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Weekly Update - Mentales Week, Ports of Old Games?

3 years ago1,174 words

I've been working on Mentales this week! I'll likely also spend the next week on that, and I've been wondering again whether to make official ports of my old Flash games...

There were some annoying setbacks - like an hours-long power cut and some stupid technical challenges while trying to figure out how to get Unity to handle file format stuff for saves - but I got some important things working, which you can see in this silent 5-minute video (half of which is just silly crass dialogue):



A summary of stuff I've added since I last posted about the game:

- Tilesets can be created and areas can have their tiles drawn using essentially the same editor that's used for drawing pixel faces. I showed a clearer video of this on my Patreon earlier in the week.

- It's now possible to save and load Tales. Getting it working was a pain because of technical programming things (each Tale has a single 'library' variable which stores objects of classes like Tileset and Conversation which all derive from a LibraryThing class, but neither XML nor JSON serialisation handled those derived classes properly and I had to figure out how to get around that), but I did get there in the end!

- These things I'm calling 'Quips' can be created and assigned to a character (though currently they're only used by the player):



Each one just has a name and an element; nothing beyond that, and the element only determines the colour of the 'card' display. They're the equivalent of skills, and could be called whatever you want, so you could use vague things reminiscent of skill names like "Insult", or more specific phrases like "You're ugly!" depending on what you wanted to do with your Tale.

- Conversations can also be created, which have a node-graph-based structure. Basic text nodes can be created by right clicking, and speakers can be assigned to them by dragging their 'cards' from the library on the right. The emote faces of assigned speakers can be changed. Dragging and dropping a Quip creates an Entry node.



- Instead of using a basic interact/talk command, you have to hold a button (currently either left shift or the left shoulder button on a gamepad) to bring up this radial menu, then you select a Quip from that.



The conversation assigned to whoever's in front of you then looks for an entry point corresponding to that Quip. If none are found, dialogue doesn't start. Multiple Quips could connect to the same starting node.

- There will also be opportunities to use Quips mid-dialogue for more branching.

- I also plan to have items, which work in the same way as Quips.

- I plan to add 'Quests', too, which are objects created in the library which can have up to 8 states, and some conversations could check or set their states. (Contrasting with AFC, which just had a single global quest state.)


It's fairly simple, but already I've been amusing myself just making those silly test conversations, and I could see how little stories could be made from it once I've added more things like moving between rooms, decorative props, items, specific dialogue actions and checks, etc.

It's heavily dependent on writing though. I keep wondering whether to add some kind of battle system, remembering examples of user-created level things in games I've played in the past (which tend to be low on words and heavy on repetitive combat, if it's an option), though I'm also aware that people who used AFC in the past didn't exactly make standard battle-filled JRPG adventures with it.

If you're actually interested in this project at all - and how I've presented it so far even makes sense to you! - what kind of stuff would you want it to have?



The plan was to take this week off and get back to Atonal Dreams next nweek, tomorrow, but my parents are going away on yet another of their holidays all next week, meaning I'll be looking after the dog and neighbouring community hall thing. That always throws me off mentally and makes it hard to focus on the usual stuff, so I'm wondering whether to just spend the week finishing off the planned features of Mentales since my mind's already calibrated to that and there's not all that much left to do. Seems wise, though I never like not focusing on my primary project.

(Annoying, though; if I'd realised in advance, I might have done an extra push on Atonal Dreams this week and done next week what I did with this one... Though maybe I'm so burned out on Atonal Dreams that would have been a waste anyway.)

Something that's been on my mind while working on Mentales is that I'd like to replay AFC, and a couple of my other old games, but I don't have Flash Player on this new PC, and I've felt reluctant to install it because it kept pestering me to uninstall it on my old PC, what with Adobe abandoning it and not wanting to be responsible for any issues that arise from their neglect of patching issues.

∞ I talked literally years ago about porting my old games to Steam (late 2019) ∞, which led to the MARDEK Steam port, but I never got around to the other games due to a combination of being busy with other stuff and indecisiveness. I know other Flash devs have released bundles of their old work on Steam, but I feel so uncertain about the idea of bundling all my old stuff together in case I'm missing out on the opportunity to port some of them - eg Clarence's Big Chance - separately. But then I wonder whether that one in particular is even worth its own release. I mean, there's certainly worse stuff on Steam, but...

I also don't know whether the effort to do a port compilation would be worthwhile. Maybe I'd end up spending a month or more on it and only ten people would buy it? It's not really something I'd want to do a big publishing campaign for like I'm hoping to do with Atonal Dreams...

One thought I've had is that I could create maybe two bundles, with the first being pre-MARDEK stuff like Deliverance and Beast Signer, which I'm mostly embarrassed by, and the other being post-MARDEK stuff like AFC, Miasmon and Taming Dreams, which I'm still proud of. They do feel like they're from very different periods of my ~artistic journey~ or whatever.

I'm so unsure, though. Maybe I'll look into trying to create exe files of some old Flash games just for my own personal benefit over the next week - alongside working on Mentales - and see where things go from there.

(I know there are other ways to play old Flash files, but I'm interested in having 'official versions'.)