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[nathy after dark]

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I spent a few hours over the past week making a web-based real-life gift-giving game for Self-Care Jam 2.

Players submit zany ideas for gifts they might give their loved ones. Donations through itch.io (and my own money) fund the best ideas, and I maintain a scoreboard of the heartwarming stories made possible through the game.

To-do list

Smooth out the intro animation
Forcefully recruit folks to submit ideas (if submissions don't happen organically)
Pick a first submission
Add the first gift story
Write a FAQ with detailed rules and expectations
Make it look pretty
Add in-game credits section
List my Patreon supporters in the credits
Credit those who have already donated!
Vegan mode

[elosociu]

nice idea! give it some visual design and it might become even nicer  

[nathy after dark]

Thanks @elosociu. You're right about the visual design, it's nearly #1 on the to-do list (literally).

Already 3 unbelievably generous people have given donations to get the game started. Funding-wise, I'm ready to facilitate 2-3 reuben gifts. On the other hand, no one has filled out the form yet. I'm trying to figure out why. Is it just too much work? Is it intimidating? Is there some bug stopping players from sending results? Because a lot of people have viewed the game, and no one has sent in a gift proposal! Someone should get on that so we can all have fun. 

[nathy after dark]

How it used to look


image url

How it looks now: Gasp!



Things are looking a lot better (with a long way left to go). Here's how I got to this point:

The game is made in Fractive (sort of). Fractive is an open-source hypertext story generator, much like Twine, but being developed by a local friend and myself with the goal of being more programmer-friendly and extensible.

Josh and I have slowly been improving Fractive. Josh souped up the default template, which is why everything generally looks cleaner and less "oh god kill me now." I coded the functionality for a back button, which you'll also see in the screenshot.

The most major development is that I made the intro's animation a billion times smoother. (If you play the current version, you'll see how bad it was.) How, you ask?? Well. That's a big question.

I made a special fork of Fractive called SpaceFractive which I'll be using for all of my more intense interactive fiction projects. SpaceFractive does some crazy magic to integrate Fractive with another open-source game library, Phaser, adding the ability to load images, add animation, sound, and anything else that needs to run smoother than a basic webpage can handle.

It's also IRL tho

I can announce that finally, the first real gift has been given by a player of Bring Me a Reuben. Once I finish this overhaul of the basic game, I'll release an update telling that story and adding it to the Scoreboard.

To make the game sustainable (ideally having another gift/story added at least once a month) I think I'm going to release a subscription-based Zine that will come with extra goodies and such.