probability and state
Today I was thinking about the origins of cuentitos.
We wanted to make a game with a system of random events, but knowing myself, I couldn’t allow this system to have the same “error” that many others do.
I needed a narrative coherence that I didn’t see in other roguelike games.
For example, Monster Prom has a random event system where the things that happen affect the final outcome in some way, but they are very disjointed from each other.
Another game that suffers from this problem is FTL, where each event has a small narrative connotation, a result, and that’s it. There is no connection between events.
Maybe people who enjoy more systemic games don’t have a problem with this, but I, who enjoy stories more than pressing buttons, do.
What I found was that none of the tools available allowed me to create this system easily.
To satisfy my needs for probabilistic management of events and reaction to the state, I had no choice but to create my own language.
Towards the end of the development of the current version of cuentitos, Roadwarden came out, a text RPG that implemented many ideas similar to what I did, but they did it in Ren'Py, a tool for writing graphic novels made in Python.
I don’t want to hear how much work it was to create the content for Roadwarden, I’m eager to track down the creator to geek out about this (if any of you know Aureus, an intro is welcome).
The game lasts more than 30 hours, so doing a very deep analysis could take a lot of time, but I’m going to see if I can do something soon.
Going back to cuentitos, I’m eager to set up a web platform so that anyone can create dynamic stories, with probability and reaction to the state in a simple way.
If this is something that would interest you, please respond to this email, I’m going to start making a list of beta-testers to start testing the platform.
Until tomorrow!