First, I'm not giving up on vore game development, or Twine in general. But the main reason I stopped updating all of the sudden was a hard drive formatting incident, where I lost all my working files for Scales and Wings. I had done quite a lot of work, story-wise, and to lose all of that all at once was a huge hit to motivation.
So now that I have regained that motivation, why am I not just picking up where I left off?
Well, I've learned more about Twine. Specifically Harlowe, the language this Twine game is coded in. And while it is great for beginners, and I have been doing a decent job of making the game's performance generally good, there is one key flaw with Harlowe that I cannot fix - the built-in History array. Inevitably, it gets bigger, and bigger, and it does not delete anything, ever. And it will continually add more and more lag every time a room is changed. In an open-ended game like the one this is, it will ALWAYS end in frustration. Like how Skyrim can start corrupting your save game after too many autosaves. Not too terrible for a casual choose-your-own adventure story of short or medium length, but a game? Absolutely terrible. Just my combat system would refresh (and add an entry to the History array) every single turn. (Actually, I'm pretty sure twice every turn, because of enemy action.) And this isn't even something I could code around, because it updates even if you never use it, ever.
I could technically ask people to save and load the game often (since that isn't a variable I use in the save system), but why bother, when I have so much to redo anyway, and I could be working on learning another, much more flexible and powerful story format?
It might be a while before I put the game back up, depending on how long it takes to learn, and it might not even be in the form of Scales and Wings specifically, but it seemed like a much better use of my time.
Without the quality of life improvements that would have been in this next update, I doubt people will want to play this game, but just in case, I'm leaving the old links up.
Old post:
Hello! My name is CrusaderSweetie, and, well, I've not had a good track record with game development. Fortunately, I knew better from starting too many things when writing fanfiction that I have this tendency of starting something then getting overwhelmed, so I never actually posted anything to get people excited for something that wasn't going to happen.
But then I found Twine. It was perfect.
I like coding, and I like text-based games, as I like writing (and reading) just as much as the game elements. I would have just found a language to learn, and done everything from scratch, but without compartmentalization, my brain just like to fizzle out completely and refuse to work properly. With Twine, though, it's a different story entirely.
Even so, I expected this project to go the route of my other games. I start, get something with placeholder assets and maybe two systems that function, then my interest dies down as the effort put in no longer matches my enthusiasm. But that didn't happen, and here I am. Even now, with literal days worth of work in this thing, I'm not even winded, figuratively speaking. And at this point, it's marginably playable, with only a few systems left before I would consider it to be an actual game experience.
So what is Scales and Wings?
Briefly, it's a game where you play as a dragon - building his lair, gathering a hoard, and hunting for food. The game is set in Equestria, and in the scenario that is currently being developed, the Frozen North. (Note: you do not have to be familiar with the setting whatsoever to play this game.) Vore is not the absolute primary focus of this game, but it is heavily integrated into it, and is present almost everywhere. It is beneficial, but not required to succeed.
The vore in question is oral vore. And technically hard vore, because you can eat things instead of swallowing them whole, but it is not elaborated on, and is not graphic.
This is still an alpha build, though. Expect bugs, and expect unfinished material that may prove unsatisfying. Feedback would still be appreciated, though. The biggest priorities for feedback are balancing and opinions on how the current systems "feel" to you. I do not mind reworking systems if it means improving people's experiences. And please do report any bugs to me here.
Details:
If someone really wants to go the extra mile, and knows their way in Twine, feel free to open up the file in Twine and take a look. I provide a bit of documentation in the top right corner, and many passages will have comments that show what each code block roughly does. This is for my own benefit too, just in case I work on one system for long enough to forget exactly what I did in a previous one. And so I don't have to sift through lots of passages trying to remember what I called a certain variable.
And if anyone wants to make their own Twine game, and likes a system I use in this one, feel free to take it. While you should ask for any art or story content, I firmly believe that code should be freely shared.
Changelog:
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