Re: the just-released "Ethos 6" game demo (see gallery):

I've killed countless generic bad guys in games, yet the entire area of non-murder-related interaction is barely explored in gaming outside of the tabletop world. NPCs typically either spout one of a few canned monologue lines that you can't reply to, or offer a very limited menu where you can ask about a very small number of topics, leading to a similar set of monologue lines. This trend is so standard that even big-budget studios never bother innovating away from it. "Undertale" is amazing, yet its actual gameplay is mostly a generic console RPG. So, the bar for performance in this area is very low.

I'm not satisfied with this untapped potential. I've wanted for some time now to make a game that's small and simple enough to be within my capabilities, but has an unusual rule system built around non-violent persuasion. I'm not against combat, just not interested in focusing on it when others have done it well already.

What are the problems holding back conversation-based gameplay?
1) "It's just not fun." Like many people, I sometimes find social interaction dull, and don't strike up conversations with random strangers often. I get the most out of a conversation when I can learn something interesting, show off, or interact as part of some other activity like a role-playing game or classwork. So I'm not the ideal audience for a conversation game. Okay, but why aren't those weird extroverts playing some catchy game like this?
2) "If the game isn't scripted, how does the player learn about the cool setting and characters you've made?" The more freedom the player has in conversation, moving away from a strict visual-novel branching structure, the more that the writing either has to be generic or carefully tailored to make sense in different contexts. I'd actually be okay with a conversation mechanic that literally says "You spend a few minutes swapping stupid puns" rather than writing out what was said, just as I've tolerated many a video game where I "attack and do 42 points of damage". There should be some mix between scripted exchanges that develop the story, and generic interaction that just conveys how a conversation is going.
3) "Severely limited AI." Typical NPCs have almost no internal state, so they can't generate original conversation text like "Yesterday I spoke with Bob about dragons". They also don't really do anything; if you see one running a blacksmith shop there's no simulation of that having any effect on supplies or profits or mood. I fear this problem is only fixable by starting to do detailed simulation of NPCs' lives to give them something to talk about. Or at least a "Mount & Blade" level simulation in which there are real events like "bandits attacked a caravan near here last week" for NPCs to talk about.
4) Finally, "What do you *do* in a conversation game?" How much should the gameplay be focused on conversation as combat, battling enemies who want to beat you up emotionally, versus friendly conversation in which you're learning or something? What provides tension and a lose condition: some meter you have to keep up like a village's hit points or your feelings, or some kind of time limit, or what? If it's to be more sophisticated than "Undertale", then what sorts of factual or emotional buttons do you get to push as you make decisions?

I've imagined a few gameplay scenarios on the same basic idea:
1) This Fallout 4-inspired scenario I've been doing. Needs you to progress toward having better gear and access to more locations where you can talk to more people, plus ability to progress farther into the wasteland because you got a rad-suit or something. So basically you're talking your way into getting Item X, then talking your way past Raider Chief Y to get Item Z to take back to base...
2) Centaur. While visiting a wizard school, you've been turned into a centaur! For some strange reason you want to get uncursed. The teachers can teach you the right magic skills, but the ones with the high-level knowledge are bad at teaching and you have to learn the basics first. Meanwhile you need to work in the alchemy lab or something to gain favor.
3) Thousand Tales. You are a new AI. You have no body by default, and need to talk your way into getting more computers, more software, better robot bodies and more allies and money. This would be like "Endgame: Singularity", focused on upgrading stuff, with some mechanism for interesting random events ("what policy do you adopt to handle this?") and the conversation stuff being about finding ways to entertain and befriend people.
4) Bard. You are a fantasy bard, visiting towns to earn a living. Your survival depends on entertaining an audience by picking the right tales to tell and the right songs to play, and maybe giving advice to a few people. Maybe you have long-term influence so that on your next visit you find you've inspired a rebellion or something.
5) Companion. A cute skunk-girl adventurer is traveling with you. You do some basic dungeon-crawl stuff that's mostly abstracted, and decide when to follow her advice, what skills to train her in, and so on. (Where's the persuasion though?)

Any of the above could be interesting, but I don't feel like I've hit on a clearly fun conversation mechanic, and that's at the heart of any such game. If there isn't one, then what's the point of this exercise? Also, I'd very much like an idea that I can build quickly to a point where I could plausibly market it; I've now built around six Ethos demos (not to mention other things) and they're nothing more than hobbyist projects, unfit for sale.

I got to play the board game "Runebound" (3rd Edition), a fantasy adventure game I'd bought cheaply. I'd mentioned earlier that I wasn't satisfied with "Tiny Epic Quest" because it tried to do many things at once in very little detail and had only a victory point system instead of a clear goal. Well, Runebound takes a different approach.

https://boardgamegeek.com/image/261.....-third-edition


HOW IT WORKS:

There's a big hex map to explore. Each player gets 3 actions per turn that can include movement, adventuring (costs 2), shopping, resting, and training. You move using dice that say "you can spend this to move onto a plain/forest/mountain/&c" or spend dice to move onto roads/into cities. You shop by entering citiees. Training gives you skill cards, which you either learn (getting their powers) by spending quest tropies or just burn to "exert". Exerting lets you reroll dice or boost your stats for stat checks.

Adventuring means going to one of the ~20 colored markers on the map to draw from one of 3 colored decks that are, mostly, focused on movement, a social decision and stat check, or combat. Eg. "Quest: Go to X spot that might be halfway across the map or next door, and try to roll one of these 3 possible dice combos to make one of these outcomes happen and get this card as a trophy." I got one to visit some forest bandit, and after exerting to reroll some dice, I got the best possible combo and he gave to my poor adventurer self. In another quest I could either lose an action to help a caravan, or make a might test to steal any one shop item.

Combat is unusual. The player to your left controls the monster. Each fighter gets a set of cardboard coins and flips them, showing symbols like an axe (do damage) or a wing (turn over a coin or re-flip an enemy's coin) or a lightning bolt (activate special power). The fighters take turns spending these coins, so there's some back-and-forth decision making that's a little more complex than just "roll to see who hits". This can last several complete flipping cycles, so the next player is encouraged to start their turn meanwhile.

The overall point is "collect lore tokens and then slay the boss dragon that shows up after Act 1, and who's weakened by your lore". There's also a second scenario available about a necromancer, and each scenario has its own custom events and quests mixed in with the generic ones. As the timer advances, story cards get played and say things like "everybody now has to fight a small dragon" or "there are lore tokens up for grabs at X location".

Shopping gets you new items that give you special combat coins and other benefits. Some items exist just to be traded at a profit.

The physical parts are cool. Plastic minis, colorful tokens, nice map, catgirl character. So many tokens and cards though that it's tricky to set up and put away.


HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED OUT:

I had some fun playing it solo and got through the first act (~10 turns), but felt like I'd made little progress toward having any hope against the dragon. I'd gotten just one item and 2 points of lore, and monsters get an extra coin in Act 2, so I was basically doomed to get whipped by the dragon and had no chance unless it doesn't recover HP between battles (which is ambiguous).

Then I tried it with 4 players, telling them I'd spent around an hour playing it while learning... but that turned out to be woefully misleading. Hours later we decided not to play Act 2 but instead to bring forth the dragon and start its final Post-Act-II endgame, ruling that we could all beat on the thing until it died. Because the game's supposed to be non-co-op, there's little ability to cooperate otherwise, yet little incentive to go first against the dragon.

Items were basically unavailable because we were all poor, including the player who'd specifically devoted multiple turns to well-timed trading. He couldn't afford, say, armor or a magic weapon. We looked upon the shop inventories in vain, since we also had little combat power as a result. We mostly wandered around different parts of the map alone, interacting mainly by the fact that adventure sites one hero visits become unavailable for a few turns. It seems like if I could wander around for long enough, having adventures, I would eventually be able to get a few items and good skills -- the good ones require 3-4 quest trophies and specific colors -- and be decently prepared for the big difficulty spike of the boss. But that difficulty level means I probably can't win even if I'm often successful in my questing, and large parts of the game (items, skills) feel locked off.

Because a given quest is equally likely to appear on any site of its color, the map feels kind of pointless even though I like the movement system and there's lot of neat-looking terrain. I'd be more motivated to move around if I could actually afford the items in a distant city or there were a reason to bother with a quest to a distant area versus seeking out another quest. There's also no change in the world caused by your actions beyond that you get lore. So the general experience is that you wander around trying to get stronger until time runs out and you fight the boss.

In contrast to "Tiny Epic Quest", there's a tighter focus on "having interesting things happen while moving on an overworld". That's good, because more detail is possible. But there's an unfortunate "multiplayer solitaire" feel and the lack of interaction with the world makes it suspiciously like just killing infinitely respawning cRPG monsters to gain experience points. The game seems to demand a major time commitment that's hard for me to talk other people into. In contrast to "Tiny Epic Defenders", TED had the sense that the world was getting wrecked if you failed, since you lost access to the special features of destroyed regions; none of that here, though I see the necromancer scenario puts zombies on the map.

Overall: I'd like to try it solo again or with 2-3 players, but I think it's going to be a lonely solo experience for me due to the sheer time commitment. I thought about how to speed things up but it takes significant house-ruling: maybe +1 movement die, adventuring costs 1 action instead of 2, item prices halved, -1 trophy cost for skills.


GAME DESIGN LESSONS:

-Detailed but slow combat drags down a multiplayer game.
-Whether co-op or competitive, have some way for players to interact.
-Have some kind of short format, ~1.5h at most.
-Too many cards/tokens and different types thereof are intimidating and make the game harder to learn. Unifying, say, combat and skill checks would simplify everything.
-Having the game world change in response to heroes' actions is more important than having lots of hexes or locations. Having many locations reduces player interaction.

Been reading a LitRPG book. Stop me if you've heard this one:

A game-player lives in a set of stacked metal housing units for the poor. He plays what I'll call CoolSwordia Online, the one super-popular video game that exists and defines the real world's main currency. But he's so poor that he can only afford to "play" in a game area that isn't actually fun, for lack of money to teleport to areas with adventure opportunities. One day he learns of a contest by CSO's developers with a huge prize, testing the players with mystery challenges.

Unlike "Ready Player One", the hero has a job at "data mining", which literally means swinging a pick in a virtual mine and somehow getting paid for this. (I've seen the concept in at least two books now, but the other one involved collecting in-game ore.) After hearing about the contest, the hero finds a special treasure chest totally at random -- it's unheard-of to get one this way -- and is handed an unlimited teleport pass, nice boots, and 1000 gold pieces. This is more money than he earned this year; and a chapter later we learn 5 GP is "nearly half a year's wages". Now his exciting questing days can begin.

Here's a bit of the story, from where he visits a greedy, obnoxious hook-nosed merchant (!) to buy clothes:


"I'll take one of those," I say, pointing to the green tunic. I find a pair of khaki pants and a nice leather belt with a silver buckle shaped like a wolf. I check out the new clothing in my inventory.
Item: Green Tunic. +0 armor. Not everything is about stats, you know.
Item: Khaki Pants. +0 armor. Not everything is about stats, you know.
Item: Silver Wolf Head Belt. +0 armor. Not everything is about stats, you know.
The clothing adds nothing to my stats, but I don't care. For once, I don't look like a beggar.


With this equipment, naturally his next action is to run off into the wilderness and fight the first monster he sees. It kills him, prompting him to check his stats again and recall that he has no combat abilities such as "Attack" or "Defend", no weapon or armor, and literally every stat point in Strength with a 0 in everything else. So he goes to a weapon shop and buys an axe (no armor or anything) so he can get right back to soloing monsters. The trainer teaches him the basic fighting abilities and spars with him, but is impressed by how much damage he can do. "I sense a great strength within you." The hero is baffled, and says so twice; he has no idea what the trainer might mean by that. He opens his stat screen and considers assigning stat point 15 out of 15 to Strength but picks Vitality instead.

I don't get the appeal. The main character hasn't shown himself to be likeable or special, and he gets handed a lot of stuff for no effort. The game isn't fun for many of the players, and incidentally we're told that the character races include human, elf, dwarf, gnome, and minotaur. The scenario is the same as RP1. The interface repeats what we just heard from the narrator.

I was reading a preview of another book that made some effort at characterization, but there was an early line like, "The game was terrible, but so was real life." The hero was a loner playing the world's one video game and devoting all his attention to it because the setting's so dystopian. Not coincidentally, I haven't felt motivated to buy the book.

https://youtu.be/RXR-dArGI90

First audio chapter of "Striking Chains", a fantasy novel. Still editing the book itself. If people are interested, I might go on to record more of this story.

Peasant Dominic becomes a magic-using enforcer for the Holy State. But when he learns about a nearby kingdom with an empty throne and a chance at freedom, he's tempted to tear off his mask and start a revolution.

"The Digital Coyote" is on sale today and tomorrow! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01J3KI4HI
It's about a bureaucrat who buys his way into virtual heaven, not so much to get immortality as to become a better person. Features transformation, transhumanism, the mistreatment of cartoon horses, a pantsless TV appearance, several explosions, a surprisingly realistic hacking sequence, and footnotes.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L1VL6GQ/

A new edition of my first novel "Everyone's Island" is now out! It's a story about colonizing the ocean.

I'm posting the first version of the novel "Learning To Fly" on another site:
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/2.....earning-to-fly
Along with the first few chapters of "Crafter's Heart". Trying to drum up interest in the books that way.

Contrary to any rumors, I have not been fighting any anthropomorphic goats or hanging out with fluffy princes.

My new novel "Crafter's Heart" is now out!

Ex-peasant Stan has moved to a sea colony to work for Ludo, an AI whose video game world offers virtual reality and digital immortality. Will he sink or swim in this strange floating town, and will the three brilliant women he meets change how he sees his inhuman boss?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JJCC5QL

This story is a direct sequel to "Crafter's Passion", though it's meant to be readable if you haven't seen that one yet. The first one can be found at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B29CYLX in e-book, print and now audio. You can also find a free intro to the setting at https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Tal.....dp/B01NCAER2M/ .

(New book soon; will announce.)

I've been asked to come up with a story following the plot thread of the hospital kids, a group of young immortals, in the Tales setting. I actually have to piece it together from all the other stories! Doing some early brainstorming for it. Here's what's been established:

-There's a group of four kids calling themselves ISPV (Iris, Siegfried, Phoenix, Volt) who live happily together in Talespace. Volt is an AI dragon with a more child-like mind than most, created as a mascot for a children's hospital. The rest are uploaders. Phoenix is the leader and a big advocate for "Miss Ludo". In life he was Alice Forester, whose parents owned a movie studio (they sold it to Ludo) and like watching terrible movies with their kid. The group is adolescent or so.
-In 2038 one of the others, Volt, befriended human hero Stan. They remained friends in 2039 and nothing more's been said about that.
-In 2039 December, Sunset the Coyote talked Ludo into uploading "nearly two hundred" kids. She did that in about 2040 February. They became a close-knit group right away. It's not clear how that got funded, but Sunset was going to push the idea that the kids should all volunteer to be a distinct superhero-like group pledging 20 years' service to Ludo.
-Shortly after uploading, they visited Hoofland and got a lesson from Sky Diver, a former pilot. Many of the kids visited again over the next month or two to help fight in the Troll War.
-The hospital kids started work on a castle at Island +12/+30 in the Endless Isles zone. They quickly got distracted by infighting that was encouraged by an avatar of FAE. The group's leaders include Eva (who wanted to stay in the Isles to avoid distractions) and Malcolm (who wanted to be at Ivory Tower for easier studying).
-Alma, an uploader, became a teacher for the group. The hospital kids were being called "the Saved of Saint John's". She became a "cleric" for her mindset more than for her powers, and encouraged the students to stay connected to the outside world. She was soon seen leading the students in an ocean scenario, helping Sunset gleefully torment a criminal.
-Sunset's adventures caused a new island to appear in the Endless Isles, at an empty spot. The island was based on "The Island of Flowers and Fruit" from a classic Chinese story, implying that it has monkeys and a waterfall cave. The island was considered Sunset's personal domain, but the ISPV asked nicely if they could conquer it in a battle and make it their base. Sunset agreed, but plotted to work with both the Knights of Talespace and the Forces of Evil to make the battle memorable. We're told by the narrator that "The Battle of Sunset Island would indeed become famous, but not for the reason he expected."

All this stuff plays out over "The Digital Coyote", "2040: Reconnection", "Learning To Fly", the stories "Phoenix" and "Stages Of Griefing", and a little of the "Crafter" books.

Who's the POV character?
-Alma: Old teacher, divided between her Talespace duties and Earthside affairs, and probably is getting involved with the Talespace-based teaching system seen in "Liberation Game". Wants to defend human liberty by remaining relevant and making others so. Also loves playing with magical stuff.
-Phoenix: Young, growing up in Talespace, becoming a leader of dedicated uploaders. Wants to benevolently "take over the world". Is probably starting experimental digital puberty, which is likely awkward for all concerned but not as bad as in real life.
-Sunset: Transhuman trickster, with odd footnote-lined thought processes and a tendency to see elaborate decision trees for how to manipulate people.

What could happen?
-The plan where everything goes perfectly is that the adults team up to set up an elaborate battle where Sunset commands legions of monkeys or something to fight the hospital gang, and loses after an exciting yet educational experience. This is of course going to go wrong.
-Another AI character from Sunset's background might want to help out, being very interested in helping people have conflict and intense experiences.
-The island doesn't exist in isolation; there are other adventurers who could meddle.
-Late 2040 is the end of the current Tales timeline. After the events of "Coyote" and the launch of the Challenger space probe, nothing is defined!
-There's a new AI-run nation in Central America starting in late '39; it could become more of a competitor for mind hosting.
-Legal and moral questions about the kids' status persist. There could be interference from people demanding that they be pulled out of Talespace or something.

I finally got to play "Tiny Epic Quest", from the same people as "Tiny Epic Kingdoms/Defenders/Western/Etc." This one is an obvious "Legend of Zelda" imitation as a board game. My overall impression is that it's all right but not outstanding.

https://boardgamegeek.com/image/366.....iny-epic-quest

There's a map of cards laid out semi-randomly with colored castles for the four players. There are several Day and Night phases and then final scoring. You can score in three ways: killing goblins, completing quests, and learning magic. Goblins show up at standard locations. You get magic by visiting a series of shrines kinda in a certain order. You complete quests by moving in certain ways or beating some dungeons.

A key part of the game is that you each have three dudes you can move. During the day phase, one player picks one of five types of movement: raft, horse, foot, ship, and griffin. Each player can either move one of their dudes according to that movement rule, eg. rafts move you along one of the vertical rivers that's on every card. (I don't know about you, but if riding a griffin were a transportation option available to me, I'd pick that.) Not much happens besides movement, though certain spaces do something when landed on and goblins cost magic points to move past.

Then at night, adventure happens. Each player gets to roll five dice and apply the symbols rolled to making various things happen. Take damage, gain MP, increase the world's magic level, punch a goblin, or get torches/maps. These last two symbols advance meeples that you've put in a dungeon area, along a progress track. That is, to pass one temple you need to roll one torch, then one torch, then two torches, &c. There's a press-your-luck element here because you can keep rolling, but risk taking too much damage and losing all your progress. You can also kind of buy dungeon progress using MP, but that's a resource that can also block damage, so it's a tradeoff.

What's this about raising the magic level? It's a neat feature. Each day the world has a magic range from 0 to 3, and it grows when people roll magic symbols. High magic mostly makes dungeon-delving more dangerous, adding tension to the press-your-luck rules. But it's also necessary for learning magic, because you can only gain progress on the magic-learning track if you have a dude stationed at the shrine whose number is within [Global Magic] levels of your current number. So you might jump from 1 to 4 if you're in the right spot and lots of magic symbols get rolled that round.

You kill goblins just by having a dude stationed next to a goblin and rolling punch symbols. What about quests? There are three cards in play at any time, and whoever meets a goal first gets the card along with a reward. Often these are little plastic items like a boomerang or bomb that physically attaches to one of your meeples. When quests get completed, new ones appear.

How well does this actually play? Awkwardly. First of all, our group bumbled through the first half. The game's owner, who'd played before, several times said "oh wait, here's another rule I forgot about". One of these is crucial: when doing dungeon rolling, both wounds and good symbols apply to all players. In three different ways. Wounds and MP gain spill over, so that the roller gets the first symbol rolled, the next player gets the second symbol rolled, &c. The "raise global magic" symbols affect the world. The others can be used by every player. Eg. I roll a punch and I'm not fighting any goblins, but two other players are, and they can each hurt a goblin. These three rules make symbol usage both confusing and thematically weird. I can potentially kill off other players by rolling wounds on my turn, even though none of my dudes are near theirs, and their progress on their dungeons/goblins depends on how much risk I take for myself. I can screw over another player the same way by leaving them with dangerously low HP/MP before they even begin rolling. This system is by design, but it feels weird because we're all supposedly heroes and there's no in-universe reason why this would happen. There are a few other points that confused our group, such as the use of "Power" to mean magic points and the fact that each card looks like it has four spaces but acts like one or two.

Then there are the movement quests. These don't involve dungeons. Instead, you have to line up your three meeples along the same road, or diagonally, or have two in a certain spot or something. There's a name on the card explaining that you're exploring or training griffins or something, but... You're getting quest credit purely for having dudes standing around on the world map in some pattern. It doesn't feel heroic and it's not at all risky. Then there's the role that the dungeons play. These are six elemental temples, and by default your reward for beating one is... nothing! If a quest card is in play that says "Beat the Shadow Temple to get the Book", you get the Book and the quest card. There's a sword, shield and staff that each player can get if they beat specific dungeons in a specific order. (Different for each player, which I like.) But otherwise, you can just imagine stopping by the gift shop on the way out. Oh, and it's possible that a quest to "Beat the Forest Temple" will randomly go out of play while you're in the middle of doing it, making the trip pointless.

You're not fighting anything except goblins that are sitting there with visible arenas for you to walk into. You're not making decisions while dungeon-delving. You're not really interacting with other players at all except through the dice system and trying to beat quests before they do. There is no overall reason you're on this adventure, since the goal is a vague "get the most points" rather than "kill the dark lord". You're not even playing as a specific person, since you're managing three meeples who are interchangeable except that some of the plastic items only apply to the dude they're attached to. Riding a griffin is mechanically no different than riding a horse except that one moves diagonally and the other horizontally.

Part of the problem here is scope: if the game includes an overworld and dungeons and monsters and magic, none of those are going to have as much detail as in a narrower game. Magic, here, just means your position on a numbered track that affects your final score and your max MP. There are no specific spells. Similarly there's only one type of monster.

I also felt like the very obvious "unlicensed Legend of Zelda" theme actually hurts the game. It doesn't really feel like a Zelda game, for the reasons above. The turn counter is an elf princess head, but it has no other role in the game. There's a gold triangle icon, but it's just your MP counter. You can find a boomerang, but it doesn't solve puzzles or anything. There are elemental dungeons, but there's zero difference between them besides which symbols they take to beat. The game tries hard to reference a specific type of gameplay, but then delivers something different. For me the experience was still entertaining, but not really what was advertised or quite what I'd want.

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-.....ital-717201100
I've used a few images from the artist (group) called NextMars for my books. The one shown above is for "Crafter's Passion". I'm trying to figure out what to do for the sequel's cover, though. Ideally I'd license an existing image cheaply!

The first book takes place in a mix of a video-game world and the real world. This sequel is mainly real-world focused, though, so doing something in the same toonish style seems like it might be misleading. (The closest thing I can find so far is https://www.shutterstock.com/image-.....sea-1062539228 .) The story takes place on a "seastead", a colony on the surface of the ocean in the year 2039. There are no hovercraft or mega-skyscrapers; it's not that futuristic. The tone is upbeat and there's a mix of real and game segments.

Instead of a plain fantasy image, I could go with something that's only vaguely accurate in the sense of showing a future sea city, such as:
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-.....der-1151980112
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-.....edge-591627035

But having a hovering anything or huge organic-looking buildings of perfect green and white would make the setting look sterile and unrealistic. The location, as described in the text, is one where you can walk from a corporate office building to a brothel or a concrete bunker or a fish farm or a roller coaster, by a set of interconnected platforms of inconsistent designs and safety standards. Thoughts?

I'm speculating about doing a "visual novel" styled game based on the upcoming novel "Crafter's Heart". Inspired partly by  littlenapoleon and  vixyyfox 's project "Changeling Tale".

1) Engine: Ren'Py, which is free and simple. It has some Python extensions and I'm familiar with Python.

2) Premise: A young man (Stan) moves to a sea colony in the year 2038, to work for an AI, and tries to build a new life among a strange culture and advanced tech. The plot can go in significantly different directions than the book.

3) Tone/style: Slice-of-life in a near-future setting, with some romance elements. Some drama involving future technology such as digital immortality, surveillance and high biotech. Some humor.

4) Intended market: People interested in reading science fiction. Not people looking for an erotica game or action gameplay.

5) Gameplay: Visual novel, which means not very much beyond reading! However, this one would be somewhat more interactive than most because of a decision-making cycle and underlying stats.
a) Pick an overall focus for the week, like just working hard at the main job or training for something. This decision affects stats.
b) A random event happens each week, based largely on your stats. Eg. doing intense work at X might trigger a promotion offer or a work injury. Some events require event flags to be set earlier, eg. events at a particular apartment don't happen if you don't live there.
c) Many of the random events are linked to friends/love interests. These are linked in both directions to non-romance-related stats. Eg. working closely with the AI strains relations with a character who opposes the AI (though not ruling her out). Accepting an offer from someone who wants to test a feather-growing biotech treatment on Stan, improves relations with her and permanently affects Stan's appearance and charisma.
d) Each week there is also a game segment in which Stan probably plays Thousand Tales, the game run by his employer. I'm not sure how to handle this part. A VN engine isn't suitable for any detailed gameplay without major work. I could treat it as a separate set of random-but-stat-based events such as "if Stan has boosted his magic stat, each week he might meet a wizard". The in-game events are connected to real-world ones because his real friends sometimes play the game and there are game residents who are useful contacts for other purposes.
e) So, the cycle is basically "Week 1: Work, Social, Game. Week 2..." The player gets agency by deciding how to handle the three types of events, and having every event change a stat like "loyal to X" and acknowledging those changes through later events. I'd like to have fairly frequent choices within conversations, even if they only tweak an "interested in Y topic" variable by one point, instead of having a long conversation the player is passively watching.

6) Endings: The ending is segmented, showing where Stan ends up physically, in what kind of role, with which character(s).

7) Art/music assets:
a) Background art would be a tough part of this project. I can't recycle some generic Japanese high school backgrounds; this takes place in an exotic setting across two worlds. Because this is a VN I'd mostly need a dozen or three background images, but they'd still largely need to be custom-drawn for this project. The locations are a mix of a near-future sea colony and a fantasy game world.
b) The cast: Around 11 named characters plus bit parts. Of these, 5 are humans seen in the real world and game world, 1 a real-world robot, and the rest either AIs or game players only seen within the game. Would also need a dolphin and one or two other robot designs. Can't use generic character art; the characters include robots and fantasy races, and this matters to the story.
c) Expressions/variations: The most important characters definitely need multiple expressions/poses. At least Stan needs several art variations too, reflecting different outfits (esp. real/game) and several types of physical transformation.
d) Music: There's some decent-quality music I could get free, but it probably wouldn't stand out as more than OK.

8) Funding: I would need money for art and possibly music.

9) First steps: With placeholder art, demonstrate that I can do the basic gameplay loop and a few random events. Oh yeah, and finishing the book would be a good idea. So... if I were to proceed with this project, that's what I'd try.

What's so great about taurs, anyway? I like them, but it's tough to convey exactly why. For me it's that they're a mix of humanoid (with the convenience of hands) and feral/quadrupedal, with some interesting changes to adjust to and speculate about. And they're cuddly and would have some physical differences like carrying capacity and suitability for clothing to figure out. Chakats, though their setting is an obvious copy of Star Trek, still have a unique culture of their own, so that's an example of developing a taur race.

But a lot of that applies to other furry species. I have no interest in a humanoid form with two extra arms; it's just not appealing to me. I do obviously like griffins, but they're not quite as fun for me as taur forms.

There's also an interesting difference between thinking about flesh-and-blood taur characters in a realistic setting, and machine-based ones who are either robotic or in a virtual world. For instance, the question of where the internal organs go is less important for a machine; and as a virtual griffin I wouldn't be freaked out by the thought of constantly having dirt or worse on my hands.

What's the appeal, for you, if any?

After several weeks of dealing with a recent censorship dispute, publisher FurPlanet and I were not able to come to any compromise. I have asked them to remove all of my stories from all of their publications, and they've said they will. These other stories are "Ivan and the Black Riders", which also appears in my collection "Mythic Transformations", and "Wings of Faith", which also appears in the free collection "Thousand Tales: Extra Lives". Both are on Amazon.

I plan to post the story "Red Engines" on DeviantArt and FurAffinity soon, in its previously published form. Rather than comment extensively on it I'll just note that it's from around 2010, and that it's violent and obviously drew some hostile attention from certain readers.

New book by *ahem* somebody: "Shifting Tales". https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GBG1MB5
It's a set of TF stories on the theme of reality shifting in addition to the characters themselves changing.

I'm going to be at Megaplex in Orlando, Aug. 3-5. https://megaplexcon.org/
If you go, I'll most likely be in the board gaming area! I'm also running one gaming session using Fate Accelerated (a free tabletop RPG) and a writing workshop.

By the way, I've got a new book coming out on Amazon in a week or so. Will post later about that.

I just finished playing "Sunless Sea" and tried a game made in Twine, and I beta-tested "The Pirate's Fate". They have me thinking about the design of different types of Interactive Fiction.

The first type of IF was based on "rooms", with a notion of creatures and objects in them. (Eg. "Zork".) That's a good structure if your focus is on moving between locations, but it's hard to work with if you want to have a lot of events happen there. That is, if you want something complex to happen in a certain place, you might have to build that event implicitly into the items/creatures with a rule like "if the player uses X item in Y room, this happens".

Then there's an event-focused system as in Twine games. There, a game is divided into "passages" that may or may not be linked to physical locations. In my Twine game "Dragon Fate", the focus is on moving around in a dungeon, but there are often multiple passages used to represent one physical room. A section with a booby-trapped door was especially hard to set up because the room could exist in three states, and the game had to track which one existed and send you to the right version. If I'd built that with a Zork-style game engine, the trap probably would've been easier to program.

What a Zork-style engine doesn't do well is time. There aren't really scenes or time periods, unless you treat them as like parallel universes that happen to have similar-looking room layouts. I noticed this with the Inform engine, too. Twine can handle time passing just by not letting you backtrack, and treating the passages as events rather than locations.

"Sunless Sea" uses a system closely related to their freeware game "Fallen London". The basic mechanic is that you collect event flags everywhere and they're explicitly shown, with pictures. Event flags are normally hidden trigger information like "you've beaten the dragon", which a game can check to do something like changing an NPC's dialog. This game makes everything into an event flag, possibly with a number, and indicates what you need to unlock certain choices. A certain event for instance requires "40x Supplies For the Passage, 0x Horizon Codex, 1+ Searing Enigma", where the first one is the product of a long quest chain, the second is the reward for completing this event, and the third is a sort of rare treasure. These flags can also be linked to a stat that's handled the same way, by some mechanic like "you can click this, but whether you're taken to a success or failure result depends on whether your Iron stat + 1d100 > X". That system brings chance into the outcome. Because the choices in any one situation are all visible, along with their requirements, there's some innate spoiler activity. On the other hand, the player is aware of what other opporunities exist, even if it's not clear what you have to do to earn a flag like "Unaccountably Peckish". (Don't.) These flags have to all be given unique names to link them to specific quests, as with the "Supplies For the Passage" which are unrelated to "Supplies For the Work" and "Supplies". "Morrowind" shows signs of similar naming oddities, because a phrase like "help with a certain problem" has to be unique to one quest if it's not to interfere with others.

Because this text-adventure system is built into a game where you're basically steering a boat around, the core of the interaction is that a menu of choices pops up whenever you reach a port, and there are triggers at sea based on randomness or factors like running out of food. As I recall, "Fallen London" works more by dealing you a random set of "cards" triggering events, where the possible card draws are based on what flags you currently have, then letting you pick the order to resolve them in.

This system also is odd in how it handles time. There are multiple time variables linked to specific places or events, and a master time variable whose purpose is to hand you a "Something Awaits You" flag every so often while sailing, causing special once-per-port-visit events to happen. For instance, visiting the Melting Isles lets you spend Something Awaits You either to dine with the locals or to forage for supplies, but then you have to leave and wait before you can do either again. Quest chains are handled, as in "The Elder Scrolls", by tracking a number from 0 to 100 to represent every possible status of the quest. But they're also tracked in the form of what other items/flags you possess, so for instance a Nephrite Ring represents that you've done X and can be used as a trigger for another event.

I beta-tested "The Pirate's Fate" and thought the design of that was interesting. Because it's a visual novel, the focus is on conversation scenes that happen in a scripted order. I auditioned to help with that by writing a segment for the game, but the writers correctly pointed out that what they wanted was very different from the mindset I brought to the table based on "Dragon Fate". DF is non-linear and uses stats and randomness, and focuses on being a long explorer. TPF is focused on character interaction, with physical location used almost entirely as a backdrop for those conversations. At no point, for instance, are you set free in a town to decide to dawdle and explore until you're ready to move on.

I noticed some hidden variables that are vestigial in the finished game. Eg. you can discuss a poker game by saying "I'm morally against gambling" versus "I'll teach you how to cheat" or another option. As I understand it, the game was going to track your replies to such things and trigger a key plot event based on a rule like "if Moralist > Pragmatist do X". But the designers decided to drop that idea and instead have the big plot twists be shaped entirely by your choices in the key scenes. That's good because the player has agency at that moment, but bad because there's less sense of making meaningful decisions at other times. I also felt like the heroine's personality became strongly scripted and out of the player's control once one or two key decisions were made, which again can be good or bad.

Having played all of these games I can't say that one system is best for all kinds of interactive stories. However, it's important to pick an engine that supports the kind of gameplay you want. In particular, what other gameplay is linked to the Interactive Fiction element: nothing outside it, or something simplistic like Sunless Sea's "sail around and try not to run out of supplies" system, or even a complex game like "Morrowind"? Do you want to show a complex location at one point in time, or a series of events where free movement and backtracking don't exist?

My own inclination is toward having movement between locations, with backtracking, relying on event flags to handle plot development. But I'd also want to see some actual gameplay outside of making choices in conversation, and to have that feel well integrated with the storytelling.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D56WDXR/

My novel "Liberation Game" is now available on Amazon! The e-book is linked above, and the print edition should be out later today.

Revolution On the Edge of Reality

Robin runs a plantation in war-torn Central America. Lumina is an AI created inside the video game "Thousand Tales". When corruption and violence threaten Robin's town, he teams up with Lumina and the digital goddess who created her to start building a new country.

Lumina's idyllic virtual world might become a force for immortality and freedom, but only if Robin helps build a whole society around it... and if they both risk their lives to make that happen.

Part of the emerging "GameLit" genre, combining science fiction with the world of gaming. This volume's focus is on people using the virtual world to create and defend a culture that crosses dimensions. No previous knowledge of the setting is expected; dive in here!

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame.....ainst-darkness
This normally solo, pen-and-paper dungeon crawl game caught my attention while I was browsing board games. It's selling very well on Amazon in print form and has a PDF version on the makers' home page, so I thought I'd check it out.

I created a basic adventuring party of fighter, cleric, wizard and rogue, avoiding the few other options like elf and halfling. On graph paper I made a small 15x10 grid; the standard dungeon is 15x24. I rolled dice combinations to generate rooms from a chart, plugging them into the grid and fudging them a little to make them fit. With each new room the party reached I rolled for its contents on one chart, then sometimes on a chart for a special feature like a healing fountain or on a monster table to determine the type and then the specific monster type and then the number of monsters. First was an ambush by six zombies, which were actually pretty easy because they and other minion types have 1 HP each and you can kill several; also this was in a hallway that limited who could attack. Then I found a room with a medusa in it (Boss class) that turned the entire party to stone instantly due to bad die rolls. Game over.

I created an identical second party and sent them into the same layout. They killed the medusa, but the cleric got stoned and he was the only one with the blessing spell to undo that. I followed the rules for noisily dragging him out of the dungeon and said that I was just dropping the guy off at the nearest church for them to deal with, and hiring a replacement cleric. So, Take 3 took me through the rest of this little dungeon. The heroes found a secret exit, got spooked by a ghost, coughed on a gas trap, hurt themselves finding a spell scroll in a puzzle box, and found a mysterious clue that can be cashed in for 1/3 of a special bonus. Then they fought a small dragon, the final boss, that for some reason was hanging around in a hallway. The dragon managed to escape after the party got in some lucky hits, and after some trouble with vampire toads that the cleric smashed and the wizard fireballed, they escaped with a valuable gem and some magic items. Three party members gained a level, making their next trip easier.

So how was it? I got a bit of a story out of it, so that's good. There was a ton of flipping back and forth between tables, though the PDF package I bought included some condensed tables in an easy-print format. I felt that the dungeon content was pretty bland because the focus was on the exact tile placement even though party members don't occupy specific squares; the only distinction between room types is a "room" versus a tight hallway. I didn't use the reaction rules that could hypothetically have let certain monsters offer me a quest or accept a bribe, because I didn't have much gold and waiting for a reaction meant forfeiting my first attack against monsters that probably would have attacked anyway. (Quests are things like "capture X creature alive" or "bring me gold".) My characters have no game-relevant personality beyond class and choice of weapon type. Overall it's kind of interesting, but it has me imagining how I could do something similar that better suits my own interests.

Sample map: https://kschnee.deviantart.com/art/.....-Map-743373337

I went to see "Ready Player One" tonight with my father. He walked out, bored, and I followed not long after. Spoilers for most of the movie follow.

I found the book to be interesting but deeply flawed from a storytelling perspective because, to skip the long rant, the setting is dead and static and nobody has any creativity or ambition whatsoever but to obsess over old pop culture. In movie format it was fun to see this story brought to life with snazzy CG interspersed with live-action scenes. Compared to the book, it looks like there was an attempt to tie the quest in somewhat with game creator Halliday's past as a reclusive nerd, so that symbolically it's a quest to understand how unhappy the man was in his personal life and to "connect to the real world". I award it points for trying that and for all the pretty colors.

But... it doesn't actually succeed. There's an attempt to show nostalgia moving on a bit from the 1980s, eg. with several references to the 2016 game "Overwatch". (The story is set in 2045.) If anything that kinda weakens the book's theme of extreme stasis without actually showing people creating something new. What's this "connect to the real world" concept though? The quests of take place entirely within the game, and they're completely focused on the creator's personal life so as to continue encouraging people to obsess over a dead man. The hero wins by hanging on the man's every word as recorded in his "journal", which in the movie is now a CG library with obsessively detailed dioramas. The first phase of the quest has been replaced with a car-racing sequence that only makes sense as Halliday wanting to find an heir based not on virtue or work ethic, but on the ability to seize on one line of one conversation nobody else has noticed! At least it's not like the book, where what Halliday really wanted was an heir who's really, stupidly good at 1980s video games.

I also fault the movie for starting off with something like 15 minutes of narration. No, you don't have to do _in media res_ all the time, but this was silly.

The dystopian real world is interesting, but Evil Corporation IOI comes off as exactly that. It also doesn't make sense that all we see of their enslaved workers seems to be people forced to play this video game, not doing anything in the real world. The nickname "Sixers" is also lost on the movie audience; it was a little weird anyhow what with everybody prominently displaying what looks like binary for "5". I liked seeing a nod to the idea that game avatars don't have to be ordinary humanoids; there are some other critters running around. The movie, like the book, completely glosses over the existence of AI technology, and it ditches the notion of it being used for education except to make some brief mentions of there being an in-game school zone called Ludus. So, we end up not seeing people living in the game world for anything but gaming.

Halliday is still presented as a god. The hero kneels before his wizard avatar in awe. The movie makes the point about the real world being so terrible that nobody wants to live in it, which is provocative, but again I fault this story for having a hero who doesn't care.

Overall, it lost my interest despite the pretty flashing lights. Despite the attempt to write a deeper plot than the original book (a surprising thing for Hollywood), it still has the same flaws as the book. I left at the part where Artemis had been captured by the evil corp.

For comparison: I take pride in my own game-themed setting partly because the characters try to live in both worlds and make a meaningful connection between the two. It also presents a more complex setting because there are other things going on than the One Big Game (other AIs, seasteading, secession, fusion, spaceflight) and people have ambitions that are mostly orthogonal to how well the One Big AI does. It's also more upbeat while still having more specific problems than "the real world is a mess", and more adventurous in the choice of game avatars.

http://kschnee.xepher.net/pics/code.....on_raiders.jpg
I've been deeply focused for the last few days on version 4 of a long-running game idea: something where you mostly talk to people instead of fighting. Not as in "there's a battle system but you can click a thing to say you talk your way out of killing". As in, "you walk up to NPCs and have something resembling a sane human conversation with them".
-V1 of this idea was based on my frustration with the Institute plot in "Fallout 4". In this demo you click on people to receive bits of evidence about FO4's Synth slaves, then go to a debate screen where you click on the evidence to counter specific arguments being made by a villain. Eg. the villain says "synths can't be creative!" and you can click a fact you found about a synth seen carving interesting designs into its arm, which strengthens the "creative" argument in your favor, gets a bonus for countering what the villain just said, but weakens your case for "synths feel pain".
-V2 was about having a conversation flow instead of the PC walking up to someone and saying "QUEST. LOCAL INFO. SHOP. BYE." The actual things being said are abstracted into "topics", and there's a notion of topics being related. If the NPC talks about Raiders, you can continue discussing Raiders or shift focus to Guns or Mutants, but the NPC gets annoyed if you suddenly talk about Science. You gain XP in the topics being discussed.
-V3 was about gaining specific written facts like "The Collapse happened 100 years ago." At this point I was moving away from Fallout-specific lore but keeping the concept that you're an outsider coming in to help an allegedly-good science foundation, the Thaw. In this demo you had to gain facts (canned text) from a teacher, then tell these facts to a robot, but to get the teacher to talk you first had to spill the info you already had on other subjects to gain favor.
-The screenshot is from V4 in progress. Looks junky with crude sprites and tiles. As shown here: As hero Pip, I knew nothing about Raiders. I used a doorway to "go outside" and have a (purely text) adventure, which granted me a Fact about Raiders and unlocked the topic for my conversations. I walked up to an NPC and clicked on the Learning menu, then the topic Raiders. I asked about Raiders. NPC knew nothing about that. I stated the fact I knew. NPC didn't care (not having it in their list of interests), but learned it. I then asked for info and the NPC was able to repeat what I'd said, then to recognize when I was repeating myself.

The idea here is that I'd link some mix of persuasion, conversation flow, and learning, with a simple adventure mode. Go outside to gain knowledge and resources that you then spend inside to build up trust and more skill and equipment, which helps you outside again. Then in the end you talk the Thaw into not unleashing Project Gratuitously Evil or something.

It's not full-out AI, but I see the potential here for a kind of gameplay I've never seen before, if I can keep it simple enough to avoid massive scope creep. A full V4 demo is... kinda close given recent progress. You'd have an ugly sprite walking back and forth between the "go outside" doorway, a bed, and several NPCs to talk with, who offer different help if you butter them up. As for making this into an actual game I'm not sure what the final form would be. Probably would need a simple battle system (I've coded several) and a simple world map (ditto) but not a complete 2D tiled world.

Today I drove east across Florida to watch the Falcon Heavy launch from the beach near Cocoa, FL. That was a looooong drive on the way back; a horde of people all went there to watch, too.

Tons of people lined the road at every bridge. People filled the beach, all staring in one direction. At 3:45 Eastern I didn't see the exact liftoff, since I was looking straight north and the launch was actually a bit off to the west behind a building. But I saw it a few seconds after liftoff. Arced off to the east and vanished, with the first-stage separation not clearly visible. Then a few minutes later two brief flashes of fire appeared in the sky, and then twin trails of fire low on the north horizon as the first stages landed. There was a near-simultaneous double landing, with a BOOM BABOOM! hitting the beach twice, seconds after the landing. The crowd hooted and applauded.

I'm told that the center first stage crashed at sea, but still, the side boosters (which had themselves each flown once) landed successfully, and the silly payload is on its way. I'd seen a few of the last space shuttle launches from the beaches near Indiatlantic, FL, but this was something new, and I'm glad to have gotten to see this bit of space history in person.

Draft 2 of "Gleaners' Guild" is complete at about 87K words! (Draft 1 was about 13K.) I'm going to let it sit for a while so I can do a TSA-Talk Christmas Story Exchange story and probably some short silly TF pieces, then come back and look it over again.

This book will not be marked as part of the Thousand Tales series, so as to avoid scaring people off by being "book 6". The pitch: "Some players of Thousand Tales pay its ruling AI to surgically remove their brains and convert them to digital format, so that they can live in a virtual paradise. Stan isn't one of them; he's not important and he can barely even afford the hardware to play Thousand Tales the old-fashioned way. When Stan starts looking to the game for the growth and inspiration he can't find in the real world, maybe he and the AI can help him find a better life for himself. The game world isn't quite so innocent as it seems, and it needs people to do the AI's work."

In this story the main character stays human (though his game avatar changes a bit) and the plot is a mix of what he's doing in the game world and in the real world. The tone is meant to be positive as Stan grows out of the moderately oppressive situation he lives in, but I worry it seems too depressing despite showing that Stan isn't being horribly abused.

The title is now inappropriate, but I don't yet have a replacement. The theme is growth, the setting a mix of California and the nautical "Endless Isles" world within the game, and the main character most interested in item-crafting and trade. The cover art is probably going to be https://www.shutterstock.com/image-.....CQgzVLb1g-1-13 .

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07838C2MJ
My new short story collection "Mythic Transformations" is now out on Amazon! This book is about people being turned into all sorts of fantasy creatures, from griffin to dragon to water elemental to still stranger things. As usual, a free sample is available. Ratings are appreciated on Amazon and Goodreads!