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The CYOAs of GBS - RPG Adventure

Lately I’ve taken to finally reading some of the latest offerings of Choose Your Own Adventure threads that appear every so often in GBS, Something Awful’s General Bullshit forum. These threads are actually rather popular, to the point of some stories even generating sequel threads. These style of threads thrive on constant forum-goer contribution, usually just done by post-voting or just simply whatever vote catches the author’s eye, and sometimes the threads even have some sort of art associated with them, either supplied by the OP or submitted by readers.

There are actually quite a few CYOA threads currently active right now, moreso than I am used to seeing. With more and more appearing I find this phenomenon in general just fascinating. A forum population notorious for foul pranks and crude humor lovingly suspends their disbelief and plays along with these threads. A similar theme can be found in SA’s Games sub-forum, Let’s Play, where thread authors play a chosen video game through screenshots or video with audience participation, but that is a very specialized area of the forums that one has to seek out rather specifically and the entirity of the Let’s Play sub-forum consists of just those type of posts. These GBS CYOA threads pop up in the random news/links forum amidst posts about current oddities, Photoshop themes, tasteless tattoo photos, etc, and they are accepted and encouraged.

As is so often the case, a wet, weatherworn figure enters the tavern to take shelter from the elements. It’s been a rough couple of months, but you’ve recently had some luck - word is the local night watch needs some outside help, but it’s more than a one man job. You’ll need help, and so you find yourself at the local tavern…

Well, you’ve seen worse. Might as well see if anyone’s interested.

RPG Adventure (edit: It seems you can’t view individual GBS threads without an account anymore. This is annoying and ruins my idea of sharing these threads, sorry…) by McKilligan is one such CYOA thread that poped up last week and has an entertaining theme going for it along with some really great art (as seen above). The OP also asks for people to submit their contributions during adventure branches in the form of poetry, which can make for some pretty creative situations and characters.

It’s ballad time!

Oh Fiskus, Bold Fiskus, the man from the loch,
He claims he’s the greatest and strongest of men
And he’s rough as tree bark and he’s built like a rock
When he rides in the night to kill cattle again.

He’s a brave righteous man who’ll tear lions apart
And he can rebuild a house by the sweat of his brow
He helps others, Bold Fiskus, he’s got a kind heart
Which will last until he lays his eyes on a cow.

Fiskus hates bovines so, and nobody knows why,
Though some claim an upbringing did him quite wrong
But when Fiskus arrives, bovine murder is nigh
And he’ll bathe in their blood while he’s singing a song.

But don’t think poorly of Fiskus, he’s quite a good man
And he’s been far and wide, crossing paths on his quest
If you’re needing a hero, Fiskus will do what he can
And for massive cow slaughter, Bold Fiskus is best.

- Space Detective

This clever contribution by one reader becomes the back-story for the main character, as you can see in one of the later updates (much to many poor cows’ displeasure).

**Steak x5 has been added to your inventory**

It’s just this sort of on-the-fly input that makes these threads so fun to follow. Some random poster can throw in some crazy over-the-top idea and the OP will adapt and make the story around it. There are many other different styles of CYOA threads currently running in GBS right now that I’m interested in looking at and sharing individually later on.

Global Game Jam Post Mortem - The Game of Nom

This is a re-posting of my Global Game Jam Post Mortem for the game our group created, The Game of Nom (since I kind of destroyed the original blog entry!).

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Just last month I participated in the weekend Global Game Jam, which took place in Cambridge (Boston) at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. I was suddenly reminded of the event’s impending date at the prior Boston Post Mortem and finally got up the nerve to sign up. To be honest I was absolutely terrified the week leading up to it because I had no idea what was expected of me. I signed up as an artist since I don’t know how to program but I can draw and know my way around Photoshop (nothing crazy, just simple 2D stuff). Luckily artists were in need and I teamed up with people who I was familiar with, so the pressure quickly faded.

Team Tea Party, as we were called since Philip was pushing for a team name and my cohorts couldn’t think of a damn thing (I felt Boston needed a Tea Party representing), consisted of myself, Darren Torpey, Jeff Ward, and Jon Georgievski. Darren and Jeff were the code monkies, while Jon contributed sound and music, and I sat in the corner and doodled stuff. It was a wonderful experience and I’m so glad I did it. Here is a photo of us in action! Darius was there for moral support/taunting.

During the planning stages (Friday evening) Darren and Jeff would talk wildly about what concepts they wanted to code and make happen; things like swarms and temperments and abstract programmer jargon. I just tried to go with their flow and make it somewhat presentable. We had to work within the theme of “as long as we have eachother, we’ll never run out of problems,” which their concept of swarms and temperments seemed to fit well, but didn’t really have anything aesthetically going for it. My idea for bees was shot down, so we went with the idea of people and food consumption, where the game was trying to balance efficient consumption while at the same time keeping your group at a level that didn’t overwhelm them and cause them to explode in an angry tizzy (thus ruining all your grouping efforts).

Thus was born The Game of Nom! Cute little ball-head “people,” which we took to calling “Noms,” with moods and grouping capabilities, begging to be dragged over fruits in order to consume them (in grape, orange, and banana flavors!).

So I guess a mini-post mortem is in order, huh? This I’ve never done before either, but I think I can manage (a month has passed since that tizzied weekend and any scars have faded into blissful, hazy nostalgia!).

The Bad

1. I failed as a QA tester. I do QA testing as a living, so I was kind of overly excited about trying the artist hat on for a change. In the end that meant I totally didn’t take QA testing our little game to heart soon enough! There were enough down-times where I could have tested our game quite a bit and found some of its flaws sooner (we compiled it with the difficulty all wonky — it’s too hard — this I know I could have caught and had toned down).
2. Should have made UI assets sooner. We had big plans for the UI (mood key, an icon-based death counter rather than just numbers), but in the end we didn’t have time to implement them because other  more pressing issues would arise. Thus screen real estate is ill-used and some of the colors are less than pleasing. I also was eager to try and see if some sort of color blind mode could have been added (I have a friend at work who is color blind and loves Peggle’s color blind mode) but that was just going above and beyond necessary and I didn’t feel we had the resources for it.

The Good

1. XNA and versioning. Jeff and Darren coded this game straight up in XNA 3.0 using C#. It was crazy awesome to witness them pushing and pulling raw code using GitHub [?] and gradually seeing it come to life this way. Seeing our very first Nom consume a fruit was adorable. It was also great because XNA supported the use of transparent PNGs, so making assets wasn’t any pain in the ass like I thought it might be (thinking about BMPs and their crazy pink-transparency thing had me worried before the Jam).
2. Music and sounds. Jon did some really great work for us really really fast (he and 2 other sound guys were basically catering to the whole Jam). Jeff was worried that he had to use some hacky ways to get the sounds and music to work nicely together while the game was running (we would never pass Certification!) but it all came together in the end.

I am please with what we produced, in such a short time-frame, and I learned a lot about the process thanks to Jeff, Darren, and Jon. And hats off to Philip at the GAMBIT lab for coordinating the event so well! The food was great, we had plenty of video cameras to make faces at, and he was very attentive to our needs.

The Game of Nom can be downloaded here at the Global Game Jam’s site (XNA Framework 3.0 is needed to run it). On the same site you can also check out the 5 other games made at the lab for the Global Game Jam as well, which I hope I can discuss some more in detail later since every one of them is great in their own way and it was interesting to see how the other teams approached the theme.