Just like last time, more details here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/game-ish-release-7114474
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More details plus download link here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/game-release-1-5767173
Funny story: -Time spent slowly deliberating on how complex a game mechanic would be to code and how to go about it: 3-5 weeks. -Time spent successfully coding the bulk of it after discarding the idea, recalling it, and going "fuck it, let's try": approximately 30 minutes. I'm sure there's a lesson there. This has nothing to do with this new release, mind you, but it might mean my new game is finally taking shape. Aaaand it's done. I wrote a bigger post in my Patreon page, so just go there for the download link:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/game-release-4329557 Flamma Academy Pocket Plane – Canyon
Half a day before. “Breach in three…” Selene counted. “Christoph and Kyle, on the left. Alex and Roan on the right. Yegrav and Sergei take the centre,” Aura ordered quietly, making the six knights form a semicircle enclosing the small mouth of the canyon. The succubus Selene stood in front of them, clad in her pitch-black armour, and a few steps ahead Aura and Asmodeus stood as the vanguard. The canyon was barely three to four meters wide and its sides were steep and smooth, making any kind of hasty climb impossible. There was nothing on the other side of the canyon save the glowing purple walls of the bounded field, but they knew this would soon change. “…two…” continued Selene. The king tightened the grip on his blade. He could feel a mass of thoughts and violent emotions flowing in their direction from far away, and the distance seemed to shorten by the second. The unstable path between worlds was rapidly assembling itself, and soon enough a horde of demons would burst from the other side. “There’s at least a thousand,” Aura muttered next to him. “Most medium sized, a few big ones.” The presence on the other side grew stronger, and soon he could make them out individually. They probably knew something was expecting them on the other side, but planned to charge in regardless. “…one…” “It’s a bit late to go pee now, isn’t it?” Sergei said, drawing a nervous laugh from the men around them that quieted down almost instantly. They all held their breath for a second, and… “BREACH!” Selene howled. With a thundering crack, the space around the barrier wall twisted on itself and fractured, and from it burst a torrent of grotesque monsters of various shapes and sizes. They roared and screamed in grave and shrill voices alike, trampling each other as they rushed out of the hole toward the mouth of the canyon. The knights held their ground as the beasts charged. It would be mere seconds before the avalanche of monsters reached them, seemingly with enough force to run them over. Everyone readied their swords and dug their heels deep, staring what seemed like certain death in the face. And then a different roar thundered through the canyon. The red-haired king was the first to meet the avalanche, howling with a voice more powerful and terrifying than any of the demons could manage. He swung his blade in a wide arc, cleaving the demon vanguard in half and throwing his armoured body against the advancing horde with all his strength. The ground cracked where he stepped as if it were struck by lightning, and he swung almost blindly, cutting through the demons as easily as one would swing a blade at empty air. The men knew that the king was not human. He looked and acted much like a pleasant, if slightly awkward human boy, but they knew he was not like them. Yet as they saw the charging horde grind to a halt and break before him, they understood for the first time just what that truly meant. A swordsman fights with cleverness and skill, tipping the balance between life and death by luck, courage and their sheer mastery of arms. Such skills are needed because they know their weaknesses, and must learn to overcome them. What they saw before bore no resemblance to such men. The king was a monster. A creature born the blood beyond mortal men. A monster with no weaknesses had no need for technique, it needed only exert its power. And with this realization came another, far more heartening one: at last, for the peasant-born knight whose families had struggled for generations against the hordes of the Scar, the fearsome monster was on their side. Several demons had managed to squeeze past Asmodeus’ charge, but over half took less than a couple steps before being cut down by Aura’s blade. Unlike her husband’s wild charge, she fought with a terrifying efficiency, her every movement as precise as clockwork. Her attacks held neither rage not aggression, they were simply exact, measured, and unavoidably lethal. The king inspired terror on his enemies, but terror at least could send them into a frenzy. Facing the queen inspired nothing but cold, paralyzing despair. The sight destroyed the demon’s morale as decisively as it bolstered that of the knights. Whatever fear they might have had, it evaporated as they readied to meet what the fraction of the horde made it past the king and queen. Together with the black-armoured succubus, they made short work of what few critters squeezed through, allowing nothing but their enemies’ dripping blood to reach the mouth of the canyon. Two hours passed as such until the last of the horde fell to the queen’s blade, and the assembled warriors let out a collective sigh of relief, many dropping to the floor in exhaustion. The king surveyed the group anxiously, holding his breath until he had verified everyone’s state: they were tired and bruised, but they were alive and well. Silently, he let out a sigh of his own, clearing his throat to address them all. “You have all performed exceptionally, and I want you to know I am proud to call you my companions,” he said as they all stared in silence, looking at him rather strangely. “Thanks to your tireless effort and bravery we have—Sorry, is there something on my face?” he interrupted himself, noticing the blank look on the men’s faces. They sat quietly for a moment longer before Sergei let out a snorting chuckle, quickly giving way to a cackling laugh that the rest of the soldiers couldn’t help joining. Smirking and shaking her head in amusement, Aura shoved the side of her freshly-cleaned sword at his face, letting him see his own reflection. Every man and woman present was dirty and bloodied, but only one of them had charged headfirst into the horde. As the demons’ morale had broken, Asmodeus had pushed his way through their ranks and blocked their retreat, trapping them between him and the advancing wall of death spearheaded by Aura. Over the next half hour, he had personally fought a whole third of the demon horde. As a result, every inch of his front was died with the dark red blood of the demons. His armour was splattered with the innards of the creatures he had torn apart, and a chunk of flesh still clung between two of his front teeth, a result of having had his sword knocked from his hands and resorted to cracking a Deimos’ neck with his fangs. The sight must have been terrifying during the battle, but having regained his typical unassuming demeanour, the dissonance looked simply comical. “Right, nevermind,” he muttered embarrassedly, dislodging the chunk of meat off his teeth. “We won. We’re all alive. Let’s get out of here.” “On your feet, you louts!” barked Sergei, prompting the other five men to stand. “Salute!” The king returned the gesture, watching them turn and march back to the camp. Selene gave him a mock salute as well before trotting right behind them, leaving him alone with Aura. “We did it,” she said calmly, patting his blood-soaked shoulder. “Flawless victory. Not bad for your first field command.” “You did the commanding, I just stood beside you and acted stiff.” “You chewed through almost half of the horde on your own. Somewhat literally, from what I see,” she added, picking a bit of what she guessed was monster’s intestine off his hair. “If you start with your whole ‘am I doing enough’ routine after this, I’ll be required to punch you.” “Yes ma’am,” he sighed obediently, meeting her caring smile with his own they both marched back after their men. I just finished writing the last line of text in the game. Bloody finally. I still have to give it a second pass and actually dump the text into the game, but the code’s all ready for playtesting. I still plan to have a few runs through it myself before I declare it’s off Alpha, but all the heavy lifting Is officially done.
Also, by calling on beta testers now, I get to keep my promise to at last start the beta process before the New Year. Technically. Sort of. Last scene took me petty long, especially given that it’s a fairly standard sex scene without any of the fancy structuring I tried on the others, but I’m particularly happy with how it turned out. I had gotten to the point where I could knock out a sex scene in two writing sessions or so, but I can’t deny that slowing down and tackling each action as if it were its own particular mini-scene lends a much better flow and feeling to the whole thing. Or at least necessitates fewer rewrites during revision. Just like last time, anybody interested please send a message to [email protected]. Every new build will be accessible to >$5 patrons at my Patreon page by default, with no expectation that they submit any reports (though of course they’re welcome!) Well, that’s about it. As a bonus, I leave you off with another short story snippet, posted here. Happy/Merry/Non-miserable whatever it is you do to everyone and see you after the New Year, provided the blazing southern hemisphere summer and mandatory family-gathering overeating doesn’t knock me out of commission. Moving slower than expected on the game’s last sex scene, though it’s not unexpected. The setup had to go through several revisions before I ended up with something I was happy with, and it took me some time to get the flow of the scene to where I wanted it.
Still, this is definitely it. Just need to get through the rest of the scene, have a final run through to verify everything works, and then it’ll finally move to Beta. Castle Terracanum – Royal Quarters
Two days before the battle. The young red-haired king let out a tired sigh, letting the quill fall off his aching hand and stretching out his arms. He glanced idly about his office, peeking past the mountain of papers on his desk as he confirmed to himself that he had finished the last of the day’s work. With the recent influx of farmers and the reclamation of enough land to sustain them, the recently re-founded Kingdom of Terracanum was finally beginning to look like a place people actually lived in. Granted, it was still rather more like a farming village with a castle in the centre than a “Kingdom” proper, but at the pace they were going, they would likely get there soon enough. Of course, as the population increased so did the complexity of managing the settlement, and thus the king found himself being introduced to the soul-numbingly dull practice of administrative paperwork. The old sage Sophos, his adviser, had warned him about enlisting some form of bureaucratic personnel before things got too complex, but that was easier said than done. Literacy, let alone accounting, were not usually among the typical skills found in the sort of people that’d brave crossing the demon-infested wasteland just for the promise of a patch of arable land. Yet, as the workload increased and the castle’s surroundings became busier, the young king finally began to grasp the reality of the situation: he was really in charge of all these people’s well-being. “Gods help them all,” he muttered. Standing up from his desk, King Asmodeus the Second looked out his office’s window to the men and women training below. Sixty or so fresh recruits had enlisted in Terracanum’s fledgling military, and Queen – and General – Aura had wasted no time in devising a proper training regimen to whip them into shape, lovingly nicknamed by said recruits as “the grinder”. Whatever their complaints – and there were many – the results were hard to argue with. What few of them managed to make it through more than a couple of months of the not-quite-torture came out the other end as sturdy, exceedingly focused warriors. The king smiled as he surveyed the swordsmanship practice, catching sight of the diminutive red-haired figures in the back row. His and Aura’s children, Ryn and Ariana, seemed to be playing along with the recruit’s training, swinging around a pair of wooden swords as if imitating the others’ endurance training. “No, wait, that’s not playing,” he corrected himself as he saw Aura howling instructions at the two children just as she did to the soldiers. Ryn immediately straightened his back and Ariana switched her grip on her sword, both looking wholeheartedly focused as they continued practicing their swings. ”They’re little kids, dear,” the king muttered to himself, shaking his head. Standing to the side was the only knight not taking part in the training. Sergei, Aura’s gruff second-in-command, had broken his leg when a group of demons ambushed a caravan that he and Deus had been escorting. The king had barely made it in time to crush the attacking Ghast’s skull just as it was trying to bite Sergei’s leg off, and later carried the injured knight back into the castle. The wound had been severe, but nothing Aura’s healing magic couldn’t deal with, and he’d be back in fighting shape in another day or two. Sergei appeared completely unfazed by the experience, and indeed claimed that it wasn’t even the worst he’d ever been wounded, yet, as Deus saw him standing there watching the training, he kept recalling the image of him lying on the ground covered in his own blood. If he had been only a second slower… “Stop, stop, not again,” he groaned, rubbing his temples. “Stop imagining it already.” Turning back to his desk, he stared at the long map that had been at the centre of his thoughts for the past days. A drawing of a narrow canyon, and the schematics of their fastidiously planned battle strategy. If they were to carry this operation as planned, he needed to trust his men to do their work while he did his. It was a simple thought to formulate, but doing so did nothing to ease the knot on his stomach every time he recalled just how fragile humans could be. Sighing, he turned away from the desk and headed out for the training field. Maybe some exercise would take his mind off it. Considering a lot of this project has been a long succession of me trying to get cute with the coding and then immediately regretting it as I realize what a clusterfuck I ended up with, I’m frankly surprised but how well it holds up. There’s still critical bugs, sure, but they’re more the “I forgot to put TRUE instead of NIL in that one place so nothing happened” instead of the whole thing crashing to desktop.
I’m happy to have finally nailed down the structure for the ending and written most of the setup. Settling exactly where the scenes are going is not necessarily the longest step, but it can generate massive delays down the line if I go into things half-assed and change my mind later. Fell a little behind schedule this week, but I’ll see about making up for it tomorrow. In any case, the second iteration of the last quarter of Phase 2 is done, and again I’m pretty satisfied with how these ended up turning out.
The third and final iteration’s likely going to be… actually, I have no idea if this’ll be easier or harder to write. I usually only get a rough sketch of what the scene will do before I start banging keys. The characters’ personalities are often the ones that end up guiding the minutiae of each scene, and I’ve run into situations where I’ve had to scrap/requite/dramatically extend certain scenes once I realized Character Y would likely do X instead of Z. You need to be a particular kind of doormat to end up worried about accommodating the feelings of people who are mere figments of your own imagination, but here I am. Still, I want to be done with this by the next weekend so I can FINALLY start on the finale. See you soon. In case anybody has been wondering why this page has been silent, I've been posting weekly updates in my Patreon page so as not to clutter this blog (and peoples' feeds) so much with what are essentially repetitions of "got [x] part done this week". Still, figured I'd post something here for a change... One of the reasons I chose TADS as the platform for my games is the versatility and level of control it gives authors to craft particular scenarios. A skilled programmer can do just about anything in an elegant, efficient manner. Not being anything even remotely close to a programmer, I can also do just about anything, only in a clumsy, bloated, repetitive and infuriatingly lengthy manner. My code’s a goddamn mess, is what I’m getting at. I bring this all up because I just got done writing and, more importantly, implementing and testing one of the three possible versions of the game’s last quarter, which is basically one big scene that looks relatively simple while playing but is anything but if you look under the hood. I am 100% sure that there’s probably some functionality I’m missing that would let me get this done in way less lines of code but… well, fuck it, I just brute-forced it this time. At least I already have the code set up, so that part only requires copy-pasting for the other two possible permutations.
Anyhow, stuff should flow smoother for the other two chunks, and I’m pretty happy with how this part turned out. I’m trying to speed up to get this done this year, but unfortunately, real life work is mounting as well so… we’ll see. That’s about it for now. |
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