what i'm working on recently
Added 2021-07-21 16:37:10 +0000 UTCover the past month-or-so i made two little micro-games -- this and this -- which are both totally non-pornographic explorations of actually making a game with, you know, mechanics.
i was a little dissatisfied with just how 'flat' the new hive was, in that there's not really a lot of progression with npcs. there's a little stuff with camps, or exile stuff, or stuff with jinn, but it all requires kind of unnaturally going out of your way to drag things out and revisit people with no real clue that that does anything. so i've been thinking about game structures that have some kind of meaningful gating/progression, and that means "game mechanics". that doesn't necessarily mean like, something super intense and challenging, just like, literally any kind of game-like progression. people have made all sorts of charts and graphs about 'gamer motivation' & picking one of them arbitrarily so that you know what i'm talking about, here's one. i feel like for porn games, 'challenge'/'competition' are a pretty bad fit, but lots of the other ones (like, hey, 'fantasy' or 'discovery') could fit really well. plenty of porn games are just open-world wander-around-and-find-content fuckfests, which fits pretty solidly under 'discovery' there.
for whatever next porn game project i work on i'd like for it to be a bit more structured and gamelike -- that was kind of the motivating factor behind the werewolf game and the ff7 thing, since they both have a mechanical underpinning (though i'd want to go back and simplify the werewolf game mechanics a bit considering how much of a tangle coding it was) -- and it's something i'm still kinda puzzling out, hence the microgames. incidentally, if you're not already aware, i have a blog where i post a bunch of misc. gamedev & writing stuff. i used to post bi-weekly gamedev posts about whatever i was working on, which is a habit that really got obliterated due to COVID, but i'm trying to start it back up again. hence the microgames.
anyway so that's where my head's at recently.
Comments
oh yeah, that's the 'summoned by accident' dev, right? at this point i think i might shift over to all custom javascript -- those two micro-games were also tests of reimplementing some parts of twine i care about while ditching a lot of the cruft. the werewolf game demo, actually, was about half custom javascript -- the map screen was an entirely custom macro that didn't touch the twine passage code at all. so, yeah, twine can be a limited engine but at this point i can get it to run arbitrary javascript, or reimplement it wholesale, so that itself isn't really a limitation. my issue is more that i'm not very good at _game design_ -- i can program basically whatever, it's just making the design and interaction decisions that make a game a game is something i'm not super skilled at.
2021-07-21 17:12:53 +0000 UTCI know a certain someone else who has mostly decided that twine programming is a mess on large projects and moved over primarily to RenPy. Would this (or Quest) be a potential way to get more complicated things done in the text-based front for you?
Ashgar
2021-07-21 16:45:15 +0000 UTC
