Actually, not that much more. It's pretty short. Have fun!
Showing posts with label Twine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twine. Show all posts
Monday, October 26, 2015
T-Rex Poop Quest Release Announcement
Hyperlink your way over to potatoclockgames.com to check out T-Rex Poop Quest, a short text-based RPG featuring a T-Rex, some poop, and a bunch of quests, among other things. Other things like playground-terrorizing dinosaur punks, a drug addicted pterodactyl, Bill Clinton, a gang of yuppie raptors, plenty of stolen and unattributed art assets and intellectual property and lots, lots, more!
Actually, not that much more. It's pretty short. Have fun!
Actually, not that much more. It's pretty short. Have fun!
Thursday, October 22, 2015
T-Rex Poop Quest
I'm just about finished with the Twine RPG that I mentioned earlier, just some proof reading & balancing & bug squashing to take care of.
When it comes to making a reasonably featured RPG, Twine really isn't the tool for the job. It was fun to make one, and you could certainly make something much more complicated with Twine, there just isn't much reason to. This game was a little experiment to see how far I could push Twine before it stopped being fun & I think I found that point.
It's a short, grindy, fetch questy RPG called T-Rex Poop Quest, and it features what is possibly the most shallow battle system ever implemented in any game ever. Still, I think it brings some things to the table, you know, enriches the genre somewhat. Like, you know how RPGs never have a "Sarah Palin's Fart in a Can" item that you have to carry around? Well, don't worry, we've ticked that box for sure.
T-Rex Poop Quest should be ready to play in like a week.
When it comes to making a reasonably featured RPG, Twine really isn't the tool for the job. It was fun to make one, and you could certainly make something much more complicated with Twine, there just isn't much reason to. This game was a little experiment to see how far I could push Twine before it stopped being fun & I think I found that point.
It's a short, grindy, fetch questy RPG called T-Rex Poop Quest, and it features what is possibly the most shallow battle system ever implemented in any game ever. Still, I think it brings some things to the table, you know, enriches the genre somewhat. Like, you know how RPGs never have a "Sarah Palin's Fart in a Can" item that you have to carry around? Well, don't worry, we've ticked that box for sure.
T-Rex Poop Quest should be ready to play in like a week.
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Giraffe Adventures Official Release & Origins Tale
Get it while it's hot from potatoclockgames.com!
The Origins of Giraffe Adventures
So, one day, many years ago, I was bored at work & realized that what little HTML I had learned in high school had evaporated out through my ears & into the cosmos. I threw together some simple linked pages just to assure myself that, in a life or death situation where the most rudimentary knowledge of HTML would come in handy, I would have a shot at survival. Those pages were the first few of Giraffe Adventures. I'd add a little more to it whenever I was bored & it soon grew into an unmanageable pile of HTML files with bizarre names meant to convey their position in the branching structure. I promptly forgot about it.
I stumbled back upon it recently & there were some laugh-out-loud moments, but still, it just seemed like too much of a pain in the ass to work on. For better or worse, someone introduced me to Twine at about this same time, which is a cool, free, open source tool for doing branching HTML story kinds of things. So, fuck, I figured I had to finish Giraffe Adventures now.
It took way longer than I thought it would. I can't believe I spent so much time on this thing. I mean, I'm glad that I did, if ever there were a story that had to be told, it is Giraffe Adventures, but jesus fuck. You know?
Anyway, if you're an alien in the future curating a museum exhibit on The Spectacular Downfall of The Human Race & you'd like to use Giraffe Adventures as an example of the horrifying decline of human culture & society, then maybe you could put the above paragraphs on a little plaque next to the exhibit. Otherwise, I'm not sure of how it could be of any use to anyone. What am I doing with my life?
Love,
Potato Clock Games
The Origins of Giraffe Adventures
So, one day, many years ago, I was bored at work & realized that what little HTML I had learned in high school had evaporated out through my ears & into the cosmos. I threw together some simple linked pages just to assure myself that, in a life or death situation where the most rudimentary knowledge of HTML would come in handy, I would have a shot at survival. Those pages were the first few of Giraffe Adventures. I'd add a little more to it whenever I was bored & it soon grew into an unmanageable pile of HTML files with bizarre names meant to convey their position in the branching structure. I promptly forgot about it.
I stumbled back upon it recently & there were some laugh-out-loud moments, but still, it just seemed like too much of a pain in the ass to work on. For better or worse, someone introduced me to Twine at about this same time, which is a cool, free, open source tool for doing branching HTML story kinds of things. So, fuck, I figured I had to finish Giraffe Adventures now.
It took way longer than I thought it would. I can't believe I spent so much time on this thing. I mean, I'm glad that I did, if ever there were a story that had to be told, it is Giraffe Adventures, but jesus fuck. You know?
Anyway, if you're an alien in the future curating a museum exhibit on The Spectacular Downfall of The Human Race & you'd like to use Giraffe Adventures as an example of the horrifying decline of human culture & society, then maybe you could put the above paragraphs on a little plaque next to the exhibit. Otherwise, I'm not sure of how it could be of any use to anyone. What am I doing with my life?
Love,
Potato Clock Games
Friday, October 9, 2015
Giraffe Adventures Update #4
I've committed myself to never letting my "playtime over the past 2 weeks" stat on Steam go over 20 hours. This has had an embarrassingly positive effect on my productivity. I'm suddenly a week ahead on my homework, I've finished Giraffe Adventures, & I'm about halfway finished with a little Twine RPG which I'll talk more about later.
Right, so Giraffe Adventures is finally finished. It has its highs & lows but overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. There are a few laugh-out-louds in there, I think, swimming among the groans & the huh?s. I'm holding onto it for a bit of proofreading, but let's be real, this was not an entirely sober endeavor. It is going to be full of humiliating grammar & spelling errors, not to mention the irreconcilable plot holes & narrative jump cuts. What I'm saying is, I'm not planning on wasting a hell of a lot of time proofreading this. It is what it is & it should be out in the wild next week.
 |
| Giraffe Adventures Final Node Map |
Right, so Giraffe Adventures is finally finished. It has its highs & lows but overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. There are a few laugh-out-louds in there, I think, swimming among the groans & the huh?s. I'm holding onto it for a bit of proofreading, but let's be real, this was not an entirely sober endeavor. It is going to be full of humiliating grammar & spelling errors, not to mention the irreconcilable plot holes & narrative jump cuts. What I'm saying is, I'm not planning on wasting a hell of a lot of time proofreading this. It is what it is & it should be out in the wild next week.
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Giraffe Adventures Update #3
I got back to work on Giraffe Adventures today after avoiding it for quite a while. Here's the thing with choose your own adventure stories: even if you're only giving the reader binary choices, after just 10 pages you have 2^10 = 1,024 story threads. ONE THOUSAND AND TWENTY GOD DAMN FOUR. In practice, of course, it doesn't necessarily work out to quite that many, as threads are terminated in story endings or merged with other threads.
Both of these mitigation tactics, however, carry certain limitations. You can't just end a thread because you feel like it. I mean, you can, obviously, but then you've ruined the whole experience for the poor sap that took the time to read your stupid thing just to end up at a shit ending. Don't get me wrong, Giraffe Adventures already has a few shit endings, but I want to avoid them as much as possible.
Thread merging is a whole different beast. It's really difficult to do right, to make it work while maintaining continuity in the story, & at the same time it's kind of a bullshit thing to do to the reader. It really only benefits the writer & maybe not even that since it makes writing the story a confusing mess. To the reader who chooses to give the story multiple readings, it's just annoying. Making different choices just to end up in the same place as before kind of defeats the whole spirit of choosing your own adventure, right? Of course, I'm merging threads like mad right now.
The old choose your own adventure books that I used to read as a kid were fun for their novelty but they were always pretty terrible. I could recognize that even as a kid, though maybe I couldn't tell what exactly made them so bad. Now I know. They did all the things that I just wrote about not doing, but look, they did it because they had to. They had to cram it all into like 50 pages. My upper bound on pages, on the other hand, is large enough to be considered infinite. It is equal to the maximum number of pages I could possibly write in my entire life.
YOU GUYS. Do you see how hard I'm overthinking the crafting of tale of a retarded baby giraffe who does things like catch great white sharks in his urethra & hang out in pyramids with Beyonce & Karl Malone? This is why I can't get shit done. I'm just going to get drunk tonight & finish this thing.
Both of these mitigation tactics, however, carry certain limitations. You can't just end a thread because you feel like it. I mean, you can, obviously, but then you've ruined the whole experience for the poor sap that took the time to read your stupid thing just to end up at a shit ending. Don't get me wrong, Giraffe Adventures already has a few shit endings, but I want to avoid them as much as possible.
Thread merging is a whole different beast. It's really difficult to do right, to make it work while maintaining continuity in the story, & at the same time it's kind of a bullshit thing to do to the reader. It really only benefits the writer & maybe not even that since it makes writing the story a confusing mess. To the reader who chooses to give the story multiple readings, it's just annoying. Making different choices just to end up in the same place as before kind of defeats the whole spirit of choosing your own adventure, right? Of course, I'm merging threads like mad right now.
The old choose your own adventure books that I used to read as a kid were fun for their novelty but they were always pretty terrible. I could recognize that even as a kid, though maybe I couldn't tell what exactly made them so bad. Now I know. They did all the things that I just wrote about not doing, but look, they did it because they had to. They had to cram it all into like 50 pages. My upper bound on pages, on the other hand, is large enough to be considered infinite. It is equal to the maximum number of pages I could possibly write in my entire life.
YOU GUYS. Do you see how hard I'm overthinking the crafting of tale of a retarded baby giraffe who does things like catch great white sharks in his urethra & hang out in pyramids with Beyonce & Karl Malone? This is why I can't get shit done. I'm just going to get drunk tonight & finish this thing.
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Giraffe Adventures Update #2
Making a little bit of progress here & there on Giraffe Adventures, but I've been way too busy to really commit any time to it. So far so good, I like where it's going but there's a lot of writing left to do.
Node map update:
There are 19 different endings as of now, with exciting titles like "Exploding Dick Apocalypse" & "You Did Some Stuff I Guess." I'll keep plunkin' away, this might be finished a month or so from now.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Giraffe Adventures Update #1
I haven't started writing any new content yet, but I've got the project migrated over to Twine, just using the standard boilerplate template. I'll probably dig into Twine a little deeper this summer, but for now I'm just keeping it simple. Here's the Twine-generated node map of what the story looks like so far:
That's the title screen in the upper-left, then you can sort of trace how the story branches from there. This is way easier to make sense out of than the weirdo numbering hierarchy system I was using before.
Anyway, I'm stoked to see where this goes. It feels kind of good to be concentrating on writing & just having stupid fun instead of on programming, for a while at least.
That's the title screen in the upper-left, then you can sort of trace how the story branches from there. This is way easier to make sense out of than the weirdo numbering hierarchy system I was using before.
Anyway, I'm stoked to see where this goes. It feels kind of good to be concentrating on writing & just having stupid fun instead of on programming, for a while at least.
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Giraffe Adventures!
Next on the list is a little HTML choose-yr-own-adventure called Giraffe Adventures.
FIRST LINE SNEAK PREVIEW:
"You are a gay retarded baby giraffe. What will you do next?"
As fate would have it, I was recently introduced to Twine, a free & open-source HTML development tool focused on interactive text kinds of things. So I'm migrating Giraffe Adventures over to Twine; at the moment it's just a pile of .html files that I cranked out in notepad. The reason I never finished it is because it got too hard to keep track of branches & everything, but Twine pretty much handles that automatically, it looks like.
Gonna get my copy & paste on for a minute here.
FIRST LINE SNEAK PREVIEW:
"You are a gay retarded baby giraffe. What will you do next?"
As fate would have it, I was recently introduced to Twine, a free & open-source HTML development tool focused on interactive text kinds of things. So I'm migrating Giraffe Adventures over to Twine; at the moment it's just a pile of .html files that I cranked out in notepad. The reason I never finished it is because it got too hard to keep track of branches & everything, but Twine pretty much handles that automatically, it looks like.
Gonna get my copy & paste on for a minute here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)