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I searched Interactive Fiction on itch and picked three random stories that weren't romance, weren't horror, and could run in my browser. Two of them didn't work and the third could be very good in its original language (even if it didn't look great) but the English translation had just that level of awkwardness, along with the bad interface, that stopped me from reading at 6am after an all nighter. All three are still miles ahead of my 2k words written in inky, but it's encouraging there are other people with the same veneer of ineptitude as me. (And I hope I'm not making GBS threads up the IF thread with my attempts, if it should be kept to just published, proper fiction I'll check out the game dev thread or just keep shtum.)
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Jun 13, 2021 06:16
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I'm enjoying seeing chat about the work that goes into making one of these beasts, for what it's worth.
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Jun 13, 2021 14:34
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Making this thread also the "hey I'm writing IF!" thread might be what will help it not slide into the abyss of the Archives.
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Jun 13, 2021 16:55
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IF is something I've tried writing many times before. I think the format is very versatile and interesting, because it is something inherently focused on choice or the lack thereof. There are a lot of things that can be explored within that space, i m o.
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Jun 13, 2021 17:25
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Does anyone have a recommendation that fulfills these requirements? For the story, sci-fi, preferably, low on horror and romance (reading the Choice forums it seems they go nuts for romancing anyone they can.) Free, so just something that does the basics correct is fine. Not experimental or playing with the boundaries of what Interactive Fiction does. I don't want to jump off with IF that's avant garde or mind-warping, I'd just like to see what the staple of the format is. Not parser based but choice based. And is put together somewhat decently, so I'm not bouncing off glitchy and buggy software. Really, I'm just looking for something that says, "This is the baseline of Interactive Fiction," that's set somewhere in a sci-fi realm. And I'd prefer sci-fi, but anything not silly swords and sorcery would be fine as well. Edit: I should make it clear rather than leaving it to the context of my post. I'm explicitly looking for something that isn't ambitious. Just something that shows the baseline of what choice based IF can be. Especially something made by one person (looking for something to set my sights on for my own attempts.) Mrenda fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Jun 14, 2021 |
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Jun 14, 2021 19:42
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Verviticus posted:minor spoilers: most of or all of the branching is executed through your character's perspective on the three major routes. they're about 95% exclusive from each other in content, but they all revolve around the same basic events Yeah that's kinda what I figured. Still better than the vast majority of games that promise branching and don't actually deliver it. Which is most of them that promise it in the first place Mrenda posted:Does anyone have a recommendation that fulfills these requirements? For the story, sci-fi, preferably, low on horror and romance (reading the Choice forums it seems they go nuts for romancing anyone they can.) Free, so just something that does the basics correct is fine. Not experimental or playing with the boundaries of what Interactive Fiction does. I don't want to jump off with IF that's avant garde or mind-warping, I'd just like to see what the staple of the format is. Not parser based but choice based. And is put together somewhat decently, so I'm not bouncing off glitchy and buggy software. Gonna recommend VA11 Hall-A again. Meets all your reqs except it's pretty unclear to me so far how much of any choices you genuinely have. Apart from that I really enjoyed it and it's mostly carried by the strong writing. Play fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Jun 14, 2021 |
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Jun 14, 2021 19:48
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Mrenda posted:Does anyone have a recommendation that fulfills these requirements? For the story, sci-fi, preferably, low on horror and romance (reading the Choice forums it seems they go nuts for romancing anyone they can.) Free, so just something that does the basics correct is fine. Not experimental or playing with the boundaries of what Interactive Fiction does. I don't want to jump off with IF that's avant garde or mind-warping, I'd just like to see what the staple of the format is. Not parser based but choice based. And is put together somewhat decently, so I'm not bouncing off glitchy and buggy software. You have a lot of requirements and it's going to be hard to fulfil all of them at the same time. Creatures Such As We has romance. Choice of Robots isn't free. Superluminal Vagrant Twin is limited parser. Birdland and Dungeon Detective aren't scifi. Oh, I remembered one. Try Chuk and the Arena.
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Jun 14, 2021 20:32
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Megazver posted:You have a lot of requirements and it's going to be hard to fulfil all of them at the same time. Creatures Such As We has romance. Choice of Robots isn't free. Superluminal Vagrant Twin is limited parser. Birdland and Dungeon Detective aren't scifi. I suppose I'm really just looking for the baseline, "playability" of game I should be aiming at. I'll check a few of these out, because nothing is a hardline no for me (romance or whatever) apart from goofy swords and sorcery.
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Jun 14, 2021 20:53
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Goofy swords and sorcery is actually pretty underrepresented in IF.
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Jun 14, 2021 21:05
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Megazver posted:Goofy swords and sorcery is actually pretty underrepresented in IF. I'm actually trying to think of a goofy sword and sorcery off the top of my head and I...can't? Choice of Magics, maybe? Oh! Tavern Crawler! That's definitely sword and sorcery, and quite consciously goofy. Mrenda posted:I suppose I'm really just looking for the baseline, "playability" of game I should be aiming at. I'll check a few of these out, because nothing is a hardline no for me (romance or whatever) apart from goofy swords and sorcery. Uuuuuuuuuuh...Mecha Ace? That's an old one. Honestly there's not a ton of sci-fi choicescript stuff. Play posted:Gonna recommend VA11 Hall-A again. Meets all your reqs except it's pretty unclear to me so far how much of any choices you genuinely have. Apart from that I really enjoyed it and it's mostly carried by the strong writing. ...did one person make all of Va11 Hall-A? If so that's deeply impressive.
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Jun 14, 2021 22:12
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:I'm actually trying to think of a goofy sword and sorcery off the top of my head and I...can't? My thought was Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom. And I guess if maybe they think 'sword and sorcery' is just a synonym for 'fantasy', there's more.
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Jun 14, 2021 22:24
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Mrenda posted:Does anyone have a recommendation that fulfills these requirements? For the story, sci-fi, preferably, low on horror and romance (reading the Choice forums it seems they go nuts for romancing anyone they can.) Free, so just something that does the basics correct is fine. Not experimental or playing with the boundaries of what Interactive Fiction does. I don't want to jump off with IF that's avant garde or mind-warping, I'd just like to see what the staple of the format is. Not parser based but choice based. And is put together somewhat decently, so I'm not bouncing off glitchy and buggy software. Look through this list: https://ifdb.org/viewlist?id=ax0yq2ksub57ie7o, there should be a button in the upper right hand side of the screen after you click through that says "play-online" Horse Master https://tommchenry.itch.io/horse-master and itch.io's list of it's most popular twine games: https://itch.io/games/top-rated/made-with-twine You can also look up the "interactive fiction" or "choose your own adventure" tags in Steam and sort by price to find a bunch of demos. I found: Oberno: Chapter One: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1355390/Obreno_Chapter_One/ Wanderlust: Bangkok Prelude: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1306990/Wanderlust_Bangkok_Prelude/ If you go way down the page Alcyone: The Last City has a demo: https://mixvio.itch.io/alcyone-the-last-city fez_machine fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Jun 14, 2021 |
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Jun 14, 2021 22:36
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omg I forgot about Horse Master. What a loving nuts game that was. One of my favs for mechanics and story being intertwined in a really neat, seamless way.
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Jun 14, 2021 22:53
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Mrenda posted:Does anyone have a recommendation that fulfills these requirements? For the story, sci-fi, preferably, low on horror and romance (reading the Choice forums it seems they go nuts for romancing anyone they can.) Free, so just something that does the basics correct is fine. Not experimental or playing with the boundaries of what Interactive Fiction does. I don't want to jump off with IF that's avant garde or mind-warping, I'd just like to see what the staple of the format is. Not parser based but choice based. And is put together somewhat decently, so I'm not bouncing off glitchy and buggy software. Glowgrass fits every one of your requirements to a tee, but it's parser IF. It's pretty much the embodiment of "here's what you can do in IF" while being short, satisfying, and relatively easy--particularly if you're willing to experiment and take time to explore. The puzzles are pretty simple, standard adventure game stuff and it's generally the game I recommend for someone new to IF. It also has some interesting interactions that you might not expect from an explicitly "basic" IF game but keeps them simple & doesn't push them very far. If you decide to try parser, Glowgrass is a perfect introduction, especially with your tastes.
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Jun 15, 2021 01:35
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To show I'm not just making noises in the thread for no reason I'll link to what I've been working on, and I would love some eyes on it. This is Chapter One of what I've been doing (just the bare introduction, but all I've completed.) It's taken me three long evenings (two of them sort of all nighters) of getting up to speed to get to this place, and it's about as long, once you've played through, as a short short story. I'd like to do things with inventories, and diagrams showing body/health state and that kind of thing, but I think that involves going into Unity and figuring that out, which is a big jump to programming when I have just under 4,000 words written of the text. Orbital Hope 3: a sci-fi interactive fiction game, or at least the beginnings of it.
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Jun 15, 2021 02:18
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Mrenda posted:To show I'm not just making noises in the thread for no reason I'll link to what I've been working on, and I would love some eyes on it. Oh wow, if you spun this up over three evenings that's pretty impressive. Especially if you've not used Ink before. Interesting that you used first person, they usually use second person, but it fits for your scenario. My initial reaction is that the first chapter is very intentionally confusing and offputting. It feels like it was written to invoke a sense of unease and it does a good job of it. One thing I wasn't sure of is what the "promise" of the story is. Like, if you think about 80 Days the "promise" is "you will have whimsical adventures exploring new places" or if you think about Counterfeit Monkey the promise is "there will be a lot of fun wordplay in this game." You have a little blurb on the bottom about what Orbital Hope 3 is, but I'm not sure what that tells me about what I should expect from the rest of the game. Obviously you might not even know! But that's something to think about. For example, take a look at Pageant, which has: quote:Your name is Qiuyi (Karen?) Zhao, and you’ve just been signed up by your parents for a beauty pageant. You’re not ready, not even close, but you don’t have a choice. But perhaps you can make the best of it. Maybe it’s the one opportunity to create a “hook” for your college application. Maybe you can reinvent yourself, get rid your anxiety and become someone new. Or maybe you can find true love (or some approximation thereof). Note on a bug in the preview, I managed to get into a state where I had two options that read "I'm going to have to have to get some liquid into me soon. Time to leave this empty, dusty, hellish, roasting store." but I'm not sure what the deal with that is. It's really good, especially given the turnaround. Do you have an idea of where you want it to end up?
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Jun 15, 2021 06:53
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:Oh wow, if you spun this up over three evenings that's pretty impressive. Especially if you've not used Ink before. Interesting that you used first person, they usually use second person, but it fits for your scenario. Thanks for the kind words, it was a fairly sustained effort over three nights, and they were long nights. I spent maybe 18 hours on this, total? Maybe a bit more if you count the five minute quick passes (that were probably closer to twenty minutes?) And thanks for going through it, and for pointing out a bug! I think that's down to my own familiarity (or lack of it) with Ink, and not knowing a better way of what I was doing (although I'd structure everything a little differently now.) What you saw are options that come up depending on how many/which of the "main" three activities you go through after you begin the post-hangover story. It's a "gently caress it, next scene!" button. You have to do some things in this chapter but not everything. I recommend doing as much as you can/makes sense, because to me that seems the point of this type of game, and I do have "clues" or information buried in the activities you might choose (and some of it includes flags for the next scene/chapter or two.) My issue is I'm using checks to see which options you've been through, lots of checks of "this" and "not this" and there's a list of ten or so variations you can have depending on which "activities" you're skipping, or if you've completed everything just with different choices, and obviously I've missed out on a few that trigger multiples of the same option. As for where it's going... Depending on what you saw in your run through there's a couple of points of interest in this scene that'll come up in further scenes. On any run through one thing I think you have to have seen (I hope so at least) is that the officer you partied with was really loving wild, and he mentions that a lot of the officers party really loving hard, and he basically bought everything you had on you (including your CU/Core Unit, which is like a combination mobile/cell phone, Identification, station wiki and Apple/Google Wallet (a phone, basically. Very inventive!)) Something I might make clearer in an edit of this is he's leaving the station, and this is is "last hurrah" before he's ferried out, and leaving/transferring off is something that happens for the rich and the officers, but rarely for people eking out a living on the giant station. The reason he's leaving, and the reason he's partying so hard, and the reason he bought all your poo poo will be something that comes up. In some read throughs, but not all, it's suggested he might/probably/does(?) know Tev, your friend, a friend who sorts people out with their party supplies. And the protagonist is quite poor (hence crashing in an abandoned store for the night instead of a long trek home,) as is Tev, and the rich/officers live very different lives. Something will also come up with Tev in the next scene or two, what happened to her after the partying (I suppose this first bit was to set up the officer and Tev, and Tev should be slightly developed on 80% of dedicated playthroughs, even if it's just her name being mentioned a few times.) Also, buried fairly deeply, is that the officer traded not just credits/digital cash for all your stuff. There's also a secure key you get (and you have it no matter what, you might just not remember you have it, yet) that's like a prepaid card for a very fancy store on the promenade (rich person/officers' territory, with all the lush and expensive shops) and that'll become something to investigate as well. It is buried a bit in this chapter, but if you haven't discovered it here I plan to make it obvious in the next scene (but with a small detour for not discovering it here, which could be a good thing or a bad thing.) All in all, this was just my first proper attempt at doing something in a complete manner, even if it's only a chapter. I tried writing this in Ink maybe 18 months ago, but I couldn't get a handle on what I was doing, nor was it as developed/flesh out as this. This time I think I've actually put together a complete segment of a story. But like a lot of short fiction, where they say you need to cut your first paragraph because it's more setting the the tone for you-the-writer, this might be a case of finishing out the next few chapters then going back and starting closer to the "meat" of the story. But that's fine, this is setting me up, and showing me I can do what I've set out to do, even if I change it up to a better starting point when I'm further into the story and have developed a tighter understanding of it.
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Jun 15, 2021 08:07
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Once again this article series blows my mind: 1986: Uncle Rogerquote:Malloy at first urged readers to copy each record by hand into a local database program—something most tech-savvy WELL readers would have had on hand—and index them via the provided keywords. As the story grew, they could find their own connections and pathways through it. She called it a “Serial Novel for the Net,” a “random-access narrative,” a “database novel.” Pretty soon she had a regular audience, who would drop by the conference often to catch up on the latest pieces. “Somebody told me it was their bedtime story every day,” she remembers with a smile. A second topic was created for discussion of the piece: though anyone could have posted in the original thread with the ongoing story, no one ever did, keeping it clear for Malloy’s daily entries. Eventually some technical folks on ACEN helped her make a tiny program out of UNIX shell scripts that let readers search the posts by keyword, or combinations of keyword, allowing even those without their own database software to access the story with its intended interface. I can't get over that this kind of extremely experimental feminist work was happening in 1986. '86! She was out there pushing the envelope and sharing it and I have never, ever heard of her before this.
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Jun 17, 2021 01:57
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StrixNebulosa posted:Once again this article series blows my mind: 1986: Uncle Roger The whole series is great, there's a lot of history that I had no idea about. Are you reading chronologically? Would love to hear what you have to think on the Silverwolf entry. In parserland, I played The Weight of a Soul, this year's Spring Thing best in show. It was excellent! It features you, a doctor's apprentice, fighting a novel plague in fantasy not-Rome. Initially I'd thought it was a pandemic game but no, there was an excerpt entered into the 2017 comp, so it's been kicking around for a long time. It does a lot of things really well, between the characters, the way the author's constructed the city to feel like a city, and the exceptional pacing mechanisms. It also has no obtuse puzzles, which always wins me points, but I'm not one of the puzzle folks.
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Jun 18, 2021 03:52
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treat posted:Photopia is an interesting multi-perspective narrative entirely without puzzles. Oh no it is not. The puzzles aren't particularly difficult—sometimes—maybe—but they're in there. MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:I always had the opposite impression, that parser games are actually mostly terrible at dialogue. Galatea is amazing but it's also based entirely around the one mechanic of talking, limits the context very sharply, and plays a bunch of tricks that wouldn't work as well in, like, a more game-like...game. I can't really think of any other examples where the parser ask/tell keyword format worked well for that, and it mechanically doesn't really lend itself to any sort of prolonged conversation. For example, in most games, you can talk to somebody about Bob, wander off halfway in the middle of the conversation, come back, move their bookshelf, and then ask them about the weather, and it really just feels disjointed. She* made a kind of spiritual sequel almost a decade later called Alabaster, which has very long-form conversation, including some optional characters who might pop up later in the story, and a very detailed mood modeling sim of the main character. *by which I mean a couple of dozen people who wrote stream-of-consciousness style in real-time as they played and used her custom editor to write each new node directly into the game over the course of a week or two, and then she stitched them all together into something resembling coherence. Saoshyant posted:Anchorhead seemed interesting the last I heard about it. This thread's a good chance to hear some first hand impressions, if anyone's played it. Oh yeah, a few years back apparently everyone who works using Inform 7 (and several who hadn't) got together (seriously the author list is over 80—it would be possibly the largest source text and the most authors on a single I7 game if not for the furry porn game, because of course there's a furry porn game, and oh yes that is referenced in CM) to create a tribute game, where each person designed one room in a single horror mystery exploration game, with no knowledge of anyone else's room or how they would fit together in the end. It had some clever connections between people's entries thanks to the organizing efforts of Ryan Veeder. Also it possibly almost killed him and he vowed not to do another one. For, like, at least 5 years. So, if you're into absurdism and riffing on Lovecraft and Anchorhead (Gentry himself wrote a room in CM) and an old-school parser game with tons of puzzles that are nonetheless generally self-contained and low on the Zarfian cruelty scale, enjoy Cragne Manor!
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Jun 20, 2021 07:56
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https://twitter.com/aaronareed/status/1408068141499006977 Emily Short also wrote about this and about Eastgate in general: https://emshort.blog/2019/09/17/patchwork-girl-shelley-jackson-and-spatial-hypertext/ https://emshort.blog/2007/08/17/if-in-the-acm-literature-part-four/
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Jun 24, 2021 16:11
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I don't like Tin Man Games output as much as Choice Of Games but I can recommend their two comedic titles: To Be Or Not To Be - cute game making fun of Hamlet featuring art of among others Kate Beaton and Zach Weiner. Doesn't have combat unlike most Tin Man games. Funny and good! You can try to be faithful to the play for which the game dunks on you or do your own thing (especially as Ophelia). Trial of A Clone - I was going to recommend this dumb game about an idiot clone by SMBC guy but for some reason it's no longer available anywhere? Google also ate their Judge Dredd and Warhammer games (both decent) from my account. What's happening over there? In that case I'm gonna recommend Choice Of Games not mentioned before: Choice of the Deathless and Deathless: The City's Thirst - You play as a warlock lawyer in a modern world where humans coexist with demons and other magical creatures. Very good worldbuilding (based on a series of books by the author), solid characters and stories. Not as reactive as some of the Choice Of bests but very much worth playing. Slammed! - Wrasslin' CYOA! Author knows his stuff and handles kayfabe in an interesting way. I thought the antagonist's deal was lame but overall good game. Hollywood Visionary - One of the more mechanically meaty games, where you oversee production of a movie during the height of red scare. It's pretty fun to come up with a weird concept for a film and try to make it good. Tally Ho - This was mentioned before but I think it's underrated. The plot is very cleverly constructed and you have to play through many different paths to completely understand all the events. At the same time it's light and funny title where you are a butler trying to help your employer win over his aunt over the weekend (he needs money to continue being
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Jun 25, 2021 10:25
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sad question posted:Tally Ho - This was mentioned before but I think it's underrated. The plot is very cleverly constructed and you have to play through many different paths to completely understand all the events. At the same time it's light and funny title where you are a butler trying to help your employer win over his aunt over the weekend (he needs money to continue being The quasi-sequel Jolly Good Cakes and Ale has an advertised million plus word count, which is insane.
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Jun 25, 2021 10:37
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sad question posted:I don't like Tin Man Games output as much as Choice Of Games but I can recommend their two comedic titles: Yeah, what distinguishes these two from the rest of their output is that they just adapted someone else's gamebooks to digital. They need better writers/editors.
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Jun 25, 2021 11:22
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For me it's more the combat and dead ends combined with limited saves. Granted, they always include chill mode where you don't have to deal with that but default difficulty is annoying. At least To Be Or Not To Be doesn't have any of that.
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Jun 26, 2021 06:54
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There's an IF I've been trying to recall - the premise is that you're a member of government, and you have to break into another government dude's mansion (while he's away) and do... something. You either have to steal a thing that he claims not to have (so he can't report the theft), or leave a message, or find evidence or some other thing I can't remember (it's not all of those things, just one). The win condition isn't completing your task, though; rather, your goal is to do the job, and then depart without leaving any evidence. This includes stuff like closing any windows you left open during your break-in, locking doors you went through, putting the keys back, and potentially includes esoteric stuff like replacing ingredients that you used or emptying/refilling buckets of water, i.e. no proof you were there. You get a different ending based on how well you do with that, so if you've smashed glass and left doors open everywhere while taking all the house keys with you, the guy is going to know that somebody broke in - whereas only having a couple of things out of place makes him uneasy and on-guard, while doing everything perfectly gives you the best ending. I do not remember what it's called but I really want to play it again. Anybody have any idea what this is?
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Jun 26, 2021 11:16
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Has anyone played the Fabled Lands release on Steam? Is it any better than the Java free version?
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Jun 26, 2021 12:05
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where the red fern gropes posted:There's an IF I've been trying to recall - the premise is that you're a member of government, and you have to break into another government dude's mansion (while he's away) and do... something. You either have to steal a thing that he claims not to have (so he can't report the theft), or leave a message, or find evidence or some other thing I can't remember (it's not all of those things, just one). I think it might be Break-In by Jon Ingold. It certainly sounds like an Ingold game. https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=nwsrknyhdae8u0a3 Check out Make it Good if you like that amount paying attention to minutiae. Fat Samurai posted:Has anyone played the Fabled Lands release on Steam? Is it any better than the Java free version? The java version feels more like reading/playing the books and has all their unfairness. The Steam version has all the edges filed off so it feels like neither fish nor fowl and exposes how threadbare the books could be. I'd keep it wish-listed at the moment.
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Jun 26, 2021 16:37
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fez_machine posted:I think it might be Break-In by Jon Ingold. It certainly sounds like an Ingold game. https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=nwsrknyhdae8u0a3 I think it was a bit more modern than that, might have been an entry in one of the the IF competitions (last ~10 years or so). Wish I remembered more details about it. e: ooo think I found it: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=73nvz9yui87ub3sd where the red fern gropes fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Jun 27, 2021 |
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Jun 27, 2021 04:13
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where the red fern gropes posted:I think it was a bit more modern than that, might have been an entry in one of the the IF competitions (last ~10 years or so). Wish I remembered more details about it. I just started play this and it's very very weird. I suspect there's going to be a lot of figuring out how the world works.
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Jun 27, 2021 06:16
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where the red fern gropes posted:I think it was a bit more modern than that, might have been an entry in one of the the IF competitions (last ~10 years or so). Wish I remembered more details about it. This is great, was worth replaying to get both the maximum subtlety score and the minimum (the best I could do for the latter was 14%, idk if it's possible to go any lower while still getting all the secrets to trigger the endgame)
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Jun 27, 2021 12:42
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So I just beat Vampire the Masquerade: Night Road, and it was real good! I'm not actually a fan of the franchise but I did play Bloodlines back in the day, so it was reasonably familiar. There are a few things that it seems to do quite differently than your normal CYOA that I really liked. First, "Storyteller Mode" should be mandatory on every CoG game from now on. Also their games should 100% either have explicit tags on "This option will raise your X stat" or just let you assign XP for it, because that's 10x better than their traditional method of having choices invisibly jostle bars around in the background. Night Road actually has this, with the Convictions stats, and I didn't even realize at first that my actions were changing them - I thought that the flashback scenes were the only things that moved them. Also I had no idea what they were doing, and you can't actually visibly see them doing anything. The "this choice checks X and Y" though is great. Second, it's structured a little unusually in that it's structured more like a traditional CRPG, with a hub area and then a series of quests that you can pick between, instead of a really long branching CYOA, which makes it feel very different. It's neither good nor bad, it's just a different structure that I think some games might want to try and take advantage of. I'd highly recommend it for the novelty, the way each different quest is pretty tightly written and executed, and some pretty strong characters. As far as the overall plot, I feel like it works well but sort of falls apart under the pressure of its own setting. Maybe if you're a big fan of the setting it'd be super great, though. I'd like to see more CoG games explicitly surfacing their mechanics, I think that's my main takeaway.
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Jun 28, 2021 03:53
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I was thinking about BAD MACHINE the other day - did anyone ever actually figure out how to get the other two endings that aren't in the available walkthrough - per strings, they're blow up the hive or become queen 002 Really loved that game.
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Jun 28, 2021 05:42
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I managed to obtain the Famicom Detective Club remakes for the Ryujinx emulator (which seems really freaking good... it's giving me way way better framerates than Yuzu) and honestly it seems really fun. You can see the age of the game design just in how it works, instead of making deductions yourself it's more about figuring out the right questions to ask and the right people to ask them of. But the story seems very strong and the new art is great. And I'd gladly buy the game for PC if they made the drat things available, not gonna buy a Switch just for that. Fat Samurai posted:Has anyone played the Fabled Lands release on Steam? Is it any better than the Java free version? I played the steam one, but I've never played the Java version. It has pretty nice art, high difficulty, and the setting, for me, is a bit generic. If you're into those books it might interest you
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Jun 28, 2021 18:25
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Night Road is fantastic. Definitely up there for CoG’s output. The ending kind of sucks though the setpieces are pretty good. But man I’m thinking if you’re gonna have a game this long, there needs to be a more sophisticated way to jump around vital decision points like you’d have in a VN. The differences in clan/powers/quest outcomes were significant enough that I definitely wanted to play through it more than once, and I did, but it’s too long for a linear runthrough every time you want to see some small permutations of your choice outcomes. Also, it’s really weird that you can kind of romance the pawn shop gal and amass a tremendous amount of dough with almost no effort along the way. The scripting for that felt kind of hacked together, and I really don’t know how you’re meant to hang in there without that extra money. Did anyone get the extra clan content that came out for it a month or two back? I bought it, it was cheap, but haven’t replayed to see what it adds.
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Jun 29, 2021 15:19
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BurningBeard posted:Night Road is fantastic. Definitely up there for CoG’s output. The ending kind of sucks though the setpieces are pretty good. But man I’m thinking if you’re gonna have a game this long, there needs to be a more sophisticated way to jump around vital decision points like you’d have in a VN. The differences in clan/powers/quest outcomes were significant enough that I definitely wanted to play through it more than once, and I did, but it’s too long for a linear runthrough every time you want to see some small permutations of your choice outcomes. It sounds like it's creaking under the limitations of Choicescript.
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Jun 29, 2021 15:24
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Megazver posted:It sounds like it's creaking under the limitations of Choicescript. It's more capable than you think, even if the syntax is ugly and basically BASIC and so tends to promote bad coding practices
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Jun 29, 2021 16:53
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BurningBeard posted:Night Road is fantastic. Definitely up there for CoG’s output. The ending kind of sucks though the setpieces are pretty good. But man I’m thinking if you’re gonna have a game this long, there needs to be a more sophisticated way to jump around vital decision points like you’d have in a VN. The differences in clan/powers/quest outcomes were significant enough that I definitely wanted to play through it more than once, and I did, but it’s too long for a linear runthrough every time you want to see some small permutations of your choice outcomes. What would that sort of system actually look like, though? From my understanding, VNs don't tend to have stat checks - they're closer to a pure branching narrative - so a "Go to Scene X" seems like it'd be hard to implement because it'd have to remember how you'd built your character to that point. Which is, you know, technically possible, but I really do like the fact that their games don't have a save/load system. Saves me from my compulsive savescumming, to be honest. With regard to the spoiler, the other ghoul option also gives you $5k, so it's not just the pawn shop lady, but I never felt terribly strapped for money. On the other hand I negotiated with the Prince and that bumps your income up, uh, significantly, to the point where it feels like kind of a trap not to. So...I think that's just the money balancing being off maybe. Unsure on the DLC, though.
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Jun 30, 2021 03:26
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I don't mind CoG games having no saves/loads on a first playthrough but it can be a bit annoying when you are going back through a game to see new stuff or accomplish specific goals. I've been playing Jolly Good and it lets you repeat a chapter after you finish it, which is pretty nice for a game as huge as this.
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Jun 30, 2021 04:04
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I got the first DLC and played as a Tremere. Since the game does a good job of incorporating the tabletop mechanics, you get the Blood Sorcery stuff which enables a few different options in some of the encounters, and you get some unique dialogue options, especially with the chapter centered on the Tremere character. I am kinda interested in checking out that other DLC, especially as it has some options that seem like they would be challenging in the setting, like playing as a Nosferatu. I read some more on the next two games in the series (Out For Blood should be out in a month), and it seems that Night Road is the one that tried to replicate the tabletop system most closely while the other two are playing looser with it, whatever that means...
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Jun 30, 2021 07:37
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