Friday 11 April 2014

Development Diary: Friends and Yearnings

Update 1 (4/11/2014):

I've decided to write the story using Twine. After seeing mustcontainanumber's Test Lab, I realized that it's possible to write AIF in Twine that feel like traditional IF. Twine recently added using variables as links which makes this much easier. I tried writing an initial draft of the beginning section in Twine and the result feels like a menu-based IF. I like it. I might rerelease Nat Dewey using a similar interface.



Now that I'm using Twine, I find that although Twine works, Twine itself is often sloppy and buggy. It's hard to keep track of lots of variables and to keep the formatting consistent. I might switch to using Twee instead.

Right now, I'm having trouble developing the character of the male protagonist. The other characters still need more work but they follow the well-known stereotypes of the jock, the slutty popular girl, and the shy nerdy girl. Who should the male protagonist be? Usually, I would make him a blank character so that players can project themselves onto him. But in this game, you can play as the shy, nerdy girl. If you play as her, then the male protagonist needs to be sexually attractive to you. The shy, nerdy girl fits the sexy librarian dream for male players. I don't know if female players have a male equivalent to the sexy librarian. As far as I know, popular culture doesn't portray shy, nerdy boys as attractive. I could use the strong, silent, brooding stereotype. But I want the male protagonist to be a regular joe so that it will be easier for male players to play as him. Buffy used Xander as an everyman character, but did women viewers actually want to have sex with him? Or maybe I could use the sincere, amiable guy, but that's bland. What sort of hobbies does sincere, amiable guy have? What would you talk about with sincere, amiable guy? I don't even want to talk with sincere, amiable guy, let alone write a story about him. He's such a Baxter.

I'm also having problems with the male descriptions. What makes an attractive man? What should be wear? Preppy? Urban? Grungy? Sporty? Clubbing wear? School uniforms? I'm worried as well about the dance. I heard that schools don't have dances any more because kids aren't into those things any more.

Note: I am not denying that there are many types of desire. I agree that people and love are varied. But this is porn. It is fantasy. It is wish fulfillment. It is meant to satisfy the craving of "I'm happy with my wife, but if Scarlett Johansson were ever in to me..."

I am familiar with male fantasies. The Ugly Duckling tales of the homely girl next door who doesn't realize how pretty she is and happens to turn into Taylor Swift when she takes off her glasses and is naive but wild in bed. I am not familiar with the equivalent female fantasies. In the love quadrangle, I don't want women players to feel like the are "settling" if they opt for Everyman instead of the Jock. I want the choice to feel like "Firefighter vs. Rock Musician" not "Firefighter vs. Sensitive Bob in Accounting." I want Sensitive Bob in Accounting to also be a Rock musician.


Original Post 1/31/14:

I am starting work on a new AIF game tentatively called Friends and Yearnings. My last AIF game Nat Dewey was heavy with dominance and submission. This made it easy to come up with new ideas for sex scenes. Actually writing those scenes was hard though because the sex was often mean and nasty. My new game will be lighter and more tender.

Friends and Yearnings is a homage to Goblinboy's Camping Trip. It will be a linear game involving four characters: two virgins and two "playa"s. Their relationships will be complicated by a love triangle. Or love quadrangle? My game will not have any camping in it though. There will also be no bets or forfeits. I want to have a sexy game like spin-the-bottle and an orgy in it.

My goal with Friends and Yearnings is to work on making more believable characters and relationships. Why are they all friends? Why does a love triangle exist? Why do the characters do what they do? What do they see in each other? I want all of their actions to be reasonable and consistent with their personalities. At the end of the game, I actually want it to be hard to decide whether you'd be happier with the slut or the virgin. In order to keep me honest, I will be writing the game twice: once from the male perspective and another time from the female "Becky" perspective. Writing from both a male POV and female POV is challenging. I might not be familiar enough with the opposite sex to make their experiences feel real. I want to avoid the pitfall of writing the female perspective by simply taking the male perspective and replacing he with she. I will try my best. I want the game to make sense and be believable regardless of which character you play as.

Right now I am trying to find the best engine for the game. Since the game is very linear, I am thinking of Twine. Twine is limiting because it is hard to separate characters from locations. Since Twine is a CYOA engine, the concepts of character, setting, and plot are all mixed into the single idea of a Passage. I can't let the player interact with a character in different rooms and at different times because the character passages are fixed to certain places and plot points. I am worried that the game will become TOO linear if I use Twine. I am also considering Tads 3. Writing the game in Tads 3 will be slower though. It is also hard to play Tads 3 games on the web. Inform 7 might be better but I do not know that language.

I will publish progress reports as new development diary posts on this blog or I will just add a comment to an existing post. I expect to finish writing the game in a year or two.

19 comments:

  1. You could try CYOA Inform 7 extension that Another Wannabe recently released. I haven't tried it yet but it's supposed to be like the extension he used for Bad Sister. He said in the release that it's easy to use and it's only a little more complicated then Twine. There should be links on the aifarchive or his blog.

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    1. Also ADRIFT 5 has a built in web-runner function and the basic functions (like for a linear game) are very easy to pick up.

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  2. The Adventure Book extension for Inform 7 is a good option as well. No knowledge of Inform code is required and it offers a few extras such as variable tracking and the ability to integrate standard Inform code if need be.

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  3. If the game is very linear (which I take to mean no branching of the plot), I'd actually suggest writing it with a non-CYOA system. Having a text parser and being able to explore/interact with the environment can provide enough local agency to make a linear plot more palatable.

    Also, I was under the impression that TADS 3 had added online play. What makes it difficult to use?

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    1. Allowing your TADS game to be run online requires having a full-service webserver and installing and configuring the TADS server software, which is fairly difficult. (Unlike Inform where "Release with an interpreter" creates a webpage that embeds the game and Javascript interpreter, with no additional software required).

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  4. It's hard to give an unbiased opinion, but I've heard that programmers have an easier time with TADS and non-programmers have an easier time with Inform 7. I try to discourage people from using Twine simply because I think it's not a very good platform. Easy, yes, but not interesting for me as a player. ADRIFT 5 is apparently a solid choice too but I don't seem to be able to "get" the programming aspect of it. To me, ADRIFT 5 is very hard.

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    1. It was probably easier to pick up in previous versions because there were really explicit explanations of everything written on every major part of the generator. Particularly with tasks, the command list was just titled "What the player needs to type:". 5 doesn't have that (yet) and I don't know if it's planned.

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  5. Also check out axma story maker which is like twine but more robust.

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  6. The main argument for Inform is that a well supported AIF library exists. TADS3 has about 5 AIF libs that apparently died in an early development stage. Another problem with TADS for a programmer is the interference that the code creates. It looks like Java but the concepts are very different and the documentation is not very good at explaining the memory and object model. So it is mainly Another Wannabe's fault that I am now a happy user of Inform. I also like, that the IDE has a native Linux version.

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  7. Sorry it's taken me a while to reply but I might have something to add since I've been in a very similar boat.

    For a linear (choice a, choice b) kind of story I think Twine is perfect. The problem with Twine is adding complexity is really hard in a large project. As you mentioned about separating characters from locations, there are no dynamic objects/systems built in to help with that kind of thing. A solution that I've used is to have a variable store the players location and use conditional statements to decide which passage to display. You could do that with NPCs too, and create nested conditional statements that show the correct passage depending on who is where. This doesn't scale well at all as you increase the amount of variables that determine which passage to show because likely you will need to add certain context based on the choices the player makes. Then time and character memory become a problem when you need to ensure things happen in the correct order. Add to that multiple characters and you'll likely find yourself with an extremely difficult game to build and maintain. I've been there too.

    At the moment I've decided to abandon Twine because I'd like to make games that can take into account complex state yet are still easy to iterate on. I haven't tried any of the popular IF tools and can only recommend that the best tool to use is the one you are most comfortable with. In my case I've defaulted to Unity which has nothing to do with text based games but its what I know best. If you haven't decided on anything yet, limiting the dimensions of your story in Twine can work fine. One reason I used Twine to begin with was that the limitations and simplicity can allow you to just focus on writing more believable characters and relationships... or at least that was the plan.

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  8. I think there is a sort of market there for "shy, awkward nerdy guy," mostly from a combination of TV Tropes and personal experience. That said, there's defiantly a lot of ways to do it *wrong*, so I'll focus on a couple of traits that I seem to find working elsewhere.

    The first one that springs to mind is what in the olden days they used to call an "melancholic temperament." The guy is a little shy or ditsy, but he has a real and genuine passion for something and a desire to share it that helps him to forget his social problems.

    Maybe it's something old-tyme stereotypical like his writing, painting, some other artistic endeavor, maybe it's just a shared interest with the girl. Either way, it fleshes him out in a way the girl might like, while also drawing interest as a sort of "puzzle:" after all, getting him to devote that kind of energy and interest to *her* has got to be quite a trip. I'm given to understand that that, along with his unrelenting confidence, is the impetus for many a young lady's infatuation with the Doctor.

    Nothing else springs to mind, unfortunately. I'll come back if I come up with something else.

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    1. Another idea for that is that everybody (male or female) wants somebody to read their mind and then make everything the way they want it to be. That's the advantage of the 'sensitive' guy - you set up something that the girl really wants and the sensitive guy is the one who actually gets that and follow through. This kind of works with the idea of an AIF protagonist because that's what a PC solving a 'puzzle girl' might look like from her perspective.

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  9. I think if you ask ten different women what makes an attractive man, you'll get ten different answers. Some women like chest hair and big muscles, others like thin and hairless, some like men who are arrogant, some like men who are sensitive and thoughtful. I actually think it's an odd question to ask. "What makes an attractive woman?" Well, there's like a million answers to that, and that's a good thing because everyone deserves to find someone who thinks they're just sex on wheels.

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    1. I agree, but he *did* specifically ask whether or not some women find the idea of a shy, less-confident guy attractive and if so what they like about him. That was the question I was attempting to answer.

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  10. Here are a few recent resources that might help in writing your male protagonist.

    video
    http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020520/Fewer-Tifas-or-More-Sephiroths

    blog post
    http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JaneJensen/20140414/215473/WRITING_HOT_MEN_FOR_GAMES_Yes_please.php

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  11. This requires a specific sort of skill to pull off, but one male type you might consider is the wit. He could be a jokester or witheringly sarcastic, or whatever else you'd like. He can start as someone the female PC is not attracted to and then slowly win her over with his banter, or he can be someone the female PC is attracted to but who's defense-mechanism wit must be broken through -- this is more of a puzzle than the previous -- to "win." This is somewhat of an analogue to the "shy nerdy girl" trope, except that he's not shy, precisely...it's just that he doesn't necessarily know how to make the transition from making a woman laugh to getting her naked. If this is done well enough, the physical description can be sort of vague at first, then as she falls for him she "realizes" how attractive he is, and so forth.

    In general, though, I think layers are almost always good. If he's a jock, make him a really hot guy with a seemingly empty head who is actually a lot smarter and more sensitive, but assumes the female PC is like all the other empty-headed ladies who just want to bang him and thus, at first, rejects her. (Or better yet, goes ahead and accepts her advances, but in an indifferent way; only later do they both realize that they were failing to understand each other.) Or if he's a powerful, successful type, then he's type-A in their earlier interactions but eventually admits that he finds it exhausting to be type-A in his relationships. You get the idea.

    From a writing perspective, this is a way to add a lot of character complexity without having to write branching character traits; the NPC's path is still linear, but he changes as the PC is able to, uh, penetrate deeper into the game.

    -- thundergod

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  12. Those are some good ideas. I heard once that romance novels by Danielle Steele usually have two male love interests. One is a hunk and the other is a sensitive guy. I flipped through one of her novels to see how she writes it. The novel I looked at only had one male love interest. Danielle Steele did a lot of telling and not showing. The main character has a strong emotional connection with the male love interest. He just "gets" her. They share interests. They are totally comfortable and at ease around each other. There is no artifice or games. No need to worry about impressing or disappointing the other. They can act like themselves around each other. He genuinely listens to her and understands her feelings. When she is down, talking with him just energizes her soul. She feels lighter and more care-free around him. They can talk for hours in their own little world. He is kind, caring, gentle, and supports her in her dreams.

    I might go with this. Basically, the female equivalent of the "bro girl" (the woman who is "just one of the guys" except a woman). Or the "male gay friend" fantasy but with less fashion sense. Writing it will be hard. I'll need to develop the characters more so that there's a foundation to build a connection between them.

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    1. Presumably, you are male. Why don't you build a male character that's built off your own insights of being male? I absolutely guarantee you will write a male lead who is a lot stronger. Granted, Danielle Steel is a step up from Stephanie Meyer, but basically both of them write pretty shitty characters from what you describe.

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    2. To be blunt, if I had any insight into what makes a male character compelling to women, I wouldn't have the time to write any AIF because I would be too busy using my insight to score with women. :-P My sincere wish for Goblinboy is that he had to leave because he found his "Becky" and she wasn't happy with him spending all his free time making pictures of naked teenage girls on his computer.

      More seriously, I approach writing like I approach programming. I take generic components and hammer things together until it all works. It's not Shakespeare but it works for me.

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