The throughline of case one is complete, but there's still plenty left to implement for it... Probably this is a good time to share an early prototype with someone and get some initial feedback, but I'm still trying to pluck up the courage.
In the meantime, I made a silly hypertext game that I'm disproportionately proud of.
Still toiling away working on the first case... and playing far too much Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. 😅
There's a couple of new posts on the development thread since my last post here, one of which links to this little lore page I made for the Forsaken Edge setting. I see worldbuilding for worldbuilding's sake as more of a vice than a virtue, but I need to be at least trying to keep things consistent, I guess.
Work on my project has slowed a bit in the past week while I recover from a wisdom tooth extraction...
Nevertheless, I've started a development thread on intfiction.org, which includes a few more details on what I'm doing.
My challenge this month is to keep working on my game until there's enough there that it might be worth showing to other people.
But my sense of how much work that will involve seems to change every time I look at it...
What was that I said about posting at the start of the month? Let's try again in March.
I promised to fill you in on what I'm up to. A detective game set at Forsaken Edge, yes, but can I give you more details?
Well, Game Maker's Toolkit has a nice video where he analyses different kinds of detective games. One of those is what he calls "contradiction-style" - you know, like Ace Attorney stuff. That's also the one he calls his least favourite, as you can just brute force them without understanding.
Anyway, that's the one I'm doing. 😊
The game is going to be a series of cases that you explore Castle of the Red Prince/Toby's Nose style. Meanwhile, the no-good NPCs are lying to you, until you can match the right piece of evidence to their dodgy statements.
The problem with all this is that I am the "What if you could talk to a creature?" person, not the air-tight logical plot person.
That's why I'm planning on getting beta testers involved as I complete each case, so that people can point out my own contradictions before they get too baked into the game. I may start some kind of developer thread on intfiction.org at some point to begin drumming up interest, but it feels like I have a way to go before I have anything worth showing yet. We'll see.
I need to get back to doing these closer to the beginning of the month!
I'll confess that the issues I ran into making a larger game in Dialog soured me on the language a bit, and I started making my latest project in Inform 7. But open source contributors have been plugging away at Dialog's quirks, and Inform 7 continues to annoy me by sprinkling newlines where you least expect it to. (The Z-machine is also just a more widely supported format than Glulx.)
So I took a couple of days to reimplement my project in Dialog and now I'm making progress in a system I'm much happier with...
Next month I'll update with a bit more about what I'm doing and how you may get a chance to help...
