Creating a fembot related text adventure (RPG/romance game)

[gynoneko]

Before anything other, I tripped over some details in the story prologue: you wrote Prot knows the Dr Fix for years, still he is attending the lectures the professor gives. While not totally odd, as the player I would expect Prot being the assistant of Dr Fix , attending the lectures solely for keeping up-to-date for the following exercise, which Prot organizes for the students. I don't think it is possible in that set Prot is studying *together* with a freshman. Even a "private exercise" would be odd.

I suggest both Prot and Claire being freshmen. That way there are a lot of plausible stories and places where the two could meet. The first scene could be Prot and Claire attending the lecture and outperform each other and all the other students. That would be the first puzzle, with many possible state variables set for the follwing game: Claire impressed by prot, Claire unimpressed, Claire annoyed by Prot, different levels of knowledge demonstrated to each other and Dr Fix and so on. We could even allow the player to choose characters and play Claire in that first part of the game, giving slightly different start points for the following story.

Let's start with that scene, just to get a feeling for it. By the way, you have Inform7 up and running? Then we could immediately exchange code pieces and test.

dark

I guess we can go with that. My original idea wasn't exactly what you thought though...
I was thinking that prot started taking classes as a freshman with dr fix, and after 2 or 3 years of classes, they have become friends. Claire is a transfer student that is in his year.

However, I think your idea works too. SImplicity is best. K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple stupid.) So for simplicity's sake, we can make it so Dr Fix is amazed at their (or at least Prot's) knowledge as a freshman, and both Prot and Claire are freshman together.
I like the puzzle idea too, that could be a good way of getting the player to start to work for a reward.

I'm not sure what kind of puzzle you want for this. I had an idea for a kind of puzzle later on, which would involve hacking computers/robots, but I'll go into that when we get there.

I did download Inform7. I will try to get it running, but you are going to have to be walking me through some of this. I'm sure I an figure a lot of this out, but someone with experience would be better at using it.

As Prot is not his name, I just don't know what to call him. What name should we use for the protagonist?

[darkbutflashy]

My original idea wasn't exactly what you thought though... I was thinking that prot started taking classes as a freshman with dr fix, and after 2 or 3 years of classes, they have become friends. Claire is a transfer student that is in his year.

Ahhh, now I get it. Reading English is hard enough for me so I sometimes miss some details.

I'm not sure what kind of puzzle you want for this. I had an idea for a kind of puzzle later on, which would involve hacking computers/robots, but I'll go into that when we get there.

I don't know how lectures work in US universities. Are there often questions to the audience? (In Germany they are unusual.) We could make it the first lecture on the topic and Dr Fix is giving the audience a broad overview. That way, Dr Fix could explain something and ask the audience what they think about how this or that is done, then Prot and Claire try to answer and after that, Dr Fix says "You are right" and let Prot and/or Claire explain further, which is the next dialogue line in the quiz, or "No, you are wrong", in which case Prot or Claire get the chance to explain why, with that explaination being the next dialogue line. All the dialogue would be multiple choice. Dr Fix will only intervent the two if both are wrong . (Claire will usually answer right, but has a random chance to get it wrong.)

I don't know how good your experience in robotics is. I'm an engineer so I can help to come up with some questions out of the "real world" and correct and seemingly correct, but wrong, answers here.

I did download Inform7. I will try to get it running, but you are going to have to be walking me through some of this. I'm sure I an figure a lot of this out, but someone with experience would be better at using it.

No problem. The reason why I want you to have the Inform7 IDE at hand is to allow you to *test* all the things I've coded immediately. And testing means playing while looking at the sources. After a while you will be able to try some things out yourself.

As Prot is not his name, I just don't know what to call him. What name should we use for the protagonist?

We could let the player decide, but use a better default than "Prot".

About Dr Fix' name: is there some reason you called him that way? The name sounds a little odd at least to me. ("Fix & Foxi" was a popular German children's comic magazine featuring two anthropomorphic foxes and their friends...)

dark

[gynoneko]

My original idea wasn't exactly what you thought though... I was thinking that prot started taking classes as a freshman with dr fix, and after 2 or 3 years of classes, they have become friends. Claire is a transfer student that is in his year.

Ahhh, now I get it. Reading English is hard enough for me so I sometimes miss some details.

I'm not sure what kind of puzzle you want for this. I had an idea for a kind of puzzle later on, which would involve hacking computers/robots, but I'll go into that when we get there.

I don't know how lectures work in US universities. Are there often questions to the audience? (In Germany they are unusual.) We could make it the first lecture on the topic and Dr Fix is giving the audience a broad overview. That way, Dr Fix could explain something and ask the audience what they think about how this or that is done, then Prot and Claire try to answer and after that, Dr Fix says "You are right" and let Prot and/or Claire explain further, which is the next dialogue line in the quiz, or "No, you are wrong", in which case Prot or Claire get the chance to explain why, with that explaination being the next dialogue line. All the dialogue would be multiple choice. Dr Fix will only intervent the two if both are wrong . (Claire will usually answer right, but has a random chance to get it wrong.)

I don't know how good your experience in robotics is. I'm an engineer so I can help to come up with some questions out of the "real world" and correct and seemingly correct, but wrong, answers here.

I did download Inform7. I will try to get it running, but you are going to have to be walking me through some of this. I'm sure I an figure a lot of this out, but someone with experience would be better at using it.

No problem. The reason why I want you to have the Inform7 IDE at hand is to allow you to *test* all the things I've coded immediately. And testing means playing while looking at the sources. After a while you will be able to try some things out yourself.

As Prot is not his name, I just don't know what to call him. What name should we use for the protagonist?

We could let the player decide, but use a better default than "Prot".

About Dr Fix' name: is there some reason you called him that way? The name sounds a little odd at least to me. ("Fix & Foxi" was a popular German children's comic magazine featuring two anthropomorphic foxes and their friends...)

dark

No real reason, any and all names are fine to change. If you have a suggestion, by all means post it. It will probably be better than mine.

Sounds good to me, so let me know what to do next.

[darkbutflashy]

Ok, I give you an impression how the game texts works together with the interaction:

Code: Select all

## Applied Robotics Institute, Lecture Room
Filled with about a dozen tables and twice as much chairs, a desk, whiteboard, projection screen, and flipchart, the room looks like any ordinary meeting room.

Soon Dr Fix' lecture will start. Your fellow students arrive and take place. You should sit down, too.

>look
The only chairs left are last row right, near a asian-looking guy, third row middle, right or left a bald, bearded student and first row middle near an auburn-haired girl. [The idea behind this puzzle is who the auburn-haired girl (Claire) thinks Prot is when she is looking around as soon as Prot corrects her.]

>sit down
Purely out of random, you decide to sit down near the bearded guy. [This is random, but the player may decide on a chair himself. If Prot waits too long with sitting down, he may end up sitting on the floor, which would be a fourth possibilty.]

A man in his late forties enters the room. He puts the plastic box he had carried with him on the desk. [This is scripted, it starts as soon as Prot sits down] "Good morning. I'm Dr Fix and this is 'Robotics 101' class. If you are in the wrong class, please leave now and let the ones on the floor take a seat. Ah, and please spare a seat third row middle, that's where I take place soon."

A student third row middle leaves his seat and sits down on the floor. [This is different if Prot sits on the floor. Then another student will leave the room and Prot gets a second chance to take a seat. If he misses again, well, duh.]

"Fine to see you all are confident to learn the basics of robotics. Be aware, aside this lecture is called "Robotics 101", it's not a beginners course. I expect you to have knowledge in differential equations and field theory, in physical chemistry, mechanics, electronics, energy distribution and computer programming. If you miss one of these fields, you may be able to catch up by learning it immediately, if you miss more, you are wasting your time here."

Dr Fix pulls out the projection screen from its housing and reaches for a beamer and notebook inside the box he briught with him. Intricately he places the beamer on a small table in the aisle and hooks it up to both the mains and his notebook.

> wait [Prot can do something different here, giving the chance for even more interaction.]

After a minute or two, the screen shows the institutes' logo. The power point poisoning is about to start.

"To give you an impression about the field of robotics, I will give you a broad overview now," Dr Fix continues. "Please try to find an answer to all the questions I ask you during today's lecture. If you are able to find the correct answer yourself, the course would be very interesting to you. Otherwise, it would be at least confusing, most likely annoying."

[Now the first picture of the presentation is shown to the player. It's a picture of an humanoid robot head (female, and of course no photo but a drawing, to match the other pics.)]

"Well, that's a robot. Impressive, huh? But wait, we are only looking at it's gentle shell. We can't get a grip for the technology inside that way. Let's skin the beauty," Dr Fix jokes.

[Another picture of the robot head, now without skin and hair, revealing a hard shell with joints.]

"Ok, now here we see the skull of a robot. It's a big problem to have such a hard shell below a soft tissue. Why do you think it's that way?"
...

We can continue together to find intersting questions and answers.

dark

[gynoneko]

Looks pretty good so far. We will have to come up with how the drawings work with the text, and what everything looks like. I suppose this will mostly be POV from Prot, but I am fine with 3rd person as well.

If we are going to start out the character with a series of choices, like a quiz, either we can give the player information they will need to enter later (trivia about robots, etc) in the form of a test, or we can have the player answer them aloud right off.
I can do some more research about robotics and the like. We can even have different tests with different topics. This could be an introduction to robotics, but we could also to the history of robotics, robots in media/entertainment, identification of robotic elements (like naming the parts of a robot), etc.
They should all be relatively easy, or we should provide the user with the information in the game and they will just have to remember it.

[darkbutflashy]

No, no, you get me wrong. The quiz isn't there because the player should prove if he knows basic robotics. The quiz is there so Claire and Dr Fix can be introduced and there is a first spin in their relation to Prot. It's not so important whether Prot knows the answers or not. More important is what Claire and Dr Fix think about Prot during and after the quiz. And that can be controlled by the player. So even if the player knows all the correct answers, he may decide to let Prot answer wrong one or more time, or don't even answer at all, just to test what's changed in the game then.

The quiz has a lot of possible endings, which lead to different settings in the whole following game. E.g.:
# Prot knows *all* the answers and answers them very quick. -> Both Claire and Dr Fix are impressed.
# Prot knows all the answers but sometimes Claire is faster than him. -> Claire is impressed but thinks that guy is a rival.
# Prot is correcting Claire. -> Claire is impressed but thinks that guy is a little snobbish.

and so on...

Second, depending on the chair Prot is seated Claire can identify Prot, or mistake him being the asian guy or the bearded bald guy. Both giving different results as soon as Prot approaches Claire.

dark

[gynoneko]

That is sounding pretty complicated, but if you think you can make it work, than great.
So does the player have to answer the questions then? Or does the player chose if he will just answer right or wrong? Is it timed?

[darkbutflashy]

That is sounding pretty complicated, but if you think you can make it work, than great.

Both yes. It is complicated, but it won't be too interesting the other way.

So does the player have to answer the questions then? Or does the player chose if he will just answer right or wrong?

I'd like to irritate the player a little in having him think he has to answer all the questions correctly. It's the reasoning of that puzzle: once he doesn't know the answer and still sees he gets past the quiz, of course with a slight bias for the rest of the game, I hope the player will understand "there is no wrong answer" in this game. In the end, it should be a romance game, right? Then there shouldn't really be any wrong answers, only answers that make things easier (e.g. building a relation to Claire) while making other things harder (e.g. building a relation to any other girl because Claire is extremly demanding and jealous).

For the quiz, I suggest multiple-choice. Two to six possible answers to any question or something like that. But always questions that require to explain.

Is it timed?

I know some romance games which have timed questions. I don't like the idea of using real-time too much because it imposes far more hurry to non-native-speakers of English than to natives.

Anyway we could, but I suggest to use turn-based time. It's easier to implement, too.

dark

[gynoneko]

Sounds good to me.
Even though this is suppose to be a romance game, I still think people will want to be able to pursue other girls/gynoids in the game and still get a good ending. Multiple play-throughs could work too, I know a lot of games that do that, but at the same time, I think if the player can get the best ending and the most out of one run through, they will like the game more.
So we will have to make it a little challenging, but still possible for Prot to get it on with many girls and still have a good ending.

I also think a little adventure is a good thing. It can still use the puzzle based game system, but I think a little espionage would be fun (has to sneak into a building and hack a system or something). Keeps it interesting at least.

[gynoneko]

So how have things been coming with the game? I've been in the middle of a really big move to another state, so I haven't had the time to do anything with it myself.

[darkbutflashy]

I'm quite busy right now constructing a complicated machine (work, meh) so I haven't got the time to make something "playable". I'll try to make a small piece next week.

dark

[darkbutflashy]

I worked a little on the start of the game. You can find the source on pastebin for the next month. I would have posted it here but Inform7 makes a distinction between tabs and spaces and phpBB doesn't.--- http://pastebin.com/download.php?i=TaHZD43E --- It's important to use the download function of pastebin as the other formats replace tabs by spaces, too.

There is not much done yet. I made up some names and the start of the story like proposed. The protagonist can sit down on various seats in the classroom, the logic for doing that seems complete. Next would be adding some other students taking seat turn-by-turn, just by marking the seats occupied and giving a small note about it. No big problem

Then the lecture/quiz will start. A litte more complicated.

dark

[gynoneko]

Just got around to trying it out. While I did have to make a tweak (my fault really), and had to install that extension by Jon Ingold, I did get it to work!
So far it seems pretty good, simple and perhaps too restricted, but it is only the beginning.
Do we have to prevent the player from sitting near the girl? I also notice that when you look at the room, it tells you the seat next to her is available, but when you go to sit in it, it is always taken. Maybe we can adjust that so once it is taken by someone else, it will no longer give the option of sitting there.
I also noticed a few grammatical errors, and a few things that I assume are a regional thing as well. For example, in USA, when you say someone is in the second grade, it always refers to elementary school. If you want to say that it is the second grade of a university, you should say "second year" or "sophomore". But as I said, I assume this is a regional thing, and is probably normal for where you live. I wonder if we should make adjustments to make this as international as we can?

I'll go back over it, and give you some more feedback, and once I figure out the programming language of this thing, I might try it out too. Till then, I can't wait to see more.

[darkbutflashy]

Just got around to trying it out. While I did have to make a tweak (my fault really), and had to install that extension by Jon Ingold, I did get it to work!

Nice!

So far it seems pretty good, simple and perhaps too restricted, but it is only the beginning.

Yes, it's more a storytelling demo which can easily be extended.

Do we have to prevent the player from sitting near the girl?

No. It was just a test. Drop line 121: "The seat first row middle is occupied." Comments are in brackets, so bracketing that out would change it.

I also notice that when you look at the room, it tells you the seat next to her is available, but when you go to sit in it, it is always taken. Maybe we can adjust that so once it is taken by someone else, it will no longer give the option of sitting there.

You are right. It's possible to make the room description dynamic, and we should do that. I'll think about the neccessary tweak.

I also noticed a few grammatical errors, and a few things that I assume are a regional thing as well. For example, in USA, when you say someone is in the second grade, it always refers to elementary school. If you want to say that it is the second grade of a university, you should say "second year" or "sophomore". But as I said, I assume this is a regional thing, and is probably normal for where you live.
I wonder if we should make adjustments to make this as international as we can?

Let's do it with american or british terms. As said, I live in Germany and there we don't talk English at all. Errr, well, we do, but we really shouldn't.

American english is ok to me. If there are regionalisms in the game, they should be easily understandable. If you haven't told me what a "Sophomore" is, it was a big ? to me -- I think for any other non-US-american and a lot of US-americans too. We should avoid such words, "second year" is far better.

(In contrary, Dr Hitogata is named that way because japanese term "hitogataroboto" means "humanoid robot".)

I'll go back over it, and give you some more feedback, and once I figure out the programming language of this thing, I might try it out too. Till then, I can't wait to see more.

Fine, that's what i had hoped for.

dark

[darkbutflashy]

I worked a little more on the first scene: http://pastebin.com/download.php?i=1Fhwz7CW

I left out the graphics window for now. We can re-add it anytime later. The description of the chairs is now a little more dynamic and the seats are being occupied by arriving students after some turns. Another bug was fixed: Before, the floor could be occupied by another student. Now it is an "enterable supporter", not a seat, so the arriving students show no interest in it.
Additionally, Dr. Hitogata arrives after some turns and reserves the place third row middle for himself.

dark

[gynoneko]

So sorry for the long delay. I haven't had the chance to test this out yet. I (finally) just got a job, and training has started, so I've been busy.
Unfortunately, the link you gave has expired. Sorry.
Could you please re-upload it so I can try it again? Thanks!

[darkbutflashy]

Sure, here it is: http://pastebin.com/download.php?i=QGbu5fUg

Im sorry for the long delay, too. I'm quite busy with the electronics work on my desk and the programming for *that device* isn't finished yet. So I cannot continue with the adventure yet.

dark

[Ray McCoy]

I've never coded a game (except for ZZT, if that show my age) but I'm going to try my hand at making a flash game before long. I'm working with Clockwork Butterfly in doing some artwork for some animations we are collaborating on, and I'm going to use that art as the basis for my game.

[--NightBattery--]

artwork?
you are doing pixel art or 2D art like the one CWB does?
i kinda draw, maybe i could help a little.
from time to time.
once in a while.
once.

[Ray McCoy]

2D art, like he does. Since he expressed a need for art, I contacted him about a collaboration. It's been a couple of months ago, maybe, but the art is 99% done (finishing it today, in fact) and we are about to start storyboarding.

[--NightBattery--]

oh well. there is always a next time.
a next project.
the more helpers, the faster.
but how come you have the art first and then storyboarding?
doesn't compute.

crazy idea>>>discussion among colabs>>design>>>storyboarding>>>art>>>mysterious computer work i don't understand>>>CONTENT!

[Ray McCoy]

Partly because I already had some material ready. I had done several animations quite some time ago, but lost my computer that had most of my work, along with the original art for it and the animation program I used, and never quite got up to buying another program. (Working college student.) We came up with a story idea and setting, and I went step by step with his ideas. Not only that, but the story changed over time---we decided on doing three animations in a story arc, rather than just one. We felt it would be better to get all the art done, then do with it as we wanted, like a big box of, um, fembot Legos. But instead of bricks, gears and springs. And boobs!

[--NightBattery--]

ah. i get it.

cool

[Ray McCoy]

Lol, yeah! Exactly. The base body will he used for several animations, and that'll save a lot of work.