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SeanMay

[Dev Log] Robot News

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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.

 

 

 

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What types of choices will the player be making? This sounds interesting.

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What types of choices will the player be making? This sounds interesting.

 

I know there will be one path where the player can just comply with the will of the robots, reading the news every day. It would be a short loop, because the player is kept in a cell and doesn't do anything other than read the news. I'll make this go on for way too long for the possibility that somebody will actually not want to fight back against oppressive robots. I'll make that path end eventually with some sort of random catastrophe like the robots kill him or the player loses his mind and kills himself.

 

The other path will be that the player sees some kind of opportunity when he's reading the news every day, like there's a loose panel in the floor or something...I haven't really figured that out yet. Once he breaks out of the prison/TV studio, he'll emerge into a world he's never seen before, filled with humanoid robots who have never seen a living human. From there, the player will be able to fight, sabotage, harass and just generally cause chaos in the robot world around him. There might even be some fist fights with robots. I know Twine allows for variables so I could essentially do some RPG-style dice rolls to see if the player survives.

 

If I want to be a real bastard, I might make the game not actually 'beatable', you just play and cause as much chaos as you can before you're inevitably taken down by the robots. I haven't quite decided that yet, but it stands to reason that a lone human in a world of robots that has no resources, no food, and no allies wouldn't survive for very long.

 

With all this, I think my biggest difficulty will be keeping the scope at a reasonable level so this thing can be actually finished by the end of the jam.

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Night 1

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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

U691gp7.jpg

 

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!

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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

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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 :)

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