Hell Breaks Loose!

Hell Breaks Loose is one of my side projects to help me flush out some of my logic while I work out how I want my big project to go.

(Yes, I’m primed for the potential irony of this “side project” becoming more popular and impressive than Game of Slaves.)

You start in a hotel, located in a small town in America.  Hell breaks loose, the town is in shambles, and you have only a short amount of time to race across town with your mind, body, and spirit intact.  Good luck!

The town started as a simple 7-x-7 grid, with some special locations.  Now, it’s a little different.  The player started in one corner and had to make it to the opposite corner without succumbing to the evils and temptations along the way.

The project under Twine taught me a lot about my expectations, and how to go about telling a decent story, but it made for a boring game… and it was a boring game with limited moves beyond what I had intended.

I then tried to make this happen under Inform7 and ADRIFT, and it didn’t work out as I had hoped.  I ran into a couple of bugs in the  program which make it very difficult to do what I want in it.  There are workarounds available to bypass most of the bugs, but they require a lot more dedication than I want to invest right now.  I have no problem learning new tools… (I enjoy it.) …I just don’t want to have to achieve ‘mastery’ in order to do a fairly simple game.

I’ve added Sugarcube to Twine and found my options expand once again!  The game engines keep improving and I’m doing my best to keep up.

– Features – 

Features you can reasonably expect:

• Goals. (That’s right, there’s a reason to play.)
• Choose a quick back-story for your persona which will affect your abilities in-game.
• Transformations – Gender, non-human variants, heaven & hell.
• Abilities / powers / equipment for…
• Different ways to deal with opponents.
• Allies (probably).
• Variety of obstacles and side-tracks.
• …and maybe a few surprises.  Who knows?

More info to come…

[Edited: 2015MAY28]

Fun fact: I did descriptions for more than 45 areas during my initial Twine work!