Trouble Brewing: A Romantic Comedy About Beer, Rebellion, & Skipping Out On Your Responsibilities
Demo Posted on Itch.io | Last Update: July 30, 2024 | WC: 88k| Dev Log
It's all fun and games until someone loses a head!
Quinn, your best friend, has brought you some awful news: your illustrious parents, having run out of potential mates for their brood, have set you up with the worst person you know -- Devon Bainbridge. Your intended is uncouth, self-indulgent, and ten years your senior.
Of course, if no one can find you, the wedding's off, right?
Make daring escape from your family's castle, get pressed into joining a rebellion, and find yourself fighting alongside a plucky bard, a brooding bandit, a naive idealist, and a fool-in-training. Escape marriage, join a rebellion, and find love... or sabotage it all.
Love Interests
Quinn, The Fool ~m/f/nb~ Your ride-or-die best friend, Quinn is both unflinchingly loyal and blunt. Who else could you ever need by your side?
Alistair/Alastriona, The Heir ~m/f~ The idealistic heir to the throne, Al is compassionate, hopeful, and shrewd. Not to mention quite stunning.
Sloan/Sloane, The Bandit ~m/f~ The leader of the local bandits, Sloan/Sloane is sarcastic and brooding. But perhaps they have a softer side as well?
Reese, The Bard ~nb~ A bard and romantic at heart, Reese is composing their masterwork. That muse could be you.
It's hard to believe it's been a year and a half since our last update, so I thought I'd pop in with some news. We're still working on Chapter 6, which is for the most part done on the writing front. There are a few scenes to go, but most of the work is going to be getting everything over to Twine. Most of the delay is related to irl issues. But I spent a good few hours today moving our writing over to Twine and making some edits. Hopefully, we'll have something to share soon.
Hi, I hope you're doing well! I love this interactive fiction, and I saw it hasn't been updated in a while. I was wondering if this was still being worked on or is it abandoned.
It hasn't been abandoned, but between some new additions to our family and work schedules, we haven't had much time to work on it.
I saw this on YouTube and it reminded me of mc sooo much🤣🤣 I knew I had to share it to you ^^7 https://youtube.com/shorts/s271e7QOHdg?si=fvg04YRk5i8vV2SJ
“the mind of a medieval person was foreign and incomprehensible” factoid is false. the average medieval person was pretty normal. the chivalric death cult, whose members were known to literally die if prevented from riding to war, was an outlier and should not have been counted
On hearing of Anjou’s death, a tailor of Orleans named Guillaume le Jupponnier, when “overcome with wine,” burst into a tirade in which can be heard the rarely recorded voice of his class. “What did he go there for, this Duke of Anjou, down there where he went? He has pillaged and robbed and carried off money to Italy in order to conquer another land. He is dead and damned, and the King St. Louis too, like the others. Filth, filth of a King and a King! We have no King but God. Do you think they got honestly what they have? They tax me and re-tax me and it hurts them that they can’t have everything we own. Why should they take from me what I earn with my needle? I would rather the King and all kings were dead than that my son should be hurt in his little finger.”
I saw some weird ass conspiracy video thing today of like 'we were never meant to have access to yeast, that was cultivated in a lab and it harms us' bullshit and I was like well first off there's no such thing as 'meant to' and second of all um? the long history of acquiring yeast from beer foam stretching so far back ??????
If you want to make sourdough started from scratch, the process is 'mix water, flour, and maybe sugar if you've got it, then WHIP IN AS MUCH AIR AS YOU CAN' and let it sit. And this works. Because there's yeast there. In the air.
Not only is there yeast in the air, it's on a bunch of fruits, too. Ever rubbed a blueberry, plum, or grape, and it was slightly darker underneath? That thin film is wild yeasts. There is also yeasts that live on human skin (and not just pathogenic ones!). We are never without yeasts.
What they don't tell you about writing is that as you write, you discover scenes and entire plots that you hadn't accounted for that need to be written. So you can spend two hours writing and editing only to realise you're further away from the finish line than you thought you were when you started
Been a while since we had anything substantial to report, but we're back! This past month, we've written about 4,000 words. We've completed the reunion with Emma, which comprised of four scenes, with variations based on the player character's dialogue choices and romantic interests.
Our to-do list:
write the reunion with Emma
write Reese's branch
write Quinn’s branch (40% complete)
add in LT variations
write the chapter 6 outro (50% compete)
code chapter 6 (30% complete)
play test chapter 6
Current Chapter 6 (+Interlude) Wordcount/Estimated Total: 30k 34k/45k
And have some additional nerdery about the song (includes pictures of the original manuscript—and where a scribe decided to change some notes, but the original notes were still obvious):
Sumer is icumen in is the earliest surviving complete English secular song, sung in this article’s video with all six voices indicated in th
We are not dead! Just hit with a combination of writers block and real life. The writing for the rest of chapter six is nearing completion, and then we will be able to start coding everything.
Seven Hard-Won Tips Specifically for Writing Interactive Fiction
This is pretty fun, putting together these lists of writing tips. Today's list is explicitly about interactive fiction.
The trick to writing great interactive fiction that anticipates, foreshadows, introduces themes early, and has interesting choices that set up later events is to *go back and rewrite the earlier chapters* after you’ve written later chapters. That way you look like a genius who can plot things out way in advance, but in fact, you just went back and made it seem that way. Good writing is recursive, and that’s just how it is.
I start with an outline, then I write a code skeleton, leaving blanks for the prose, and then go in and fill in the prose. This way I’m either in code-brain or prose-writing-brain. I don’t like switching between the two. Then, after than phase, I go back one more time and I do the callbacks—you know. Might the main character be wearing a feathered boa in this scene? Here’s some custom text. Might the main character be limping? Here’s some more custom text. If you do that after you write the prose, you’ll have the leisure to think of anything fun and specific you can use.
Callbacks tell players that their choices are unique, important, memorable, and valued by the writer. It tell them that their choices have led them down their own particular path that the writer is rewarding with unique prose. It doesn’t have to have a stat effect or create a new fork in the narrative. Great prose is the reward.
Find an group of alpha readers to read your work early and often and then shut up while they read it and just listen to what they say and comment. You must resist the urge to explain because you won’t be there at everyone’s house when they are playing your game or reading your narrative.
Make rules for yourself about how you are going to name your variables. Don’t do what I did, with a horrible blend of sometimes calling a chracter “gil” in the variables and sometimes “gilberto”; sometimes “fitz” and sometimes “fitzie”; sometimes “metvyv” and sometimes “met_tabby”—ugh! This is self-torture. Don’t do what I did.
Keep your initial creation of variables super organized. Write comments in there explaining what these variables are and when you might need them. I comment most when I am creating variables. You might create a variable in chapter one called “mustardallergy” that you don’t need until chapter eight, so write a comment that says “variables for chapter eight” and stick that “mustardallergy” variable under it. I didn’t do this for my first games, and I regretted it.
Use generic variables and make your life easy. If you are writing a scene at the racetrack, just make a “xrace” modifier and add and subtract to it willy-nilly to represent just general ups and downs of fortune. Stub your toe? -5 xrace. Wear a fine hat? +8 xrace. Throw around some money at the bar? +12 xrace! Eat some bad shellfish? -15 xrace! Then add xrace to every test. It’s a way of tracking just the ups and downs of fortune. You can omit it when it doesn’t make sense, but it’s just a great way to make tests and rewards and penalties cumulatively meaningful without having to have a billion variables tracking every last *reason* for the rewards and penalties.
Discover more mini-essays about writing interactive fiction, writing in general, and the process of writing the forthcoming Jolly Good series below.
How are the RO’s with jealousy? Who is more jealous than others? And I don’t just mean in a romantic sense (although that is fun!)
Al would be the most jealous in general. Everyone else has things they want, and they feel constrained by their position. Romantically, they would be very jealous of anyone who their crush seemed to have a romantic connection with but would feel super guilty about it. They wouldn't ever act nastily toward anybody, but there would be some bitterness. They are going to have a really hard time with the LT routes, once those are complete.
Quinn is occasionally jealous of the MC because of their wealth, but not of the money itself. They never got to have the naivete that the MC has, because they've always had to work to survive and the lack of money has defined their position in society and shaped their life in a lot of ways. None of their wit, skills, or hard work really counts for anything. Romantically, they wouldn't be jealous much.... unless they thought they had a shot.
Reese is a little jealous of people like Sloan/Sloane, who know who they are and what they want. They don't have as a good of a grasp on their sense of self, while Sloan/e seems to be a font of self-confidence. Romantically, they aren't really jealous. They believe in fated love, so if their partner is not 1000000% into them, it's not meant to be. They are also a total shipper on deck.
Sloan/Sloane is a little jealous of Al, though they wish they weren't. No matter what, at the end of the day, Al's family may not love them, but they do value them, and Sloan/e doesn't have that. Romantically, it depends on who the other person is. They may feel jealous of someone who they feel has more to give.
I know this would likely never happen in the story- but since alcohol is such a big part of MC’s character,
how would the RO’s (crushing perhaps?) react to a drunken confession from the MC? In Vino Veritas or whatever they say!
If crushing...
Al would probably dig the big romantic declaration but once they realize the MC is drunk they feel guilty, like it was something they weren't meant to hear. They wouldn't bring it up later if the MC didn't remember the next day or seemed embarrassed. They would hope the MC said it again sober, but they'd also be kind of disappointed that the first time was while they were drunk.
Quinn wouldn't realize it was romantic at first. The MC and Quinn are the type of friends who say they love each other fairly regularly and MC has probably drunkenly told them "I live you" a dozen times. They would probably not believe it until the MC started crying out of frustration. Quinn would in fact want to have the awkward conversation once everyone was sober, and would wait until then to return the confession.
Reese stops them the moment they realize what the MC is saying. They are not having the first time their crush confesses to them be while drunk. Absolutely fucking not.
Sloan/Sloane cuts the MC off and helps them get to bed. Secretly they plan a very romantic confession of their own, now that they know the MC's feelings. Like candlelit dinner and flowers and shit.
