kbelflower

[kbelflower]

Just got started playing ATOM RPG - haven't got through the character creation yet, but I'm confident that I'll be playing by mid-July if I really put metal to the grindstone💀

[kbelflower]

Still awake at 3 am? Have a Snickers

[kbelflower]

I find that I'm leaning more towards text-based CYOA design philosophies and the more I do so, the better it feels to develop. It feels like I'm going in the right direction.

[kbelflower]

Taking Web Development classes while simultaneously developing an HTML game is a very good way to get an A in both

[kbelflower]

I've been thinking a lot about recording my train of thought in some way - it's just been rattling around in my brain for years now, like an itch I wanna scratch but don't know exactly how to reach. So, I guess I'll just try here.

I've been developing a fun passion project in my free time for about two years now. It's a text adventure remake/demake of the original Fallout, and I've (rather vainly) called it Manhattan's Fallout or ManFall for short. Now when I say two years, and *free time*, let me be clear - I have very low work ethic, and dragging myself out of my funk and into the work seat has been a constant and never ending process. If I had actually put myself to the test, set a detailed schedule and followed it, held myself accountable and such, I would likely already be done with it. But that's neither here nor there.

The game started as a completely faithful recreation of the original Fallout, but as you can probably guess, that didn't exactly mesh well in a text-based format. The first Fallouts are largely point and click RPGs, which is somewhat difficult in a medium where visuals aren't the primary form of storytelling and gameplay.

As a result, there have always been compromises between nostalgia and fun along with new ideas that I've brought up to make sense of it all. I always tried to keep myself within the bounds of the lore, never straying farther than I felt I could get away with in the public conscious. But last month, February of 2023, something just...snapped. I decided to jump full force into straight remaking the game, taking the coat of paint and the themes and pivoting to a complete text adventure reimagining of a game from the 90s. And I'll explain everything I've changed so far.

Firstly, the year that the game takes place in. Eighty years after the Great War always felt really strange for the first Fallout - not soon enough after the bombs to be recent, but not long enough since them to be a whole new world. It was the grandfather era, where your grandparents likely saw the world end but you yourself don't know of it for better or worse.

For the simple desire to include more plotlines focused on the old world, and to allow for a much harsher post-apocalypse in general, I decided to shave off 50 years and set the game in 2107: thirty years after the bombs fell. It's recent enough that most people have parents who survived it or saw it happen themselves, the weather can be harsher and more extreme, society can be more cobbled together and selfish, and the old world is still fresh in the minds of civilization so the loss feels more real and tangible. For this game to work, it needs to feel like an entire age of human history has come to an explosive close, like we held it in the palm of our hands and now it's nothing but ashes and ruins. If it feels like a fairy tale told to children rather than an event that ruined humankind forevermore, then I have failed.

Second, I've made the choice to move away from an open-world exploration model in lieu of a hub-based system. Open worlds are everywhere nowadays, some good and some bad, with Fallout being one of the poster children of this setup. But for me, a solo developer that is hand-crafting a game played entirely through dialogue and prose, the ability to travel to any settlement at any time in the game would only lead to each settlement feeling bland after a while. I can't feasibly have enough interactivity for a player to find new and unique content no matter what order they play each location in, and I won't break myself in two trying to achieve that.

By segmenting the game into hubs, or more accurately into *chapters*, I can include a handful of two to three locations per chapter (maybe just one if it's big enough) and build upon player choices each chapter without having to account for extensive backtracking. It saves me time, allows for more detailed story structure as I'm not factoring in player retreads, and allows the game to feel much more like an actual interactive novel.

Thirdly, I'm changing up some of the plot points in the game. They aren't huge plot points that alter the story itself, but rather replacing one character in the endgame with another character who you meet much earlier (you'll know it when it happens) and adding a twist into the Necropolis portion of the game. I believe these two changes, though they aren't the only ones, will better tie the Water Chip plot and the Super Mutant plot together in ways that the original game didn't.

There is only one more big change that I can give info on right now, and that's because it's something that might confuse players if I don't handle it correctly and I just wanna explain this off the bat: The Hub and Junktown have been conceptually merged, meaning I took pieces of both (characters, stories, ideas, etcetera) and pieced them together in a way that I believe strengthens the whole. It takes the more boring parts of both locations and paints over them with the better implementations of those aspects from each other. Gizmo is still a casino boss, Killian is still the city's sheriff and mayor, and Decker has been better integrated into the caravan lifestyle in a way that I think makes working with the caravans a lot more of a gray area.

There are other things I've been thinking about doing, but those are the most set in stone big changes since I decided to pivot recently. I'll keep you posted, thanks for reading 👍

[kbelflower]

Coming back to Tumblr, don't know for how long. Cheers

[kbelflower]

So, I've spent the past two weeks trying to figure out a good workflow for writing this story. Daily entries burned me our quickly, and after recently joining a community mod project for Fallout 4 (known as Project Arroyo, go Google it), I realized that a different setup for uploading would be necessary. From now on, I'll be posting one entry of the BlogSpot story on every Sunday. My social media will follow that schedule: Blog stuff releases every Sunday on Twitter, Instagram (my other account linked in the bio), Facebook, Reddit, and on my Discord. I apologize for the long caption, but I felt that I had to get all this out there for those who like my written work. Also, the Discord will be linked in my subreddit as well as on the BlogSpot page under the dropdown menu. Use common sense, you'll be able to find it. https://www.instagram.com/p/CCjWoAAJSwi/?igshid=ctg98d2bbwg3

[kbelflower]

[kbelflower]

[kbelflower]

I forgot to post about this last night when I finished it, so here you go. I'm working on Entry 13 right now, so I'll be getting back to scheduled daily entries instead of late night writing sprees. https://www.instagram.com/p/CB2_0O5JJ9u/?igshid=10f3rejzzjcy9

[kbelflower]

Entries 10 and 11 out now on BlogSpot! Enough said https://www.instagram.com/p/CBzIVbYpjNm/?igshid=8h9wrmnc41iq

[kbelflower]

This is the updated version of Entry 9; the link is in my bio, and social medias can be found under the dropdown menu. Hope you like the new version https://www.instagram.com/p/CBvx86WpwxL/?igshid=1h4bvdrolfgft

[kbelflower]

Yeah... this version sucks. I'll be posting two pictures instead of one tomorrow once I rewrite it and roll into Entry 10. https://www.instagram.com/p/CBuT3IZJeoG/?igshid=fqm944kjmlqu

[kbelflower]

Entry 8 is out now, folks. I literally spent an hour before midnight trying to grind this out, so maybe it ain't half bad. I don't know, but I hope you like it. Link's in my bio, and the rest are through the BlogSpot https://www.instagram.com/p/CBrsz3zJ2Y1/?igshid=m40r1pji0jzv

[kbelflower]

This one is long as SHIT, so I apologize. I had a hard time finishing this one near the end, so if it begins to feel lackluster or bad at the downturn I would love you guys to tell me. Thanks in advance (p.s. the link's in my bio and the rest are found through there) https://www.instagram.com/p/CBo6nyHpRuj/?igshid=1r966ao3jgzhy

[kbelflower]

The link to the Blogspot can be found in my profile bio, and links to all my social media accounts and related pages are located there. https://www.instagram.com/p/CBl9rlIJ2nU/?igshid=oa87erkyhtma

[kbelflower]

The link to the BlogSpot can be found in my profile bio, and links to my other social media can also be found on the BlogSpot itself under the dropdown menu. https://www.instagram.com/p/CBjP_qAJp9m/?igshid=189tnh3my3119