SeanMay

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Everything posted by SeanMay

  1. PSN ID exchange

    I'm SeanMay on PSN...Sony has never called me out for using my real name on the service and I'm still not sure why.
  2. So this is going to be my second attempt at making a Twine game for Wizard Jam. I'm really excited to get this started. The title I picked, "I'll Kill The Last Alien" spurred me to write a bit of a prologue that will start off the game in some way: ------------------------- We called them Voids because looking at them was like staring at nothing and everything at the same time. It's hard to describe the sensation, seeing a shape that you can't quite comprehend but knowing that it is there, and in all likelihood wants to kill you. And kill they did. This ship was on its way to Gliese 832 c, the closest habitable planet we could find after Earth and Mars were a lost cause...at least the closest one that wouldn't freeze us to death or immolate us as we entered the atmosphere. 16 lightyears away. And we made it almost 10 of those before they got to us. It's been 4 years since they breeched our hull and started to take over. We didn't even realize what had happened until a year later, when a few crew members they had infected decided to flush all the cooling fluid for the jumpdrive into space. We thought it was terrorism at first, when the neutron core went critical and blinked half the ship out of existence in a second. 535,341 people dead in a tenth of a second. We thought losing that many people was our biggest worry. Now, reflecting on it, they were probably the lucky ones. The Void that were on the other side of the bulkhead, the side of the ship that survived, decided to drop the pretense and reveal their true form. They didn't need to hide anymore, now that they had the advantage. We couldn't warp home if we wanted to. Now it was time for them to toy with us. They hunted us through the corridors of the ship, eviscerating vast swaths of people with no hesitation. The number of survivors dwindled. First 400,000....then after a month, we were down to 30,000 left alive on the ship...if living in fear of every moment counted as 'living'. Over time, we learned how to avoid them. They could effortlessly phase through ballistic glass to slaughter whoever was unlucky enough to be in the room on the other side, but putting even paper on the windows rendered them incapable of moving through. We lost another 10,000 people even after that, people unlucky enough to be in the hallway when one of them passed, people who weren't watching the security camera feeds close enough...and probably more than a few who just wanted to die and stop living in constant fear. But then, about a year ago, we started fighting back. And to our surprise, we started winning. It turned out there was a reason they boarded our ship when it was in the darkest, most remote area along our path. UV Light was their enemy. We started developing weapons made out of whatever we could find, cobbling together crude UV "rifles" that would produce a concentrated beam of light. It tore right through them like they were made of wet paper. Funny thing was that the thing that saved us was moving ourselves into the History Park section of the ship. The LED lighting we used for everything else on the ship didn't put out enough UV to stop them, but the ancient incandescent and fluorescent bulbs used in the simulations of environments from the 1930s-2000s put out enough UV to keep the things away. One by one, we started rebuilding. And we stared killing them, getting bolder as we developed our UV weapons with more precision and power. We were down to 15,321 survivors when we realized there was just one of them left. On the far side of the ship, near the bulkhead that saved our lives once before. According to the security cam feeds, it looks almost like the thing is trying to escape the ship...but if these things can't phase through paper, they definitely can't phase through 32 feet of solid inconel-titanium alloy. We all agreed that killing the thing was our only choice. I was the woman unlucky enough to draw the short straw to have to do it. They put me in glowing UV armor and gave me the best rifle they could slap together, along with a backpack full of UV grenades. It's overkill, but we've learned not to leave things to chance. Everyone is watching me as I lay my hand against the 'Open' button to enter the parts of the ship no person other than the Strike Teams have seen for two years at this point. This is my task. I'll kill the last alien. ----------------------------------------- The 'game' itself really serves as just a way to move through a story non-linearly as the player character traverses the ship on their way to killing the last alien aboard. There will be audio logs, diary entires, and memories of what life was like before things got torn apart. So, less game, more interactive fiction. I'll post updates and builds here as I move through the dev process. Also, if anyone would want to collaborate on some art for the game, I'd like to have some visual elements but lack the ability to actually draw. I'm on the IT Slack or you can just message me through the forums if you're interested.
  3. I'll Kill The Last Alien

    Well, this is a sad update for me. It was probably not the best time for me to start up working on something when my life was so turbulent, and the last couple of weeks have been really bad, not conducive to game development (things have gotten better though!) So obviously the game won't be ready for the end of the jam, but I do feel like I have a good base to develop something once things stabilize for me! I'm so impressed with all the great stuff everyone has been putting out over the course of this jam, hopefully next time I'll be in a place where I can complete something too!
  4. I'll Kill The Last Alien

    Well, today's short work session was dominated by discovering that the names for my passages didn't work well in Twine. Apparently Twine doesn't play nice with passages that use the _ character. Alright, more tomorrow, I'll begin the day by correcting the ~50 incorrect passage names. Yay.
  5. I'll Kill The Last Alien

    After making no progress yesterday on this, I came back to it today and got a lot of planning done. I've planned it out to where you can reach the 'end' and discovered some things along the way (like my protagonist's name and the real reason the aliens invaded the ship, which is good to know). As of right now, I know this is going to take a lot of writing, and getting it finished by the end of the jam will be tough, but I'm really excited to do it. The space of the story has expanded so much since the first foray into it, but I think, once done, there really could be something here! Tomorrow will bring planning out a couple more side stories, then actually starting to write the damn thing.
  6. [Dev Log] If On A Winter's Night A Gamer

    Great start! And, yeah, giving people true options can lead to the story expanding exponentially, but I'm sure you'll figure out how to control it.
  7. [Dev Log] If On A Winter's Night A Gamer

    Well, you really don't need them at all if you don't want to use them. A Twine story is basically just a webpage with some extra stuff on top of it...and exporting from Twine doesn't require any knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS. So, you could make a Twine story without knowing any of those languages. That being said, if you would want the story to look different than the standard Twine format (white background, black text, plain serif font), you'll need to use some CSS to change the style...but that's something to worry about toward the end, anyway, so when you get to a place where you want to make some style changes, let me know, I'll help you out. And honestly, you probably won't need JavaScript to do anything, Twine's bulit-in macros and such probably handle 90% of the programming-related stuff you'd want to do in a Twine game.
  8. [Dev Log] If On A Winter's Night A Gamer

    Oh man, trust me, I am just working off the top of my head for the most part , so don't put pressure on yourself, just make what you want to make. I have a good bit of experience in Twine and I'm pretty good with HTML/CSS/JavaScript, too, so if you need help on how to do something, let me know, I'd be more than happy to help you out! I also have a lot of experience in feeling depressed and anxious, having a short attention span, and such, so let me know if you need any help on that as well!
  9. I'll Kill The Last Alien

    Thanks, fellow developer of a game called I'll Kill The Last Alien! Yours is looking like a lot of fun as well!
  10. I'll Kill The Last Alien

    Dev day one went pretty well, I feel like the story is firming up. I went ahead and created a map for the ship (which I've called the Valiant) to allow building out the story a little easier. I'm going to work first on mostly writing the critical path to get to the 'end' of the story, even though that's not really the main point of this game, but it'll give me a good idea of the boundaries of the story, and I can go back and fill it in. Essentially the protagonist will move through the environment and they'll have the opportunity to interact with objects that launch them into a side-story featuring a character who had owned the object or did something meaningful in the room. I realize I'm sort of channeling What Remains of Edith Finch here, even though I haven't played it yet. I've also included a picture of what the story looks like in Twine right now. There's a ton more to do (and a lot of writing), but I like where this is going!
  11. WJ5 Team Recruiting

    Pitch: I'm making "I'll Kill The Last Alien", a text adventure in Twine set on an almost-dead spaceship beset by weird Lovecraftian space vampires...I'm trying to brush up on my fiction writing skills that have been atrophying in the past couple years as well as seeing how much fun CSS and JavaScript stuff I can put into a Twine game. What I need: Art for backgrounds and/or characters. Although a lot can be done with text, bringing this ship to life with some visual elements could be really cool. What I'm doing: Writing and programming the game in Twine, with a very outside chance of producing some background music for the game. Contact Info: PM me here on the forums or message me on the IT Slack, where I'm @Seanmay Time Zone: Eastern Portfolio: Not much in terms of game dev, but you can check out my website to see I'm a pretty decent UI designer, I just can't draw worth anything. I've written a novel and some short stories that have been published in some magazines or collections, you can find them here on Amazon but if you want to read them, no need to buy them, just ask me and I'll send you a copy.
  12. WIZARD JAM 5 // Welcome Thread

    I tried and failed miserably at Wizard Jam 2 or 3, but I'm back, baby! I'm looking forward to actually finishing this year.
  13. Idle Streaming Community: Twitchy, Tasty

    Hey! I have barely streamed, but I'm thinking about starting, maybe this will push me to actually do it. https://www.twitch.tv/lumiras85
  14. Wow, that looks so much like the new X-Com I feel like 2K's lawyers might start to get very interested in this game.
  15. Hitman: Steve Gaynor Edition

    I agree about the sprawl of this level, it does feel a lot less useful than Sapienza. There's a lot of people, but there's not a whole lot you can do with them, and if you try, there's a hundred people within a few feet that will notice it. Having so many people around at all times makes this level by far more difficult than either two before it. That being said, I sort of like that they're changing the environments up in terms of density. You could get around quite a bit in Paris as Helmut, and Sapienza's secure areas were large enough that you could stay out of people's field of vision pretty easily throughout the environment. Marrakesh feels much more dangerous, but that has made the hits more satisfying. As for making it a little easier:
  16. First off, I'd love to hear a spoiler-filled discussion of Her Story next week. I think it's an incredible game, and I'd love to hear what everyone thinks of what the story means. Also, I'm glad that they brought up something I'd been feeling ever since starting up Arkham Knight: the general feeling that I'm playing as a horribly bad person who is presented as a hero. The game may call him Batman, but I'm not so sure that version of Batman is the one anyone outside of Frank Miller wants to see. I honestly just felt so gross playing the game and watching 'Batman' torture person after person to get information from them. My first breaking point came when: This really honestly made me sick to my stomach. It made me sick in the way that GTA V's infamous torture scene did. Except in GTA V, the torturing is done by a person (Trevor) who is clearly made out to be a murderous psychopath and is presented very clearly as a criminal...and even then, the game concedes that the torture was unnecessary and entirely not worth it. Not in Arkham Knight, though! Here, torture is seen as a very clear and very useful tactic that results in the protagonist exactly what they want every time. As much as they give you dumb 'Detective Vision' quests that are really just walking around an environment and scanning things in, 'Batman' isn't a detective in this game, he's a gritted-teeth thug who will only use his powers of deduction if beating the shit out of the person doesn't yield the desired results. Even after he does some detective work to figure something out, there's a good likelihood he'll still give an unprovoked torture session to anyone who happens to be within arm's reach. Then there's the absolutely deplorable way the game deals with women. Within the first couple hours of the game, we have I don't think there's a single moment in the game that I saw where a female character had any kind of agency or power in the game. They all just seem to serve as damsels in distress, completely unable to do anything until 'Batman' swoops in to either save them or beat the shit out of them. Speaking of gross misogyny, the last straw for me to completely stop playing the game was when: As far as I can tell, Batman: Arkham Knight isn't a fun game at all, at least to me. It seems less like a Batman game and more like an ultra right-wing wet dream simulator.
  17. [Dev Log] Robot News

    Being the kind of person who always starts things, but rarely (if ever) finishes them, and being someone who has never developed a video game before, this seems like it'll be an entertaining disaster from start to finish. So, I settled on Robot News. It'll be built in Twine with maybe some abstract art thrown in there. Here's the concept: Long after the fall of humankind at the hands of hyper-intelligent robots, the player takes the role of one of the last humans left alive that aren't working in vast labor camps or medical experiment facilities. Compared to those people, the player's job is simple: deliver a 30-minute newscast twice a day called, unimaginatively, Robot News. We first meet the player at the end of their rope, ready to snap, done with giving the same boring broadcast every single day. It's time for the player to fight back against the oppressors. Will he survive? Probably not, but it's going to be a hell of a ride while it lasts.
  18. Well, that's settled, atte needs to develop every single video game for the rest of time. I'm so excited to see how this thing plays out. Are you planning on having any kind of meta-game or story that links the various games, or will you just present the menu as a splash screen a la illicit rom packs (hopefully with copyright-dodging BGM)?
  19. [Dev Log] Robot News

    Night...9? =========== First update in a while, mainly because I had sort of lost vision of the game and dreaded the prospect of what Robot News was going to be. Now, the game has splintered into something even more strange than I would have imagined, and will probably stand more as a document of insanity than a competently made game where you read news for robots. Topics now covered in the game include: recursion, dream logic, games-within-games, urban blight I have absolutely no idea how playable or logical this thing will be by the end of this jam, but if all I accomplish during this thing is to embrace my inner David Lynch, then I'll be happy, playable game or not
  20. [Dev Log] Robot News

    Night 2 ========= I'm glad to say that after last night's some real progress made tonight. I've set up the main loop of the broadcast, which will produce a few random bits of news like sports scores, weather, maybe traffic or other things that have values that can be put into an array and randomly picked. After the player does this broadcast enough times, they start to notice a flaw in the studio, and from there they will be able to move the story along. They can also just keep going back to their room. Here is a playable version, it's barely there but the broadcast loop is working well. http://polybiuslabs.com/robot-news/Robot-News-v01.html
  21. The style reminds me of so many hours spent watching Football Manager matches play out trying to imagine what it looks like out on the pitch. Nice work so far, I like the simplicity and concept of it.
  22. [Dev Log] Robot News

    Night 1 ------------- I didn't get much done tonight in terms of the story, I'm still trying to get my bearings with Twine. I've used it in the past, but there's still a good amount of syntax to learn. The way it uses CSS is a little weird, and I wish it would assign proper classes and IDs to the elements rather than giving them arbitrary names. I also wasted some time trying to mess with Twine 2.0, which seems more streamlined but also not nearly as good...it's built as a web page, not an executable, and things like middle clicking to create new passages don't work on the page and you can't right click anything. Still, things are proceeding. I at least have some logic set up to track how many times the player decides to go into the studio and do the broadcast, which means the story can change with various if statements instead of building out entire new passages. I'm trying to make it look good, but I haven't decided on a font yet The one I'm using right now is bold but ugly, so we'll see how long it lasts. I'm also not in love with the green on black thing I'm doing right now. Anyway, day one in the bag, let's hope day 2 sees more progress!
  23. [Released] ROBOT NEWS by me, Dinosaursssssss

    This is great! I've found tutorials for Blender to be pretty bad, but these look wonderful.
  24. I can't wait to see how these turn out! The art for Dot Gobbler looks like the most amazing copyright-dodging Pac-Man knockoff, and the prospect of seeing Obama in some sort of power armor is too exciting.