Sharks are cool and comfortable!
Elden Thing | Back & Body Hurts Platinugggggh Rewards Member
Profile pic and banner credits: sharkaeopteryx art by @superkiak! eggbug by eggbug! Mash-up by me!
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I'm a Vietnamese cis woman born and currently living in the U.S. You may know me from Sandwich, from Twitter or Mastodon (same username), or on Twitch as Sharkaeopteryx. I do not have a Discord or Bluesky account.
Ask me about language learning/teaching, cooking/eating food, late diagnosis ADHD, and volunteer small business mentoring. Or don't, I'm not the boss of you.
I think people deserve to be young, make mistakes, and grow without being held to standards they don't know about yet and are still learning. So, if you are under 22, please don't try to strike up a friendship or get involved in discussions on my posts.
Please don't automatically assume I follow/know/co-sign someone just because I reposted something from them—sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Also, if you think being removed as a follower when we're not mutuals is a cardinal sin, please do not follow me.
reading this article and having played Yazeba's is setting fireworks off in my brain about having stickers on certain pages in a CYOA story, so you can have an inventory and conditional progression benchmarks, then I begin considering my desire to learn how to use Twine again
so my train of thought is clearly wandering far afield, but I'm enjoying the reports from the safari it's on
Serious question: what sort of visualizations would you find useful? I have exactly 0 experience with the design side of Interactive Fiction, but I adore graph databases and would love to have a hobby project as an excuse to use them once in a while.
Not sure if you are familiar of the works by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey http://e-merl.com/. He has some interesting crossings between interactive fiction and comics. Kinda like the hypecomics and infinite canvas trends of those old days of internet proposed by Scott McCloud and all of that.
You would probably be interested in A Duck has an adventure. A really old "hyper comic/game" made in flash from arund 2012 I think?
There is a copy that kinda works with the Ruffle emulator even with the Actionscript 3 wargning https://archive.org/details/ADHAV
He alsd has more of these, but are all old flash game, I think you can run some of those with some players if you can donwload the SWF files https://www.kongregate.com/accounts/Stillmerlin
Here are his description on each one http://e-merl.com/hypercomics Also a full thesis on this stuff: http://e-merl.com/theory/thesis
He was indeed creating an engine for this, called the Tarquin engine but I guess it never amount to anything or other things happened (proably the death of flash)..
But I feel that we are getting near this prospect once again. You know we need to revive hypercard or Macromedia Director, or pertefect Twine or grab ideas fomr these old engines :).
Edit: By the way, I remember reading the UFO 54-40 book as a kid, I read it in Spanish and I absolutely adored the Ultima ending because it gets constantly mentioned in the book on how to get there and making emphasis that no decisions were the thing that let you there... you eventually arrive at Ultima because you understand what they mean even unconcionously, and just scan eh book for the ending. I adored that idea from that book so much, like the game congratualtes me for actually breaking its own rules.
I also liked other type of books that had like escape from Particular ly the Escape from the Kingdom of Frome.
The peculiarities of these is that there was one ending and one ending only. But you would end up going in circles a lot tryign to find your way out. There were blurbs like telling you if you have been here before, go to page XX, otherwise keep reading and it would show you a different set of evenst assumign you alreayd passed there.
The next thing would be what, probably the DND adventure books? Those were kinda neat, but I kinda disliked the roll your dice or you die.. I always cheated on those because I never felt the dice working great with the books... they do feel better as a game book in the digital age (I have read the Tin man games adventure books in mobile (https://tinmangames.com.au), and they have better pacing and structure wth the dice btw).
But yeah all of those things are so neat... I need to fil my need on creating something around these... a tool would be nice to contribute to yu know- Something open soruce definitely.
Different genre, but I've recently been into the idea of metroidvania progression graphs where you just show "doors", "keys", and "bosses", where e.g. https://i.imgur.com/GuRIeEM.png is one way to go through Super Metroid (without a helpful legend for shapes and colors because I'm lazy), and it really helps you see branches and loops more clearly than a game map does. Suspecting that it's often a good idea to start with a graph when designing things.
Oh, I like this! Thank you for linking it. The article reminded me of a post from Sam Kabo Ashwell—I'm betting you've read this already, but people coming to your cohost may not have—"Standard Patterns in Choice-Based Games," which aims to identify various structures these games can take and to introduce some provisional terminology: https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-patterns-in-choice-based-games/
love this kinda nerd shit
need to make a side account just for savin' shit
btw, y'all got me reconsidering a visual novel (of my first) that i never finished making
and a forum thread-like flowchart of 300+ comments i'm possibly only halfway done makin'
and flowchartin' visual novels i've enjoyed 🤔
but who's got the time, really 🤷🏿♂️
