I adore this game. Youve captured the characters beautifully. It leaves me with so many feelings every time i play. Thank you for sharing this little bit of passion.
Holy moly. I like this a LOT. The art, the writing, everything is so perfect. Everything I would expect from a crossover between two such thorough medias.
What did you make this in? By chance would you be willing to drop the source code to this? I ask for the sake of my camera roll, which has been suffocating in screenshots, because for every line I read, I think to myself "I need to save this so I can read it again and think about it later". I also would love to see how the dialogue branches look behind-the-scenes.
I understand completely if that's not something you're comfortable with doing though. Bravo to you on such a rich and in-depth writing—everything I wish to see in post-canon and more. Thank you for the dirkjake food.
Thank you so much for playing! This was made in HTML5 using Construct 3.
Construct 3 doesn’t have traditional source code, or at least no file that you can open without a paid plan, but I’ll give a rough description of what’s going on under the hood:
The program then clicks down row by row with each tap, displaying the text and images called by that row.
If a row is marked “check”, the program rolls a number 1 to 100 and checks it against the threshold of that stat’s point amount. (0 points for 1-30, 1 point for 1-60, 2 points for 1-90, 3 points for 1-100 or no chance of failure.)
If the rolled number is within the threshold, then the check is a success and the associated text and image is displayed. If not, the game automatically clicks down to the next row.
If the check is marked with UnlockA, UnlockB, UnlockC, or UnlockD, then a successful check unlocks a dialogue option for the next dialogue menu. (If the check is a failure then the dialogue option in the next menu will simply not show.
Dialogue menus are signaled at the arrival of “CHOICE [#]” lines. The options are listed below, with numbers to the right. Those numbers give the program the number of the row to jump to if this dialogue choice is selected. (There has GOT to be a less clunky way to handle this, but I don’t know it.) (Also, note that Google Sheets start at 1 and arrays start at 0.)
The player proceeds downwards through options until they reach an end.
While the spreadsheet presents the branches in a linear fashion, the actual structure of the game utilizes what I like to affectionately call the “Shadow the Hedgehog Framework.” You can see a rough visual representation of the branches here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=1DsntJdyh0Rbw62pQm0oEV84Q50uXWAN-0ytOnLFAgbU
(This is not en exhaustive diagram—just what I worked off of while writing. There’s a few very careful decisions you can make to get from the far right to the True end at the last minute, for example. I wanted to prioritize player agency over stat consequence, if that makes sense.)
Hopefully that answers your question without overloading you with information! I’m a narrative designer as my day job so I’m very passionate about new ways to play with dialogue trees. If you’d like to play something even more experimental (and clunky…), I have another DirkJake dialogue game here: https://iconoclastcafe.itch.io/elevatorstuck
i'm not the OP, but thank you so much for sharing the backend process of your narrative design for this game! i absolutely love elevatorstuck, too, and your games are such an inspiration for presenting visual novel-style stories with really well-executed design. (i'm also curious about the 'source code' for elevatorstuck, but no pressure!)
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Oh good. Really REALLY good. I love this Jake & Dirk voice. I've gotten 3/4 endings, excited to try to play around and get the 4th.
"made in roughly a week" dirk may not be a god, but perhaps you are??
I adore this game. Youve captured the characters beautifully. It leaves me with so many feelings every time i play. Thank you for sharing this little bit of passion.
Holy moly. I like this a LOT. The art, the writing, everything is so perfect. Everything I would expect from a crossover between two such thorough medias.
What did you make this in? By chance would you be willing to drop the source code to this? I ask for the sake of my camera roll, which has been suffocating in screenshots, because for every line I read, I think to myself "I need to save this so I can read it again and think about it later". I also would love to see how the dialogue branches look behind-the-scenes.
I understand completely if that's not something you're comfortable with doing though. Bravo to you on such a rich and in-depth writing—everything I wish to see in post-canon and more. Thank you for the dirkjake food.
Thank you so much for playing! This was made in HTML5 using Construct 3.
Construct 3 doesn’t have traditional source code, or at least no file that you can open without a paid plan, but I’ll give a rough description of what’s going on under the hood:
Hopefully that answers your question without overloading you with information! I’m a narrative designer as my day job so I’m very passionate about new ways to play with dialogue trees. If you’d like to play something even more experimental (and clunky…), I have another DirkJake dialogue game here: https://iconoclastcafe.itch.io/elevatorstuck
Thanks again for playing, and for your comment!
i'm not the OP, but thank you so much for sharing the backend process of your narrative design for this game! i absolutely love elevatorstuck, too, and your games are such an inspiration for presenting visual novel-style stories with really well-executed design. (i'm also curious about the 'source code' for elevatorstuck, but no pressure!)
Very good game. I've got two endings so far, and I'd like to know, how many are there?
Four total!