next »

[J. R. Hill]

A tiny Choose Your Own Adventure inspired game.
Make choices, go places, do things!

Some mockups:


 


What's going to happen?  Will you become a detective?  Travel in time?  Stop an alien invasion?  Explore a dungeon?  Master the culinary arts?  Go to school?  Switch bodies with a dog?  Anything could happen, and if it doesn't work out, well, there's always another Thursday around the corner.

[Zaphos]

nice.

I hope the tiny res lets you do a really wild, densely branching set of possible stories

[J. R. Hill]

It's going to branch out as much as my imagination can handle.  My goal is that any successful branch end should take about 15 minutes to reach (if you read all the text).  The game window may end up larger than 64x64 but I'll decide that after I get some major story arcs fleshed out.

Currently brainstorming the story arcs...

boop

[eyeliner]

Though I do really like the concept, please increase the window size.
Way too tiny, but it does sure give the game it's charm.

[J. R. Hill]

The game will default to 2x resolution but the more I think about it, I'm thinking it's gonna be about 80 x 96 for most screens, some larger some smaller.  The text area will be much larger, so the graphics are going to be more illustrative than functional.

I have a ton of good storylines & storyline groups brainstormed now, so I'm gonna pick a mildly weird one and start pumping out assets for it.  Then I'll make it functional and release a demo.

[Ashkin]

This looks great.

[J. R. Hill]

Another mockup.  Backseat rumor kid is going to be one of the major quest givers in the game.  Gonna work on this bus interior too because it's gonna be visited a ton...

[RichVreeland]

love the aesthetic! 

[BlueSweatshirt]

I like the idea. 

[oyog]

Yes!  Another devlog to spam my mailbox with updates! 

[J. R. Hill]

JMickle confirmed for Brawl music.

[mokesmoe]

His final smash is making great music.

[J. R. Hill]

Makin paper-doll style bits.  (Forgive the blur, it's cause I'm too lazy to enlarge the pictures myself)

[J. R. Hill]

So I'm giving myself at least this month to get the game basics down.  Once I get this first path done, I'll release a demo, after that I'll work on 18 more paths and re-release the game every 18 paths I complete.  The end product is going to have more than 100 separate stories, and I'm going to aim for a completion probability of about 1% per story assuming you just make random choices, and about 90% if you think through and pay attention to clues.

Also, I'm only going to do weekly updates (each Thursday, obviously) from now on so that it seems like I'm accomplishing a lot more than I am lol.

[Ashkin]

So I'm giving myself at least this month to get the game basics down.  Once I get this first path done, I'll release a demo, after that I'll work on 18 more paths and re-release the game every 18 paths I complete.  The end product is going to have more than 100 separate stories, and I'm going to aim for a completion probability of about 1% per story assuming you just make random choices, and about 90% if you think through and pay attention to clues.

Also, I'm only going to do weekly updates (each Thursday, obviously) from now on so that it seems like I'm accomplishing a lot more than I am lol.

Awesome plan- I love that you've broken things up. Wish I could break my project down a little more easily.
Do you have a deadline for each 18 paths? 18 paths a week? A month? A... A year? D:

[J. R. Hill]

Probably a month each episode-pack-thing to begin with.  After that the process should speed up, but my schedule might get busy too...

Also, thanks everyone for being encouraging!

[J. R. Hill]

So the AGS website is down (temporarily I hope) but if it doesn't come back  by tomorrow I might switch to a flashpunk base and make my own dialogue system probably using xml, but maybe a mysql query thing.  It would throw a fairly large wrench in my coding, not because I've accomplished terribly much, but because I'd have to find or make my own dialogue editor to make the process smooth.  I plan on having a ton of text, so hard-coding each branching dialogue tree would be unmanageable.

The upside if I use xml is that it would be fairly easy to implement user generated content.  Or even turn it into an extensible adventure game library for flash programmers and/or a flash shell that could be modded for graphical interactive fiction games.

[Ashkin]

It's probably better to make your own dialogue system, because then you'll know it INSIDE and OUT. And that means you can tweak it and make it work however you want. And user generated content is totally a great possibility.

[J. R. Hill]

Thursday Update #1

Done this week:

• Refreshed AGS website several times - it didn't help
• Abandoned previous progress lol
• Some GUI work

Immediate to do:

• Make an awesome sprited text display system
  • Animation/full color support
  • Variable width characters
  • Expandable/scrolling stuff
• Make more character bits
• Take screenshots of progress so people will be excited
• Draw some animals
• General game engine setup
  • Input control
  • graphic reading (from external files)
• Get a story branch written/xml'd

[J. R. Hill]

Thursday (almost) Update #2

Done this week:

• GUI System about 80% complete, graphics, layout, etc.

Next Thursday:

• Flash prototype!
• Pictures!
• An xml-editor rant?!