2020 sucks so far, huh? Hope everyone is taking care of themselves.

This is looking much healthier! My plant is growing again.

I've enlisted a friend to help me push along in this section. The vast majority of this is just outline at the moment, without prose; I'm thinking simply about how I want the encounter to be shaped, how I want the gameplay experience to unfold. This is divided into two sections (it looks like three), the left being Jessica approaching from a balcony accessed through a secret passage and the right being wandering straight into the enemy camp from some stairs. The balcony approach has more numbers going on--very simple ones, but they're there--and is only half done! (I'm trying to think of ways I can streamline the remaining work, to be honest.) The right section, with the stairs, leans into a more adventure game-y "this choice leads to a game over, this one doesn't" approach. I intended for the stair approach to be more difficult, and so used more instant deaths. 

Can these two approaches coexist? I'll want a lot of feedback on this section. 

I suspect I can get the rest of this section outlined, finally, in the next couple of days and then start the prose next week. Then I want to write another ship section, then I want to pack things up and look at making a small alpha. Exciting!

Got this part all outlined! Moved some things around, cut a couple, cleaned up. Focusing on getting this all filled in, and then moving onto the next ship section.  Strongly considering cutting the extensive "duel" section from the middle? Hmm.  It would leave the encounter rather lopsided, with the balcony approach being considerably more complex, but that problem arguably already exists within the "Stairs Jessica advantage" tree as it is.  We'll see. I hope I can get enough people to try the game out for robust playtesting and feedback.

I got this all filled in! Things are chugging along. 

I wanted to make this update to alert everyone that I have found someone to make music! Cool lady Autotectonic will be providing some noisey tunes for The Dive. I suspect I'll be plumbing her existing catalogue for the alpha with original BGM to come for a proper release. Go check her out :) 

I went on an absolute tear today and finished up this section. I'm not happy with it and I will pretty much definitely be coming back to revise sections, rebalance and make it bigger. But it's playable and testable which is what's important for now. Now I am gonna start working on the next ship section, then try to get some kind of nice interface on this thing and pack it up into something downloadable. I've been looking at this damn encounter for over a month and it will probably take exactly five seconds to play through it and I'm glad to see the back end of it tbh. I'm happy for the two 'memory' sections i came up with that added some much needed depth. What are you all doing for valentine's day?

Progress has resumed! I took a small vacation when my partner visited from California and I started part-time college classes last week. I finally had some time this week to knock some new passages out. I also signed up to a patreon with some great looking tutorials on how to make the game interface look much more attractive with CSS and HTML. Not too much to report today, I just didn't feel good leaving the thread hanging for almost a month. Really want to get something playable and testable soon. 

Oh, here's some thoughts: I had a couple of people run through it and I found they were all getting funneled into the "stairs Veese advantage" path way too easily. The wrong couple of (reasonably sensible-seeming) decisions early in the story would basically lock you in, and the section is a difficult one, and doesn't include either of the memory passages associated with the second combat section. All around a big problem for me. I went back and cut one of the fail-states from the original combat section, and added another step before the player is locked into the 'stairs Veese advantage' path, as a quick fix. But I'd like to pore over the whole section when I get the chance and try to achieve a better balance. Revisiting the beginning of the project bit by bit with the later changes to my process in mind is sure to be stark.

It has color now! And music! I'm peppering in the music tracks as we speak.

I'm at a bit of a loss as to how much I can do with the interface without a dedicated artist so I just hope for something functional and easy on the eyes, really.  I should hope to get something out for playtesting within the next week or two at this rate, maybe a little more allowing for uni assignments.  Here's the vitals!

Well, I went ahead and bit the bullet. The first playtest build is now available.

I'm very nervous! I've never made a game before. Please let me know if there are any bugs or errors. All feedback is welcome. I'm not charging for this build obvs but if you want to contribute to the game's development I've linked my ko-fi on the download page. Hope you enjoy it!

Spoilers~!

I hope you're all doing okay. I've been surviving this period pretty well but it's had an impact on my workflow. Sometimes I take days off and I've been doing an increased amount of work on my manuscript which takes time away from The Dive. Most work on the game over the last couple weeks has been promoting the demo where I can and rolling out little bug fixes. I hope to jump back into it in earnest very soon, especially because for the next couple weeks I won't have any uni work.

Here you can see I iterated very heavily on how I wanted the next section to flow, even as I was just spitballing--I expect it to grow and change even more once I actually start writing and coding! As well, there's a lot of variables and such missing from the demo that I need to begin coding in because they'll start affecting your relationship with the crewmates in this section. Exciting stuff. 

Feedback from the demo has been good! A friend streamed the game on their small twitch channel and their audience ate it up, mostly making suggestions around interface and accessibility--things like making the memory sections a different color and adding keyboard navigation which I would LOVE to know how to do. Nobody so far seems to have any trouble with the difficulty but i continue to monitor how often people get certain outcomes and will tailor accordingly. Reception of the writing and dialogue has been very positive.

I've thought about releasing an updated demo at some stage with incremental improvements, further down the line. It would probably be smart. I think I should make a prioritized list of action points beyond "write the next section" to get started on.

Stay safe and stay inside. <3

Gosh, amazing what a little color can do! Without a budget to speak of I'm stuck using stock images for the moment, but hopefully by the end of development I can have a UI I'm proud of.

I started on the next ship section in earnest--i'll worry about the connective tissue later--and drew up a little list of points I want to fix, plus a story note I took for myself so I wouldn't forget it. 

I had started on a counter system for the romantic subplots with the crewmates, intending to have the player need a certain number of points to unlock The Big Damn Kiss or its equivalent, but swiftly decided it would be better to base it on choices made during milestone conversations. In a future game I'd love to play with having your relationship with a character develop with accumulating behavior, but that would be scope creep for this one. There's currently one decision which would basically lock you out of romancing either character--it's reasonably flagrant--but I'll need to decide if there's some way to be lenient and walk back that mistake or if this is just going to be a Hard game in that regard. 🤔

I put out a couple of fixes for very silly problems to make the music work properly where it wasn't (again), got scrollbars going in the browser version and hopefully the game is now working okay on mobile. 

Stay well and stay inside. <3

I got my first donation for The Dive!

Second ship section is coming along. I'm having an internal debate over a scene which I really like but you'll only see if you made a particular choice much earlier in the game and I really want people to see it so should I loosen the requirements?? But I think I need to just let it be what it is or else the paths will feel homogenous, and it won't feel special when you stumble upon a meaty scene that feels tailored just for your Jessica. 

In the next big section there is a scene coming up which I decided might be uncomfortable for victims of sexual assault (or just anyone who doesn't want to experience that kind of content). I don't think the scene as currently planned is particularly gruesome--it shouldn't be any worse than anything in the later Alien films--but I had a discussion about it with some other devs and that reinforced my decision that I should have an option to detour to a toned-down version of the scene. What I'm trying to decide now is whether I should put the warning at the beginning of the game or the start of the section preceding the scene. It's a delicate balance between not wanting to blow the tension of the sequence by warning ahead "SOMETHING HAPPENS HERE", but also not wanting to keep any sensitive players on tenterhooks from the very start. 🤔Advice would be appreciated! Hit me here or on my twitter.

I put out one more update to the demo, with the backgrounds I've put in so far and some things cleaned up--I didn't want to but there was some outdated code that I think was accidentally blocking off some paths on the ship.  So it's looking and sounding nice! Check it out if you haven't already or take it for another spin. I'll be focusing on the full game now and probably not updating the demo again unless there's a really bad bug i fucked up. I'll keep updating this thread with previews of any improvements to the interface and new music.

Stay inside, stay entertained!

Progress on this section is coming along well and quickly! Here's a favorite passage. I read The Forever War over the weekend for inspiration and liked it pretty good. I feel like The Light Brigade remains queen in terms of literary DNA, but it's awfully new so maybe I just really like that book. 

School is starting up again this week--online classes, though, ech--and I want to put some time into my manuscript so I'll be slowing down a little on developing the game. Probably taking paper notes and doing small edits mostly, then starting up on it proper again once I have a second draft of my book done. I expect that should be a few weeks, I'm about halfway through this draft anyway and I put it on hold to do some work on The Dive. Between now and then I hope to ingest lots of DS9 and ancient sci-fi novels.

I started shelling out for the first piece of some original artwork. At the moment I foresee three pieces and I'm budgeting for that many, but I hope I can eventually get the traffic to justify five or six.

Not much else to report! Hope to update again soon.