Friday The 13th Update | Week Ending on 14th of March

What a supernatural week, huh? Lost an hour, had a full moon, Friday the 13th, actually got work accomplished. What a set of rare occurrences this week...

Hello, Ducklings! I am back again this week to provide an update on Project S.A.M and Evil Quacks!

How's it quacking?

We have picked out our first "Pond Cast" topics and our recording date. I won't reveal them to you all, because it is significantly more EVIL to make you wait and that's what we're about here.

But I can say that I am very excited for these to release on the standard places you find your podcasts.

Had an EVIL Initiation, ya know, the usual.

We officially had our first meeting with our EVIL affiliate, Joseph Chew, and brought him up to speed on the project.

We took some time to discuss the changes we want to make to S.A.M and even have a rough structure laid out. If we're lucky, he'll even write some developer updates of his own to get into the nitty-gritty system structure conversations we have.

But what if I wanna know the nitty-gritty stuff now?

Well do not worry, ducklings, I will be writing them in the meantime. I want to more thoroughly explain our thoughts and what we discussed in a separate post so I have more room, but for now, take this WIP of a picture!

Weren't you also doing something with the story too?

Yes! I am doing quite a lot right now. I have succeeded in putting the first 3 missions in Twine and am now trying to find a way to expand the default grid in twine. It became apparent to me that past the first mission, our missions branch quite a bit. While all that branching makes for a variety of playthroughs available to our players, it gets very messy, very fast. I am trying to keep everything neat and organized and will continue adding missions once I figure this out.

BUT!

Our EVIL Genius, Kevin Brady, has agreed to come back to check how the story plays through and make any edits needed once I get it all set up in twine. After all, this story is his and I am excited to see him excited to see his creation get a step closer to how it would feel when playing it. Maybe I can coerce him into writing some of these too...

What does this mean for Project S.A.M?

Project S.A.M is continuing to make the process even if it is back in a "planning" stage of the game. Putting the story into Twine has allowed us to experience all the paths, branching, value changes, etc in time with the player choices instead of simply reading it based on a JSON file.

This will help provide insight into balancing out just how much S.A.M learns from the player's choices. We may be EVIL but we don't want AI to take over just yet...that's step 10. We're able to experience the flow of conversation naturally instead of just scanning over a JSON file trying to find the next option amid hundreds of linking objects. What parts of the conversation seem to flow naturally? What parts feel abrupt? Do we think S.A.M's value changes here are justified? Does S.A.M properly remember all the choices he's supposed to? Does the story escalate too quickly? Not quickly enough?

All these questions and more can now be evaluated while navigating through the story.

Also while putting all of these chat messages into Twine I started to re-evaluate the object structure for chat messages. I'll talk about the current structure for S.A.M and how this along with my current day job experience has given me a different view on how to organize this. Overall taking the time to put the story in Twine has aided us in evaluating gameplay, story, and system structure. I consider all of this a win especially since Twine is open source and fairly easy to learn.

Is that all Madame EVIL?

Yes, ducklings, that is all for this post. I'll put up another one on Friday or Saturday with a detailed look at the System structure.

Until then, remember to be your true EVIL selves.