complicatedquest

[complicatedquest]

The Undecided Adventure: Gameplay

I'm currently making a game in Google Slides called The Complicated Quest, which is a sequel to my first slideshow game The Undecided Adventure. If you're interested in playing it, there's a link in my previous post. I thought I'd go over the gameplay and lore to the game as they're both relevant to the game I'm currently making.

The game is primarily a choose-your-own-adventure, so the main gameplay is clicking between links which take you to different routes and different endings. Most of the secrets in the game are found by trying to click different things in the image, which are required to access the secret, true ending.

In this screenshot, the visuals are split into two parts: the image and the text. The text describes what happened after you made your last choice, where you are now, and what your next choice is. The image shows where you are and is made almost entirely of preset shapes from google slides besides the elf clip art. Fun fact, that random dirt patch is where Santa Claus is buried because I thought that was cool. If you click "SANTA", you go down the route where you fight Krampus, but if you click "DROWN", you go down the route where you fight a mecha-snowman. Additionally, hovering your mouse around the image will have the cursor turn into a hand when you hover it above the elf. If you click on the elf, you go down a secret dating sim-esque minigame, which is required to open a lock in the temple.

Speaking of the temple, clicking on the door would link you to a different slideshow which uses a tool called Link Lock by Jacob Strieb to lock it behind a code, so you'll have to find the code somewhere in the game. For example, a clue on how to open one of the three locks of the temple is found in that page next to the temple. I hope to eliminate using Link Lock in The Complicated Quest by creating keypads inside the slideshow as to keep the whole game in one slideshow.

Puzzles like this only appear twice in the original game, but I hope to make them more prevalent in TCQ. In this one, you have to press these buttons in the right order, and are giving this map as a hint. Pretty simple, just reverse the map and then press the buttons in order as the line moves through the maze. This one puzzle took twelve slides and many links to work properly, and the ones in TCQ will be more complex and take up even more slides.

Finally, animation as used in gameplay. In this frame, an animation started where these three circles moved from off screen to the bottom. To win, you have to click on the off-colored boulder before it moves off screen. It's basically a quick time event. I probably won't do too much of this in TCQ for three main reasons. 1. It's annoying to work with. Even if you have an animation so that an object only appears after a cue, the link of the object is still there, so that sucks. 2. Doing animations like this for some reason has the objects become more transparent as they move on, as you can see in the picture, so that's annoying. 3. For some unknown reason, google doesn't have a custom animation option. You just have to work with the presets. I have ideas involving animation, but I'll only use it if I REALLY like the idea.

Come back tomorrow if you're interested in the deep lore I came up with for this stupid slideshow shape game :)

[complicatedquest]

The Undecided Adventure, my first game made in Google Slides

The Complicated Quest, the game I'm currently working on in slides, is actually a sequel to the first google slides game I made (tho I want to make it work as a story on its own as well). I made it for a school project, starting simply with just the beach and field path with no secrets, before returning to it later to completely spiral out of control. This is basically what the gameplay of The Complicated Quest is like, except TCQ steps it up by like ten.

CLICK HERE TO PLAY THE GAME

This is the public copy of the game with as minimal changes to as how I originally made it as possible. I recommend playing it on a computer, doesn't really work on phone. I'll post about specific points of interests in the game later, but for now, have fun playing :)

[complicatedquest]

Intro to Google Slides Game Development

Hi everyone! In case you haven't heard, I'm currently creating a game in Google Slides called The Complicated Quest. But, how does that even work? It's actually really simple, here's the basics.

Google slides has this feature where you can add a link to an object that can be clicked on when playing the slideshow. Aside from linking to websites, you can also link to other slides, which is the key to google slides game dev.

You can add these links to any text or object, including slides' many preset shape options, which I use as the base for my games. This works great for choose-your-own-adventure games as you might imagine, which is the main form that The Complicated Quest takes, but this also leaves it more open to really anything if you have enough patience, use enough slides, and acknowledge whatever you make is going to be way shittier than the real deal.

Good example of this is my recreation of Five Nights at Freddy's for my FNaF timeline slideshow (different story).

As you can see, I kinda just got a compressed image of the office and put it into slides for this one, but the buttons have a square object put over them with links to other slides. In this case, I clicked on the square for the door button, which sent me to a different slide where the door is closed.

Clicking the red box at the bottom takes you to the cameras, where each individual camera button takes you to a different slide for that camera.

So, that took 135 slides for a full night, just to get a picture on how many slides these games can take.

I'll keep this blog updated on the current slides game I'm working on, so stay tuned :)