Going Up

Showing your alpha build to people

Tonight I went along to my second Norfolk Indie Games Developers meet-up. As before, it was a gathering of passionate, interesting indie devs of varying skillsets (coders, artists, writers etc) chatting about all things gaming for three+ hours.

Unlike the first time I went, this evening I had something to share. I took along the hideously unfinished and untested build of Going Up, my Twine-based interactive conversation and decided to let a room full of far more experienced games devs Have At It. (more…)

By Simon Jones, ago

The Lift: complex conversations in Twine

I’ve written before about Twine, a game making tool aimed specifically at constructing choose-your-own-adventure style text games. If you heard about Depression Quest last year (probably for all the wrong reasons), then you’ll have encountered a Twine-built game.

Anyway, I’d previously been attempting to create an elaborate steampunk adventure based on an Arms Race comic script I’d written a few years back. It could have been quite fun but was far too enormous a project to be my first foray into making games. As you can see from my blog post about responsive characters, what I was really interested in was character interactions. (more…)

By Simon Jones, ago

Game design: Responsive characters

Despite this blog post’s lofty title, I’m not a game designer. I am, however, attempting to become one, pretty much from scratch (spot the noob programming joke!).

I’m currently taking Future Learn’s programming course, which is a mostly useful but very peculiarly structured introductory course. I suspect I’ll end up learning more by working my way through Unity tutorials, in the long run. (more…)

By Simon Jones, ago