That was a buncha stitched-together random screens. Some were tutorials or posters you can read. The game picked the "player" to be balsamic vinegar that run-through.
Since the text engine sucks (4x50chars per dialog) and I wanted pics to go along with text in the game's "books", I just drew each page... but a lot of printed material displays fullscreen.
Here's some more fake-EULA-things:
A "cowboy voice"? Use your imagination there (no cows on Planet Gara - haven't invented any grazing animals yet). Or just talk like a gravelly-voiced, barrelchested smoker.
This's a big project and the video-game-thing is only a part of it. I have about 12,000 lines of script written for the game, plot, and othersuch. Once I get certain in-game books written, I'll post those, and they will explain the imaginary creatures and other shit for me. Huzzah!
I am pretty slow at making illustrations, though. I know how the critters look in my head, but haven't tried actually depicting most of them yet. The 'fractal' creatures are extraplanar entities from other worlds in other stories, so they aren't representative of the style I mean to draw the native lifeforms in. Kind of an 8-bit thing going where it's an NES palette, but with 1-3 highlight/shadow colors depending on hue.
Picking a character for the first leg of the game. Foods/drinks do different things for different characters, but if it's their favorite, it restores 100% HP, PP, or both. Sometimes it even does more! Fancy.
Playing as different characters FEELS different, as it should. One's a bit colorblind; another doesn't hear so well. One is so PSI-sensitive, she sees 'auras' others don't, and then THE CAT plays like... well, a cat.
* * * E D I T * * *
So, I decided to re-include some of "the bigass list of text" here instead of editing the original post.
Tutorials.
You can have up to 3 Parties. It's sort of like Maniac Mansion in that you need to switch between them to do puzzles and stuff. Everyone gets their own variations of each area's music, and everyone gets their own 'natural skills' (more on that in some other post).
Enemies on the map roll dice when they touch you. Depending on who wins (and by how much), they or you get first go, or a harder/rarer formation of mobs gets summoned. It can change the music, too (e.g. an 'easy enemy' theme to a 'tough enemy' one). There's ecology sims - most enemies not classified as vermin are finite in number and can be bred or extinctified to some extent. This is useful because, just like in real life, you can make up uses for all their parts.
Explaining ESOS cosmology is beyond the scope of this. Suffice to say: the game generates a bunch of random civilizations so it has fodder for things like procedurally-generated comic books, TV shows, and rare mob encounters. It picks from a lot of different maps which may or may not be connected to the continuity/plot, and these represent the 'other worlds' (no actual space travel in this game).
Explains the plot of the previous game, DONGLAND: WACKY-CADILLACKY-O'-POKETY-PRICKS-A-SMOKIN. That's a story for another time, but most of it gets told right there. Then:
While descriptive of the game and goings-on in it, this is also a parody of a line from Final Fantasy Tactics:
"Many soldiers after the war had no jobs, little money, and even less loyalty to the crown." Control code bugs caused the words "little money" to take fucking ages to print, so naturally, the pictured text prints slow as hell.
LNZ's money (* AKA 'slaw') is like a Kit-Kat that functions as currency, made of epoxy-like concentrated nutrients, thus 'nibble money'.
Gongs are important. They're useable items and having more of them adds more gongs to the music that has them. Since I used gongs from Earth, I morphed many of their sounds. The same's true for most animal sounds and other things - most sound 'familiar' yet also 'alien', by design.
Actually, while I'm talking gongs, let me post this as an aside: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1566676/ARC/chaugongs_C4-C6.rar This is 2 sampled, chromatic octaves of tuned gongs. Sloppily sampled, but free to use. Load them into a VSTi sampler (shortcircuit works great) and just go to town. I have many other gongs I've been meaning to sample, but haven't made time. When I post things like this, it means you're free to take them and I hope you enjoy them. Actually, my work is free and almost entirely released to public-domain, except when I do something like remix someone else's song because I don't want to complicate anything.I have many MANY more free samples and music which I have created myself. I'll get to posting these once I figure out just how to organize them and where to put them. They need more descriptive names, too. I don't require credit if such things are used by others, just have fun! I AM DEFINITELY GOING TO POST a .rar of about 60 'sfx' sounds I have generated soon.I am using this GREAT tool to do many of them: http://www.superflashbros.net/as3sfxr/ -
then I remaster/modify them as I wish. Now, back to the subject at hand... The GARA TRILOGY stories happen in Lower Netazeca (LNZ), a state/province in the Semiunionized States of Amerigo (S.S.A.). Here is a shitty old screenshot of an ASCII map of the important part of LNZ. I drew it from distant memory and not-to-scale, so a better one is coming.
Animating maps and battle stuff takes ages. It's why I haven't showed many gameplay screens. I figured out a clever way to do animated faces while text is printing, though. Huzzah!
I hope I'm entertaining people here and not just being a pest on this forum. I hate self-aggrandization and oneupmanship, but hell, I like sharing my creative processes with others. I invite y'all to do the same. Or just talk about whatever, there's no rules in this thread. ^_^
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