I’m so excited to have submitted my first ever LD game! Thanks to Rose for encouraging me to go for it. 馃榾
I made聽an聽interactive fiction game inspired by the original version of the Frog Prince story. It was really fun to come up the method for聽the player to alter the fairy tale and then to聽let my imagination run wild on the story. I hope you’ll find it interesting if you give it a shot. 
Thought I'd do a quick postmortem of my game The Hall of the Sorcerer King, a choose-your-own-adventure where you have to choose what spells to cast to avoid running out of mana.
If you haven't tried it, give it a shot!
I knew I wanted to use Twine for LD39 - I had limited time and didn't want to worry about graphics, and I wanted to be able to focus on story. But unlike my first LD game, The Frog Prince and the Iron Heart, I wanted something a little game-ier than just an interactive story.
I'm really happy with what I came up with: offering multiple spells to cast on each obstacle, and tracking mana and health so that you have to think about what to do when.
I wanted the game to be tough - after all, if you played through without ever running out of mana, it wouldn't be a good fit for the theme "Running out of power", would it? So I spent quite a bit of time tweaking the game so you have to be pretty clever to make it to the end.
If you've played it, I'd love to what you thought of the difficulty - I heard from a couple people that it took them multiple tries to come up with the solution, which is exactly what I was going for.
Encouraging explorationSince the idea was for people to have to experiment with various choices to beat the game, I didn't want them to have to play through everything over whenever they wanted to try something new. Initially I was thinking people could just rely on Twine's built-in Undo button, but the more I thought about the nature of the puzzle, the more I imagined wanting to jump back to a specific point in order to change your choice.
So I built the breadcrumb sidebar that tracks all the rooms and what spell you cast in them, and lets you jump back to that point if you want to try something different. I think this turned out really well and I've gotten good feedback on it.
I have this issue every Ludum Dare. For Formicary, it was the digging mechanic. For Schoolhouse Note, is was the idle animations. For The Hall of the Sorcerer King, it was the breadcrumb sidebar - that one feature that I really want, but that I end up spending five times as long on as I should have.
I'm really happy with how the sidebar turned out. But I wish I had been smarter about accounting for the time it would take, or been able to stop and think if there was a better way. Oh well, there's always next Ludum Dare to accomplish my goal of not having to stay up late, right?
A focus on gameplay over charactersI wanted this game to have a fun gameplay mechanic, but one of my goals when I decided to make a Twine game was to write about interesting characters. My favorite games are always focused on characters and relationships, and it's something I'd love to be able to do myself.
When planning The Hall of the Sorcerer King, I initially thought I'd give the villain more of a backstory and possibly connect him to the main character. I thought I'd go back through the game and hide more hints about what happened that players could discover as they explored. But by the time I was writing the ending of the game, I was out of steam. As much as I want to create compelling stories and characters, I find coding easier and more fun than writing, so I usually end up prioritizing it.
In general, because of the rushed nature of LD - the need to add gameplay people will like and polish that will attract people to your game - it seems hard to pause all that and focus on story and character. I'll keep working on it, though!
If you have any thoughts on some of these topics, leave a comment or send me a note on twitter! If you haven't played The Hall of the Sorcerer King, I hope you try it and let me know what you think. :purple_heart:
Nothing to Say is a dating sim by me and @Rose featuring a very shy protagonist. Your dialogue options are limited by what letters you've unlocked - you start with nothing, of course, but you can earn more. Can you puzzle out how to confess your feelings?
Ludum Dare fun fact - Nothing to Say is an unofficial sequel to @Rose 's minimalist dating sim from LD26, Nod!
I used the scripting language Ink to write the dialogue for Nothing to Say, and it was an absolute joy to use, so here's a short devlog about how I used it and why I recommend it.
Me and @Rose's game for LD45 is Nothing to Say, a dating sim-inspired game with a puzzle element: you can't choose dialogue options unless you've unlocked the right letters, so you have to make strategic choices of letters to keep exploring the dialogue, earning hearts, and eventually to confess your feelings.
The game is made entirely with HTML/JS/CSS. The only external library I used was Ink.
When working on the script, my goal was to write a fun, engaging dialogue that players would actually enjoy playing through multiple times. I didn't have a ton of time, so Ink was a huge help in letting me draft different interesting branches for the conversation.
Ink is a scripting language for branching stories from InkleStudios. I highly recommend it for any narrative game, especially games with lots of dialogue choices - it's super easy to write out the choices and the outcomes of each. (According to the documentation, there are considerably more complex features too, but I haven't explored those yet!) You write it in their editor, Inky, which lets you test the story as you go, completely decoupled from your actual game code.
For Nothing to Say, the letter-unlocking mechanic was handled by the actual game code - the Ink script just included all the options, so I could play through the different options freely in Inky to try to write fun moments. Also, the script can be divided into sections, which makes it easy to shift things around later.
Ink lets you add any tags you want to each line - you can see in the screenshot above that I marked Zoe's expressions with smiley face tags. (I'll tell you what, adding in @Rose's adorable art was a big improvement over a lone smiley face floating on the screen!)
I also used tags to mark which lines score points for the game code, while simultaneously tracking the points in Ink to determine how Zoe responds to you at the end of the conversation. In Nothing to Say, you can't rescore points you already scored in a previous playthrough (except the pity point about how she appreciates the effort you're making, of course..) - that was handled by the main game code, since each playthrough was a fresh start from Ink's point of view.
The javascript version of Ink is a breeze to use. You just keep asking the Ink story for new lines or choices and it spits them out.
``` function getNext() {
if (story.canContinue){
var line = story.Continue();
var tags = story.currentTags;
function getChoices() {
story.currentChoices.forEach(function(choice) {
var choiceElement = document.createElement('div');
choiceElement.innerHTML = choice.text;
choiceElement.addEventListener("click", function(event) {
story.ChooseChoiceIndex(choice.index);
getNext();
});
choices.appendChild(choiceElement);
```
There was plenty of processing on top of that, like testing the choice text against what letters you have unlocked, but the Ink story was a super solid core. :)
There's a really quick look at how I used Ink in Nothing To Say. As an amateur gamedev and writer, I'm a huge proponent of how fun and easy it is to use. Definitely check out the Ink web tutorial if you're interested. (They have Unity integration too, that's a whole other story!)
For the theme "Start With Nothing", @rose and I made letter-unlocking dating sim Nothing to Say. We felt pretty clever about our use of the theme: you both start with limited options and have to build from there, and you literally start with the letters NOTHING.
We鈥檙e not the only ones to have that idea. I love word games, so I was happy to discover there are lots of other great games about letters/spelling in LD45! Here's some recommendations, in no particular order:
Fantasy interactive fiction where you spell words to open new branches of the story. Cute and funny, and I love the achievements!
You start in a void with an armadillo and have to spell your way out. The game is packed with personality and is tons of fun to play.
A pure spell-as-many-words-as-you-can game with a really fun twist. I found it challenging and super addictive.
Progress through an intriguing fantasy story by manipulating a word to spell a new word. I appreciate that it has hints!
A clever puzzle game where you navigate letters into place to spell words (which become cute little objects!) It's short right now, but a great idea.
Spell words to attack enemies and earn more letters in this super polished RPG. Fun to play and full of great touches like amusing flavor text for letters and enemies.
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I posted these recs on Twitter, too. Anyway, I just wanted to share the games I happened to find and enjoy - if I missed a fun letter-based game, let me know!
@rose and I just released a post-jam version of Interstellar Connection, our narrative puzzle game about helping a lonely spaceship pilot make a connection. We added a couple of enhancements, like endless puzzle mode, but the most interesting one was adapting the game for smaller screens so it can be played on mobile devices.
Interstellar Connection was built directly in HTML, so most changes were CSS. I redesigned the layout from two side-by-side panels into tabs, and added an automatic tab switch in the JS code to transition from puzzle to story and back.
The game is not strictly responsive - changing the browser width doesn't change the style. Instead, I do a one-time check of the window width when the game loads. If the width is below 960 px, I enable the stylesheet for the narrow view, and that width is also factored into game logic, like whether the relay network is generated as 6x4 or 4x6.
You can see it in action by adjusting your browser width, then refreshing. (Or by opening the game on your phone!)
I was really excited to tackle this. Since Interstellar Connection is a short, casual browser game, having it be accessible to people browsing on mobile seemed like a great way to expand our audience. And it was interesting to work on - @rose is normally the UI expert of the team, so for me to take this on was a great challenge!
I'd love any feedback on the mobile version as well as general feedback on the game! Please play and rate if you haven't!