I don't think I'm going to have to make any more big engine changes. Just got to write content until the last of the story arcs are done. 5 hours is long enough right?

I think I've submitted, I have no idea .... certainly links are hosted and posted on my game page.

I actually really like the concept I ended up with. The match three mechanic, combined with themed options, means that you can find yourself trying very hard to only trigger the options you want. Maybe you can find some cunning tricks to have 3s in reserve, and maybe I added some narrative elements to make that harder ;)

There's also a score which stops when you finish the game. Who can "win" with the lowest score? Who can still be playing with the highest score?

I wonder if anyone will even play it long enough to find out...

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/candy-crush-your-own-adventure

For LD41 I made a game that lets you play through a choose your own adventure narrative using a match 3 interface and it turns out it was pretty fun writing the story for it.

(Game + source here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/candy-crush-your-own-adventure)

The really interesting thing is the story content is already pretty much separate from the game engine. Would anyone be interested in writing their own story and delivering it to people in this way?

Anyone interested is very welcome to just take the code and run with it but I'm also happy to potentially work with people on this.

I would also just love to hear if anyone gives this a try.

The main restrictions at the moment are : - Panel size : you only have so much space for each scene of your game's text to appear in - Number of choices: limited to at most 4 options (but it supports 0 - 4) - No text formatting (at the moment) - It currently doesn't render options that have been chosen before to prevent the narrative making nonsensical loops but allow for a bit of content re-use.

Features commenters have already suggested or that I was thinking of adding: - Ambient sounds for a given scene - Playing sounds when a given option is chosen - Ability to specify assets in the settings file (needed for supporting your own sounds and supporting your preferred look + feel) - Settings screen to let the player choose some options like the name / title / gender of their protagonist - Intro screen to show off a title card for the story - Setting flags that can be checked in other scenes for a more dynamic story - Translations. They'd be awful but I kind of want to see just how bad feeding the story text through google translate would be

Yup, I made a game, it was my first ever LD attempt and I'm very happy to say it hit the 30 reviews mark yesterday. The feedback has all been very positive and on the back of this I very much intend to take part in another LD some time in the future.

I wrote a choose-your-own-adventure-style story and slapped a candy-crush-style game on the side which the player uses to choose which option to go to next.

I'm happy with what I made, it was fun to make, I don't mind the story is nothing special (or downright bad depending on your taste) and I don't mind that it looks and sounds like the absolute bare minimum to be called a game.

If you're into reading lots of text, or just to see how this kind of idea plays out, here's my game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/candy-crush-your-own-adventure (with apologies that it's only in English at the moment)

I haven't seen many other games that are so text heavy so I figured if I shared how it went for me people might get some inspiration next time and/or see it as a valid game option. I also would love to play more like it so link your text-heavy game in the comments and I'll gleefully take a look.

So, if you are willing to read my LD development story here you go:

Planning

I set my alarm for 30 minutes before the theme was announced. At 2am in the morning local time I can't say my brain was firing on all gears but it turns out I judged my limits pretty well. I've not made a full game before, let alone one in 48 hours, so my goal going in was to keep this as simple as I could.

Going over my notes, apparently I was toying with the idea of a rhythm game for a while. I have absolutely no recollection of this but I was brainstorming into a text editor which I will absolutely do again. Having ideas somewhere outside my head where I can assess them and come back to to riff off later is definitely beneficial.

I had a lot of stupid ideas, which is fine. I was just trying out anything I could to see how it felt.

It was only after I'd spent some time suggesting mad ideas to myself that I actually prodded them with the rational parts of my brain that were still awake.

I made a list of what I thought would be fun, what I thought I could do and what pitfalls I could identify and what makes each of the mechanics I was looking at "fun". All of this based on the advice I could get myself before the jam and I think it worked for me.

I've heard from various project management bods that the point after which planning produces diminishing returns is very roughly the 50% mark. That is, so long as you have half a plan, you're probably ready to start working on it and winging the rest won't be too bad.

I had already decided to use phaser.io (http://phaser.io) to make the end game as accessible as possible, I was always going to force my idea into that framework.

I identified I'd probably have to write two different game mechanics in the same 48 hours. I wanted to make my first LD as simple for myself as possible so, coupled with the fact I still don't know phaser.io very well, I opted for match 3 as one of the mechanics. I suck at artwork and graphics so lots of text in an engaging way seemed like a good way to cheat my way around that. So I opted for a text based adventure controlled by a match 3 interface.

Notably I hadn't picked the actual story yet, not identified fail states or win cons, hadn't designed the UI, hadn't worked out my graphical style etc. etc.

As it happens, I almost disastrously over-estimated my ability to churn out the words needed for a complete story, but this was fine and I'll get back to why later.

Time elapsed since compo start: 1 hour

First the bit I knew I could do

I was pretty sure that match 3 would be fun on some level right from the outset, it's generally just satisfying to see stuff disappear, fall and make a little noise having done so. Still, that was the very first thing I checked and it took a few hours to implement the basic match 3 UI in my chosen framework (http://phaser.io).

If this wasn't interesting I guess I could have bailed and tried a different idea but as it happens, it was fine. Also, if you don't know what the text on the left hand side is referring to I recommend googling it, you will not be disappointed. If I was going to be sensible I could have used some sample lorem text (https://www.lipsum.com/ is a very handy tool there) but I digress...

Anyway, at this point I was feeling pretty pleased with how things were going. As I made breakfast I was even wondering whether I'd low-balled myself and that I was going to be done by the end of the day.

Pause for delirious laughter

Time elapsed since compo start : 4 hours

Content is king

So, with the mechanics all done and dusted (it wasn't) I felt it was time to start writing some actual text to go on the left hand side. I hadn't actually decided where I was going to take this yet, just that I wanted to do a detective story with some Lovecraftian undertones if I could.

Use what you know

I have a little experience writing a lot in a short period of time. Not a ton, just a little. For the last few years I've subjected myself to NaNoWriMo (https://nanowrimo.org/) where you try to write a whole novel of at least 50,000 words in a month. I've only succeeded a couple of times and never published anything. I am definitely a novice at this.

Still, I have forced myself to write many thousands of words in a weekend in pursuit of this goal and I've learnt a few things in the process:

1. Let it flow. Your internal editor will slow you down, editing comes later.
2. Crap is better than nothing. You can build on crap.
3. You will surprise yourself, you're not as bad as you think.
4. I can sustain a pace of 2,000 words a day but it's hard.
5. I get stuck picking the course of my narratives.
6. I have a bad habit of not doing nasty stuff to my characters.

Notably, some of this is personal to me. If you're thinking about writing games with a ton of content I'd recommend forcing yourself to write regardless of the quality. Do NaNo if you have the time around November, it's mad and fun.

I ended up writing 8548 words of story / options on top of the actual code which I'm pretty sure is a personal record. But I digress...

Plot out the narrative

I started by just writing scenes without any idea of the direction I was going in. I think this was fine and got me a feel for the character of my protagonist but I'm sure the pacing of the first few scenes feel very slow as a result.

As it happens, that might be just what the player needs to get into the game mechanics. This was a fluke. I think there were a lot of flukes in this game's development, which is fine.

Anyway, I realized that I needed to work out a story tree after all this meandering. I am very, very glad I did but I did make some notable mistakes :

• I felt like one of the ways to make the match 3 interface have narrative significance would be to make the "candy" items mean something. Red was meant to be violence/agression, blue was thoughtful, green was "go with the flow" and yellow was meant to me money related. This turned out to be a bit restrictive.
• Initially I wrote the interface between the two games to need there to always be four options. This meant I forced myself to write paths that ended up being, basically, dumb. Well, more dumb (see item 2.).
• In trying to avoid the pitfall of 6., the main reason I tried to write something Lovecrafty in the first place, I added too many fail states.
• I overestimated how much I could fit in a panel and thus underestimated how many scenes each story point would take to write. So I made a lot of scenes...

By the way, I don't have a good tool for this. I know there are writers who use various plotting tools. I just use pen and lots of paper, which seems to work for me.

Don't plot too much

This is actually something I realised while making the tree but it felt like an important point in its own right. Going back to the 50% rule I mentioned earlier, I left myself space to improvise on my plan and this helped keep me engaged while I was forcing myself to write so much text.

In case you need telling: Give yourself the space you feel you need to have fun while being creative.

Time elapsed since compo start: roughly 7 hours

Write until your fingers bleed

Once I made a tree I started writing one branch at a time. The crucial thing was: with the narrative tree sort of there (it got changed a bit) it started becoming clear how much there was to flesh out and I knew from experience that it was going to be a heck of a push.

As the first day progressed I couldn't help but notice that I had so much left to do. I put that aside and wrote more and I had fun doing it.

Story flowed, characters changed and grew and whenever I was bored with one reality I'd made I'd go to another branch and work on that for a bit. Still, I got stuck plenty.

Breaks are good. Take them.

Whenever I got stuck I took breaks to do the graphics, add some sounds to the game, tweak the mechanics of the match 3 half, play through the game and catch times I got the layout wrong or just take a walk.

When you can't write more, then you can reflect

Before going to bed, I took time to assess my progress from the first day and it was clear that I had too much left to write. I wasn't sure what I was going to do about it but something had to be. But that was a good problem to sleep on.

Time elapsed since compo start: roughly 19 hours.

The results of a good night's sleep: Change the plan

I woke up at a sensible hour on day 2, ready to push on to 2am on Monday, and I started with coffee and avoided my keyboard for a bit.

I had a few good ideas. I changed the code to allow me to use less than four options and I spent some time fixing bugs in the match 3 code that I had previously tolerated.

Then I got writing again.

Time elapsed since compo start: 29 hours.

Last minute panic: I'm not going to make it - bodge it

With maybe 12 hours left to go it became painfully clear that the only way to tie these branches up would be to loop back to other branches done but that it wouldn't make sense to provide options back to the branch the player had just visited.

So I made some last minute engine changes. I was very, very lucky I could change the engine of my game so significantly to fix things this close to the end. I think the simplicity of the mechanics I was working with and the fact there was relatively little code to it paid off here. There are plenty of other reasons to keep it simple. Do that.

Last last-minute panic: 20 minutes before submission hour

Let's just say the quality of a couple particular endings are even worse than the rest. It turns out I can write even faster than I was doing for most of the weekend. I don't recommend it but needs must as whatever crazed gremlins that sit in my brain drives (See item 2. again).

Summary / TLDR

I got lucky with my first attempt in that I finished within the 48 hours by the skin of my teeth. Just text seems a simple option for a game mechanic but writing that much content was no mean feat.

It was definitely fun to make this game and especially it was fun to write the story. I learnt a lot about my ability to write, my capacity to ad-lib in the process and it's given me some ideas I might be able to use next time I try to write a novel in a month (again http://nanowrimo.org is worth your time if you have it).

If you want to try this but haven't done much writing before I recommend getting practice with that, like every other tool you end up using in LD it's important to know your limits and even then you'll get your estimates wrong.

All that being said, I'm very happy to discuss this more in the comments if anyone actually gets this far!

And finally a reminder that my game can be found at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/candy-crush-your-own-adventure.