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Thermaldetonator

[Dev Log] BIG GAME HUCKSTER$$$$

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I'm building my first game this Wizard Jam! 

 

I've chosen BIG GAME HUCKSTER$$$$ as my episode title. 

 

I'm doing a simple take on a Game Dev Story style economic sim. 
It will be pretty silly. 

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That was a super bear bones explanation, but I've been super busy today.

 

I'm making the game in Twine.

My design pillars are:

  • to make it silly and fun
  • to prioritize player choice 
  • making the game company gross

I'm trying to keep the scope pretty small, but I've never really seen a sim in Twine;it'll be interesting to make. 

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Yesterday was the most productive day I've had yet. I've committed to the episode and concept. I didn't get the actual game where I wanted it. I attached a picture of the tiny, tiny bit of story I built in Twine. However, I watched a number of tutorials that will end up saving me a lot of time in the long run. I haven't built anything in Twine before, so just seeing that you can make if/then behaviors and basic variables in Sugarcube was a revelation. (I woke up planning a really complicated work around. Additionally, I learned a bunch of Javascript that may or may not prove useful. (It also mixed me up a little with distinctions between JS, Harlowe, and Sugarcube, ugh). Most importantly, I recruited the amazing root from the team seeking forum to help with art for the game. I'm so thrilled about that. 

 

Work is really crazy this week. I'm way behind where I'd like to be though. My number one priority is to get a working bare bones prototype as soon as possible. I just want it to let the player build a couple games and get a response in their resources (money and prestige at this point). If I can get that basic gameplay loop then I can add things like more variables for the games, possibly other resources, and some elements of randomness. (I feel like some element of randomness is super key to the risk/reward and fun of strategy games and economic sims). So my goal is to get a bare bones prototype running by Friday. 

 

We'll see how things go today. I'm having trouble getting variables from passages outside the main story chain to populate in my story. Hopefully I can figure out those small bugs and get going! I'm also going to try to recruit someone to help with music. 

 

 

big game hucksters night one.png

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Sounds like you're learning your way around twine pretty well. Looking forward to it!

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Major progress today. I think my variables from other passages are being called to the rest of the story and being operated on correctly. Yay! 

 

Someone in the Slack today suggested trying Ink/Inky instead of Twine. I tinkered with the idea a bit (actually dove into the tutorial). I'm sticking with Twine, because I don't want to add learning Ink to my list of tasks. I also got things working, really rapidly today. I'm getting hopeful this game might actually be playable and have some fun bits! I do like a lot of the advantages of Ink though. I'm very intrigued to tool around with it later. 

 

I definitely I can get my basic prototype up by Friday. Hopefully I'll be able to ask some friends for a little bit of feedback. It would be good to get a sense of which things to prioritize in adding complexity if/when time allows. 

 

Lastly, I'm hoping I can also get some help with music. I have a weird vision for it and I'll post a separate reply with my basic though here and on the other thread. 

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I'm putting out a call for some background music. It would just need to be one or two longish music tracks that would be at home in a lost blizzaro 90s Maxis game. 

 

Some ideas for reference: 

 

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