The coincidence is kinda insane though - quick personal story I think is worth a readers time. I was just working on assets to develop a very quick (3-levels, built for one person) narrative romance game until I fell asleep last night. I’ve never developed any game of any kind.
I then wake up to a JS library for narrative games at the #1 spot on HN.
FTR the game is a simp game I’m using it to ask someone I’ve been seeing to make things official.
I love trying and going a bit overboard because life is short and sweet and it’s your responsibility as a human to make it fun.
I do appreciate this comment though. I personally know a lot of my peers would be made better by internalizing your belief - I’m just not one of them :)
Looking forward to slapping a few quick games into this and distract the kids in a low bandwidth type style.
For that matter, what is a "narrative game". None of the sample games would fit the definition in my head of "narrative game". If I google for "narrative game", the sample games certainly don't seem to fit.
And, assuming there is a common definition of "narrative game", what does this library do special to facility making "narrative games" that other game engines do not?
It's a cool project. I like that your examples use ASCII maps. So simple to prototype. No need to break out a map editor.
since last night I had the idea for one,
where you're an adult and you have to do adult things
like file taxes and go to work and dust your house
and the less you do these things the harder life gets,
but the more you do them, the easier it gets,
and the goal of the game is to die with no debt.
I kind of love the look.
Maybe with a new set of ansi escapes we can get Zork to look like that. :D
It's so much more impressive. Those 3D effects are just insane. Just look at that 3D globe.
Highly reccomend, its so good that it takes all the fun out of designing my own janky custom system.
I was definitely wondering how I would do this outside of Excel, but I have so many projects going on right now that figuring this one out didn't sound fun :D
& Evennia is very cool if you want to make a multiplayer one!
One of these days I'll try out Inform7 it seems so cool but haven't had an idea for a game that could use it yet
And it breaks the IDE until you somehow uninstall it and every dependency. And kill all its temporary files.
Its selling point isn't for building mechanics-first games like a more general engine (e.g. Pico-8).
But what you can do is easily make maps, a character that walks between maps, NPCs, and triggers for dialogue/text.
Consider other engines aimed at non-programmers like RPGMaker: the main games people make with it are "narrative games" where you walk around and read text/dialogue, usually with zero additional mechanics outside of the built-in map + trigger system. It's probably 90% of games built with it!
So I'd reckon they're saying "you can build those games with this tool too".
> Odyc.js is a tiny JavaScript library designed to create narrative games by combining pixels, sounds, text, and a bit of logic.
Scratch and the others in that style always felt like it went one step too far. It's designed for 5 yearolds, and 5 yearolds don't need to be learning about code.
This is a good sweetspot for a ~10 year old. Reasonably simple string manipulation , a couple of syntax tricks to learn, and not much else. Just to get a basic side scroller with some NPC's. Then they can incorporate control flow when they are ready.
Consider releasing a class for kids on this tool & investing in the playground. You could get some real sales.
A different angle, you could do some basic procgen game assets with this tool.
I noticed it's open source but is missing a license. Could you add one so developers can understand to what extent they can modify and publish their forks?
For example, it occurred to me that I could translate it into my native language and publish a fork of it (with credits, of course), since less than 5% of my country speaks English. Would that be okay with you?
In any case, feel free to fork, send a pull request, or reach out if you'd like to help make it more accessible!
kevinsync•8mo ago
https://achtaitaipai.github.io/odyc-exemples/games/mushroom....
chrisweekly•8mo ago
TheGoodBarn•8mo ago
mNovak•8mo ago
https://achtaitaipai.github.io/odyc-exemples/games/john-wick...