Help Me Decide: Scaling Back the Corrupted Menagerie

Today’s blog has some news that a few of you will find disappointing, and others probably won’t be too terribly affected by. Today’s blog is also highly ironic considering my decision, announced in yesterday’s blog, which was intended to prevent any more egg on my face as far as the choose your path adventure game is concerned.

While hard at work putting the finishing touches on the Corruption Menagerie demo today, I decided I needed to better organize the data within the game engine to make the process go a little smoother. I’m using an engine called Twine 2 to create the game, which organizes each branch of the story into a separate slide into which you write various text and code, with helpful arrows pointing you between the various slides.

After better organizing the slides onscreen to improve my workflow I made a discovery. Twine 2 has a limited amount of screen space in which you can create slides without them overlapping each other and becoming unreadable, and thus un-locateable if you need to find something to check yourself and tweak something.

Why is this a problem? Well, mostly because the demo only takes the player through entering the menagerie and the demo already takes up a significant chunk of the available space.

I got online to see if there were ways to resolve this and discovered another potential issue; the file size of the game.

Being an amateur in this whole game development thing it hadn’t occurred to me that an all text game might end up taking up more file space than a web browser’s cache could handle. I did a quick publish of the file to get my current file size, projected how I could expect that number to grow based on my current plans for how the story plays out, and discovered that my most conservative estimate still has the game well exceeding acceptable file sizes.

Needless to say, these events have made me feel more than a bit foolish in regards to all the prep work put in before starting work on the game itself. SIGH.

However, I refuse to sit around and feel sorry for myself. I can only press forward and decide what to do next.

Still here I am, holding a pile of plans and drawings that simply can’t be done with the existing technology, no way to tie them together as sequels to each other, and at a loss for a plan.

I still intend to release the demo next week (at least for a short time), because after all the work I put into creating the darn thing it seems silly not to at this point. The fate of the full game is up in the air, however.

Now I have several options I can pursue, and I’d like you readers to help me decide which one is worth following. I’ll lay them out first and below I’ll put a survey monkey where you can vote on which path I should choose (see what I did there?).

Drastically scale back the game and follow a more linear story line

The current plans for how the game plays out involve the player having multiple paths and numerous possible endings, each of these having different iterations based on the class and specialty you choose in the opening slides. I could eliminate most of these branches and focus on telling a more linear story that simply plays out differently based on your specific choices.

Break the story up into smaller game episodes

While the scale would be far less epic, I could conceivably break up the story line into a series of mini-adventures. Multiple smaller games instead of one big one. These would not be true sequels to one another, but stand-alone adventures set in the same universe.

The idea and choose your path nature would be retained. But rather than one epic crawl through the Menagerie as a single character, we would be following a series of different characters on smaller adventures through the Menagerie, seeing pieces of the story from different perspectives at different times.

Cut out the opening class/specialty choices

I could keep the game as a single entity, but remove the ability to choose a character class and specialty. The game still wouldn’t reach the same scale as I’d originally planned, but I could conceivably retain more of the non-linearity this way.

Transform the game into books instead

It occurs to me, there’s material enough here that I might be able to take all of this prep work for the game and produce some more traditional works of fiction. These might be short stories, novellas, or a full-length novel, I wouldn’t know until I did some more work on it. If I decided to pursue this route I would abandon doing the games in favor of writing the fiction.

Abandon the project altogether

Sometimes it’s better to cut your losses and simply walk away from a project before you sink more time you’ll never get back into it. Could this be one of those times? If so, so be it. I’m willing to admit when a project just isn’t working and I need to refocus on something else.

Those are the options folks. Let me know what you think I should do below. (Be sure to hit “Done”)