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Questions about a storygame? Thoughts on Eternal? Any other IF you're playing out there?

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Here's a convenient place for anyone who wants to discuss the entries to the Year's End Contest as they trickle in. Congrats to @ninjapitka for finishing early.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
I for one really enjoyed reading through the first entry. Can't wait to read the others!

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Sorry for derail, but can we start some kind of petition for Adelynn to get rid of the colored text in profile?

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Oh, come to think of it it's probably pretty hard to read without dark mode on, huh? Guess I should change it to something that works for both.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Thanks for the review. And no, I'm not okay.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Convenient List and Links of Entry: @Killa_Robot ; @Cricket ; @EndMaster



Ford

lopz66

Coins

MicroPen

[M]izal

Corgi

enterpride

DerPrussen

Camelon

TheChef

Ogre

Mara

Cupcakitty

Shadowdrake

Wildblue

TheDeadKin

ninjapitka



End already threw Bilbo into the SHAME pit, so she can't win. But feel free to include her on your judging card anyway for a "what if" perspective if her story deserves a place. For want of 30 minutes Bilbo ...

TheCanary apparently had an entry, but it has been unpublished. So it is also ineligible to win.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

Isn't Bucky judging these as well?

And Canary submitted a story on time, just did the fool thing of not having it ready before the 2 day waiting period. So is he DQed or something?

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Yeah, I’m about halfway through them. Didn’t see any reason to tag myself.

Also yes, that’s how I’ve treated them in the past. Otherwise, it’d be insanely unfair to Bilbo. The publishing by the deadline rule shows two things: 1) that no one had extra time for editing, and 2) that all the judges will be reading the same story. If it’s unpublished, we can’t tell if it’s been edited further or had additional content added to it since the deadline.

As a third update, Ford had to unpublish his story to fix broken links, so he’s also DQ’d. We’ve racked up a lot of them. That said, Ford actually put some effort into this, so it’s worth reading anyway. Golf clap for Ford for exceeding expectations.

@enterpride are you supposed to be able to get to three different main branches based off your choices with the bear? I swear that when I used the go back button to randomly go through the story to see how many different endings there were that I somehow unlocked a whole new section of the story I hadn’t seen before, but when I restarted the game and tried to find it again, I couldn’t. So if you used some scripting in the Bear section, I think a bug might be blocking a decent chunk of your game. (But it was late, so maybe I am wrong.) If that is the case, make a note of it to fix after the judging is over. I liked the story but have been waiting to leave a comment until I got some clarification on this.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
As far as I know, there's no scripting in my game, just pages and links.

So there are two main endings of the bear fight:
- See your loved one, then wake up flows to the 'victory' branch and the following feast.
- Choosing to see a monster or remembering the whole thing forces you to the 'defeat' branch where you either drown in love of consume yourself in hatred.
So maybe it's that. Good luck with the judging! There are a lot of very good entries to choose from.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
I remember those. It must've just been the sleep exhaustion then.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

What is the two day waiting period thing that Canary had?

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Several years ago, 3J put in a feature that blocks you from publishing a new story within 48 hours of creating it as a measure to stem the tide of the 60 minute stories. So most regular users either keep a small stable at the ready or open a new one up as soon as they enter a contest.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
"small" stable. Yes, yes, a few dozen is certainly small...

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

Yeah it was just a noob move and my own fault. I didn't know I wouldnt be able to publish it for two days. 

Maybe it was a bad idea to try and join a comp for my first ever story lol

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

It's a shame @bilbo got disqualified, because I really like hers. I've hit most of the stories now, not all, but they are each good. I like how the mood varies from shades of contemplation, bittersweetness, and melancholy, to outright creepy or horrific.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

@Bucky, it looks like you did have the silver, but somehow I missed adding the amount so it would show up. Telling stories at the Sandrat earns you 120. So even with other expenses mentioned in that scene, I don't think it's possible to have less than 105 before you do the bribe. But I'll definitely correct the variable on a future edit. :) So you were supposed to be able to continue, I just forgot to award the right amount.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Okay, I thought it seemed like my money dropped more than it should have just before that segment. Minor hiccups aside, an excellent story.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Yes, I'm really enjoying it. Very different from the action/adventure stuff we usually get here, and there's definitely room for stories like these on the site.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

Ugh 15 stories, including Canary's. Glad Ford and Serpent got DQed just to lower it by 2.

I'll start with Ninja's since he submitted first and should get the bonus of me actually paying the most attention before I inevitably get bored and just start clicking through these things.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

Corgi's is already below 2.5, I'm not bothering with his either.

In fact DQed and unpublished.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

I'll try to get the rest of my ending walkthroughs up in the parlor over the next couple of days.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

All the walkthroughs are up now, unless I forgot an ending.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

@Killa_Robot there are walkthroughs in the Parlor if you want to explore the other endings. "A Child of Sandrella" is a good route to take if you've already played through once, as currently that walkthrough route accesses 7 endings. (Which I'll fix post-contest, as my ideal is to have a max of 4 choices at any end.) It isn't the best route for catching the actual stories he tells, though.

@3iguy, thank you. There is no official canon ending, but there are about 5 that I consider the "most likely" ends, if that is a thing. "A Child of Sandrella" is one of them. ("The Dreaming Forest," "The Vanishing Tale," "The Final Sacrifice," and "Kill the Muse" being the others.)

@bilbo, thanks. :) When you got the egg, did you get the ending with Sage or with Sandrella? I think "A Child of Sandrella" is the ending with the most information about what is happening. I like the idea of giving players a choice as to what they take from the captain. There's already 4 choices of gifts in the thrift shop, but it does make sense to have an option during negotiations as well. That might be something for my edit, if it works out.

@bucky "Forever Love" isn't the rarest ending, but I wanted a more traditional, happy sort of ending in the mix that wasn't too hard to reach, especially for those who aren't completionists and just want to play through once or twice and have a resolution. It also functions, with the remembrance paper, as a reward for those who do not take the 'easy way out' of money troubles.

@enterpride I did write most of the endings in the last few days of the contest (though I had most of them plotted from the beginning) so they got a little rushed - though none of them were meant to be multiple pages. The goal was a sort of quasi-resolution for most of them - his character arc either shows a change with one of his traits (selfish to sacrificial, obsessed with his lost love to willing to destroy his love, stagnating to embracing change, content in being in Ivani's shadow to finally stepping up himself, etc.) or he fully gives in to one of his negative traits (e.g. despair or anger at the world.) But he can, in most ends, only partially solve the worlds problems - if he gains any understanding of them at all. His journey was always one of hope, not assurance, that there would be something in the Grove to fix everything. In some endings he may save his love, or change himself so he can move forward in life, and only in some affect the larger problems of memory and stories. But most were also to set up the point that reaching the Grove, for him, isn't the end of a journey; it's still the beginning of his. He's spent 40 years stagnating in Dreaming Forest, and now he's travelled a few weeks in the real world, "awake" for the first time since he lost Ivani. He needs to step up and keep moving forward, no matter what he gains or fails to gain in the grove, rather than wallow and wait for the muses to come back. Humanity, too, needs to fight to move forward, regardless of what they lose or how hard it gets.

But I do plan to revisit the endings a bit in a post-contest edit, so if there is anything specific that you think needs work or more developed, or you think a specific ending really needs a second page/epilogue, please let me know.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

The submit button disappeared when I was trying to leave a review for @Canary (it does that on my phone still, sometimes,) so here is the short review:

Even though I got (I think) the 'best' ending where the villain slaughters the town and goes free, I didn't find myself caring. It was violence porn without much purpose.
Why was the villain so angry? Besides randomly causing as much carnage as possible, what was his goal? Where did he get his powers?
There were some clunky sentences and grammar errors, but for the most part the writing itself was OK. There just needed to be more of a hook or reason given to launch the rampage.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
The trick with that is to hit the back button on your phone, wait a couple of seconds, and then hit forward. (Without doing the rating again or anything like that.) It should resize the box and leave your text still in it. Although I've noticed it's gotten a little more finicky with some recentish Chrome update, I just tested it this morning and it does still work. The other solution is to get Firefox for Android, which is a thing I keep meaning to look into. It's supposed to be pretty stable by now. The OTHER solution is to not write reviews on mobile like some kind of lunatic.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

Ahh, thanks. I went back but did the rating again. And the submit button showed again, but vanished again once I pasted my text in.

For the most part I use the computer, anyway.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Yeah, pasting the text does the same thing. I just leave mine where it is, go back and then forward, and it'll still be there with the box correctly sized.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

Phone reviews are amazing! How else would you post an entire comment, only to later realize that the section about "proofreading so careless mistakes aren't showing up in a published story" is rittled with typos that you can not update or correct. Usually it comes out as "proving reading is careless! Mistakes ain't show one public pub story." Then when you ridicule the author for not taking your comment to heart in his next story, you go back to reference the comment and realize the problem with phone reviews.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Happened to me on one of the stories when I gave an example of proper dialogue format where two quotations marks got stacked next to each other ""

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago

Ouch. This really does always happen though. I felt bad about one of my comments for a contest entry. I can't remember which one, but there were a few key typos that made it hard to read my suggestions. It wa sort of like every important word was auto corrected to a different one. I think it was the same one you are talking about, Bucky.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Actually, it was worse than that. It put an extra " in the middle of dialogue that shouldn't have been there. Oh well, the other 90% of it wasn't jacked up.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
I want to say thank you to everyone who gave me advice on my story. I agree it's too short, I didn't have time to do what I wanted, and I had trouble keeping track of things that last day when I went to finish it. I think I tried to do too complicated of a plot. Since people did like the setting, when I finish my dragon game I'll be writing one in the same city with different characters called Rebels of Redlion. It will be much longer and you'll have the choice to join the Thieves' Guild, the guards, or even the Night Swords.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Sounds cool. Can't be worse than joining Thieves' Guild in Skyrim.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
I refuse to join. Not selling my soul to the stupid Daedra Jerk just to kill some dude I don't care about.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
Can't wait to become the head of all three factions! After like five missions and without any relevant skills.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
You kill the Dark Brotherhood, then you don't have that problem. Not worshiping Sithis and a Gravehag either.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
I hate the Skyrim guild. >_< I also wanted to say that I'll start reading stories from other people. Some of them here look amazing, I just keep getting distracted.

Year's End Contest - Entry Discussion Thread

4 years ago
For those who are getting ready to throw overly ripe fruit, we're waiting on Killa and Cricket to finish judging.