Weekly Quack - April 25th

EVIL Weekend Ducklings!

Few announcements this week - so I will be quick.

We are continuing to get the story put into Twine. Here's a snippet of what it currently looks like:

I ended up having to zoom out to fit it all on one screenshot! I have run into some continuity errors that our lovely Evil Genius Writer Duck, Kevin, has helped me take care of.

Even with his help though, it seems to be a struggle to keep organized the overall flow of the story. There are points that don't seem to flow naturally or we get lost in which messages need to be remembered and referenced.

While it seems simple in this picture, each passage (square) can contain if statements checking for different values of S.A.M and previous messages hit to display different messages to the player.

This chaos is the main reason why we decided to put the story into this format to start, this way we can try and control this chaos and edit the story. Finding these problems means this was valuable. While this is frustrating and a little disheartening, it means that we're making progress on polishing and editing the story out!

What's currently on your mind for the story?

I, Madame Evil, have not written this story. All of that credit belongs to our EVIL Genius Kevin Brady, so most of my ideas revolve around adjusting the formulas for S.A.M and balancing the choices presented at the end.

We want to make sure that the player had the opportunity to hit X amount of individual S.A.M value to ensure that when that value is used in a big decision it didn't require a perfect run to attain. From just inputting the data into Twine I can say that I don't believe there are enough opportunities to adjust S.A.M's values as there should be. I am currently concerned that some values required for major story points are incredibly difficult to attain.

I think this can be remedied by writing a structure for any time the player responds. For example, each main mission should provide a "higher-stakes" choice the player must make. Each option presented to the player should relate to increasing or decreasing one of S.A.M's three values: Trust, Empathy, and Confidence.

In addition to this, small choices throughout the story should offer at minimum one choice that influences one of these values at a minor adjustment rate.

This is obviously something that needs to be tested and I need to talk to EVIL Genius Kevin about how much rework would be required for this. It's important to note that while this story has been edited before and isn't in its first draft, it most certainly isn't in it's final.

We have a lot of work left to do, Ducklings. It will take some time but we're confident the game will come out better than before.

Is that all?

That is all, Ducklings! We're still making progress even amid these troubling times.

As always thank you for your EVIL support and remember to always be your true EVIL selves!