An Atomic Age Retro-Futuristic text adventure game. You play as an engineer who works for the Jovian Oligarchy Oversight Board and you're coming back from a mission on Ganymede. Your ship is low on fuel and you need to stop at the Epsilon-9 space station before heading back to Europa and reporting in about the progress you've made with the Hydro-Mining Consortium. The problem is that Epsilon-9 is abandoned and derelict.
This is a work in progress. This is pre-alpha. But I wanted to use the devlog feature on Itch to document my journey, and now here we are on Github creating a repo for the code because it's starting to become unruly in the Twine editor, and I figured that editing individual files was easier, and I needed the syntax highlighting if I was going to expand the javascript of it all to be more robust.
This is the first time I've ever made a serious attempt to make my own game--I've flirted with the idea, and fiddled around with a bunch of SDKs and IDEs, and full featured engines, and not so full featured engines... That being said, this is also just a proof of concept for myself. I've utilized a number of AI tools to build this, though namely Hotpot's Image generation and some help coming up with ideas and structure for the story from Perplexity. I may or may not dabble with using Chat or Copilot for any code generation.
I began the project inside of the standard Twine editor, but it became pretty apparent that if I was going to be using the Snowman story format, and trying to do a lot of my own JavaScript coding instead of macros, then I should probably switch to a more modern webdev type of workflow.
Sadly I can't reccomend anything for Node, which is what I wanted to use, but Tweego works really well as an alternative to working with npm dev dependencies. It was also easy enough to setup. I'm working in Debian 12, so for me it was just a matter of downloading and unzipping the archive into my base home directory and putting a symbolic link to the executable in my /usr/local/bin directory.
sudo ln -s /home/[username]/tweego/tweego /usr/local/bin/For whatever reason, absolute paths are necessary, otherwise you get an error stating, "too many levels of symbolic links." I have no idea what that means, but eventually I came across a Stack thread that said to use absolute paths, and that solved my problem.
I want the player to be able to make different dialog choices based on their own preferences. The narrative will be branching to a certain extent, but will skew heavily toward proof of concept with limited options. Thereby eliminating the overhead of maintaining a story with ever-increasing complexity.
Each sub-system on the station will have it's own personality that you get to interact with. I want dialog decisions to affect some of the outcomes. This sort of relates to the decision cyling mechanic, but it will effectively operate in the background, and will not be a system that the player will directly interact with.
Part of the idea behind the game is that it'll use mini games for each of Epsilon-9's sub-systems. Righ now there is a short blurb on the type of puzzle each room should have, but nothing has been implemented yet.
I'm debating internally how exactly I want to implement the puzzles. I might try a few different ways.
This aspect is partially implemented. It will mainly be used for the datapads scattered throughout the game.