AF:C is quite busted, especially the really old quests are prone to breaking. There's one recurring nuisance of a bug which is that the interaction between dialogues with splits and plot states is really buggy, meaning it's best to always save and reload ASAP when you enter a new plot state, because old NPCs you talk with again have their dialogues broken when the state advances.
I'm not sure I ever played this Sausage game. It sounds weird. As for crossdressing as a joke, it'd depend on how it's done. The joke there always used to be "haha isn't it funny if a guy does feminine things like wear a dress???", just doing that by itself now probably will raise eyebrows because, like, why is it funny? The root of the joke is just dumb gender norms.
I never liked how you padded your quests with random battles!! It felt like such a waste of time. I only ever really put battles in my quests if they advanced the plot, who would want to fight random Bat #2354 when everybody does it in their quests? The combat engine's just way too simplistic to make it work and form an attachment to for me.
Velma's just such a weird show. The common consensus is it's either deliberate ragebait (and apparently effective, too, as it became Netflix's most watched animated debut?) or a really bad attempt at doing what the overall well-liked Harley Quinn TV Show did, which is taking an existing property [Batman/Scooby-Doo] and focusing on a non-protagonist [Harley Quinn/Velma] and going in different directions with everything. Except in Velma they made something that seems to only appeal to the creator only. Too 'woke' for chuds, too 'problematic' for SJWs, or whatever. It just looks like a complete mess.
I still really like Taming Dreams!
I don't really fondly recall the quest itself, anyhow, I think because I was there myself too during that time and reading all your blogs, so I still connect all of that with the things you were going through back then. There are good things about it, too, of course! The items as mental states thing is interesting and clever!
I think MARDEK's writing works because it's mostly just a silly pastiche of JRPGs and even when it does take itself seriously it's about distant and nebulous concepts and with fantastical characters. It's not really trying to critique, like, society or anything.
I made a battle once where the puzzle is that to defeat the opponent you need to make your sausage sad and weepy and beat up your brother with it. Also you and the opponent are Goblins.
I think I only ever had one quest use all 36 rooms, and that quest had a very low stuff-per-room density. Most quests, even big ones, rarely use more than 25.
I've made quests that take several hours to play! The big collaborative quest I'm working on with some AF regulars from the old days probably is like four hours of content for an uninitiated run, and it's not even done yet! We really pushed what the system can do with that one, and broke things in several ways along the road.
I sent you a bunch of AFC quests some time ago, you should play some of them to see what the engine can do! I'd say "art quest" and "art quest 2"are the best picks for that, as they're free of any and all in-jokes, entirely self-contained and I think manage some cinematic flair despite the limited engine!
I don't think AFC ever leaked to any flash sites. It's only a select group of people who have it, really, and any aficionados who asked the right people.
I would be interested in an official release!
1
Tobias 1104~1Y
Damn, I thought it was pretty much complete and functional. I'm not looking forward to diving into ancient code I no longer understand. But hopefully it's something fairly easy to fix, once I get around to it.
And the more I think about it, the more I think now's probably the best time to try and finally port all my old games, and I've been looking into that... with frustration, since what I did with MARDEK doesn't seem to be working and the wrapper app I've coded is being interpreted as a virus for loading in another exe! Pfff!
Maybe an excuse to start asking about some stuff on Reddit, though.
Once I've got past that hurdle and to the point where I can actual tweak game-related stuff, it'll be valuable to hear feedback from you and anyone else who's spent time with it since it's been so long since I last did.
I don't want to add any major features or anything, just minor tweaks like I did with MARDEK (if anything I might remove some stuff like... aren't there some unfinished creature types?).
I've also been considering just making this Dreamons thing a fairly direct remake so then I can more comfortably make changes people might want to see. But I'm still thinking about the details.
You mentioned cross-dressing re The Magic Sausage, and I don't know how you got that out of what I wrote! The issue was making light of imprisonment and domestic abuse (the protagonist had spent ten years as the unwilling wife of a bandit and it wasn't treated seriously at all), nothing gender-related.
1
Maniafig219~1Y
The cross-dressing thing was in reply to you wondering whether a hypothetical joke would be problematic or not, after talking about worries about how The Magic Sausage would be received.
The Magic Sausage itself just looks uncomfortable to me!
AF:C is quite busted, especially the really old quests are prone to breaking. There's one recurring nuisance of a bug which is that the interaction between dialogues with splits and plot states is really buggy, meaning it's best to always save and reload ASAP when you enter a new plot state, because old NPCs you talk with again have their dialogues broken when the state advances.
I'm not sure I ever played this Sausage game. It sounds weird. As for crossdressing as a joke, it'd depend on how it's done. The joke there always used to be "haha isn't it funny if a guy does feminine things like wear a dress???", just doing that by itself now probably will raise eyebrows because, like, why is it funny? The root of the joke is just dumb gender norms.
I never liked how you padded your quests with random battles!! It felt like such a waste of time. I only ever really put battles in my quests if they advanced the plot, who would want to fight random Bat #2354 when everybody does it in their quests? The combat engine's just way too simplistic to make it work and form an attachment to for me.
Velma's just such a weird show. The common consensus is it's either deliberate ragebait (and apparently effective, too, as it became Netflix's most watched animated debut?) or a really bad attempt at doing what the overall well-liked Harley Quinn TV Show did, which is taking an existing property [Batman/Scooby-Doo] and focusing on a non-protagonist [Harley Quinn/Velma] and going in different directions with everything. Except in Velma they made something that seems to only appeal to the creator only. Too 'woke' for chuds, too 'problematic' for SJWs, or whatever. It just looks like a complete mess.
I still really like Taming Dreams!
I don't really fondly recall the quest itself, anyhow, I think because I was there myself too during that time and reading all your blogs, so I still connect all of that with the things you were going through back then. There are good things about it, too, of course! The items as mental states thing is interesting and clever!
I think MARDEK's writing works because it's mostly just a silly pastiche of JRPGs and even when it does take itself seriously it's about distant and nebulous concepts and with fantastical characters. It's not really trying to critique, like, society or anything.
I made a battle once where the puzzle is that to defeat the opponent you need to make your sausage sad and weepy and beat up your brother with it. Also you and the opponent are Goblins.
I think I only ever had one quest use all 36 rooms, and that quest had a very low stuff-per-room density. Most quests, even big ones, rarely use more than 25.
I've made quests that take several hours to play! The big collaborative quest I'm working on with some AF regulars from the old days probably is like four hours of content for an uninitiated run, and it's not even done yet! We really pushed what the system can do with that one, and broke things in several ways along the road.
I sent you a bunch of AFC quests some time ago, you should play some of them to see what the engine can do! I'd say "art quest" and "art quest 2"are the best picks for that, as they're free of any and all in-jokes, entirely self-contained and I think manage some cinematic flair despite the limited engine!
I don't think AFC ever leaked to any flash sites. It's only a select group of people who have it, really, and any aficionados who asked the right people.
I would be interested in an official release!
And the more I think about it, the more I think now's probably the best time to try and finally port all my old games, and I've been looking into that... with frustration, since what I did with MARDEK doesn't seem to be working and the wrapper app I've coded is being interpreted as a virus for loading in another exe! Pfff!
Maybe an excuse to start asking about some stuff on Reddit, though.
Once I've got past that hurdle and to the point where I can actual tweak game-related stuff, it'll be valuable to hear feedback from you and anyone else who's spent time with it since it's been so long since I last did.
I don't want to add any major features or anything, just minor tweaks like I did with MARDEK (if anything I might remove some stuff like... aren't there some unfinished creature types?).
I've also been considering just making this Dreamons thing a fairly direct remake so then I can more comfortably make changes people might want to see. But I'm still thinking about the details.
You mentioned cross-dressing re The Magic Sausage, and I don't know how you got that out of what I wrote! The issue was making light of imprisonment and domestic abuse (the protagonist had spent ten years as the unwilling wife of a bandit and it wasn't treated seriously at all), nothing gender-related.
The Magic Sausage itself just looks uncomfortable to me!