I've just launched my first proper Twine game! In
Seedship, you control an AI spaceship filled with frozen colonists, searching for the best planet to found a new colony. It's based on randomly generated planets, random events, and procedurally generated text when you found the colony, so it should have high replay value.
Play it here:
http://philome.la/johnayliff/seedship/play
It was created with Twine 1.4.2 using the Sugarcube 2 story format.
Comments
Thank you! =^^=
EDIT: and for the record: 11220 points. Because aliens. *sunglasses*
The writing was excellent, with only necessary and effective words used, and no purple prose at all (So rare in a Twine game).
The gameplay was also simple on the surface, but increasingly complex as you moved on, and highly engaging.
You seem to understand that fluffy graphics are not always needed for a great game, and the minimalist approach really works here.
And the fact it has replay value is something that is icing on any game. By the end, you feel you've taken a unique path, and been delivered a unique experience different from other players based on your actions.
My only critique would be the fact that you have to repeatedly click to get each sentence to show up at the start. This was a little bothersome for me, and kind of hid the high quality game that lay beyond it. If I was a less patient person, I would have quit when I hit it, but thankfully I didn't.
Great job!
P.S I only got 7248. My planet was very habitable and there were beasts of burden, but I took too many hits to the cultural database and wound up with a police state restricting access to it. Nice lesson there!
The name entry works by having two <span>s, one with the original name, and an initially hidden one with the dialog box. The original planet name is a link that runs some javascript to hide the first span and show the second. The dialog box itself is linked to the planet name. Then the 'Done' button in the second span hides that span and re-shows the first, as well as updating the text inside it to reflect the changed name. Here's the code:
There's also some Javascript (not shown here) that limits the length of the name dialog to 20 characters, and that clicks the 'Done' link for you when you press the Enter key.
I also followed you over to your patreon.... looking forward to your next project!
I've just released an update that fixes a minor bug and a few typos.
It's cool to see people's results and scores! By the way, the highest I got in my repeated playtesting was about 14,000.
(And to pray like crazy for alien contact, unless they run off with your preserved settlers... damn tentacles!)
The saddest was when all my sensors failed and I didn't have any probes or resources left, so I had to land on a world... which so happened to be very icy.
'Arctica' was so hostile the 220 survivors died, leaving nothing but a landmark on an alien world.
... And the fact that ending happened was badass.
Thanks, for the FUN!
Not sure if I can beat that, but definitely will play again!
I would change only one thing - on my resolution entering "Credits" screen results in showing a scrollbar. But I understand not everybody hates scroll bars as much as I do.
Thank you for sharing your work.
Regarding something longer, I made Seedship after I realised that the elaborate open-ended space exploration game I wanted to make was too ambitious for a first game. Someday I want to come back to that or some other large-scale game, once I've had some practice from small-scale games.