Camp Handiba Development Thread

[EwanG]

OK, those of you who've been following my experiment in Flash gaming may (or may not) be pleased to hear that Camp Handiba is one of two "spec" projects I am currently working on. Will be posting about the other one shortly as well.

Without getting into details that aren't able to be divulged at the current time, it looks like I can do the programming for Handiba, and then get some help on the artwork that will make it worth doing. Given the experience last year of writing up some broadcast scripts for the story, I have all the scenes in place for the first "season" of the game (when you play as either Scott Evans or Becca Evans), and an outline for the second season (when you play as Zoe Evans). Since I only have to produce artwork good enough to get the idea across to the artist, I should be able to put this together in a 4-8 week period.

The reason I'm doing two games in that period rather than one is that I tend to get to a point where I get stuck or tired, and having another game to switch to will keep me more productive since I'll still be in my "RenPy" space. Of course it's been "fun" the last couple days as I relearn the language, and discover which things have had syntax changes since my last RenPy project.

I'll probably post on here every week or so as much to keep notes for my own use as to keep folks up to date on the status. I'm just looking forward to this project finally getting out there.

[EwanG]

So the reprogramming has taken me to a reformatting of graphics. Seems that when I did the last character design I just created the side window formats of the characters. Even though y'all will probably never see this version, I do want to make sure that I do enough staging to give the artist the proper "inspiration". Nothing like having to go through 17 characters, render each in several different moods, and then add all the compass positions, and then finally setup their PNGs to be the same height and without any background. Sheesh

[musical74]

good to see this is back on track!

So will this become a flash project now?

[EwanG]

No, this will be in good ol' RenPy. If all goes well, it will have a free demo version, and a paid for downloadable that is the full game. If all doesn't go well... then I guess I'll cross that bridge when we come to it

[EwanG]

Weekly update (somewhat late because I posted it in the wrong thread originally)-
Doing reasonably well. Have finished redoing what I had in the demo, which included a number of fixes for consistency (hate when I refer to a character I haven't actually met yet) as well as adding a little more story and a couple new choices. So I've now started adding in the new material from the proposed series. This is going ok, although I have to keep adding logic to check for the dependencies. Since I give the player the choice of where to go each day, they may not do things in the order I would, so I have to make sure that I have code to interject comments where appropriate, and not where it isn't.

So far minimal additional artwork has been necessary. I know that for one of the cave scenes I'm going to have to do "something" to let the artist know what I have in mind (beyond just the text description), but that should be at least a week off.

FWIW...

[EwanG]

In this week's update, a bit about the game "organization" (aka Ewan's snively excuses for why progress has slowed somewhat):

When you start the game, you initially pick from one of two characters to play - Either Scott Evans or Becca Evans. Scott has three young ladies that he can end up with, while Becca has one young gentleman and one young lady she can end up. The young lady Becca can end up with is also one of the young ladies Scott can end up with. When you are playing one of those two characters, you also interact with the character you aren't playing. So I have to keep track of "If Becca's with him, then you might see Scott with her, but if Becca's with her, then..."

In each of the two character tracks, there are two days that have choices, but they are the typical menu type choices. Starting at Day three, you have four choices each day that you pull from a map of the area. And I shuffle which ones are available which day for three days. Then you have an important event that helps you "clarify" who you are trying to end up with, and then you have three more days where you can choose to either go where your person of interest is going, or one other location.

Once you have played through once as Scott and once as Becca, a third character opens up - that of Zoe. If you pick Zoe, you are taken to the next year at the camp, and you get to choose who Scott and Becca each ended up with. So that affects who Zoe sees them with and some of the options available to her. In her case, she has the choice of finding true love, or solving the mystery behind what is happening at the Camp. Only whether or not she can ultimately succeed at finding out what's happening depends on whether Scott or Becca ever went to a particular location at least twice (either twice as one of them, or once each) to uncover a key bit of knowledge.

So you can see why making sure I am tracking everything well enough not to drop the player in a logic hole is making the story go a little slower at the moment

At least progress is still being made, and I suspect it will pick up in a couple of weeks since CR II is going quite well, and I suspect I will have the initial coding on it done by mid-March at the latest. Then it will be full time CH, with the occasional fix on CR II until it's ready to ship.

Assuming that happens, then CH will probably have it's initial coding done by the end of March. And then it will be up to TPTB to decide what happens next to CH...

[EwanG]

Well, I'm still on track for an end of March delivery, which I'm glad to see given that there was a little more tuning on the other project than I expected to get it ready to turn over. As I mention over in the RenPy area, it's difficult to fix an error you literally can't see because you got used to a different language that doesn't consider that an error.

Of course one of the other tricks to getting done on time is to stay somewhat focused. The other project gave me some ideas for things that wouldn't fit in it, but would fit in CH. However, at this point I'm going to be doing well to get done what I originally had outlined. So guess I'll file those ideas for either the next VN after this, or for a possible sequel to CH.

Anyway, that's what I'm up to for anyone that's curious.

[EwanG]

For anyone who's still interested after all this time, I've decided to go with an online serialization of the Camp Handiba story. The story that would have been presented in the game will have it's main track covered online at Camp Handiba (for some reason the domain was available).

I would still someday also like to do a VN adaptation of the game to explore the several other tracks that I had planned and outlined, but given that I'm still in job search mode, it's a lot easier to take the scripts I had done for the possible network adaptation and turn that into a novel than to have to do the additional programming, art work, and voice integration that the VN version would take. With any luck the novel version will be successful enough to help make the case to do the program!

In any event, just thought some of y'all would be interested.

[EwanG]

While someday I would STILL like to make a VN version of this, I thought I'd let folks know that the book version has just been published at Barnes & Noble (ebook only for now):
http://tinyurl.com/4a99uew

FWIW,
Ewan