Slave Story

zondarg 2019-04-30 10:46

Well made interactive fiction! The story is gripping and deep, and there are many endings, from dying from a snakebite in the jungle over getting promoted as writer and film star to being a free man on his own farm (I did certainly not catch all possible :grin:) I first expected interactive fiction with Twine, but this is written in Godot with an self built UI and framework around? Congrats, that is even more work. I liked it! Good job! (btw: you need to give ratings to others to be more visible on the games list :wink:)

dining-philosopher 2019-04-30 21:14

@zondarg Thanks! I knew Twine and other tools specific for this type of game existed but never looked at them very closely. From what I remember they were a bit limited in UI options, and I'm not sure how flexible they are in terms of conditional events. This LD did give me a lot of inspiration to make a Godot template and perhaps make more elaborate, "juiced up" games like this in the future. From what you said, I think there are at least two major endings that you missed ;) BTW, I see you also used Godot for your game, why didn't you add an HTML5 export?

zondarg 2019-05-03 15:45

@dining-philosopher The exported HTML5 did first not work correctly, in the meanwhile I have found out why (do not use "fullscreen" setting when exporting for web) and put it on itch.io to play.

jjjjason 2019-05-08 02:46

This was nice. The story is well written, and there's a good amount of content (especially at the Mother split). I'm also surprised to see that you've rolled your own IF system, but I think this style of presentation probably does work better than the rather plain-ness of Twine. Great to hear you've made it general-purpose enough to build upon in the future.

Edit: whoa I just tried Tarzan'ing it up at the fight pits and am at a whole new section of the game! There is a *lot* of content!!

Double edit: Now the mines!!!

Triple edit: It's an interesting choice to write this story from the perspective of a slave at that particular time. Because of that, instead of offering a moral judgment of "slavery is good/bad", it's more like "slavery sucks, but it's just how it is so we have to deal with it". Can you talk to how you decided to write it from that angle, and how you approached actually writing it?

dining-philosopher 2019-05-13 21:02

Thanks for the amazing comments and completionist persistence @jjjjason! My first idea was simply to have a game where you spend years of your life on different activities/choices, but in a (my own) comfortable Western setting. After an hour of thinking this through I decided to change it to a setting that allowed for more tension, and which also fit the theme better (I wrote down "slavery" as one of my initial takes on the LD-theme).

The writing itself was actually really ad-hoc, I just drew a diagram with the various locations and possible endings in one or two words, eliminating about half of them in the end due to time constraints and changing others on a whim. I did write some good and some bad endings on purpose of course, it seemed nice to give the player this variety. One thing that could be better I guess is to make the outcomes more predictable to the player, for a greater feeling of agency.

cdunham 2019-05-14 02:58

Interesting story, definitely fits the theme! I'm not sure if my smaller choices, like designing spaceships, matter with the main ones though. Seems like a lot of content for being a jam game, so good job!

aurel 2019-05-14 07:29

I really liked this. The writing was really nice, considering how I played through about 4 or 5 of the endings. I did notice one bug, however:

If you choose to smash the spaceship as soon as you get it from your mom, the bad kid still wants your spaceship, which is supposedly non-existent.

Other than that, this was really cool and really interesting - I only wish there had been more to it, as all the endings felt really abrupt and sudden!

m0dsat 2019-05-14 09:16

Really liked the game. The story has many paths, and I enjoyed both the long ones and getting killed by snakes in the woods at age 11. Great work.

jordgubben 2019-05-15 18:02

Most of the time it's hard to tell if this is historical or sci-fi, an that is a scary thing.

conk 2019-05-17 20:31

That was awesome! It has a great replay-ability due to the mix of interesting and funny options to choose from. I ended up getting quite a few endings too, although earlier choices didn't seem to mean much as I smashed my ship but still had it? Unsure what happened there.

Overall a really solid entry, great interpretation of the theme and the mood is definitely the strongest category! Great job :grinning:

samlecreator 2019-05-18 03:44

Wow! I didn't expect to see such an emotive text-adventure in LD! Your writing was brilliant, and really made us feel responsible for the characters. Great job!