Going to be unloading a lot of these posts, so bear with the incoming flood. I really regret not keeping up with everybody’s posts and thoughts, as they’ve all been seriously interesting and amazing.
Returning to my 2nd ever project, the text based game, was nostalgic. It was pretty funny to compare difficulties I had or things I straight up didn’t know that I could easily take care of now, as well as the depth of coding I got into with the choice trees that I didn’t really cover half as well at all in my final project.
At first, I was utterly lost for what exactly to do with a text-based game. The examples we saw in class were wildly varied, and each showed a crazy amount of potential mechanics down their unique paths. This total creative block ended up actually being partially why my project was late. In the end, I forced myself to start from somewhere and just slapped down my favorite color, pale lavender, as a placeholder background. The awkwardness of the actual color in comparison to the text felt stifling, and in that moment of non-text influenced atmosphere, I decided that I’d make a largely atmospheric, story-like text game (as opposed to like, a massive scale land with interconnected landmarks). I deadened the color to a much more ominous shade, and decided to try for a tense, mysterious feeling in my writing.
I realized that, to accentuate an actual feeling of tension, I needed to include a time-based element to the games. If it weren’t for this, I would’ve probably spent a tenth the amount of time I actually ended up pouring just to get the damn thing to work. A huge problem I faced was that when you reached the time limit in an area enough for the danger timer to show, hitting the danger limit again in a different area would “move” you back to the first scene the timer appeared in, with all of its specific choices. This meant a scene lock loop that would be unescapable per play run, and really made it hard for me to test the playability of later parts in the game, which was the other issue. I’d decided to contextualize the timing element as breath – if you ran out, you started from the beginning, but it’d refill every time you made a choice and entered a new scene – and had a lot of trouble balancing it between having no effect on urgency and making the game an unplayable level of difficulty (some scenes would reduce your maximum “breath capacity”).
Overall, this project ended up actually being a lot of fun, and I’m happy for the basic foundational coding it taught me for later projects and onwards.