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Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago

So, I have this cool idea for a storygame. You travel the lands in a fantasy world to stop this dragon, okay, sounds pretty generic, right?

But my twist is that I want several characters (or a party) to aid him, but along the way, these people can die off and not return. Each would have there own HP and would die off in various ways, but I cannot seem to figure out how I could incorporate this.

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago

@nmelssx

@bradindvorak

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago

I've been summoned? For a fairly unspecific answer, obviously, each killable character needs an HP variable of their own. The more characters like this you have and the more they interact with each other, the more complex this gets. Every time there is to be some interaction with a character, you need check if they're alive (using either link scripts or page scripts, depending on the magnitude of variability) and have an appropriate response for each scenario.

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago

See, I am having trouble with the advanced editor in general, but I love the idea of a Fire Emblem esque game. I can see this will take a long time to do, and I have no objection to that, but I may need help with it.

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago

Why does everyone have to f*** up perfectly good story ideas with way too much stats-gameplay-oh this just has to be scripted nonsense?

You could do this perfectly well with the adv editor if you didn't have to give them HP and make it too much like Fire Emblem. If the point were just that they could die in various ways.

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago

^^Probably the best advice for making the game, both in terms of actually completing and also making it a better storygame.

Just add actual tension in your story by making your choices affect the outcomes, being as harsh as the choice can potentially be. Instead of having health just make a couple of choices that, in succession, will cause the character not to appear again in the story. It's a lot easier to just do a couple of scripting tricks like Briar did in POF than a whole health system.

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago

So. . . I'm not quite following. So use choices to kill characters instead of a health system?

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago
That would be much simpler and make things much easier for the author and the readers. You might have a team of six people and then six variables that are zero or one: one means they are alive, zero means they are dead. On each page you can have a list at the end of the page that just lists who is left alive. This will still be quite complex with the options that are available to the user (I think). In other words, if you have five people left alive, are you going to have five options for "xxxx attacks the monster?" Or are you going to just have "fight," and in some cases have the result of that fight being that one of the team dies. Actually, even that will be complex because you might have to write code to determine who is alive and who dies...

The easiest way would be just to plan out a path, have just a couple other team members, and incorporate their possible actions into the story, if you ask me.

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago
Hey, whats wrong with scripting? >.>

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago

 To add to what Seth said, combat systems, stats and all that get really annoying. I could barely stand them in DS and Mommy, and those were written by some of the best authors on the site (dont think anyone writes like BZ, which is pretty much the only reason I sat through the combat in DS. Picking attack agressively all day doesnt suit my fancy, lol). 

Just do what countless authors before you have done, and use variables or dont use them at all. Fancy scripting doesnt change much, it just dresses the game up in a fancy binder. (#madgleeism)

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago
To be honest, it's not hard.

Let's start with something really simple. Say you have 1 character, and you want to set his health. You put

%char1HP := 100

on the page link of the start of the first page. That means set the variable char1HP to hold a value of 100.

Next say, on a page, this character got slashed by a sword or something, and lost 20 health, you would put

%char1HP := %char1HP - 20

on the page link of the page the character got slashed on.

Then in the global page link, put something like this

IF %char1HP <= 0 THEN
$DEST := @p100

which means if this character has less than or equal to 0 health, bring them to page 100. Then on that page you can describe how they died or something. See? Not as hard as everyone think it is.

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago

Okay, I understand. But I think the most complex parts is where I want the characters to interact into the overall story (not affecting the plot) but have conversations among themselves, which seems very difficult in scripting and coding (something I have zero experience in).

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago
I'm not sure I understand what you want, then. Two (or more) other characters can just have a conversation on any page (especially if it doesn't concern the plot). Are you asking about if a character is dead? Or if you want some characters to talk about another character who (may or may not) have died?

In that case, I'd still suggest a simpler method, where you just use pages and choices. Something I have done is to set a variable to 1 or 0 to indicate if something has happened, then on the page where there is a choice, I have two different links. One appears if the variable is one and the other appears when the variable is zero. I have even done that with the wording on the link being identical.

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago

Okay, at least THAT I understand. I will fiddle with the coding and variables in a few minutes.

Hey, Hey, Help?

10 years ago

A similar thing can be done with just one link and a link script.