General Chain Game Discussion Thread

[Momeka]

I recently posted all my games on Gamejolt as well. The site seems pretty solid, one nice thing that itchio is missing is that you can do general post with images and gifs to your followers. Good for marketing and just spreading awareness. But the game pages themselves seems harder to customize and all of them kinda look same-ish.
Anyway, I was thinking it could be another good place to share the chain games on. I don't know, what do you guys think? Should we stick to only itchio or should we spread it around to other sites as well?

Also maybe we should have a general chain game discussion thread?

[Prpl_Mage]

Did and done.

Also, I figure that if we want more to see them then more places are good. But if you do more places that means more places to maintain. And that job must fall on someone.

[Momeka]

I don't mind doing it, I'm already managing the itchio stuff anyway. Should be able to reuse most of the stuff, just need banner and thumbnail art in different sizes.

[Prpl_Mage]

As long as it isn't too much trouble then I'd say go for it.

Also, something that I realized while making my chapter. Maybe we need to be better at givingcredits when using resources from other creators? With SV and this one we're doing a lot of things from scratch but we were using a lot of resources from different places in the old ones without really acknowledging anyone got the work. Well except Momeka who credited Drace for the music.

[Momeka]

As long as it isn't too much trouble then I'd say go for it.

Yeah! I'll get to it when I got some free time.

Also, something that I realized while making my chapter. Maybe we need to be better at givingcredits when using resources from other creators? With SV and this one we're doing a lot of things from scratch but we were using a lot of resources from different places in the old ones without really acknowledging anyone got the work. Well except Momeka who credited Drace for the music.

Yeah, I was pretty bad with it in Spring Valley. Downloaded some songs from some youtube channel that had uploaded a bunch of chiptunes, no idea who had actually made them. I also gave up on the whole Resource Pack I was assembling from the game. It got just too much of a headache to figure out what was made and what was ripped and edited.

[Fisherson]

If we do this one method I would recommend is to take a little example of a Skyrim Mod I played recently. Basically it was a MediEvil tribute mod that changed the main story but didn't erase it. It basically split the story into two parts using portals in a small room with a man reading a book. The man reading  the book served as lore but also told you that you could only go through the portal by choosing one of the two books: Dragonborn or Hero of Gallowmere. The first was obvious but the latter was the first four levels of MediEvil a wonderful dark humored based hack and slash that paired pretty well to Skyrim and as a bonus once you faced the last boss you could go back to the room and resume your life as the Dragonborn. I propose we use a similar system of a central "Gatekeeper" and "Gates". There's lots of ways to play with it further than the example above depending on how we decide to set the starting character.

Do we go with a "Sora" a neutral traveler to all timelines who serves as our main player character? Or should we try what Dragon Ball Fighter Z did and have a 'soul' choose and possess somebody from the main timeline to act as their vessel? Either way there's loads of ways to make in interesting if we have open gates from the beginning. It adds replayability off the bat and a load of ways we can go back through and add secrets and alternate routes to even make Juno's Odyssey envious and without too much effort I think.

[Momeka]

Messed around a bit with GB Studio and it reminds me a bit of RPG Maker. Basically drag and drop events for setting up everything. Thought it could be fun to try for a chain game in the future if people want to mix it up a bit.
It makes gameboy games, so the game won't be able to be as big as the previous ones since it got a bunch of limitations to it. It also doesn't come with a built in battle system or anything like that. Most games made with it is story based with some light puzzles. That said it would be possible to script a lightweight battle system if we feel the need to, but not sure how user friendly it would be.

It can also export the game so they are playable in the web. So you don't need a gameboy emulator to play it.

[Prpl_Mage]

Sounds like an interesting idea, there are some makers that could achieve different things. But somewhere there needs to be an interest and not exclude people from working with it. So keep messing around with it, see if you can do something cool and maybe set up some system that can be used by the group.

Also regarding the whole split and non-linear chain game. I just remembered Halo 3 ODST. We could do something like that where the different "chapters" are rather pieces of flashbacks leading up to the current situation. You investigate some object, a story plays out and you may get that object as an item afterwards. When all of that is completed there can be an ending depending on what you did.

Or something more like Zelda 1/Dark Souls where each person could design a "dungeon" or "area" with it's own progress, items and boss. And then stitch it together with some sort of overworld, items/abilities that improves mobility or unlocking shortcuts to make backtracking easier.