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Dev Log: Madrugada

A topic by Li Hieng created Jul 13, 2016 Views: 651 Replies: 9
Viewing posts 1 to 6
Submitted

Hey guys! I've been in the Winter My First Game Jam with a twine game called Pink, it was my first and it was totally a noob game. Twine is very eclectic, you can do a lot of things with it, the most basic looking CSS and variables can be a lot more complicated than it looks. Such as the CSS stylesheet I copied and pasted in Pink.

I decided to bend the rules a bit and use the same engine again by making another Twine game but with a better understanding of it than I did before. I'm going to use If statements, my own CSS, which is mostly copying and pasting CSS animations, and the gradients are mine. I'm also going to make dialogue choices by using the cycling link like in the Twine game, Breakfast on a Wagon with Your Partner.

Madrugada is a mystery/thriller text game about a person named Jai who is invited to a family reunion by a cousin they haven't seen in years. They leave their island home to find themself venturing into an unfamiliar, sleepy Southern town, to find their cousin dead and buried in the woods. The idea of Madrugada came after the Zero Escape series, I kind of hate to say. I loved the mystery and the dramatic, yet so human scenes and characters. Although, I will admit for me that some endings were really outlandish? I almost laughed when Sigma was like "OMG IRON ARMS AAAAGGGGGHHH." Because I didn't expect it to be honest.

Day One - Day Two?

[img][/img]

I kind of slacked off because I was also doing schoolwork and I kept getting sleepy. Then I spent the nights playing Undertale, but also managed to make an Intro screen and the first few pages. So I guess at some point I did work I guess

Day Three - Four

I found the CSS animations and got to writing down the story. The sentences aren't very well written at the moment. I will have to fix some plot ideas and sentences. I'm trying not to write too much but I also want to write enough where I don't break the "Show not Tell" rule. I also decided to make the character gender neutral at the last minute. A lot of people tend to prefer that in Twine games. And I notice the shifting from past to present is annoying the shit out of me at the moment I might not being doing it right, but there is a flashback in the beginning where I tell the reader why he ended up where he was at. I finally got to the dialogue part at 1AM, but I don't like how the dialogue is going. Everything is scattered and nonsensical. I also used a timedcontinue macro to read the long pages of text. But now I'm wondering if it is better to switch to Jonah.

The bounce animation (Wtf happened to the gradient? Why is it look all rough like that? It doesn't look like that in the browser???)

[img][/img]

The cycling link dialogue (This may change in the future.)

[img][/img]

(+1)

Your gifs have that banding because they can only display 256 colours. Limitation of the format unfortunately. Don't worry, it doesn't affect the experience of the gif much :)

Submitted(+1)

Ah, didn't think of that. I think I could have fixed that though. Oh well I will try again for the next time lol. Thanks!

(+1)

Well you can use dithering to give the illusion of a larger range, not sure if whatever you used to capture it would have the option to do so, or how good it would look if you do. Unknowns! Best of luck trying to fix it but don't spend too long, they're fine as-is for showing development :)

Host(+1)

ahh i really like the voice + attention of the narrator in your writing. this sounds like an unsettling, gripping premise. thanks for showing some gifs!

Submitted

Thanks so much! I'm going to try my best!

Submitted

A New Update After a Decade.

There's two days left. I'm not good at this journal entry thing as you can see. This jam was rather unsuccessful for me lol. So when i signed up for the jam, I didn't expect to be going to summer school. So I signed up for summer school thinking that I can handle it. Yeah. School is more important than jams. But see, I had the time, I just didn't have the energy to do anything as usual. That summer time laziness.

So this game was meant to be quite long. Maybe not Porpentine's Howling Dogs long. But long. And I only ended up writing enough to at least reach the point of a puzzle and this puzzle is supposed to lead up to the main conflict of the story. So yeah, quite a few interactive stories have mazes, the idea popped up in my head because quite a few Inform 7 games have the mazes, puzzle rooms, or interactive rooms. What I love about Interactive Fiction is not only how your choices will change the story but also how you can interact with your setting. And I hope to actually achieve that or something close to achieving that.

I added new transition CSS from glorious trainwrecks. I added some shaking CSS for earthquakes and anxiety. I also added some music from Free Music Archive. I also changed the text shadows to make it more readable for certain colors but I feel like it might've been pointless.

Small talk in a car:

[img][/img]

I might've messed up on some spacing or no breaks lines because there's like this huge gap of space on one of the pages. I'm a person that constantly likes to go back and edit things to a point where it hinders my process because I waste time back tracking, editing, and then after all that editing I stop working. People usually do editing when the work is done no?

The Earthquake scene, um okay maybe not the actual earthquake scenario. Maybe just what happens before that. For some reason imgur isn't allowing me the message board/forum option to copy and paste. (Mouse decides to be a jerk while making the gif. Computer lags because it hates me. But I managed to fix the break problem in this gif. If I get to post it..... JFC I forgot to finish a sentence. This is why I always back track and edit grammar and mistakes.)

[img][/img]


So here's the cornfield maze, this gradient may change, it doesn't look very cornfield mazeish, but the previous one was too bright. The maze is incomplete by the way:

[img][/img]

Okay, see you later, you will find a Twine demo soon.

Submitted

By the way, another one of my huge inspirations for this twine game was Banshee's Last Cry, which is an Interactive Novel you can get on iOS. It's actually my main inspiration. I don't know why I love it so much, but I do.


Host(+1)

the vibrating text is super cool! also whoa this game is a neat inspiration--i'm not too familiar with text games for mobile but i'm now interested!

also, i've featured this dev log today O: !! keep up the good work!

Submitted

Thanks so much!

Yeah there's not as many Visual novels or any other genre games but there are quite a few CYOA text games out there!