"When I was seven, Uncle Jack took me to see the golem."
Bikay is an orphan living in Rotongwe, a sprawling, heavily populated city in a former imperial colony.
The country is still dealing with the aftermath of a successful revolution, where the people rose up and threw their former rulers out for good. One of the last battles against the colonial forces took place near Rotongwe, but all that's left outside the city walls now are the remains of a giant golem, a long-dead magical war machine that won the defenders their victory.
But Bikay doesn't care so much about that. Life in Rotongwe is tough for an orphan now the great reconstruction's under way - but the poor look after their own, and Bikay in particular has Uncle Jack.
Jack is strange. He's clever and good with his hands and he keeps Bikay out of trouble - but he's scary, too. He's got a quick tongue and a savage temper for anyone who crosses him. No-one knows who he really is or where he came from. And he seems to be very interested in what the high prelate of Rotongwe plans for the future of the city - not only that, he seems convinced that Bikay's got an important part to play in that future.
Who is Jack? Does he mean good things for Bikay or does he want to do Bikay harm? How does he know so much about the golem? Why does he want to get involved in the future of the city?
And what will he ask Bikay to do to make that future happen?
Updated 24/01/15:Added a Mediafire link for the Windows version of the alpha. Hope it works! (See my most recent post for a few disclaimers!)
Updated 22/01/15:Added a couple of screenshots to the first post as well.
Updated 22/01/15: After some considerable time, the alpha - let's call it an alpha - is finished. The game is not "done" (and may never be) but the story is complete and playable from start to finish. Roughly 42,000 words, sixteen decision points, four endings, three bad endings. See my most recent post. Anyone want to play it?
Updated 23/08/14: I added another sample of the script to the thread in a separate post.
Updated 18/08/14: You can see the opening to the script at the bottom of this post.
What's this Knowing thing, then?
Knowing is half the battle. Seriously, though, Knowing is a short story/novella I finished a while ago and recently thought I could maybe make into a simple game. It's a fairly serious dark fantasy aimed at a slightly older audience, I guess? You play as Bikay, trying to find out who your Uncle Jack really is, what he's doing in the city of Rotongwe, how he knows so much about the city's past and deciding whether to trust him or not.
Who are the characters appearing in this story?
The four principal characters in Knowing are:
The protagonist. You. Bikay is... kind of a blank slate, at least to start with. Your choices are less about where the story goes and more how you want Bikay to react - what sort of person you'd like to play as. (At least right now that's how it is. It could change.) The story starts when Bikay is around 7 or 8 years old, but it jumps forward in time at points until he's around 17 or 18.
Bikay's uncle. Or is he? They could be related, but no-one knows for sure, and Jack's not telling. Jack's clever, smart and protective of Bikay, but he's also hot-tempered, impatient and cruel. He's obviously got an agenda, but what is it? Do you want to support him or not? Jack's a grown man, though it's not certain how old he is exactly.
The high prelate of Rotongwe - the man responsible for governing the city. Adegoke (or Gokay) obviously means well for the city but he's willing to sacrifice a lot and to trample over people's rights and freedoms to guarantee them security now the country's been liberated. He wants Jack and Bikay to help him, but can he be trusted? Does the end justify the means? Adegoke's a grown man who fought in the revolution as a boy, climbed the ranks as he grew older then moved into politics until he was running the city.
Kira is a girl who's a friend of Bikay's, another of Rotongwe's countless street kids. She's from a different tribal background to Bikay and wasn't born in the city, so people make fun of her for being provincial and dumb. But Kira's almost as hot-tempered as Jack, and doesn't want to put up with any verbal abuse - something that occasionally gets her in trouble. Kira wants the best for Bikay, but she's wary of Jack, and doesn't trust him. Kira is roughly the same age as Bikay, though she first appears in the story at around 8 or 9 years old.
(There are a couple of other minor roles, but we'll stick with those four for now.)
So... what sort of story is this?
Okay. Knowing isn't a romance as such, no matter what you do. There isn't any adult content apart from some moderate sexual references. There's a lot of talking, and listening to other people talk. There's a fair bit of suspense! Some action! Some violence - though this was pretty gory in the original story and I was thinking I'd tone it down. There's no profanity.
You said this was fantasy?
Not elves and dragons fantasy or anything like that.
The setting behind Knowing is loosely - very loosely! - based on late 19th century Africa, if magic existed, and the African nations had managed to defeat the Europeans in battle and then threw them out of the continent. Now that they've got their freedom, what will they do with it? Rotongwe itself was inspired by photos and paintings of Western Africa/Nigeria in the 1890s, particularly Lagos. (Although I, uh, still don't have a fantasy name for the actual country in the story.)
(I'm trying to be respectful and even-handed with drawing on this subject matter for inspiration but I'm just a regular white guy from a comfortable suburban background, I haven't studied black history for years or anything like that, so hopefully none of this seems... inappropriate. I don't know. That stuff isn't the main point of the story, but it does connect to it, so hopefully none of it would upset anyone and I'm just over-thinking things.)
What are you doing to turn this into a game, then?
Well. I can't draw or make music or anything like that, but Twine seemed hard and Ren'Py seemed pretty easy to start working with, so I thought I'd give it a shot.
The original story was around 20,000 words, but it was written in third person and it seemed a VN ought to be in first, so the whole thing needed re-doing. But I actually shelved the story in the first place because I wasn't completely happy with the writing, so having to re-do everything wasn't so bad.
I've already planned out a basic structure as a flowchart with yEd. At the moment the narrative is ultimately linear - there are no completely separate paths, and the ending is always the same thing happening at the same place. But right now there are seventeen decision points where you're adding to one of four meters that influence how that ending finishes up - so that's four endings, sort of, and five bad ones as well. Some of the narrative branches briefly too - events you won't see if you didn't pick a particular choice, simple stuff like that.
Plus there's definitely plenty of room to add more branches, or make whole new paths.
So how much of the game have you actually finished?
I stress again that the original story was finished. It's done. I just wasn't totally happy with the way it turned out. So the basic plot's been finalised for a while.
The game?
- * I have about 90% of the basic flowchart entered into a Ren'Py script (just placeholder text for the events and choices).
* I have about 50% of the story re-written to fit the game (with the extra paths, but none of the bad endings yet). That's about 17,000 words so far.
- * Between half and two thirds of that 17k words has actually been added to Ren'Py and formatted for readability, etc.
What is it you'd like anyone here to tell you?
Well... (deep breath)
- * Does any of this actually sound interesting to you? That'd be a good start.
* Do the characters make you want to find out more about them? How about the setting?
* Does the idea that the game is linear and you're mostly just reacting to things put you off? Do you think the story would have to have separate paths to get you to play it again?
- * If you are actually interested, what could I post here that would help you decide whether or not you think I can write, and if you'd like to read more of my writing? I'm happy to stick a few paragraphs from the script in if that's the way to do things here.
So how about that writing?
Here's the opening to the story and the first... event? Decision point? Some stuff that might or might not be clear:
- * Note that while the writing is supposed to be simple and easy to read, Bikay is not actually seven years old when he's telling the story.
* The decision point here is meant to be - are you choosing yourself (cool story, Jack, whatever) or are you choosing Jack (wow, Uncle Jack, that sounds awesome! Please tell me more)? (Yes, at the moment the four main endings are basically "Who do you want to side with?" )
* Some of this is already a little bit different, because I edit things when I add them to the Ren'Py script - cutting lines down to size to make them flow better, and so on.
>A nightmare? Was it still down there?When I was seven, Uncle Jack took me to see the golem.
"You need to learn about this stuff," he said. "You're old enough."
I knew there was a big battle outside the city, a long time ago, when we beat the white devils and took our country back, but I didn't know anything more than that. So I followed my uncle to see what the fuss was about.
We walked along the high road for a bit, until we got to a place where I could see the hills in the distance and how the ground slowly went up and up towards them. The sky was blue. There weren't any clouds, and I saw kites flying high overhead. The birds made these scary noises as they sailed round up there, and I could see the deer under the abak trees kept looking up, like the sound made them nervous.
I looked down, and then I saw the mouth.
It was a big crack in the earth where the ground started to slope up. But it seriously looked like a mouth. A huge mouth. A mile across, even. It had great big stones like teeth poking out of either side, all covered in weeds. It wasn't open very wide, but it looked really dark inside.
"Thirty years ago, now," Jack said. "Twenty thousand white devils, fifteen whole regiments of cavalry, stood up the top of that slope and got ready to attack the defenders outside Rotongwe. They kept dropping shells on them, balefire that set light to the earth. When they charged, they had so many wards cast to protect them the air was glittering. Then they got to the bottom of the hill, that mouth opened up, and a nightmare climbed out."
"It was a golem," Jack said. "But a golem two hundred feet high! The wizards from the Academy who put him together didn't really want that mouth to open up, but they'd made the golem so big he sucked up all the hillside, and the ground just collapsed. The white devils' cavalry couldn't stop in time. Most of them were pounded into mincemeat - just like that! The golem swung his arms and tore their wards up like tissue paper. The rest of them fell down into the hill, and nobody ever saw them again."
I crept nearer to the mouth while he was talking and got down on my belly to stare inside through the teeth.
It was really dark in there. It was so dark the walls just vanished right away. But a long way down, so far down it made me dizzy, you could see this shape where the last of the sunshine could just about reach. It was a giant. Just the top half of him, like a man was kneeling down there, like he was really sad he wasn't going to get out.
"Are you listening, Bikay?" Jack said right behind me, and I squeaked. "You want to fall in too, do you?" he said. "You'd scream and scream all the way down, and when you hit the bottom... huh! You'd go splat so hard there'd be nothing left of you."
He grabbed me by the neck and dragged me away from the edge.
That was the first time I saw the golem.
>A nightmare? What did he mean?
"It was a golem," Jack said. "But a golem two hundred feet high! The wizards who put him together didn't really mean for that mouth to open up, but they'd made the golem so big he sucked up all the hillside, and the ground just collapsed. The white devils' cavalry couldn't stop in time. Most of them were pounded into mincemeat - just like that! The golem swung his arms and tore their wards up like tissue paper. The rest of them fell down into the hill, and nobody ever saw them again."
I looked up at him, hoping he was going to tell me some more.
"The white devils kept coming," Jack said. "But they couldn't do anything to the golem. Their guns couldn't even scratch him, and their balefire just went poof! as soon as it touched him. In the end they ran. The bravest soldiers they had turned around and ran rather than end up dead like everyone else."
"And they knew," Jack said to me, and he looked really serious. "They knew this would happen. We'd already beaten the white devils, we beat them at Ontuye, at Banningford, at Verheun... lots of battles, lots of different places. But they still tried. They knew there was no way they could beat us but they still tried. People do not change. Remember that, Bikay, okay? People do not change."
That was the first time I saw the golem.