Progress Report 2021-02-08

Hi friends,

This past week has been both busy and not busy. I took a little bit of a break to unwind from releasing the Chapter 1 update but still got caught up with working on bits and pieces of things every day. While I did plan on starting the Route B content this past week, I ended up poking at coding stuff instead. I updated the game files with a small but major update—you can now name your saves.

I have also been working on a short story that will be released for all patrons later this month.

Story Content

I did some outlining work on Route B – I’m fairly certain I’m going to start with the MC and Aeran visiting the Viridian Lady’s villa, which is a sequence I’ve been excited to write for a while. There are two ways the MC can gain entry to the villa:

• By Stealth (these will be primarily agility checks; if you have the grappling hook you can by-pass the agility checks, but you can only get the grappling hook if you go to the Docks, take Zenaida’s money, don’t return to the tavern and then go on a shopping spree in the Cove)
• By Persuasion (walking in the front door and convincing everyone you’re supposed to be there)

This sequence is a little more complicated than the other places the MC can visit, so I need to work out how failure works in this scene and also clamp down on variations since I don’t want to end up with too much content to create for this scene.

Command Line Adventures & Contingency Plans

As mentioned last week, I’m working on a solution to the Twine editor’s UI lag. What I am looking for is a way to compile separate Twine story files and their associated CSS and Javascript so I can minimize lag by writing each Wayfarer chapter as a separate file.

After a lot of experimenting and testing my first solution has become a dead end. The entwine task for the Grunt plugin hasn’t been updated in 5-6 years and all the repositories it references have been updated around 30 times since then. I don’t have experience with command line interfaces, so I am very out of depth here and couldn’t understand why what I was doing was resulting in an error. My partner took over for me and he was the one who eventually found the root of the problem: it’s old and it doesn’t work.

Since he has a computer science degree and experience with command line interfaces, I am leaving this part of the game’s development to him. TweeGo is the command line compiler larger Twine games use—it’s kept up-to-date and one of the major Twine/SugarCube contributors has written walkthroughs and guides for using it, so it’s a good sign. 

I was hesitant to research TweeGo because it’s marketed as a tool to primarily write your Twine game in a plain text editor and I don’t want to write my game in a plain text editor (that sounds like a nightmare; one of the reasons I like working in Twine is because of the visual map the editor generators so you can see a flowchart of all your passages). But my partner went through its documentation and it sounds like my assumption was wrong: while you can use it to avoid the Twine editor entirely and still make a Twine game, its main function is to compile project files into an .html file.

Sounds like it does exactly what I thought grunt-entwine would do.

I have a few contingency plans if we can’t get TweeGo to work:

1) Keep coding in the Wayfarer master file and work through the lag. The lag comes from the editor generating the passage boxes and connection lines for the visual map:

I do wonder whether I have hit a limit on the lag, as long as I stay in the pulled back story structure view (like above – you can also view your story with passage titles and with a passage title/first line combo, but that REALLY slows it down). It’s manageable for now; we’ll see what happens when I start coding Chapter 1 Route B.

Twine 3 is going to be released sometime later this year. I may not upgrade right away (I have issues with Twine 2.3.11, which is the most recent version of Twine 2 – I love working in this program but newer releases and updates always feel buggy and Twine 2.2.1 feels so much more stable). The general advice for the Twine contributors is to make sure you have several backups of your files if you do switch – Twine 3 is likely going to be very buggy when it releases and it will take some time to sort out all the problems. I would like to see if they’ve addressed the lag issue with Twine 3.

2) If I’m working in a single file for the entire story, I will likely divide Wayfarer into three games, divided at the Act break. I would rather not do this because I really want to keep the player’s stats intact and if I make three separate games I will have to deal with save imports and a system to account for new players who may have skipped Game 1… It’s complicated. I’d rather keep Wayfarer as one standalone game (albeit one that will be very large) than break it up.

3) If the lag becomes so bad that breaking the game into three parts doesn’t work, Twine integrates with Unity and Unreal Engine. I feel like that is a… big, big jump to working with actual video game engines. I would have to redo all the code for the visual design, but I would be able to keep the visuals intact. Not a huge fan of this option since I don't think I have the capabilities or background to learn Unity's code, but one of my partner's friends suggested it as an alternative, so on to the contingency plan list it goes.

4) Switch to a different IF platform. This would be either ChoiceScript or Inkle. This is the last resort option because I would sacrifice the visual design completely, as well as a bunch of functions (the inventory system, the interactive maps, the timed choices, etc). The positive side of this is that turning the game into a ChoiceScript game would make it more accessible to the COG community, with the potential of publishing to Hosted Games. But I would really like to maintain control over my game and I don’t want to lose the integrity of the current design.

At the end of the day, the most important part of the game is the text itself and those files aren’t going anywhere. There will be a game, but the how is a little more complicated than I initially anticipated.

(Thank you, editor lag, I’m not salty about this at all.)

Misc Updates

I recently updated my FAQ page on my development blog. If you missed it, you can see the new one here. That prompted me to want to update other pages on the blog and one thing led to another and I spent 6 hours yesterday making character portraits in Artbreeder.

And I dislike every single one of them.

Brissa Varyn

Malsara Markal

Nova Markal

Rhodarth (uuuuuuuggghhhh couldn't get long hair or make him green uuuuuugggghhhh)

Look at how bad Malsara came out. I was trying to take Nova’s portrait and just make her hair blonde but it didn’t work very well and I am a little horrified. Look at Varyn’s face. What did I do to her? She doesn’t deserve this.

Anyway, I’m probably going to dismantle this and switch it out for something different (Unsplash photos? Aesthetic objects representative of the characters? Who knows) at a later date, but if you want to see some hilariously bad artbreeder portraits that don't really look like my characters at all, my WIP character page is here (desktop only): https://idrellegames.tumblr.com/newcastpage