Tales from the Road's Future (Moving to Twine)

Hey there, how's it going? I've had some free time recently, so I'm gonna take a minute to talk about what's up with Tales from the Road. It's gonna be a bit long winded, so feel free to skip to the end for a TL;DR.

The project isn't cancelled. Yet. I've invested too much time into the writing of this thing to give up right now. If anything I'd stop working on it once I get the current part (3) finished. Of course that's likely still a long way out.

So,  let's look at the biggest change coming up. Tales from the Road is switching platforms. From being coded in Python and played in the command prompt to Twine 2 Sugarcube. The game will still be open source and free, of course. The main reason for doing this has more to do with the user experience than it does the difficulty of actually making the game.  In fact, from my  experience so far, programming the game in Python would be easier due to some of the limitations of Twine.  The actual user experience, though, will be a lot better when compared to a command prompt environment.

Here's an example comparing the Twine version with the Python version. Within the same scene, plus or minus some dialogue changes.

Twine:

vs

Python Command Prompt:

Pretty big difference. It's an even more drastic change in practice.  Also keep in mind that I haven't configured the look of Twine at all yet. This is just the default appearance.  I won't be bothering with that until I get the story ported over. I've also thought of possibly adding some form of art/pictures, and I also want to look into adding sound effects. But I don't anything set in stone yet.

The start screen has also been refined a bit:

It's a lot nicer looking now. No way for people to mess up the game by entering invalid values either.

I also experimented with using PySimpleGUI instead of Twine, but trying to get that to work with a project of this size is... a bit messy. Plus I didn't think it was a huge improvement over the command prompt. Here's an example of what that might have looked like:

Still looks pretty ugly.

Besides this big aesthetic change, I've also done a fair amount of edits and rewrites to the story as I've ported it over. The intro, for example, is a lot shorter. Instead of coming back from vacation you simply wake up in your bedroom. This changes the dynamic of the story a little bit, mainly with the first bits of dialogue you have with Sasha and Jacob.

I also cut some scenes and interactions, Most notable one being the vendor scene when you first arrive at the festival. This whole scene did nothing for the story, it was just filler. So I cut it. I also made it so you only have to go down one of the paths at the park instead of both. I feel like the flashback scene in the park doesn't really do much for the story so I made it optional.

There might be other changes I make as I'm only now getting into the festival part of the game. There's been a lot of minor dialogue changes as well. Mostly just flow changes, making stuff sound less wordy, and making the overall story a bit more refined. I know from part 2 and on my writing improved somewhat, so I likely won't need to do as much rewriting now.

Also debating rather I want to re-release the game or just update this page. Part of me feels like the game is getting a big enough update to justify doing so, since it's getting moved to an entirely different platform with a brand new look and refined story. But the other part feels like the core game is still the same, and so it doesn't warrant a re-release.

I think my plan for right now is to release a major update on here containing the Twine version with all the content currently available. And than maybe re-releasing the game once I finish writing and implementing all of part 3. There's no way I'll be able to finish the game anytime soon, so I guess I'll have to compromise.

Well, I think that's all for now. I'm hoping to get the Twine version finished and uploaded soon, target release date would be sometime at the end of the month but there's no guarantee I'll hit that.

TL;DR: Game is getting moved to Twine 2 which means a whole new user interface. Release coming on the current page soonTM.

As always, leave any questions or comments here and I'll try and answer them.