Monthly Build 2018/07 – Sarah’s Run

Hey there, this marks a full year of monthly builds! I was originally going to just have another Dead End build since I’ve actually made a decent amount of progress on it since last time buuuuuuuuuuuuuut I started poking at Sarah’s Run again, an updated version is one of the things I get asked for a lot and I figured “might as well”!

For years now the only playable version of this has been a unity webplayer (a thing that no longer exists) version on kongregate, but the project was so old that updating it, fixing shaders, changing obsolete code… it was way too much work for me, especially when I had other projects. BUT thanks to your support I was able to do it without those nasty constant thoughts like “aren’t you going to need to pay rent soon?” pushing me to other projects.

And once I got it updated, I figured I might as well ~really~ update it; The game and levels are still the same, but the UI is super improved, the controls work through Sinput now so they are fully customisable, the game saves your progress so you don’t need to play it all in one go (10 levels can be a bit much for some sessions), and I even changed some of the more annoying sound-effects 🙂

Anyway you can watch the video above to see me talk through the game (and go on a tangent about watching cool people make puzzles), and/or download the win/mac/linux versions below!

have fun! 😀

Spooktober 5th – it’s a point & click adventure game!

Didn’t make a post yesterday because I ended the day in the middle of a task and that was kind of a downer for me, but I can post today and it’s 2 days of work I get to share!

so more or less in the order I added stuff

– You can examine stuff as well as just interact with it!

– There is now an inventory system!

– My scripted scene parser can handle conditionals and a bunch of non-linear execution of stuff

– You can use items on other stuff!

– Dialogue choices!

– The game can be played entirely with the mouse now!

Getting most of this stuff to work was ~hopefully~ the toughest part of coding the game systems, from here on most of the difficulty making the game is just gonna be exhausting myself doing art & writing.

speaking of writing, here’s a bit of the script on that NPC that runs when acted on (objects have a seperate script for getting examined)

before the last two days work, these scripts had to be very… non-dynamic(?). It would just run through each line top to bottom and then end. But now it can jump around (I can even write loops D:), check against (or set) game variables, throw up player dialogue choices… all that stuff!

and it’s pretty quick to write with too. Whether it’s quick enough to write everything for the story I have planned out I don’t know yet… but I’m pretty confident! 😀

Writing Fantasy

So lately I’ve been working on things inspired by classing gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure, and I’ve been writing a story in that style using twine. Which is FUN. But I couldn’t easily take that story and format it in a way that would be printable like a gamebook.

So I made a twine story format for it!

If you point twine here you can use it if you like.

You can see the guide for it here,

or if you’re a $5+ patron you can see a more robust demonstration since I’ve updated my WIP project The Necromancer’s Tower with a Writing Fantasy version.

Update: I’ve released Assault on the Frozen Fortress, a short festive/horrific gamebook using Writing Fantasy.

This was a fun (and sometimes frustrating, I don’t use javascript much!) project, and probably won’t help much with my plans to procedurally generate adventure gamebook stories… but I learned a bunch and hey maybe it’s useful to people 🙂

(also hey I know I’ve not posted about it yet but I released my dice for iOS this week! It has a new trailer and everything! I’d like to give promo codes to all patrons who helped support it, but apple won’t let me generate enough for everyone. I’ll look into what I can do about that, but in the meantime if you’re a patron you get all versions on itch.io still of course <3)

Monthly Build 2019/11 – The Necromancer’s Tower

> Play Here <

> Read the rulebook a bit first! <

> Update: Writing Fantasy Version! <

Check the video above for an awkward introduction, and then a 40 minute playthrough (if you can bear that).

Spooktober 3rd – I’m very tired!

Point & click! Dialogue system! Fixed perspective camera panning! Shader improvements! Being so tired from this and a bunch of IRL things that I don’t have the energy to write a longer update post!