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.

Development is back on!

I apologise for a general lack of updates since my 'brief' hiatus. I have had a complete internet outage this week, but that hardly explains the rest of this month!

Basically, I've been slacking off of development and been playing the Fallout series from the very start. It's the first time I've ever played games in that franchise and I must say that I'm absolutely loving them. I've completed Fallout 1 and 2 (twice - the replayability is amazing) and was going to start on Fallout 3 when, fortunately for you guys, my computer kept overheating. So it's back to development!

My break has definitely done me some good. Replaying the current content in the game has felt much clearer in what works and what doesn't. Most of it does work, but the dialog feels lame, especially after playing the Fallout games. I'm currently experimenting with a new way for the dialog to work in my game which, if it works, will be a lot easier to add conversation branches to and will hopefully get my writing to flow a little more freely.

That's it for now. I'll update next when I've finished experimenting with my new dialog system.

Brief break

I'm going to be away from all keyboards for a week so there won't be any updates for a short while. The writing has been coming along ok, but it will probably be another month before I start looking for beta testers. If I'm lucky I'll return to this project feeling refreshed and able to write more productively!

Screenshots

Below are three screenshots taken from Souls of Gaia. I'm providing these previews to show how the graphics are going to work in the game. One of the problems I find with RAGs games is that the images used for characters (when talking or examining) either have the script and room layout built around the background in those images (which is creatively restrictive), or the backgrounds are at odds with the room image (requiring a suspension of belief). Either way it's not an ideal situation.

What I've attempted to do with Souls of Gaia is use the overlay feature in RAGs to display items, headshots in conversations and scene overlays for encounters (read sex). All of the background images are 640x480 so there is a consistency in how everything is displayed. There was a risk of a huge file size being generated with the use of png images, but so far I have 162 images in the game and the file is only 17MB. I'm quite happy with the way it's looking, but there is still some issue with the background being at odds with the scene overlays. I think it's minimal though and won't pull the player out of the game, although the players will ultimately be the judge of that.

I should mention that it was the testing of this graphics style that led to the creation of this game. It was supposed to be a short game (couple of rooms and characters) and used to test the audience if this style works or not before I developed Slut Royale further, but my creative juices started to flow and I've just been running along with it since. So yeah, try to remember that when I finally release this game, because this is me thinking 'small'.

Examining an object

 

A cutscene

Talking to NPCs