I'm having some second thoughts about how I should design the game. I thought that I could finish the first day with little to no Twine coding involved and make it a giant story and all that. But I think I'm going to need to go full ham on this and make it into a game as much as possible. Because of the way it's set up and because of the back button, I went through (skimming) 50% of my content with very little effort, which is over 300 pages. I think that by having it be a game and being able to redo the day over and over and having stats and all that, it will pad (for lack of a better word) out the game.
It's funny because as I read the story I found out that: IF you take your time to read the story, it's quite good. IF you've gotten into the habit of skimming over AIF's, kind of like me, then it's just alright.
I am currently looking up tutorials for Twine 2.0. I still don't know the full capabilities of it, but I'm beginning to see where I can take the game. I just need to build a good infrastructure so that additional events, stats and counters will be easy to keep track of. This will probably mean going back and adding coding into every single passage, or redoing the whole thing all together...
For now, I'll just test out coding individually and wait until this weekend to put up the survey. Depending on how confident I feel with Twine, I may or may not start to add stats and start building the game again...
What's good is that Ver.002 is already a lot better than Ver.001... imagine Ver.003, lol. SO much work.
Edit:
Well, the good thing is: The twine coding does not look that hard AND I've originally planned for a version of the game that did include stats. I don't want to make any promises, but it seems probable to make a "playable" version of the game. I just need to include areas to go and places to train your stats and all that.
The bad thing is: How to save... The Harlowe and SugarCube story formats use different coding. SugarCube has a save function (which I don't know if it'll save variables), but uses Twine 1.X coding. I am learning coding for the newer Harlowe Twine 2.X, but it doesn't have a built in save system. I'll update this as I find out more...
Edit 2:
I know this is getting to be a long post, but it is relevant. There IS a save function, but looks to be no export. Stats are easy enough to add and keep track of. At the current moment, what's getting to me is the math. As in, how to come up with a formula that incorporates a little bit of X stat with Y stat and a base percentage to figure out if you're successful in some (probably sexual) interaction. All of that and then the hundreds of event counters that I will need in order to tell a sensible story. I'll leave you off at a high note: I figured how to make a prompt show up so that you can input your own name AND I've (sort of) figured out how to set genders, so you'll probably be able to play as Kelly right from the beginning.
I've read over what you said about adding stats and places to train them to the game and I was curious as to how you would implement that into the game with how the day and story are currently structured and was wondering how you were thinking about doing that, as in my opinion I feel like that could present quite a challenge.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually for stats, since that sounds interesting.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you can make unlocking a back button cost 9001 stat points? ;P
If you want to go full stat support, you might want to remove the back button/option as it is a potential game breaker. If you want this here is a small discussion about it.
ReplyDeletehttp://twinery.org/forum/discussion/2931/remove-back-option-in-2-0
Yeah, I know that I can get rid of the back button relatively easy. What I really want are some side buttons that can save, load and display some additional information. If I build the game this way, I'll need to do some things that I kind of argued against, which is: base the game around a timer where each action takes up a certain amount of time, make the city open and explorable, make encounters happen based off of RNG (until you're familiar with them enough), have a system where you'd 'go north/south/east/west' to explore the city, have each area be incorporated into the three time sections (morn, after, evening), have scenes and options locked behind stats. I think it is completely achievable in Twine, just kind of mind boggling to think about. But, I can always chip away at it and try to build the city before populating it with events.
ReplyDeleteThis is just my idea, don't follow it if you don't want to.
DeleteWhat you can do is keep Phase 1 as-is, then start incorporating stats Phase 2 and onwards.
That way, you can both finish Phase 1 ASAP and not have to re-code everything to include stats, and also introduce a new mechanic - stats - come Phase 2, instead of dumping everything on the player from the start.
IMO if stats are going to be a big part of the game, then it needs to be sorted out now. Going back and adding code is going to be a pain once you've gotten deep into the game. A lot of mistakes are going to be made, and you're going to pull your hair out figuring what you did/didn't code.
DeleteMy suggestion is to avoid "stats" but allow "variables."
In this kind of game, stats like "strength" or "reflexes" or "intellect" are not really necessary. However, variables such as "drugged Judy", "fucked Kelly", "Abby fucked silly", or especially "8 in dick" are easily incorporated.
Using variables vs stats, you can write passages that can essentially link to themselves and only show content based on relevant data to the route you've chosen to play.
Stats on the other hand, while essentially are also just variables, can add depth to your game, but take away from the story aspect and make it more of an RPG.
I believe the terms are these: CYOA vs CYOO. Choose your Own Adventure versus Choose your Own Outcome.
The most important thing for you to decide right now, though, is what story format of Twine do you plan to use. Harlowe, Snowman, and Sugarcube all use different script commands, as I'm sure you're well aware. You'll want to stick to one as opposed to releasing different versions.