Flavor Text Adventure Contest
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- marionline
- Metal Slime
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I'm not 100% sure what the expected result should look like. More like an rpg or like a text adventure?
Does the flavor text apply to dialogues and surrounding descriptions? Or is pure dialogue branching also okay?
If using the OHR: Would all NPCs have to open a menu where you choose an option and then they'd show a textbox?
And, is it okay to merge story branches together again? Otherwise there would be a lot of them quite soon, right?
For story games there's also a tool called RenPy. It combines story and sprites.
This and Twine already mentioned by Willy Elektrix were two tools that came to my mind.
Besides a simple text based game that runs in a terminal shell.
Does the flavor text apply to dialogues and surrounding descriptions? Or is pure dialogue branching also okay?
If using the OHR: Would all NPCs have to open a menu where you choose an option and then they'd show a textbox?
And, is it okay to merge story branches together again? Otherwise there would be a lot of them quite soon, right?
For story games there's also a tool called RenPy. It combines story and sprites.
This and Twine already mentioned by Willy Elektrix were two tools that came to my mind.
Besides a simple text based game that runs in a terminal shell.
- TheLordThyGod
- Slime Knight
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I'm trying to make something for this. My OHR kung fu is no good, but I love adventure games so I'm going to give it a shot anyway. It doesn't really have any functionality yet, but it already looks better than LinearQuest (not difficult).
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- Stote's Quest ideas
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...spake The Lord Thy God.
- Pepsi Ranger
- Liquid Metal Slime
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The type of adventure you create is up to you. My vision is a traditional OHR style game (minus the battles, or with, doesn't matter) that involves exploration, puzzle-solving, and interactive objects that activate choice menus for the player to progress. But that's just one idea. You can do what you want. Just make sure it could be classified as an adventure game.I'm not 100% sure what the expected result should look like. More like an rpg or like a text adventure?
Flavor text, in this case, is traditional usage, where the player "uses" an object on the map (i.e. the stove or oven from the original example) and a textbox pops up, but the adventure part of it is to create choices for the player to make when activating these objects. It would be akin to clicking on an object in a point-and-click and getting a response based on which pointer icon is activated (use, talk, touch, look, etc.). But, I'm not sure if that answers your question, so maybe do what you think flavor text is, and then we can tell you if it helps make your game more adventurous.Does the flavor text apply to dialogues and surrounding descriptions? Or is pure dialogue branching also okay?
You could also post animated GIFS of your game in action if you get really concerned about your flavor text choices, but I'm sure it'll be fine.
No. That would be excessive. Just do what the story calls for.If using the OHR: Would all NPCs have to open a menu where you choose an option and then they'd show a textbox?
If you want to maintain a standard, you could have each NPC open a menu, but the majority of them may just have "talk" or "use" options appear in the menu, where others may have multiple options. But again, that's up to you and the standard of quality you want to set your game to.
No idea what you're talking about here. How you develop the story is up to you. If you are talking about merging choice selections and results, then sure. Again, make the game in whatever way it needs to be made. Don't make your game terrible to meet the demands of a gimmick. Use the gimmick as needed to make the best game you can. Again, the base requirement is to make an adventure game where interaction with objects is part of the gameplay, but interaction with all objects is not necessary.And, is it okay to merge story branches together again? Otherwise there would be a lot of them quite soon, right?
I also recommend a few of you make a quickie game using Mogri's Interactive Storybook (the link is on the announcement post), as it's a Slime Salad featured engine that currently has only five games (including one of mine) and is really quick and easy to use. You could dash off a short and fun adventure in just a few hours. Plus, it could improve your adventure story-telling skills, as it requires no graphics, and unless you want to do something fancy, no scripting.For story games there's also a tool called RenPy. It combines story and sprites.
This and Twine already mentioned by Willy Elektrix were two tools that came to my mind.
Besides a simple text based game that runs in a terminal shell.
Mine is an unfinished psychological drama (well, more like a comedy) about a man who commits a crime because he likes pigeons. It will take me a while to finish it, and I probably won't finish before this contest ends, but you guys could certainly write something short and clever and submit it to this contest. I think Mogri would appreciate it, too, since he made the engine and no one has used it in about three years.
Actually, here's the link so you don't have to go hunting for it: https://www.slimesalad.com/book/
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Last night I made a game with Interactive Book to test it out. It was dumped out in about 15 minutes pn my phone so it's pretty much nonsense, but it's complete more-or-less.
I might enter this contest though, most likely with a Twine game since I downloaded Twine about four years ago and have done literally nothing with it.
I might enter this contest though, most likely with a Twine game since I downloaded Twine about four years ago and have done literally nothing with it.
Last edited by Idontknow on Sun Jun 11, 2017 3:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Working as intended!
- Pepsi Ranger
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- SwordPlay
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I'm designing a concept for an epic-ish neo-punk-noir game but I am having trouble justifying it and it's spinning out of control (help me) hahaha (send help immediately).
I don't want to make something boring, as that would go against the spirit of "flavour" but I do want to give it a jolly good crack the best I can.
I'm not sure if I can get it done, but I might try to churn out a few joke games instead :p
EDIT: Hippity Hoppity HYPE Homie
I don't want to make something boring, as that would go against the spirit of "flavour" but I do want to give it a jolly good crack the best I can.
I'm not sure if I can get it done, but I might try to churn out a few joke games instead :p
EDIT: Hippity Hoppity HYPE Homie
Last edited by SwordPlay on Tue Jun 20, 2017 10:26 am, edited 2 times in total.
- Willy Elektrix
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- MorpheusKitami
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How about minigames rather than joke games? Well, I assume a minigame about, say, making a cup of tea without scalding yourself might be considered satire of the adventure game genre, and what is satire if not a joke with sophistication, so...Virtuous Sword wrote:I'm not sure if I can get it done, but I might try to churn out a few joke games instead :p
Last edited by TMC on Wed Jun 21, 2017 2:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
I've been going deep into my game. It stars Necromancer protagonist Diana as she explores her home and town in order to find a way to defeat a highly paranoid and almost magical hacker, the self-proclaimed HACKERMAN, who has it out for her and her son over a trivial internet argument.
Most of it is goofy nonsense in the spirit of my other games, but there may be some surprises along the way.
It's a twine game, because I wanted to try out a new medium. I had to brush up on my high school CSS skills but the game itself operates fine, albeit horribly incomplete. I'm still mulling over what colors to make the text and background, or any other layout changes.
Most of it is goofy nonsense in the spirit of my other games, but there may be some surprises along the way.
It's a twine game, because I wanted to try out a new medium. I had to brush up on my high school CSS skills but the game itself operates fine, albeit horribly incomplete. I'm still mulling over what colors to make the text and background, or any other layout changes.
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- Sample of flavor text
- angry_greek_woman.png (77.63 KiB) Viewed 3828 times
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- Older screenshot of a fight with Damien's computer
- momhacker-1.png (119.94 KiB) Viewed 1353 times
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Re: Flavor Text Adventure Contest
You've gone and given me ideas.
Oh no door is locked!
Lucky for us, we have a menu full of verbs, and lots of things to point them at.
Push aside the doormat to reveal a key. (Rats! Now I've spoiled the first puzzle.)
The default battle engine actually works really well for this, although you have to create a ton of attacks and enemies for even a simple puzzle. It'll also get complicated if you need to preserve a room's state between visits -- it's simplest if you can keep the game linear, so the player can never revisit a scene. (Guess what I'm not doing.)
I do not actually have a good story for this idea yet, but that has never stopped me.
Oh no door is locked!
Lucky for us, we have a menu full of verbs, and lots of things to point them at.
Push aside the doormat to reveal a key. (Rats! Now I've spoiled the first puzzle.)
The default battle engine actually works really well for this, although you have to create a ton of attacks and enemies for even a simple puzzle. It'll also get complicated if you need to preserve a room's state between visits -- it's simplest if you can keep the game linear, so the player can never revisit a scene. (Guess what I'm not doing.)
I do not actually have a good story for this idea yet, but that has never stopped me.
You ask a dangerous question! Here's my wishlist, most of which doesn't have much to do with tags:
- Some way to hide the MP cost indicator, maybe keyed off of whether the hero's MP stat is hidden? That "0 0/0" is a little ugly.
- In the main battle menu, draw the highlight bar before any of the text, so that the outline of the previous item doesn't get eaten. It looks especially bad when the highlight is faint or matches the menu color exactly.
- Auto-transmogrify-on-tag would be lovely. Before battle fade-in and when any tag is changed in battle, check to see if an enemy should transmogrify. (There's a possibility for infinite loops here; I assume you'd just short-circuit at some point, with undefined behavior because that's what the author deserves for setting up an infinite loop.) This would neatly solve the persistence issue.
- Actually, the other half we need is "set tag on death" for enemies. (Heroes can already do this!) You could do some really cool things with both: a dragon that gets madder with each egg you destroy, for example. This is such an obvious feature that I was sure we already had it. (You can do it with an on-death attack, but again, most cool battle system ideas involve creating dozens of attacks to do simple things, and anything that reduces that is a good thing.)
- The ability to associate a caption with an enemy that could be revealed when targeted by an attack with a theoretical "scan" bitset would save me approximately one attack definition per enemy. Admittedly more of a nice-to-have since the functionality is already there, but "scan" is a pretty common use case in RPGs. If you want to make this more general, have a "responses" submenu similar to the existing "attacks" menu -- the responses would allow you to give captions for counters without having to set up an attack for each one. (This would be really nice to have for any nonstandard use of the battle system)
- I'd love expanded captions. There's no reason we need to limit them to one line (but then you'd also want a caption preview in the editor).
- And along those lines, it'd be great if captions weren't wiped out when they chain to an attack with no caption. But now I'm nitpicking; I already have workarounds for this.
These suggestions are all great ideas.
I would implement some of these immediately, but I'm trying to avoid working on the OHR due to a pressing deadline.
Or costs which are zero. If any of the other costs are zero they are hidden.
I guess bitsets could be added for both of those. Or alternatively a per-stat "Don't show <stat> costs in battle menus" plus a "Don't show attack MP cost if zero" bitset, since MP is special.
I guess that start-of-battle transmogrify should be instant, while during-battle should perform a dissolve.
If an attack sets a tag, I don't know whether it happens at the beginning or end of the attack, before or after chaining occurs, or when the attack is selected rather than performed. We need to decide upon that. Maybe after the attack is performed, but before the 'next' chain is decided? I think clearly it needs to happen before 'instead' chains for followup attacks are checked.
I guess in future there could there be other kinds of responses? (Set tags directly, or textboxes (see below)?)
Counter attacks happen after the triggering attack, so I guess non-attack responses should be the same, but there would be a caption displayed without any attack active. That might require creating a dummy attack in the attack queue, in other words not so simple.
I think the best first step to responding to this request is to make it easier to create a new attack from the enemy editor (jump straight from one editor to the other).
Just expanding the file format a little to allow a couple extra lines would be a doable stop-gap.
I would implement some of these immediately, but I'm trying to avoid working on the OHR due to a pressing deadline.
I wonder whether costs for hidden stats should be shown at all (well, maybe sometimes you want to show that cost, and other times you want to use a hidden stat to 'silently' disable a attack, so a setting is appropriate.)Mogri wrote:Some way to hide the MP cost indicator, maybe keyed off of whether the hero's MP stat is hidden? That "0 0/0" is a little ugly.
Or costs which are zero. If any of the other costs are zero they are hidden.
I guess bitsets could be added for both of those. Or alternatively a per-stat "Don't show <stat> costs in battle menus" plus a "Don't show attack MP cost if zero" bitset, since MP is special.
It annoys me too whereever it happens.In the main battle menu, draw the highlight bar before any of the text, so that the outline of the previous item doesn't get eaten. It looks especially bad when the highlight is faint or matches the menu color exactly.
This would be very powerful!Auto-transmogrify-on-tag would be lovely. Before battle fade-in and when any tag is changed in battle, check to see if an enemy should transmogrify.
I guess that start-of-battle transmogrify should be instant, while during-battle should perform a dissolve.
If an attack sets a tag, I don't know whether it happens at the beginning or end of the attack, before or after chaining occurs, or when the attack is selected rather than performed. We need to decide upon that. Maybe after the attack is performed, but before the 'next' chain is decided? I think clearly it needs to happen before 'instead' chains for followup attacks are checked.
I agree that we should add enemy settings such as that instead of requiring attacks.Actually, the other half we need is "set tag on death" for enemies.
I'm unsure about this one...a "responses" submenu similar to the existing "attacks" menu -- the responses would allow you to give captions for counters without having to set up an attack for each one.
I guess in future there could there be other kinds of responses? (Set tags directly, or textboxes (see below)?)
Counter attacks happen after the triggering attack, so I guess non-attack responses should be the same, but there would be a caption displayed without any attack active. That might require creating a dummy attack in the attack queue, in other words not so simple.
I think the best first step to responding to this request is to make it easier to create a new attack from the enemy editor (jump straight from one editor to the other).
I'd like to allow textboxes in battles, as drastically improved versions of captions. (Length, positioning, portraits, conditions, chains, etc.) But that's probably still far-off because there are so many questions to answer. Or maybe it wouldn't be hard?I'd love expanded captions. There's no reason we need to limit them to one line (but then you'd also want a caption preview in the editor).
Just expanding the file format a little to allow a couple extra lines would be a doable stop-gap.
I tested and made a couple changes to battle captions recently, and could have sworn that this was not the case. Are you using turn-based or active battle captions?And along those lines, it'd be great if captions weren't wiped out when they chain to an attack with no caption. But now I'm nitpicking; I already have workarounds for this.
Last edited by TMC on Sun Jun 25, 2017 5:25 am, edited 1 time in total.