Tag: alabaster

Alabaster Processing

So general submissions for Alabaster are closed, and I’m working on incorporating the last changes that I was sent. Thanks everyone who participated — this has been really useful and interesting, and I have hopes that the end product will be interesting as well.

My plan at this point is to

— work on the file myself a while (debugging, optimizing the code, tying off some conversational loose ends that no one wrote any conversation for)

— beta-test the game (I usually hold closed beta tests, but since this has been an open project an open beta seems more appropriate as well); this will also be an opportunity for collaborators to comment on how their contributions were interpreted or add any finishing touches that they wanted to add

— upload to the archive and add IFDB info, at which point the game will be considered officially released.

What follows here is mostly a postmortem on the experiment, with some further thoughts.

Continue reading “Alabaster Processing”

Alabaster, Release 13

Release 13 is now up, and the conversation graph is getting fairly complex. There’s still lots of room for contribution, though — small contributions fleshing out the story are just as welcome as more ambitious ones.

The thing is starting to run with more delay than I would like. I have some ideas about how to streamline this, but can’t do so this afternoon. (Some of it has to do with the collaborator interface itself, but I will want to optimize any pieces that will wind up in the final game.)

Alabaster, Release 10

Thanks to Eric Eve, I’ve worked out the hanging bug in Release 9 (sorry about that!). Release 10 should be stouter.

It also comes with new dialogue and a couple of new features:

  • New “player mode” allows collaborators to try the game without the collaboration interface popping up. Try PLAYER MODE ON to activate this, and PLAYER MODE OFF to turn it off again.
  • THINK will remind the player about what he has already learned on this play-through.
  • The tag “[if immediately]…[otherwise]…[end if]” can be used to mark a variation in dialogue depending on whether a quip immediately follows its prerequisite quip, or comes in sometime later. (See the “that the safe haven seems too far away to reach tonight” quip for what this looks like in practice. This is just an extra; if it seems confusing, ignore it.)

Alabaster Release 9

…is now up, incorporating quite a large collection of new material.

There was enough there to convince me, in fact, that I needed a better index — one that would show where facts come from, as well as what they trigger. So the latest conversation graph includes that information. It also shows which conversation topics can trigger the NPC to make a followup comment later. (NPC-directed quips are the ones in square boxes rather than ovals, and they usually have a hyphenated rather than an ordinary name, because their names are never seen by the player. The latter point is just a convention on my part.)

The most recent batches of stuff introduces a few things that might reasonably be called plot developments, and that raises a new challenge: how to maintain continuity when some authors are introducing game-changing events. In one of the strands, it is possible to get Snow White asking you a riddle — which might lead to some sort of stronger alliance with her, I suppose, though I don’t know yet. In another, it is possible to communicate with the spirit of a deceased dwarf and confirm that she is definitely a vampire (at least if you believe what dwarven ghosts tell you). Other strands seem to be suggesting that she isn’t. Yet another points to the possibility of some complicated treason plot involving the true King, who is perhaps not dead, just… out of town?