Oh hey sure. I will extend it! maybe to another month. bc im like totally behind on my project too. dkf;jsa. What do you all think?
A member registered Dec 23, 2015 · View creator page →
Creator of
a twine game about murder, natural disasters, fields, and who-dun-it.
Interactive Fiction
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Perseids, or, All This Will Go On Forever comments · Posted in Perseids, or, All This Will Go On Forever comments
3rd Entry
Yesterday I did some writing but I was feeling really iffy about what I have so far. So I decided to give this game two endings and bring in some choice menus. This will teach me some renpy coding for sure. But also, I feel like writing linear stuff is kind of boring to me as a writer? Ever since I got into writing interactive fiction, I found that writing stories without interaction or choices has become the most difficult thing to me even though it is also the most stressful thing ever. God, I'm weird, I wish I can make up my mind. But the thing is, having more than one ending, having branching in your stories allows more freedom in my opinion. It allows you to explore your story and it gives you more space for that vague idea you had.
Also I felt like I was getting into a writer's block, but then I remember that this is an adaptation of a older, unfinished story and I forgot parts like exploring caves, shopping at weird stores or eating rice and bean flavored ice cream. So I'm glad I remembered that because then I would've hit a block.
Wispna finished the emotions for Luna's sprites
2nd Day Entry
Yesterday's Current Word Count: 5,574
Which means I wrote 1,735 words. Funny enough on the first day of the jam, I wrote 1,700 words. Perhaps that should be a daily goal I aim for?
The plot for now is just introducing the house, the inheritance gift, and the cursed rain forest. Pretty soon the climax will come, I usually "feel" when there's something important coming up. Even though I shouldn't, I want to go back and add some stuff.
Here's Wispna with Símon Álvarez's facial expressions
I also tried sketching out an GUI idea. Basically. I'm going to use a free open font called Alice. And I tried attempting to make the logo with like a rosary bead thing. And well I'm not that good at paint.net.
So the menu buttons are on that one side on the left. Just like the New Renpy Default menu. And then on the other side is going to be a vintage TV with a river in the screen. There's a part in the story where Símon sits down to watch TV and is introduced to a program about a beautiful green river, but he's incapable of changing the channel. Also what the hell is with itch.io's forum, I can't scroll down, the scroll bar disappeared?
3 days late into the jam, I decided to make the devlog.
Team:
Xian Xian
I'm the writer and noob coder in Renpy for this visual novel project. But I've been writing since my late teen years. I've been in this jam multiple times so I feel weird talking about myself. I'm a sociology major, literally just graduated with a B.S. Uh I like magical realist novels, mystery and a little bit of horror. I'm from a multiracial background and most of my recent writing projects actually have Afro-Chinese or Afro-Latino main characters. My recent project that I put on pause takes place in a sort of cybernoir Chinatown. I like JRPGs and only recently got into visual novels like 2 years ago. I love the medium but I wish there was more in the mystery and horror genres since those are the ones that got me hooked, aka the Zero Escape Series and Banshee's Last Cry. However, I don't really read that much horror and mystery, my only exposure is through movies and video games so I hope I pull off this story well enough, especially since I feel like that's all I ever write these days. My experience in game dev is Twine, I've coded baby html/css and did all that variables and boolean fun stuff. I've tried to learn other engines but college and executive dysfunction got in the way.
Wispna
I’m the artist for this ren’py project. I’ve always drawn, but began doing art more seriously when I started high school. Now I do digital 2D art on a regular basis, and though my main program is Clip Studio Paint I am also proficient in Sai, GIMP, photoshop. I also have experience with coding, and while most of my expertise is in html and CSS, I know some C# and Python as well. Having made Ren’py games before, though never completing them due to writing hangups, helps me better able to understand what the assets I create need.
I am mixed chinese and caucasian, and enjoy seeing projects that have both eastern and western elements in them.
I’m mostly a fan of the fantasy genre, but I also enjoy scifi, suspense, mystery, and horror. The games I play most are rpgs, visual novels, and survival games. I really love the art in games, and am hoping both this game jam, and working on a team will help me see a visual novel to its full completion.
Platform: Renpy
Game Concept
I wrote a summary for this in a doc and I'm just going to copy and paste it.
"Mellizos (Twins) is a kinetic visual novel. It tells the tale of Símon Álvarez, a hermetic, unambitious college student who returns to his birthplace, Santa Paulo, after the death of his grandparents. The island is shrouded in dark clouds of pollution and the population is small, which leaves Símon dumbfounded, as it contradicts his blissful memories of childhood innocence and diasporic nostalgia. When Símon meets Luna Garcia, a distant cousin, repressed memories begin emerging and he falls into an obsessive spiral of uncovering more about his home country and his deceased twin brother."
Mellizos, is a rip of an unfinished twine game I have in a folder that is loosely inspired by the chupacabra which is a mythical creature that has apparently been seen in Puerto Rico first. You will read a lot of about typical Puerto Rican things like virgin mary statues, brightly colored houses, folktales, and poverty caused by colonialism and imperialism and floods that have caused destruction is mentioned in this story. An eerie thing I just realized while writing this devlog I wrote this story way before Hurricane Maria. My Puerto Rican family is safe, but thinking about the condition of the island is pretty grim. This game's setting and story is heavily inspired by Puerto Rico, it's basically a Caribbean modern folktale about a creature that has been stalking the family after the great flood. After writing the unfinished Twine game, I actually wrote a script for a detective story that takes place on this island in Renpy and then I wrote another side story for that in Twine and god, I wish I can finish one of these stories.
So far for the game making progress:
I have written 3, 839 words and I'm barely even done with the first day of the game. I already feel like going back and adding and fixing stuff because I feel like it's rushed.
These are the sprites of the two main characters, Símon Álvarez and Luna Garcia by Wispna.
I was going to work on music by myself but I've been having tinnitus which means I'm trying to chill with the amount of music flowing in my right ear. So who knows if I will post something other than word counts and Wispna's art. Uh, this text thing started doing some weird bug that's similar to when you hit the insert key and text you just typed starts getting replaced by the new text you made, so editing and rewriting stuff was a horror. So sorry for the roughness of this post.
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:
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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.)
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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:
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Okay, see you later, you will find a Twine demo soon.
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?
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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???)
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The cycling link dialogue (This may change in the future.)
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