Untitled Space Game: Dev Diary 2

I decided to go with Twine because it's (fairly) easy to pick up, and it reminds me of making way too many text adventures in BASIC on a Commodore +4. I knew going in that it was (in theory) mainly designed for interactive fiction, and you had to sort of bash things into shape in another direction if you wanted to make a game - or at least something people more readily associate with a game.

First time around, I just couldn't work out how to make it do what I wanted.

When I returned, there were now multiple versions galore. The default version, Harlowe, seemed to have more features. I just sort of vaguely assumed it would now be very easy to add additional elements like audio and visuals.

Whoops.

As it happens, I realised about 40 locations deep that actually I should probably be using the version called Sugarcube. Why search desperately for code that allows me to save and load games, which may not even work anymore, if it does this in Sugarcube by default? Why struggle with audio, and install a HAL mod to somewhat give Harlowe a kind of parity with Sugarcube, when I can just use Sugarcube?

Surely it'll be easy to load up my Harlowe penned game into Sugarcube and carry on as normal?

Ah. Well. Nevertheless,


It turns out that lots of Reddit threads told me no, I would not be able to do this. Disaster incoming, all that fun stuff.

Thankfully I'd just sketched out locations, had basic links between passages (essentially the "rooms" of your game), and hadn't added in any custom CSS or JavaScript at all beyond some background colours and hiding the side bar.

Which broke, but it didn't take long to fix.

Trying to figure out Sugarcube was a whole new ballgame. It's designed to make your narrative fiction a bit more gamey. With this in mind, it should be plain sailing from here on in, right?

Ah. Well. Nevertheless,

Popular posts from this blog

Oh hey, HTTPs finally works and I remembered I have a blog

I pretty much stopped posting after realising Blogger were possibly never going to enable HTTPs on custom domains, because I figured what's the point when I'm gonna be shunted out of search results? No reason to be penalised by Google for not having HTTPs when they wouldn't let me use the damn thing. Anyway, TL;DR is they finally enabled it as an option and after some fritzyness, I'm back and ready to post nonsense about junk. Hooray.
Read more

Thoughts on Mass Effect: Andromeda

Yeah, I saw all the bad reviews and laughed at the hilarious wonky animations. I've discovered ways to make Ryder either do a crab-walk shuffle or look like she's on rollerskates. Sometimes I load up the Tempest and she's vibrating up and down while team mates stand on tables. My biggest concern was that after having played an hour or so of Andromeda's demo, I didn't like it. The introductory planet feels wanky, with vision obstructing grass and awkward to climb rocks all over the place - not what you want when trying to get to grip with a new game and its mechanics. The combat seemed like some weird throwback to ME1 where everything is floaty and underpowered. Once you get past the first not particularly well done first hour or so, the game opens out into something I'm finding to be hugely enjoyable. It's gonzo ME1. It's all those Mako planets from the first game, but jammed with stuff to do on them. If the original ME, which felt like a lost s...
Read more

Back in business

Who knew it'd take Twitter going down in a ball of fire to get me back to posting on a blog. Anyway, welcome to the very distant past. I don't even remember how to change the incredibly dated template to one of a dozen other incredibly dated templates, so good luck with that.
Read more