7larson - Tumblr blog

[7larson]

tbiny devlog #3

it's been awhile since i've made a proper update, i know, but i figure this blog should contain all the glamor and gloom of the process and maybe its existence will help motivate me.

i've been trying to work on my game for awhile but i've really been struggling with, well... everything, for awhile now, but especially since losing my job in january. it's been too long though, and today i told myself i would work on it no matter how small that was, so i set up a trello board for tracking purposes and an arcweave account for plotting.

i'm still making the game in ink but arcweave is really useful for being able to see the overarching structure of the story for more simple plot point purposes - i'm sure there's possibly other simple flowchart tools i could use for this rather than arcweave but i couldn't find any that scratched the itch i needed. "just make the game in twine" no, my brain doesn't like looking at twine. i enjoy ink a lot, i am much more of a word and code person than a visual person, i just needed something a little easier to look at for an outline, and in all my searching and trying things out, arcweave is what was easiest to just drop a box in and type some shit in it and then put arrows going between them, so arcweave it is!

that's... about all i got done today. mostly just adding a couple of things to the trello, really. but i hope in the coming days, as i continue to force myself to work on it, i will get back in the flow!

[7larson]

hello! it has been awhile since my last devlog, and no devlog today. i am just here utilizing tumblr, who my blog is hosted through, to share a little bit of good news :) for those who do not know, i am a former activision qa worker of 3 years who lost my job when the company refused to work with me on accommodations (e.g. i worked remotely for almost all of those 3 years, but then they forced rto, i had a pending disability accommodation with them for nearly a year with documentation from my doctor, had very little communication from them, and they denied it) and tried to force me to come back into the office.

when i left in january, i asked my coworkers to do one thing: make it a place that they are overjoyed to work, and that bobby kotick (who in 2009 said his goal was to take all the fun out of making games, with the goal of focusing on profit above all else) would have hated.

today, microsoft recognized their union, the biggest union in game development. i'm so fucking proud of them.

[7larson]

i finally finished making my own custom tumblr theme, so i'm shutting down my old blog and using this! it's just a more convenient post-editor by far, and easier for people to follow. you can follow me on tumblr @7larson, or the direct url is 7larson.blog and will stay on my website!

feel free to send in asks or replies or anything, i'd love to talk to people about my projects!

[7larson]

tbiny devlog #2

this is a repost of a blog article originally made at near-midnight august 21st, 2023 as i am migrating my blog to a new host. there was only two already written, everything here on out should be new :)

i should have been at work today, but i woke up with a horrible migraine, so instead, i called out and slept in. when i woke up, the migraine was still pretty bad, not in a state to go to work, but i wanted to finish setting up this blog and revamping my website, so i did that. don’t look at my commit history, it’s a mess. don’t migraine & code, kiddies.

today i want to get into a little bit about what the story of this game will be, its inspirations, etc. since it’s an idea i’ve had floating around for awhile, so that’s what we’ll jump into!

many eons ago, i got really interested in the concept of a ghost or spirit that lives in the body of or is otherwise attached to another person. this isn’t a unique idea, of course, it’s been done in a lot of media. the thing that originally drew me to the idea in this case was the Chronicles of Darkness book, Geist: The Sin-Eaters, but a lot of other media i’ve loved over the years has explored similar ideas in different ways, particularly The Blackwell series by Wadjet Eye Games.

i made characters based on this concept, but really wanted to incorporate this idea of the host being the main character, and transgender, and the spirit not knowing how to grapple with that, or something along those lines. in the end i don’t think it works well that way, or at least, is as interesting. i think there’s a lot more room for trans allegory in the spirit being the main character, and being trapped within the body, and having to cope with it being a different body than the one they came from. i want to explore things like gender and mental health through that super cool urban fantasy lens i’ve always grown up being attracted to, and what better way to do it through this story!

so that’s where our story starts. This Body is Not Yours is the working title, i don’t know if that will be the finished title, but that’s what i’m going with for now. you play as a ghost who, in the afterlife, made a deal with a dying person to bring them back to life on the condition that you’re bound to them now. and when you wake up, you don’t immediately remember that, because memories are a little weird when you don’t have a body for a long time. don’t think about it too hard, it’s better for the narrative if you learn these things slowly, i think.

i’ll make it make sense. maybe.

so on to day two of development.

first, i learned some more basics of conditional statements and how to edit sentences partway through using them for quality of reading, basically. i think that will come in handy later.

next, that CSS thing from yesterday was really starting to bug me, and with some caffeine for my migraine and the powers of google, i was able to thankfully find the solution. it turns out i just need to only be exporting the story.js once i have the CSS styling the way i want. oops!

with that in mind, i went ahead and did some more serious CSS styling, so now the game is nice and moody and has an appropriate light and dark theme :) i usually use light theme for everything, because my eyes suck, but i know most people prefer dark theme and it fits the setting, so here’s what it looks like now.

also, i commented out something i want to use later, but left it there so i can use it… later.

i also found out i can use ink’s class defining to define lines that i stitched together through scenes using glue (this all sounds ridiculous if you’re not familiar with ink, but knots, stitches, and glue are all real terms) so i can change the color of what appears to be a single line in the game, even if it’s split into a couple segments in the file. very useful!

this is pretty much it for technical stuff today, i think, the rest is just writing! so… this has been a devlog. tune in next time for god knows what!

[7larson]

devlog #1

this is a repost of a blog article originally made on august 21st, 2023 as i am migrating my blog to a new host.

today i finally sat down and started to learn how to use ink / inky. i figured if i want to even have a shot at entry-level narrative positions, i’d better have some public work to show off under my belt, so i’d better get cracking :)

i actually spent way more time figuring out how to make this blog than i spent messing with inky, because it turns out inky is really quick to get the hang of. the devlog was a last-second strike of inspiration.

most of day 1 was coming up with my concept (one i’ve had for awhile, actually), and then starting to hash out the specifics of how structuring works. i actually started with twine, which was… well, it was fine. i always thought i was sort of a visual person, but it turns out, i’m a very language-oriented person.

who would have guessed!

and seeing the words laid out in front of me in an almost more code-like way like how ink and the inky editor function actually worked a lot better for me. it’s very similar to the html/css work i dabble in with brackets, so i felt right at home.

figuring out basic branching was pretty straight-forward. i also figured out how to add simple conditional statements (e.g. “this line only gets said if the player has seen this scene”) and a little dice roll.

getting the live preview working was straight-forward also, at least by just exporting. i haven’t quite figured out how to get it to keep my CSS though. i can set classes in inky, but then i can’t define the CSS for those classes until after i export it for web…? and i can’t re-export into the same location apparently…? maybe i’m missing something. i can’t find a lot of info online about it. i could just copy the CSS file somewhere externally and then overwrite it after exporting every time i guess. what a pain!

maybe more soon! i thought about making videos but. it turns out narrative devlogs are just a lot of writing. a little boring maybe, lol.

[7larson]

[7larson]

hello world

this is a test of my custom tumblr theme