Hello everyone! My pixel-art-heavy and beginner-friendly parser entry for Spring Thing 2023 has officially been released into the wild. Learn more about it below, or click to play:
PLAY THE GAME!
You are a witch's crow familiar, headstrong as anything but still young and untested.
What starts as a normal day soon takes a harrowing turn when your pacific caretaker, Valmai, is struck down by a terrible hex of mysterious origin. Now it's up to you, little bird, to cure your caretaker and discover the hex's source.
Are you up for the task?
Beginner-friendly parser commands peppered with choice-based elements
Limited vocabulary: you'll only need LOOK, TAKE/GET, DROP, PECK, and CAW
Free to play; formatted for browser, tablet, and mobile
More than 30 unique, hand-crafted pixel art scenes
Roughly 60-90 minutes of play time
Cute woodland animals
Accessibility features: optional tutorial, dynamic TASKS list, three varied fonts, dark/light mode, and toggle-able text indicator for 'press any key' commands
For both detailed step-by-step and spoiler-free walkthroughs of the game (and information on how to obtain the secret ending), click here.
Written by groggydog
Raven portrait pixel art from craftpix.net
All other pixel art by groggydog
Created in the Adventuron Engine
Many thanks to my alpha/beta testers:
Alpha: jbeebs305, manonamora
Beta: Christopher Merriner, Dee Cooke, Mike Russo, Travis Moy, ZAG On Em Clan
Thanks for being here! I'm going to start off this blog with a bit of info about me, my history with games, and my plans for this blog. Come in and see!
Meet The Blogger
You can call me Wham, I've been playing games since i was child with a Gameboy Advance and a well-loved copy of Pokemon crystal, but its really only in the last five years that I've come into any sort of gaming community and had the desire to explore gaming as a hobby and video games as an art form.
Let's start with the kind of games I've enjoyed (and you can check out my Backloggd link in my profile for more)
JRPGs are the big one, and a perennial favorite of mine. Heavy hitters here include the Final Fantasy franchise (X,XII, and XIV especially), the Xenoblade games (especially 3), and the Persona series. I'm currently trying to explore more series that I've missed over the years, like Star Ocean, Trails in the Sky, Tales of, etc.
Rougelikes! Not quite as much these days, but ever since The Binding of Isaac came out, I rode the wave of the indie roguelike scene for a good seven or eight years and have a deep love for where this genre has gone over the years. Notable games for me here are Isaac, FTL, Risk of Rain, Hades, Inscryption, and Darkest Dungeon.
Diablo-style loot RPGs, I've had a long history with these games starting back when I would play Diablo II LAN games with my friend and his dad back in middle school, and games like this have always had a soft spot in my heart. I spent years playing Path of Exile, and I routinely come back to games like Titan Quest and Grim Dawn as well.
Fighting games! This one is pretty new for me, back in 2020 one of my good friends decided he was gonna try to get into Street Fighter, and that caused a small revolution in my friend group that has led to me playing a whole hell of a lot of Guilty Gear Strive, Street Fighter 6, and other assorted games. I'm by no means good at them, but I've been committed to learning and improving at them bit by bit (you'll see in the weekly FGC Corner :) )
Visual Novels/Narrative Games. This one is very much a less cogent genre space, but some of my absolute favorite games can all be loosely put together around these terms. Games like 13 Sentinels, 999, Virtue's Last Reward, Umineko, Misericorde, Perfect Tides, things of that nature.
There are many others out there, so I'll end this section by listing off a bunch of other games that are classics for me: Outer Wilds, Neon White, Just Cause 2, Devil May Cry 5, Blasphemous, Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Elden Ring, Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Rimworld, Disco Elysium, Monster Hunter, and many many others!
The Big Idea
What I mostly want from this blog is to be a space where I can get together at the end of a week and think back about what I've been playing, what I think about it, and whatever else is connected to those feelings. Over the years I've enjoyed seeing other folks thinking and writing critically about the media that they enjoy, and while I hold no aspirations of turning this into anything quite as specific as that, I want to give myself space to spend more time thinking about this hobby which means so much to me. I have no idea how its going to go, if I'm going to like it, or how consistent I will be able to be, but for the time being this is my plan all laid out!
If you've read all this and it sounds interesting to you, or you think you might have tastes that align with mine, feel free to follow along! I'd love to have more people to talk shop with, or even just knowing that some other folks out there might think my words are interesting.
so I just read (and really enjoyed) Gideon the Ninth
but my friends have also told me that it's essentially a novel spawned out of the Homestuck fandom. I've never read Homestuck before. I feel like a foreigner trying to make sense of a very involved mythos
Celebrate Halloween as a single parent living in a haunted house.
Being a single parent is never easy, especially when you have two kids to raise. You also live in a haunted house, where the supernatural inhabit the same space as the place you are meant to call home. Both of these factors equal chaos, which leads you to the present.
It is Halloween. Live through the spooky day on 13 Hallows Lane and decide what you will do when the sun begins to set and trick-or-treat goers fill the sidewalks.
What will you do? Decorate your house? Play some pranks on poor trick-o-treaters with help from the ghosts within your walls? Attend to your children to make sure they do not tell anyone that your house is haunted? The choice is yours!
Because Requiem is more of a *game* than anything else I've created thus far, I spend a lot of time tweaking stuff on the back-end that the player will never really see.
An example:
Once the player has reached a certain point in their early journey, they unlock The Armory, a place to upgrade their gear with currency found in the Well.
So, a question presents itself... How do I appropriately scale the cost of the upgrades?
I don't want it to be linear, because right now better rewards are earned the later in the game you are - it would be entirely too easy to trivialize the combat encounters.
So originally, I was going to manually set each value. So the game would check $player.armor, for instance, to see their current max health value. Then it would assign a cost value to the next level of upgrade based on my manual input, in gradually increasing amounts.
But this is *really* clunky, and requires a lot more code than I think I needed. The Armory passage was getting entirely too long.
So today I cleaned it up, and here's what it looks like now.
Up at the top we begin by using a polynomial to calculate a nice, steady cost increase automatically based on the player's current number of upgrades ($player.armor). It looks like 50 > 80 > 130 > 200, etc. etc. The cost-increase itself increases by 20 chits for every level.
The rest checks to make sure they can actually afford the upgrade (and just displays plain text if they can't). If they then click the available link it reduces the player's chits and processes the upgrade. The $purchase and $purchase_chits variables exist to display a purchase confirmation message when they reload the shop.
And that's it! I've taken what was dozens of lines of code for each upgrade set to just 11 lines. It took some playing around to get the polynomial right, but I'm happy with where it's landed.
Have you ever wanted to create a game, but felt overwhelmed by the visual aspects? Or wished you didn't need to edit the UI?
This jam is for you!
The Bare-Bones Jam is a month-long game jam for text-based games where you cannot change the formatting of the chosen program. Not only are graphics prohibited, but so is changing the interface or presentation in any way from the engine defaults.
During the jam, the focus is on the text only.
After the jam, you can do whatever you like with your game.
This jam was inspired by the Naked Twine Jam from 2014, but it is not restricted to twine.
Constraints and Rules:
You cannot make changes to the visual of the game, and must keep the basic UI and formatting of the chosen program. [Excluded are the uses of basic text formatting (italics, bold, underline, etc...), lists and tables.]
Games should not include assets, like images or sound - the focus should be on the text.
Games should not include any generated AI content.
The Jam is open to any program/medium, as long as the piece can be considered Interactive Fiction (i.e. the game is interactive, and its focus is on the text).
The Jam is open to any language.
The Jam is open to NSFW content, as long as you indicate it in your submission (in the Content Warning of the form).
Spam or hateful content will be removed!
During the duration of the jam and the two weeks following the deadline, the submissions should be free to play.
I started querying my fantasy novel about 2.5 weeks ago, and since then my mental has been in the tank, and in a way I never experienced with negative feedback on IF projects.
I'm torn between having a real drive and desire to write, and a real struggle to deal with the anxiety and feelings of inadequacy that stem with getting lots of rejection.
Today is a very special and scary day. My novel is done, and my first agent queries are going out. I've never done this part of the process before, and it feels very vulnerable to foist this thing out on other people and say, "Do you like it?"
But I really do see myself in this for the long haul. I've got another book on craft to read - Story Genius - and lots of short story ideas plus a solid outline for my next novel.
Onwards and upwards. And hopefully having a healthy relationship with inevitable failure.
Do you have WIPs that you've put on indefinite hiatus?
Projects you've started and then abandoned or forgotten?
Then this is the place for you.
The Bring Out Your Ghosts Jam is a place to show off the ghosts of the game development process. Abandoned or forgotten WIPs. Overly ambitious projects that never got off the ground. Notes and ideas for games that never came to be.
The name and timing of the jam is inspired by the Ghost Festival (or Zhongyuanjie) in East Asian tradition, a time when the ghosts of the deceased are said to visit the living. Imagine being visited by the ghosts of dead WIPs. What would they say?
Inspired by the Bring Out Your Dead Jam, hosted by Emily Short.
Rules
Incomplete and abandoned games, ideas, notes, etc. are all welcome.
Projects updated because of this jam are also okay. If you decide to revisit (or finish!) an old abandoned project because of this jam, that's great!
As with the original Bring Out Your Dead Jam, it would be nice if you include some context in the Author's Notes when submitting. How did your project come about? Why was it abandoned or forgotten? What lessons can be learned from the process? This is optional but encouraged :)
While the creators of this jam come from the interactive fiction community, any games, physical games, text, etc. are allowed.
Over the weekend I spent some time adding polish and, I suppose, **pizzazz** to my game. I want the combat and interactions to feel good and be highly readable even when the game wants you to click through everything pretty quickly, not necessarily needing to read every bit of repetitive text every time.
So, here are some purely CSS- and HTML-based animations I added in...
We've got two things to show off on this image.
First, you can see that the Critical HIT! text does a neat spin effect on a slight delay. It's very readable, and just feels a bit more rewarding when you get it.
Second, the loot page has been updated so that the currency and additional items slide in on a slight delay from each other.
They're small changes, to be sure, but I think the interface all that more enjoyable.
I also took that silly Evangelion reference from last week and kicked it up a notch - with this nice, subtle CSS gradient effect. I love little touches like this that just make the game feel better.
And yes, this will change colors depending on which theme you have selected.
----
That's it for today! More coming soon. If you're interested in alpha testing, drop me a line. I'll be looking for folks in the next months or so.
