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[JobLeonard]

I knew which other devlog made you play Paper Mario before I even clicked

That space book seems very appropriate to this game, since I guess it's told from the perspective of the astronauts, which is also the focus of this game (it's about a space bard, not about the technical speficiations of the player's spaceship)

And go to that meet-up! You'll learn something about a special sub-culture!

[nathy after dark]

I've just gone through and added a Current Info section to the first post:

Current Info

• A free, 5-episode browser-based adventure game
• Funded through Patreon
• Made in HTML5 using Phaser and Fractive
• Set in a Utopian/Dystopian alternate reality 2017 on Planet U.T.A.H.
• Coming-of-age story of the Space Bard, a shapeshifting, genderfluid aspiring musician
• Poetic, autobiographical sci-fi focused on mental health and queerness
• Everything is a metaphor
• Each episode featuring a different local Utah band
• Printed companion zine with each episode??
• There will be a special Halloween episode even if we have to release it in January

Episode 1 To-Do List

Plan for localization

• Extend Fractive to allow for localized markdown files
• Design a workflow that helps me write game dialogue in clear, accessible, and translatable English

Player choices and consequences system

• Design/implement a 3-dimensional representation of the player's mental/emotional health (The Vibe)
• Design/implement an evocative but unobtrusive visualization of the Vibe
• Implement a simple system for tracking and responding to events and choices that have taken place
• Dialogue utilizes 6 different emojis which automatically adjust the Vibe when they appear in dialogue
• Define special conditions of the vibe such as "depressed," "panic attack," "creative mania"

Save files

• Local autosave/load through localStorage:
  
  • Serialize the Vibe
  • event flags
  • player's location
  • player's phone history
• Implement some form of cloud storage/save-file export so player data isn't tied exclusively to one browser/machine

Writing

• Detailed bio on each character to appear in episode 1
• Finalize relevant details of the world-building
• Outline the rough story progression
• Implement a rough draft/demo using placeholder art

Art

• Find an animator with personal experience and enthusiasm for the project & subject matter
• Crowdfund, save & scrounge so I can pay said artist before I ask them to do anything
• Put together a storyboard/art bible document of all episode 1 locations, props, and characters with reference images and descriptions
• Work closely to get the final assets just right

Shapeshifting system
Social media/texting system
Dialogue system
Inventory system
Point-and-click exploration system

(I'll have to expand on these to-do list sections later--they're some of the more complicated parts.)

I've been needing a structured to-do list for quite a while. Don't have time to expand on absolutely every part at the moment, but I think I covered all the general areas that need to be completed before episode 1 can be ready for the world.

 

[nathy after dark]

(This post may only be comprehensible/of-interest to experienced programmers  )
The real open-source hypertext generator
was the friends you made along the way


I've never worked with any unstable open-source libraries before that weren't my own. I did submit a couple of misguided pull requests to LibGDX in my time, but other than that, never had the real experience of contributing to a project through a personal GitHub fork. Guess what skills I've started picking up since adopting Fractive.

While visiting us humble Utah gamedevs, ex-local gamedev Greyson Richey lent his prowess with professional web development to recommending Josh and I make some structural changes to the library using Webpack. We each set out on separate paths of experimenting along those lines, with me trying to wrap Fractive in custom loaders in a project template, and Josh integrating Webpack directly into Fractive in ways I haven't put in the time to understand.

Results:

• I learned how Node.js and npm really work, after many years of using them whenever some tutorial told me to, but not understanding
• I learned that ES2015 exists, is way better than ES5 which I was using without even knowing it, and with a transpiler I can write SpaceBard in ES2015 and use OOP as I'm used to doing gamedev
• I can work with Webpack now and know how to write custom loaders!
• None of this has yet yielded any boost in productivity for Fractive or for SpaceBard, so we're abandoning Webpack, which is where we spent most of our time experimenting.

I learned to make a proper pull request, and tonight I closed my first 2 issues on Fractive! Woot woot!

P.S. It's warming my heart to see that me using Fractive seems to have kicked Josh back into action in the indie sphere. I feel like I can already say (also because I've now helped 2 queer people expand their wardrobes while contributing character designs) Ballad of the Space Bard has touched lives and we've barely left pre-production. I want to keep incorporating every opportunity to enrich my communities during this development process, and I think that spirit of generosity will show through in the game itself.  

Love y'all! Be safe!

P.P.S. shoutout to my friend Catt Small for sharing this relevant mental health article and inspiring me to get on Mastodon, which has been great for me.

P.P.P.S I took a couple of detours (side-hustles, if you will) over the last week, both to write a short story, and make a quick game in Fractive for Self-Care Jam 2. Here's the log for that one. Check it out! (It's actually the first Fractive-based game ever released.)

[JobLeonard]

Cool. Modern JS is slowly starting to become... well, a sane language/ecosystem to program in

[SchriefFighter]

I love the name of the game, and it looks cool! Keep up the good work!

[nathy after dark]

Thanks everyone for your support!

Today a friend reminded me of this song the teacher showed us way back in elementary school...





So much love for Carl Sagan  I'm so glad I was reminded of this while working on Space Bard. I might also incorporate Cosmos into the on-and-off research I've been doing.

[nathy after dark]

Bookshelf of the Space Bard

Switching to web-based multimedia as the game's platform lets me get away with all kinds of laziness. For example, I wanted the player to be able to browse the Bard's personal library, looking at book covers, and maybe revealing the Bard's thoughts on the books. (I also used a bookshelf in The Whisperer in Darkness as a way of citing my influences as easter eggs in the game.) In Unity this would have required coding an entire feature for an interactible bookshelf, taking pictures of book covers and spines, etc. While that gives me more control over the cohesiveness of the experience, the game would take many years to develop if I had to do everything myself, unless I cut 90% of the innovative ideas I'm excited about. I've come gradually to make a high-level decision about Space Bard: I would rather the game be janky, eclectic, and look stupid, than it be a tight, polished experience that reflects almost none of the boundless energy and inspiration I put into it. Hence, multimedia!!

I realized today that a faster, more iterable way to put a shelf full of books in the game, was to make a shelf on goodreads.com and embed it in the game with an HTML/JS widget:



EDIT: On the topic of sharing love for literature, I just thought of a segment from one of my favorite stories, "Paladin of the Lost Hour" by Harlan Ellison, that I want to share with you:

"Many years ago," Gaspar said, taking out a copy of Moravia's The Adolescents and thumbing it as he spoke, "I had a library of books, oh, thousands of books -- never could bear to toss one out, not even the bad ones -- and when folks would come to the house to visit they'd look around at all the nooks and crannies stuffed with books; and if they were the sort of folks who don't snuggle with books, they'd always ask the same dumb question." He waited a moment for a response and when none was forthcoming (the sound of china cups on sink tile), he said, "Guess what the question was."

From the kitchen, without much interest: "No idea."

"They'd always ask it with the kind of voice people use in the presence of large sculptures in museums. They'd ask me, 'Have you read all these books?'" He waited again, but Billy Kinetta was not playing the game. "Well, young fella, after a while the same dumb question gets asked a million times, you get sorta snappish about it. And it came to annoy me more than a little bit. Till I finally figured out the right answer.

"And you know what that answer was? Go ahead, take a guess." Billy appeared in the kitchenette doorway.

"I suppose you told them you'd read a lot of them but not all of them."

Gaspar waved the guess away with a flapping hand. "Now what good would that have done? They wouldn't know they'd asked a dumb question, but I didn't want to insult them, either. So when they'd ask if I'd read all those books, I'd say, 'Hell, no. Who wants a library full of books you've already read?'"

Apparently you can even read the whole story online, legally.

[nathy after dark]

I got a response to the last post in the local gamedev Slack channel that made me feel warm and fuzzy:

This is the best devblog update ever

I lol'd (in a good way) at the Goodreads widget, and that Harlan Ellision excerpt is 

It's really hard to write elegant marketing jargon for this game because it's so weird but sometimes it comes to me in overwhelming waves of inspiration(often while showering) and I want to share some of that process

Title of the game

It was originally called Spacebard, then SpaceBard, or Space Bard. Some friends commented on how flooded the games sphere is with terrible space games, and when they hear "Space" as the first word in a title, they immediately lose their attention. Hence, "Ballad of the Space Bard" (which also works well because I did some research, and couldn't find a single other game with a title starting in 'Ballad')

TIGForum tagline

You need a good bite-sized description of your game for your TIGSource dev log! Here are all the ones I've used so far, in order of appearance, and some comments on what works and what doesn't:

• Ballad of the Space Bard: BoJack Horseman in musical Space Utah -- BoJack reference good for quickly establishing the game's tone. Not an ideal tagline because it doesn't tell you what kind of game it is!
• Ballad of the Space Bard: Queer musical adventure with a cause -- a little better. Could attract more fans working on similar games! But I'm not sure how many other queer people are on TIGSource, so it might be too specific and turn other people away
• Ballad of the Space Bard: The Most Existential Musical Tragidramedy on mobile -- "Tragidramedy" combines 3 words in a way that might not make sense, and "tragicomedy" already implies the drama part, doesn't it?
• Ballad of the Space Bard: Utah's Most Existential Multimedia Tragicomedy -- Maybe the best one I've come up with. Heralds the local spirit, philosophical underpinnings, multimedia eclecticism, and genre

Elevator pitch

I am constantly struggling with this. Here's one that came to me today:

Ballad of the Space Bard is a free 5-part web-based interactive Multimedia epic tragicomedy set on a queer sci-fi alt-present Planet U.T.A.H.

It's quite a bit to remember but I think it covers all the bases? Do half of those words make sense outside of my own head? Idk, I'd love more opinions/suggestions on that!

People love feature lists with bullet points

Ballad of the Space Bard features:

• The Vibe: a 3-dimensional neurodivergent mental health system
• The most implausibly well-read adolescent protagonist in gaming history
• A plethora of contradictory answers to the Big Questions

[Fenreliania]

Ballad of the Space Bard is a free 5-part web-based interactive Multimedia epic tragicomedy set on a queer sci-fi alt-present Planet U.T.A.H.

Much too much information to parse at once. It checks every box of what the game features, sure, but it doesn't expose the meaning or the feeling or the purpose of the game in a clear way. Perhaps more direct:

Ballad of the Space Bard is an epic queer tragicomedy in Space Utah, released in 5 parts as a web-based multimedia experience.

[nathy after dark]

Thanks Fenreliania, you're definitely right about that. I appreciate everyone's responses so much. I've learned that I can't just work on such personal projects forever without feeling a community behind me. This is why I love dev logging.   

Another crucial point I'll come back to again and again is inspiration. In that department, I've been playing Prey because I was bold enough to request the campus library buy it for me. And they really did, along with Meanwhile Elsewhere which you might have noticed in the Goodreads post. It's a collection of sci-fi stories by trans authors and the stories continue to blow my mind. Special thanks to Paige Ashlynn for recommending it, and being there for me since my earliest days in the gamedev community.

I also signed up for MoviePass, which I'm assured by friends actually works at the local theaters. My card isn't activated yet but my parents took me to see Lady Bird tonight and I'm pretty much still crying. What a lovely movie. 

[nathy after dark]

Open-source shenanigans

Josh has been super active pushing Fractive forward towards its first milestone. I've told him he can post updates here if he likes.

In the meantime, I've also been fiddling around with modifying the Fractive engine in my free time. Which is extremely irresponsible with the amount of homework I'm procrastinating. Seriously, Thanksgiving break is almost over and I haven't caught up on a single class. 

But anyway! It's been a super fun time, and productive for Fractive and my continued experience with Node and TypeScript dev! I experimented with using markdown-it-attrs to parse Markdown instead of CommonMark, which was meant to give a nifty syntax mainly for adding style spans and DOM id's to elements of the Markdown. Here's what that looked like.

When I showed this to Josh, he pointed out that he had added the same functionality in a better way on the main dev branch. I had just forgotten to pull from the upstream, which if you want to be negative about it, means I wasted some hours, but I'm actually glad I did it anyway, because I learned some really cool shnazz about ASTs and HTML transformation.

Next, I took on the task of extending Fractive to support localized text. This is probably my first major contribution to Fractive, it seems to work great, and I understand the library much better now. I love open-source work so much. It's addictive working on improving the engine, and despite in the past advising others not to get distracted by engine design, I'm happily falling into the trap myself.

Say what you mean(?): Art about art, Stories about stories, Games about games

I went and saw The Square with my new MoviePass a couple of days ago. Parts of it were spellbinding and even profound, but overall, I was very turned off by how it seemed full of itself, mocking art for its high-minded pretentiousness while still coming off as pretentious itself. I worry that "art about art" is the default mode of creativity, and leads one's work to seem boring and full of itself. Since we tend to write best what we know, and as creatives we know more about art than anything else, we just make art about art, that fails to address real and impactful topics. I believe just as much as anyone that art can change the world, but when I spend all my time in Art communities, I get so tired of what seems to be people blinding themselves to all the other important parts of life.

It set me seriously thinking about one of the quandaries I'm wary of in writing Space Bard: does it ruin your story if you talk about the story/its themes in the story?

I connected this question back to a quote we read in my Film class:

I am always reluctant to single out some particular feature of the work of a major filmmaker because it tends inevitably to simplify and reduce the work. But in this book of screenplays by Krzysztof Kieslowski and his co-author, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, it should not be out of place to observe that they have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what's really going on rather than being told. They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don't realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart.

So some very talented people out there would argue that the solution is just to write a story and keep the themes layers deep, never talking about them. But my game is about a character who questions everything, observes obsessively, and wouldn't just walk through a life full of lessons without commenting on them. I want to find the right balance where some things are left for the player to figure out, but characters in the story can still have opinions and insights. Ugh. I guess I'll figure it out as I go along!

P.S. Everyone I talked to who watched The Square loved it without qualifications, so this might just be an issue of personal taste. But I don't want to play through my own game and think "God, this game is so stuck up about everything it believes in."

[Sanud]

There is some merit to keeping some of the layers deep in the art itself, but imo those self-contained works are rare (and rarer still, those that allow you to infer your own meaning/theories while staying congruent to the work of art's realm)

More often than not I like reading interviews with gamedevs as they explain the ideas behind creative choices, and the resulting coverage can add a surprising layer that adds onto one's appreciation of the final product (and on some unfortunate instances, taint the final product too). I don't know how many people out there also like informational interviews too.

My best advice (if it works for you) is: do what feels right, and watch out for external factors like time, or the growth of the player base and how they're reading the piece.

[nathy after dark]

@Sunda thanks for the input! It's nice to know someone read and thought about my rant in the last post, which I actually cut short because I realized it was getting really messy in translation from my brain into English, and full of run-on sentences which are probably a bad habit of mine and that's Writing 101 so maybe I should know better.

Anyway, I think you're right. One point I thought of after making the post, is that Stanley Kubrick's films certainly exhibit the tendency to dramatize in cryptic ways, allowing for interpretation. And you know what? That doesn't make them the epitome of sophistication in film/art. He cared about higher causes than Film itself, but the hidden layers he may have put in his films (for example, the slaughter of Native Americans symbolized in The Shining), have basically guaranteed that his work never inspired anyone to change anything substantial in the world. I'm not saying he should have made activist propaganda instead, or that Space Bard is activist propaganda, but I think there's nothing wrong with saying what you mean. In my opinion the whole point of making Art is to be better understood by yourself and others, so why be cryptic and pretend to be making nonsense? It's dumb. 

Artivism is a word I might use to describe the effect I'm aiming for.

[nathy after dark]

I may not be the only one who thinks of terrible band names,
But I may be the only one to write them down obsessively for the last 4 years
And I just might let them ruin my game for you

One of the earliest ideas I had for differentiating Planet U.T.A.H. from its real-world counterpart, is filling every background with posters for fake bands with names I found hilarious when I thought of them. (Your mileage may vary.)

The inspiration guessing game!

I thought of a game we can play in the meantime while I'm more focused on school finals than Space Bard. One point to the first person to guess which movie/book/comic/song/current event/whatever inspired each of these fictional bands that may or may not appear in U.T.A.H.:

• Mystyk Spyryl
• Hungry for Apples
• Mutant Patriarchy
• Acid Reasoning <--- (Hint: This only makes sense if you listen to a certain song's lyrics incorrectly)
• Pyrosis
• Quadrimom
• Vlad and the Not-My-Presidents
• Nancy Alpha Tango
• RM Taxi
• 20-minutes Adventure
• The Soft Hugs
• Pickle Jar Hero
• Every Girl a Goddess
• Fruit Sex
• Ahoy, Smexi
• Fudge Bourbon McQueen

No need to guess them all at once. Some are fictional bands directly from other fictional universes. The same inspiration source might be the answer to multiple of the band names, so you have to explain why and how it applies.

[nathy after dark]

Sometimes you gotta decompress

I get very passionate about my games and writing (if I'm focused on the right projects) and it can take over my life. I have a high standard for research, and often accumulate a massive reading list of research/inspiration for my current project. No matter how fun the books are--like Packing For Mars which I adore--I sometimes can't bring myself to read them because I've created too much pressure, and I find myself consuming them hypercritically instead of pleasurably.



When this happens, if I catch the problem quickly enough, I find media that's so wildly unrelated to my project domain that I couldn't possibly take relevant inspiration from it. This gives me the permission to relax and enjoy without stopping to take notes constantly.

And when I inevitably do find inspiration in the woefully unrelated books, that's when the inspiration is really bonkers and worthwhile.

P.S. I had one of my longest friends take a look at the band name guessing game, and he was supremely puzzled. So yeah it must be pretty hard.

[nathy after dark]

Big progress on the engine

Turns out the best way to motivate myself to work on the SpaceBard engine, was to tie it in with one of my smaller projects, so I could see more immediate results. I decided to name the engine (Fractive + Phaser) SpaceFractive and use it for my other game, Bring Me a Reuben, which is about giving gifts in real life.

(I'm also using SpaceFractive for at least one more secret project.)

Today I made a big push on SpaceFractive, and modified the compiler so it can embed a Phaser game window alongside Fractive text, and both are controlled by the same JavaScript files:



Things like point-and-click gameplay, cutscenes/animation, etc. will appear in the Phaser window, with game dialogue done around the edges. I might eventually get more tricky with overlaying them, which is possible because Phaser can create a transparent background on its canvas. But fussing over fancy dialogue boxes is a ways out there for Space Bard.

[io3 creations]

The inspiration guessing game!

I thought of a game we can play in the meantime while I'm more focused on school finals than Space Bard. One point to the first person to guess which movie/book/comic/song/current event/whatever inspired each of these fictional bands that may or may not appear in U.T.A.H.:

• Mystyk Spyryl
• Hungry for Apples
• Mutant Patriarchy
• Acid Reasoning <--- (Hint: This only makes sense if you listen to a certain song's lyrics incorrectly)
• Pyrosis
• Quadrimom
• Vlad and the Not-My-Presidents
• Nancy Alpha Tango
• RM Taxi
• 20-minutes Adventure
• The Soft Hugs
• Pickle Jar Hero
• Every Girl a Goddess
• Fruit Sex
• Ahoy, Smexi
• Fudge Bourbon McQueen

No need to guess them all at once. Some are fictional bands directly from other fictional universes. The same inspiration source might be the answer to multiple of the band names, so you have to explain why and how it applies.

P.S. I had one of my longest friends take a look at the band name guessing game, and he was supremely puzzled. So yeah it must be pretty hard.

When you say that it's related to "movie/book/comic/song/current event/whatever" is similar to this game:
I thought of a number. It's between 1 and 1,000,000.   Can you guess it?

Improv Comedy shows start with asking for specific things (location, people, motivation, etc).
Crossword puzzles also have a much more narrowed down connection between hints and words.
Perhaps, it's not impossible but for most it's better to set the bar a little "lower" by adding the specific categories next to each.

[nathy after dark]

Fair enough. I think I did rush that out without thinking it through, because I felt like I hadn't been doing anything on the log and I wanted to spice it up. Here's a new iteration:

The Band-name Guessing Game

- 1 point for naming the source of inspiration for each fake band name.
- 1 Extra point given for a good explanation of the joke/pun behind it.
- Endless goodwill points if you find any of my jokes funny

You can guess on as many of the names as you want to at the same time.

Number. Band name -- Hint
1. Mystyk Spyryl -- Fictional band from a TV cartoon
2. Hungry for Apples -- Got milk?
3. Mutant Patriarchy -- Alternate title for a comic book
4. Acid Reasoning -- Listen to this album carefully for a phrase that sounds like something else.
5. Pyrosis -- Fictional band from a comic book
6. Quadrimom -- Play on the title of an indie game. Bonus point: Explain a situation where a person could have 4 moms in real life. (Octodad) +2 points io3 creations
7. Vlad and the Not-My-Presidents -- Current politics
8. Nancy Alpha Tango -- Don't try to decode it with this.
9. RM Taxi -- What a real Chicago rock band would be named if they were from Utah
10. 20-minutes Adventure -- Quote from a TV cartoon
11. The Soft Hugs -- They're from another game with a TIGSource dev log!
12. Pickle Jar Hero -- Not actually from the same TV show as #10
13. Every Girl a Goddess -- Based on the name of a YouTube channel that officially ended this month.
14. Fruit Sex -- Very obscure reference to a classic DC comic book
15. Ahoy, Smexi -- Reference to a film
16. Fudge Bourbon McQueen -- Reference to a more recent film

[nathy after dark]

Oh my GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD

The Black Mirror season 4 premiere was so amazing.

So. Amazing.

Welp. I guess my game is gonna be full of hundreds of references to something called "Space Fleet" and there's nothing anyone can do about it, least of all myself.




Sorry, just fangirling!

[io3 creations]

The Band-name Guessing Game

- 1 point for naming the source of inspiration for each fake band name.
- 1 Extra point given for a good explanation of the joke/pun behind it.
- Endless goodwill points if you find any of my jokes funny

You can guess on as many of the names as you want to at the same time.

Number. Band name -- Hint
1. Mystyk Spyryl -- Fictional band from a TV cartoon
2. Hungry for Apples -- Got milk?
3. Mutant Patriarchy -- Alternate title for a comic book
4. Acid Reasoning -- Listen to this album carefully for a phrase that sounds like something else.
5. Pyrosis -- Fictional band from a comic book
6. Quadrimom -- Play on the title of an indie game. Bonus point: Explain a situation where a person could have 4 moms in real life.
7. Vlad and the Not-My-Presidents -- Current politics
8. Nancy Alpha Tango -- Don't try to decode it with this.
9. RM Taxi -- What a real Chicago rock band would be named if they were from Utah
10. 20-minutes Adventure -- Quote from a TV cartoon
11. The Soft Hugs -- They're from another game with a TIGSource dev log!
12. Pickle Jar Hero -- Not actually from the same TV show as #10
13. Every Girl a Goddess -- Based on the name of a YouTube channel that officially ended this month.
14. Fruit Sex -- Very obscure reference to a classic DC comic book
15. Ahoy, Smexi -- Reference to a film
16. Fudge Bourbon McQueen -- Reference to a more recent film

Lol!  I've still only got one!   Not surprising that it's a game related one.   Though, I've never been good at most crossowrd puzzles as those don't tend to match my interests.
6. Octodad.
I do like logical puzzles like the situation of having 4 moms.  Q: What is the definition of "mom" and does it have to be at the same time? 
If not, then other than the birth mother, there could be 3 foster mothers (one after the other).
If yes, then there could be the biological mother (i.e. the one with the egg); a surrogate mother and a same sex couple.
Or did you think of something different?


p.s. I thought I've seen a way to hide text by applying a "highlight" to prevent spoilers ... but