Incubus Island Monthly Goal #2

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Incubus Island Report #2

What up bitches. I had written a rather large post about a few of the things I've created or re-created in the past two weeks in order to have II able to do all the things I'd like it to. I added to it bit by bit each time I'd accomplish something, almost like a journal. It was fairly long, almost too long - I was worried I was over-explaining things and going into tedious detail. Then an incredibly frustrating thing happened: Blogger lost my draft - I opened it to find that it was entirely blank.

Annoying to have lost it, and I'm too irritated about it to re-write the whole thing, but writing it all wasn't a complete waste of time: It's actually incredibly useful writing about things I'm working on, because it forces me to think of them in a different way, and sometimes I get ideas on how to improve them, or where to take them in future, that sort of thing.

Anyway, I didn't lose the part I wrote on the game's 'Virtue' system, because I had copy pasted it into a message to someone. This someone is HB38, a person who is developing a custom scenario for the game, and there's been a bit of back-and-forth over that. Why is someone working on a custom scenario for a game that isn't even remotely close to playable? Because I'm working on a custom scenario system that will hopefully make it easy for content to be added to the game for anyone interested. So anyway, I may as well talk about those two things.

Virtue System

A lot of RPGs have a karma or morality system to track if you're good or evil so the world can react to you accordingly. II's 'morality' system isn't like that. The moral character of your acts don't affect the world around you (aside from their immediate social/legal consequences), they affect your character himself.

Unlike in IC, the II protagonist is not a seasoned sociopathic misanthrope. You start out as a normal person who is capable of doing the sort of things a normal person would do. Evil needs to be earned. The more vile a person you are, the more options to be even more vile present themselves.

I made a list of a wide range of virtue-related acts (murder, white lies, rudeness, threats of violence, torture, insulting someone's appearance, tampering with medication, etc). Every one of them has a numerical value indicating its level of evil. This number is used to gauge how evil your character needs to be before he will be able to commit said act, and also how incrementally more evil he becomes by doing it.

* There will be of course acts that increase your virtue rather than decrease, and also things that become unavailable to characters tainted by evil deeds. I'll explore these at a later time.

Custom Scenarios

So as I said, I have been working with HB38 in regards to custom scenario building. I am creating it so that, to add content to the game you need only create a passage for it in Twine and give it the 'custom-event' tag. The game will automatically find it and associate it with whatever location the event takes place in (which you would supply through an event location tag, ie 'beach-event', 'jungle-event', etc) where it might be triggered by a player upon visiting said location.

Also in the interest of facilitating custom content and modding, I've documented a lot of the features of the conditional linking system II uses ('Cubus', which I also used in IC). Once I regain access to the Wiki (the host has some issues with accounts not being able to log in, mine is one of them) I'll start using it as a documenting source. Honestly, it's best I write documentation for my own sake anyway because I'll frequently start building something that I already made, having forgotten of the previous effort's existence.

History by Popular Vote

Oh, I did some interactive thing at the end of my last post, a poll on what the favorite ending was. Fairly informative, for example I had no idea Dirty Cop would be so popular. Schooling Sluts requires no explanation. Probably worth noting is that if you add up all the Smith family related ending votes, they would exceed everything else in popularity. 

I've made a timeline of events from IC that I consider 'canonical', ie happened during the Incubus's life and are safe to reference in II in some way or another; this poll data will help inform this timeline, and I've already tweaked it a bit. 

I'll have a post out on the 1st with a summary of what I did and a new goal for next month. I'll do another poll as well, probably a similar one about favorite weddings. 

That's it, then.

Incubus Island Monthly Goal #1

As per my previous post, I'm starting to have more time to throw around on projects so I'm setting monthly goals for Incubus Island, both as a means of self-motivation and to keep myself focused (because I am often inclined to wild tangents).

My Goals For This Month

1) Get into II, figure out where I was at, and complete whatever complicated task I was in the middle of.

I think (but am not certain) I was changing how variables were stored after learning something new about Twine, got interrupted mid-way, and left town for two weeks, and then wasn't able to get back into it until now-ish.

2) Implement a multi-part scenario. 

Some scenarios are now multi-part. I think a good way to test what I have and what needs to be changed is putting in one of the scenarios I've written into the game. There's a bunch of features I made and planned on making that would streamline the process of making scenarios, so in the process of doing this I'll build those. Will also do some changes to the <<do>> macro (the thing I made use to make conditional choice links in IC). Might put multiple scenarios, actually.

Sounds pretty modest but it's a good start. As I mentioned before, I really just want to get the ball rolling. I anticipate my free time trending upwards, fingers crossed.


Other Thoughts

An IC modder told me that creating custom scenarios for IC was kinda daunting because of the amount of places outside your scenario passages you need to add code to to make it connected the same way as everything else. I get this. It's something I'll be bearing in mind as I dev II.


Poll

I figure I should try to learn which plot points are closest to your black hearts. What's your favorite ending for Incubus City?

Vote on your favorite ending. (poll has expired)

I'll do a new poll with each of these posts.