The sixth day of the Game Jam is done.

Today I had my last day of work for the week, which means I got little done, but I now have three full days to work on the game! (It’s Wellington Anniversary Day on Monday so we get the day off work.)

I’ve been watching a few talks by Jon Ingold, Co-founder and Narrative Director at Inkle, and in one of them he talks about the struggle with creating narrative games like the ones they create: You have to think of every possible scenario that could happen in the game (and a few impossible ones) and then code to accommodate them.

I’ve been trying to think about how I can take this advice and make adjustments to my game: an example of this is in the first combat scene. There are three possible outcomes from combat in the game: you either fail (and die), succeed with no injuries, or succeed but sustain some injuries. This is the code for the latter:

I want them to know they got hurt, to increase the variable called ‘Damage’ and then move to the after battle scene. 

After thinking about what I learned in the talk, I made some adjustments:

The scene starts the same as before by telling the character they got hurt in the fight, but now, after it increases their damage, it has conditional text dependent on how much damage they’ve sustained thus far. If they reach three damage levels, they die.

This might seem excessive, as there is literally no way for them to have any damage yet - it’s the first fight scene of the game after all… at least right now. That means that no one will ever see that little bit of code I wrote (other than you who’s reading this!) but there’s a good reason why I added it.

The reason is that I have no idea where this project will go: I might look at it fondly as the first game I create, pat myself on the back and then move on to other ideas, but in the chance that I want to develop it further, doing this extra code now means that if I decide to add a combat scene earlier, or move this entire part of the game to occur later in the story, it means that I won’t need to sift through hundreds of lines of code to make sure there are no loose ends. It’s a form of future proofing and also allowing myself more creative freedom.

With only a few days before submission, I’m getting a bit nervous. Can I get everything done in time? Have I bitten off more than I can chew? Is it doing something unique and interesting? Is the concept of a hybrid system (using physical cards and dice and the story being digital) an exciting new way to interact with games, or is it annoying and getting in the way of people’s enjoyment.

I guess we won’t know till it gets released!