The Spirit Of Disaster (Competition 2012)

[Auro-Cyanide]

Congratulations for everyone one who won, and those that completed a game since that's an achievement as well. I didn't vote since I didn't have time to play enough for me to feel like I could make any call . I did enjoy the ones I did play though and it's very exciting to see so many people participating. Good job!

[Pyrephox]

Oh good, I'm glad Living for Disaster got a bit of love. That would definitely have been my fourth pick, I thought it was one of the strongest entries that did a pretty standard take on the prompt.

I also wished there was more support for Dhumaketu, if I was forced to pick a favorite (and I kinda was) I would go with Dhuamaketu (and I did!)

Thank you!

Dhumaketu was mine. It's actually the first VN I've ever done...I literally downloaded the engine for the contest. So the critiques about use of the code/transitions/music were spot on; it definitely was not as polished or fleshed out as it could have been, partially because I was teaching myself the engine at the same time as I was trying to write it. The cursing was EPIC, let me tell you.

Edit:

I ended up voting for:
1) Anniversaries (I really, really appreciated the way the branch points created fundamentally different stories and the reframing of the narrative based on the player's decisions, enjoyed the characterization, and basically just felt that it was incredibly solid without being dense.)
2) 4D (I loved the ambition, and the advantages it took of the medium to tell its story, even if the execution wasn't everything I would have wanted.)
3) Fairytale (Very close among a number of entries...this one just stuck with me more than the others that were equally adept in execution/concepts. So, completely subjective line.)

[Carassaurat]

Since nobody went for the bait on last page, I should just admit that it was a bit of a troll: I wrote Living Through Disaster myself.

It was an experiment to see if I could write something which I have absolutely no knowledge of or experience with, and deliberately wouldn't look it up. It's also a quirky-and-the-straight-man type of story, of which I had said in the writing thread that I didn't want to do one. So it's a test to see if I could write myself out of the most uncomfortable situation. The answer... yes and no. It did better than my other entry It's All Your Fault in the voting (for so far as statistics with a sample like these are worth anything), but the reactions to the final scenes weren't always the most pleasant! I thought it'd be easy to make people cry, but it turns out not to be, which is hopeful in itself.

Anyway, just because I didn't think it turned out to be very good doesn't mean that anyone who liked it is wrong; my opinion isn't somehow more valid just because I wrote Living Through Disaster. I actually really appreciate that people enjoyed it, and I'm grateful for all the comments I've received.


I won't go through a reply on commentary, because all of it is noted and I don't disagree with much, except for this tidbit:

It seems a little strange that she says that out loud. That line seems more suited to an interior monologue.

Living Through Disaster has no interior monologue . It's all narration and dialogue.


Lastly, since I went through all the trouble and you wouldn't notice otherwise, here are some things I did to make sure that people wouldn't guess that Fault and Living were by the same author: Fault is in British English, Living is in American English. Fault uses double hyphens (--), Living uses single hyphens (-) and I've been using dashes (—) in the discussion thread. Fault uses ATL, Living uses a simple position. In the code, too, they differ, because I didn't know if that'd end up visible: Fault's character definitions are in the form of ayfn for the Narrator, while Living uses underscores, ltd_g. Fault uses dissolve, while Living uses Dissolve(1) for the same effect. And there's a blank line between every line of dialogue and sprite changes for Fault, but none in Living.

[Funnyguts]

I've completed turning Anniversaries, Adversity, and Pepper into a separate game all its own. Grab it here. The game itself is unchanged from the AdComp submission, all I've done is adjusted the menu screen and the credits. Papillon, let me know if there's anything I should change.