Slut Royale: request for writers and image manipulators

Xionkana, the person whom I have handed creative control of Slut Royale over to, is looking for writers and image manipulators to help them with the project:

"Now, why do I need help? Because I'm a programmer, plain and simple. Xionkana's the name, and code is my game. My writing and photo manipulation skills are horrific, at best. So, at this stage, I'd like a (person/couple of people/few people) to bounce ideas off of, and drastically improve the quality of this game.

Now, a few things I want to say right away:

1. I will not be using any currently available engine software. (They simply will not do what I will need them to do. )
2. I will require some degree of secrecy from everyone involved while the project is in development. I want to bounce ideas (creative or technical) in confidence. Of course, after the project is released, I'd be more than happy to answer questions about how things have been done, but I will not be making this open source.

With everything said and done, if you're interested, please email me at xionkana@gmail.com with a sample of your work, and we can chat from there.

Cheers,

Xionkana "

I am still helping with this project in an editorial capacity, and possibly even the occasional bit of writing, but it would be really great if some people came forward and worked with Xionkana.

Games update

Slut Royale - I've been approached by someone who wants to take the game and develop it into their own ideas. Since this is going to be sitting on the shelf for a long time I've given them the permission to pick up the torch. I'm not going to give any further detail away as it is in a very early planning stage, but I will be providing some assistance with the project in a mostly editorial capacity.

Last part

I know that I originally said that it was going to be four parts but I decided that it worked better as three. However these two "friends" will return in another adventure soon! Enjoy the finally and I'll update you soon on what this blog is actually supposed to be about - the games!

Gameplayed myself into a corner

When I had my initial creative flare that resulted in this entire new game I inadvertently created a real nightmare of a situation with all of the possible dialogue surrounding the main focus of the chapter (Kiera) because I wanted there to be lots of options available to the player for corrupting her. In the back of my mind I knew that I'd done that and have been ignoring the problem for as long as possible by developing everything else around it. All of that is finished (bar some editorial work) so now I'm forced to face the inevitable.

The best way that I can untangle this mess is that once the player has chosen a corruption path they won't be able to flip to an alternative method (at least, not that easily). That creates a more rigid narrative structure but in order to make it interesting enough to be replayable the paths need to be more diverse once chosen. This has resulted in the creation of more characters, more locations, more objects and more scenes but I think in the long run it'll be less work to create the extra content. My writing is getting quicker the more I practice it and a creative writing course that I took recently has really helped me there as well. I actually enjoy doing the writing more nowadays and that can only be a good thing.

Anyways, here is the next part of the exclusive story I promised:

Game page updated

I made a lot of progress today so I decided that it was probably time to update the game page! It should give you a bit more of an idea of what the game is about and how some of the puzzles can be approached.

In other news, I'd like to say that I'm really excited about the impending release of H.C. and the Wizards Sacrifice over at H3N Comics. The artist is the person behind the amazing Fallen Star comic and is also co-written by one of my favourite artists on the Hypnopics Collective, jnightshade! It looks like it'll be out in the next week or two so be sure to check it out.

A treat for my followers

Progress on Souls of Gaia is slow but steady! I've written a lot more over the past month and have been doing a lot of alpha testing as the game becomes more playable as a result. I haven't encountered any bugs thus far but I have changed a few puzzles that I thought were more interesting than they actually were.

As a reward for being patient with me I'm posting an image story I've been working on recently. I normally post this sort of thing over on the Hypnopics Collective as a flash file but I thought you guys deserved an exclusive. It's going to be about 20 pages long (4 parts) which I'll post steadily over the next couple of weeks. Enjoy part 1 and feel free to leave any comments!

New dialog system up and running

The new dialogue system is up and running. It required a lot of debugging, but since then I've found adding new dialogue to be very easy. There is only one bug remaining, which technically shouldn't appear unless I create a dead end in a conversation tree (which is a bug in its own right), but if it does appear then it breaks the game with an infinite loop. I'm still working on a solution for it, but since it shouldn't occur if I do my job right in other places I don't think it's enough to scrap my new system.

There's not much more to report on right now. I need to focus on the written content for the game otherwise it'll never get finished. This is the period where the chances of the whole project collapsing is at its highest, so I'm going to limit myself to just a couple of hours each day. I'm hoping that I'll get two benefits from this approach: prevent myself from reaching burnout and work a lot more efficiently. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've set aside a day to work on a game and achieved practically nothing because I don't focus.

Edit: And in a moment of inspiration the fatal bug is fixed! Now, instead of a loop, if the conversation tree adds no options for the player to select a new option is added: [End Conversation]. That part seems obvious, and it was, but the inspiration was in how to execute it within RAGs. I'm very happy right now.