All right. Basically, I’m setting up a system of “Step here, choices appear, choose one, move on a set path, repeat.” I’m going about making my game like this since I’m very visually-minded. It’s going to have thousands of possible outcomes. Hope you like it!

We got a little farther, it’s still far from finished but here’s a little demo. It’s sort of a simulation strategy.

You can download the demo here: http://shard123games.weebly.com/ludum-dare.html

Although we are allowed to start now, I won’t actually start till that Friday. Mainly because this is the end of a semester for me so I have finals to take and papers to write. I will be using Inform7 to write an IF game. I have never used Inform before, although I have toyed with it in the past. Hopefully I’ll have a complete (probably short) game by the deadline. Either way, I am using this opportunity to learn how to work a fantastic IF creator.

You don’t want me to sic my magic cat on you, do you?  :-)

I’m really sorry about this. I’m not sure whether to continue in what I’m doing. I don’t know whether I really want to be making a visual novel.

I don’t know why I’m feeling this way. I shouldn’t. I’m really conflicted, though. I don’t know whether to share this kind of thing. Part of me is really afraid of being harassed over it. But I want to share how I’m feeling, and it’s related to game development, so I’ll take that risk. I want people who are commenting to keep in mind that I feel very vulnerable about this kind of post, and that I don’t deal well with jokes about my emotions. Please be gentle.

Working on the visual novel, something felt… wrong. I don’t know why. It was more fun than I usually have while making a game. Something felt wrong about it, though. I really hate feeling that way.

I’m looking at the roguelike I had planned. I will probably work on that. I’m really sorry about not being in the Mini-LD. I’m ashamed of myself, but I can’t seem to focus on my entry. Please forgive me.

I may or may not finish my roguelike. I may or may not get back to the visual novel. I don’t know what I will do. It’s really upsetting for me, but I can’t help it. I really need to look at what I’m doing, and try to figure out why I’m feeling the way I’m feeling.

I don’t know what to do. I really don’t. I wish I could say with certainty what I will do. I wish I could say what I want out of game development. I really don’t know right now. I’m sorry.

Please forgive me,

— Mr. Dude

Walkabout

The game is about a chubby farmer who is about to lose her farm. In order to keep it, she needs to reinvent herself, or perhaps she will be able to find happiness with the way she is now…

Marry your way out of your financial troubles, or get smart and make your farm profitable. Get the bank off of your back by paying off your loan. Or, you could take the easy way out… You could kill whoever tries to get between you and your farm…

I warmly encourage anyone working on a dialogue system for the MiniLD this month to check out this interesting article series:

Designing a Dialogue System From Scratch

Part One:
http://tom-jubert.blogspot.com/2011/06/designing-dialogue-system-from-scratch.html

Part Two:
http://tom-jubert.blogspot.com/2011/06/designing-dialogue-system-from-scratch_08.html

Part Three:
http://tom-jubert.blogspot.com/2011/06/designing-dialogue-system-from-scratch_14.html

If you know of other similar articles, I’d love to hear about them!

Updated Hieroglyph deciphering experiment Rosetta some more:

http://www.ninjadodo.net/temp/LD19/rosetta_v7.zip

Fixed some bugs, improved usability.

Hi guys, the game that qwezc and I are making is moving right along. Its now got actual game play! Every time a baby is born you get points that you can spend to introduce new technology to the humans. It still doesn’t have much dialogue or a story but that will come later. I’m thinking of adding some special powers that drastically change the humans’ opinion of you.

Here’s another screenshot:

No screenshots yet due to lack of art, but I have some things to report.

I currently have about half of the first chapter’s dialogue written. The plot doesn’t branch yet, but there are plenty of dialogue choices that affect the two main characters’ opinions of the protagonist. Since the ending is determined by the characters’ opinions of the protagonist, the fact that it doesn’t branch yet shouldn’t hurt anything.

I have come to the realization that I won’t be able to complete the story for the Mini-LD. I will get as far as I can and then release what I have with some flavored “To be continued…” scene. “Flavored” meaning that they will vary depending on how well the player did, ranging from “That was fun! I can’t wait for the script to be completed!” to “I can’t believe you behaved like you did. I know the script isn’t done yet, but you were really awful to work with.” depending on what the player decides to do.

I’ve also found myself deeply enjoying working on this game. I usually spend lots of time writing lengthy dialogue scenes for my other games (most of which are never used), and visual novels are mostly dialogue. I get to do what I already tend to spend most of my time doing anyway, and that’s a great feeling.

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel while doing this when I started, but I’m really enjoying myself. This is certainly more fun than writing yet another shooter.

Currently, I’m getting ready to make character art. I’ve got family over today, and they’re very noisy, so today is mostly lost. I will likely stay up tonight to get some character art done.

For the character art, I’m doing it in order that the characters appear. Since most of the characters have more than one outfit, I’m doing each of those as I need them. (Also in the order that they appear) However, for each character/outfit that I make, I’m making a complete set of emotions. I will be making action poses for each character as well, but that can wait for when I start needing them. Action poses are really tough to draw, so I want to get used to drawing characters in simple poses first.

The characters will be drawn with fairly cartoonish proportions. Specifically, the characters will be 3 heads tall. This will allow me to get used to making characters in general without needing to worry about realistic proportions. Plus, I enjoy drawing chibi characters.

I’m really looking forward to having character art to play with. But, with the noise in the house, I’ll need to do that overnight…

Peace, love, and a bit of luck,

— Mr. Dude

So I thought i’d share the way I am structuring the dialogue in my game.

I am using a node graph architecture – each piece of dialogue exists as a node in a tree. Each node can have several child nodes, representing the next piece of dialogue. A child node can be any other node – including itself, or the parent of itself. This allows for recursive dialogue (“try to open door” -> “door won’t budge” -> “try to open door”…..)

Throughout the life cycle of the game, a pointer to a dialogue node is used to track the “current node” – this is the piece of dialogue which is currently being executed, and switches to the next piece when it is able to do so. A disadvantage is that it cannot execute more than a single node at any one time – i.e. only a single piece of dialogue can be displayed.

If a node has a single child, the dialogue switches directly to the child node when the current node has finished executing. However, if it has multiple children, the choices are displayed for the player to choose from. The choice selected then becomes the new dialogue node.

To fill these nodes with content, and link them together, a description of each node exists in a table Lua-side.

All of the nodes listed in the AllNodes table are created and linked together at run-time automatically. To create nodes, you just place new node descriptions in this table, and specify the names of the child nodes.

The first prototype build, which shows the dialogue tree in action (with only a small part of the Soldier path complete) is available here:

Journey through hell – prototype

Next step – text effects! more content!

-DBS

Hello folks, I will be participating in this MiniLD! But since making dialogue in Game Maker is kind of tough, I’ll probably just have a story in my game, The Struggle for Humanity. In this game that I’m working on with qwezc, you are of an ancient alien race that has to introduce new technology and ideas to the early humans. I’ve never really done something like this before, so I’m excited to see how this turns out!

Here’s an early screenshot:

After sifting through several different ideas, I’ve got a premise that I like.

I should be able to finish it without too much trouble.

I’ve decided to go way out of my normal development fare. I’m making a furry girl’s love game. Oh hell yes. And the best ending has polyamory. No further spoilers about that.

It’s about a vixen who has a crush on her next-door neighbor. Along with her best friend, she courts the neighbor and tries to win her heart. The game will track how the neighbor feels about the protagonist as well as how the protagonist’s best friend feels about her. The ending will ultimately depend on those two things. However, either opinion reaching an extreme value will give an ending that depends on both opinion values.

The game will be told from a third-person perspective. IE: The protagonist appears as a character on-screen instead of being the narrator. I like writing stories from the third-person perspective. It gives a nice feel to calmer stories, where a first-person perspective is better for action-packed plots.

I’m very happy to be doing this game. It’s a great break from the sorts of things that I’ve been doing. It’s also a good reason to do a bunch of drawing. Also, I get to learn to do actual art in Inkscape. (Granted that I don’t have a tablet, so I’ll have to use a mouse)

I will use a manga style, no gradients, and no outlines. The flat colors and lack of outlines are style elements that I’m very comfortable with. The manga art style is new to me, though, and I haven’t made static character art in quite a while.

The music will be done in LMMS, and sound effects will be made with some clever LMMS work.

I look forward to working with Ren’Py. I’ve been playing with it for most of today, and it’s loads of fun.

Peace,

— Mr. Dude

Naturally I plan to join the “all talk” miniLD. My favourite part of Oblivion, Fallout, Mass Effect, KOTOR and Metal Gear Solid was always the dialogue. I am planning to write a super-simplistic Ren’Py style HTML5 NPC chat engine. My goal: comedy.

The characters I’m going to use were sculpted this winter in Poser Pro 2010, which is a wonderful piece of software with extremely realistic humans that you can tweak to your heart’s content – I can give each face any expression I like. I’m going to prepare a half dozen renders per character (happy, angry, shy etc) and render a few 3d backgrounds for a few scenes of quest-filled talk and a little action. This is what the cast looks like:

My little cast of characters.

By tweaking various “morphs” I can change each character’s expression:

Emotions aplenty!

I will enter the Mini-LD.

After considering the theme, I don’t actually have much interest in creating a story through text.  The concept is about dialogue.  Since I generally don’t like to explore mood and story via dialogue (I prefer the ‘show, don’t tell’ method), this theme is challenging for me.   Therefore, my entry will likely be somewhat unconventional.  I will be pursuing one of two goals:

Either:  Concentrate on a dialogue engine.  I have never written a robust dialogue engine before and I need to know what goes into one.  I have a rough outline of what I would like it to support and how to code that.  As such, I would be producing a tech demo for the competition.  I would still attempt to do some story (I have a vague idea), but I might just have to fall back on old poetry I’ve written as a script.

Or:  Try to be innovative with the idea of all talk.  What if the characters (this would work best with two human players) could not speak to each other, but still had to communicate (ala Journey, the upcoming atmospheric PS3 title).  What if the characters were robots, and instead of speaking verbally, used some protocol language (R2D2 anyone)?  What if you were interacting with aliens and had to learn their language (The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis)?  I have a basic story to go with the robots idea, and I may pursue that.

Feel free to steal any of those ideas (actually I’d be excited to see anyone use them)!  I’ll see you guys in irc, and I’ll be watching the blog.  Good luck, all!

http://www.ninjadodo.net/temp/LD19/rosetta_v6_1.zip

New version of Hieroglyph deciphering experiment Rosetta. Revised some of the puzzles and made various other adjustments. Thoughts/comments welcome.

I Never been fan of text based game, I think the major difficulties here are to avoid linearity without losting yourself at writing the plot tree, and creating a great mood.

I will not spoil my plot too much but in few words it will be a: psychotic space polar, with robots, holograms, huge spaceships, zombie ( space zombie ?!!?)  and probably few girls for guys who like to flirt .

I don’t draw so graphics will be made of  strange “collages”.

I will try to add a fighting system but still don’t know what kind.

My goal is to write quickly the game engine (need to be finished before Tuesday) , then start working hard on the story/graphics/sounds.

English is not my native language so it will be hard for me to write everything in english without a lot of mistakes, so I will probably need somebody to help me to correct grammar

Cheers and good luck all !

Hello Ludum land!

A mini-LD devoted to dialogue was just the kicker I needed to get back into making stuff. I have yet to create a meaningful story in any game i’ve made, and this is the perfect time to make one!

The game I am making will consist of nothing but animated text, like the modern interactive fiction stories which are scattered around the net. This allows me to throw away my biggest weakness – drawing, and concentrate on something I believe I am capable of delivering well – an immersive story.

So, here’s the pitch:

The game is a story of the player’s trials in the darkest reaches of the world.
There are three paths the player can take – the soldier, the priest, or the child. Each path focuses on a certain type of test (the soldier has tests of strength and cunning, the priest has tests of faith and wisdom, and the child has tests of courage and temptation).

There will be plenty of choices to make, and the chosen route will make the game differ significantly.

The most interesting aspect to solve will be how to structure the dialogue so that it is as flexible as possible. That, and making an animated text system which is highly configurable.

I’ll be using familiar tools – C++ with an embedded Lua interface, and either SFML or HGE for graphics purposes.

“The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” – Victor Hugo

Well, I thought things over.

I’ve been working on action games and poking at roguelikes for years. Other artistic interests of mine have been neglected. I haven’t written a story in ages. I haven’t really drawn anything in a few years. I’ve been frustrated.

I’m going to challenge myself. I’m making a visual novel with Ren’Py.

I have a plot in mind, but I’m not giving it away. It’s a big break from my usual stuff, though.

It’ll hopefully be an interesting story, and hopefully I can still draw after not having drawn anything in so long. It’ll probably be good for me to step out of making mindlessly violent games.

I’m going to count this among my “I think I hate this but I’ve never  tried it, so I’ll give it a go” experiences. I’ve really been under the impression that I wouldn’t enjoy this type of thing. For all I know, I may discover a fondness for manga. (My game will be drawn in a manga style, which is how Ren’Py games are usually drawn)

I may well have been wrong about myself for a long time. There might well be something I’ve been running from. I’m not sure just yet. Blah. I’ll leave it for this morning.

Peace,

— Mr. Dude