{"author_name":"marudziik","cat":"LD #30","comments":[],"epoch":1409052480,"likes":2,"metadata":{"p_key":"26547","p_author":"marudziik","p_authorkey":"5431","p_urlkey":"61977","p_title":"The incomplete experience of Mage\u2019s Tower (a post mortem)","p_cat":"LD #30","p_event":"LD30","p_time":"1409052480","p_likes":"2","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"5431","us_name":"marudziik","us_username":"marudziik","event_start":"1408665600","event_key":"24","event_name":"LD30"},"text":"

Mage’s Tower\u00a0<\/em>is a text adventure game involving portals leading to different worlds. It’s not completed, but I decided to submit it because I did spend my weekend trying to put something together. Even if I failed, I’d like to know if my general idea was interesting for anyone.<\/p>\n

To the point<\/strong><\/p>\n

I did submit\u00a0 a game. This is good. The bad thing is that I didn’t manage to finish it, so the experience is incomplete. This is fairly important for a Twine game, so I’m a little heartbroken, especially since I took another day to work on it (I could use only a couple of hours out of it though) and had to submit it as a Jam entry.<\/p>\n

You can play my game here: http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-30\/?action=preview&uid=5431<\/a><\/p>\n

As I said, it’s not going to be a complete experience, but if you fancy similar games, you can at least look at what I tried to do.<\/p>\n

Theme<\/strong><\/p>\n

Can’t believe I’m going to write this, but the theme was actually okay. Right from the start I had this idea for a text-adventure game, and while I wasn’t sure how to start, I knew that I wanted to use Twine and\/or some custom JavaScript. At some point I knew I wanted a random way to transfer the player between different places, and maybe this is where I actually should have started in the beginning, because I wasted waaay too much time on the not-very-important beginning of the game.<\/p>\n

Tools<\/strong><\/p>\n

It turns out that Twine is a very good tool to make choose-your-own-adventure style games. This was my first time using it, and in the end I was surprised how interestingly complicated things you can do using such a simple tool.<\/p>\n

I’ve had some problems with it at the beginning, though. Using a lot of community-made macros, it turned out some things look different under different browsers (Firefox vs. Chrome vs. mobile browser), and I really wanted for the game to be consistent. In the end, some transitions don’t work as they should in Firefox. And I’m reassured that developing something for the web (HTML5+CSS3) is still a hellish experience. Some of the macros were outdated and I tried to fix them, with little success.<\/p>\n

Coming close towards the end of the Compo, I even managed to implement some simple JavaScript to manage player’s inventory. This helped a lot, but the original idea was to use extensive JS to have even more interaction (think canvas elements on some of the paragraphs) – this wasn’t really realistic though, given my fairly poor knowledge of JS (on top of how TiddlyWiki works, and Twine too).<\/p>\n

Also, not knowing Twine did come with a price. It took me too much time to think about how to organize things like dialogs, quests, inventory – I actually started to figure things out towards the end of the competition, and some experience here would have helped.<\/p>\n

Learning<\/strong><\/p>\n

I learned a lot – maybe not in terms of technical knowledge, but more about my limitations. I learned that creating a compelling story in English is not as simple as I thought it might be (mainly because I’m not English), and I gained a lot of respect for IF creators in general. Maybe reading more books in English would have helped.<\/p>\n

Also, it’s not enough to know some MilkyTracker to create something that sounds okay (hence no sound in my game, which is a bummer because I did spend some time on creating some very bad music and I did adapt Twine to play it).<\/p>\n

There’s this saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. I know exactly what it means now.<\/p>\n

While I was really crushed when Compo ended knowing that I might not be able to finish any game even under Jam rules, I’m glad I did submit something in the end (otherwise my weekend would have been wasted). I’m not satisfied with my work, but Ludum Dare is a good time to take risks.<\/p>\n

Effect<\/strong><\/p>\n

After you’ve visited all 9 worlds, and tried to get all 3 achievements (involving repeatable actions), there’s not much more to see, so there’s no point playing after that. Sorry.<\/p>\n

It should be playable on mobiles, though all the effects work as intended only in Chrome.<\/p>\n

TL;DR<\/strong><\/p>\n