Incubus Island Monthly Goal #5 - August 2020

It's been an annoying month: Excessive workload elsewhere reduced my free time. Subsequently I became ill (no, not the big one! thankfully) possibly in part due to lack of rest as a result of the thing I said in the previous sentence. Consequently I didn't have as much time to work on personal projects, or often did not feel up to it when I did. I accomplished less than I wanted to this month, but I don't feel bad about it because the reason was outside of my control. Still it's a little disappointing, but next month will be better. (Though I will still be busy for at least another week, unfortunately.)

Here's last month's goals:

1) Fix <<change_bg>> widget. 

This was pretty simple. I had overcomplicated things the way I had it, and even with this solution I can certainly trim it down even more now that I look at it again. Essentially I have two widgets: <<show_bg>> which runs at the start of every passage (due to its inclusion in the PassageHeader) and <<change_bg>> where you use in an event to change the active background image. 

So if I am at the 'beach' location, the game will automatically put in the beach background. However, if something happens in an event and the character goes somewhere else, I put <<change_bg underwater >>. The script removes the previous css class from the html file's head tag and affixes the new one. (I'm using css page backgrounds as in Incubus City).

2) Fix the event system. 

I have done some work on the generic event launcher and it work ok, as well as made forays into the 'meeting NPC' event (including creating a way to cause the ). I also made some locations 'launch event at start' types and others 'launch event upon explore' types ('explore' meaning do something at that location other than just arrive) as specified in their attributes table. Because of the somewhat nebulous nature of this goal, I can technically say this goal was achieved; however, the event system will need more work than what I did, but this would have been true regardless of if I finished what I intended to. It's a good start, at least. 

3) Flesh it out. 

I may also write some scenarios, but I won't make it a goal. If I do, I want to force myself to do them in a way where I create a playable but content-sparse outline of it, and then add text/dialogue and additional flavor options once I've made it working and finished. I feel like this is the more sensible way of doing things, the way I do them now (following whatever ideas pop into my head wherever they take me regardless of what my original plan was) is a little haphazard and leads to 'lopsided' results.

Other things I did:

Most of the work I did was at the start of the month, and there was a big gap, so I don't remember all the little things. But I did add another type of thing you could schedule at the conclusion of an event. In IC you could receive texts as follow ups to events, as a way of epiloguing them. I've mentioned before that in II I can have it so that such occurrences can be scheduled to happen a specific number of days from when they are set (ie if you bang a girl, you might hear back from her a few weeks later about how her period is late and she's getting a bit worried) you can also see news reports about things you've done. I've added a few more types of these occurrences and increased the amount of places the occurrences can occur in. 

I also wrote a scenario. The  goal was to experiment with writing it out as a 'skeleton' of a scene, and then going in and filling in details and adding variation and little branches. The reason why this needs to be an experiment is because working in this way goes against how I normally work, which is just following my impulses and writing whatever's in my head at any given time, and tangenting off in this or that direction until the story I was making bears no resemblance to what it was supposed to. I failed to even remotely change how I work on scenarios, unfortunately, but the scenario is ok. I'll do further experiments on how I work on these because I think it might reduce the time it takes to make them without affecting quality of results. We'll see. 

This month's goals:

1) Work on Typhon's story. 

I'm going to focus on this one part of the game. In the game so far, you can meet him, talk to him, but I'd like to make it so you can get him to 'join your party' by befriending him doing a favor for him. I'd like to launch with some element of pimping/brothel in the game at launch, so this makes sense. I'd also like to figure out how the 'party' system works - it's actually already in the game, and long has been, but there's no code in the game to have characters join, or instruct them to meet you at home, or anything like that. This'll be a good way to work on those. 

2) Reorganize how things are laid out in Twine. 

It's gotten... well, not messy, but inconsistent. I've organized event passages by location they happen in, but it makes more sense to organize them based on their role in the game. Events that are simple meet-and-fucks should go together, events that are multi-part or otherwise hook into other events should go somewhere else, etc. 

3) Pull all event content I've written into the game.

I have scraps all over the place. I'm  going to find them all, put them into scenario passage templates, (totally unformatted and unfinished, but all the content in the template so it's easy to get started on them when I want) just to have them in the game. I'll organize them in the Twine interface so I'll know at a glance which ones are at which stage. I need to do this because I noticed that I started writing out stories for ideas that I've already had and written, without realizing it. I have a terrible memory and I think putting everything in the game even in shoddy form is a good way of keeping me clear on what's where and soforth. Also, if I'm in an image-finding mood, I'll know which ones need images and what type of images to look for. I'm hoping this will be better than my current processes (which are totally arbitrary).

Conclusion

Now, I have probably a week and a half of not being able to work on the game ahead of me but hopefully things will clear up after that. Fingers crossed. 

Oh, I just remembered: I keep getting asked, when will the game be released in some playable form? I've probably given a difference answer to it each time I'm asked, but roughly it goes like this: I don't know. It deals mostly with my satisfaction at the level of coherence, and that it gives a clear picture of what the game is meant to be. I should probably spend time thinking about what milestones and goalposts specifically I could set and show progress towards so I can maybe portray this in the form of a %age. 

Gotta go.