Decks, Settings, and Areas

StoryNexus
1

Okay, I’m making an experimental game about ruling a nation inside of a world where reality itself is falling apart, so each world is a tiny universe onto itself, able to contact others through “The Aether”

There are something like 5 Settings, and 7 different areas. The idea is at the beginning of the game, the players choose a setting, and then an area. By and large, this doesn’t change OVERTLY much about the game, but it does change what they can access is my goal (the vast majority of events will be in the “Everywhere” deck).

But then I want to add at least two more decks. a Setting Deck (dependent upon which part of the multiverse they’re in) and an area deck (dependent upon what type of universe their little nation is built in). Is there a way to make decks appear based upon their setting, and then, area, and also, to have it so that all settings share all the same areas (since the areas are “generic” things like ‘Desert Realm’ or ‘Forest Realm’). Potentially rather than a deck dependent on one of the 7 “Realm Terrain types” it would be dependent upon what type of technology they choose, etc.etc.

Ideally, there’d be far more decks: Everywhere, Realm Location, Terrain, Creatures, Technology, Culture, Society, Government, and Creed.

And please, please, PLEASE, do not just immediately say “HOW MANY STORYLETS WOULD YOU NEED TO WRITE FOR THAT?”
Because I’m working in a team of writers for this, and we plan on expanding this hugely over time :P right now we want to just see if we can get 1 or 2 variable deck slots (eg: players only ever see 2 or 3 decks, but there’s more like 5 or so decks per slot, and what they see is dependent upon their traits).

So? Yes or No? Possible? And if it’s possible, how do I go about making it work?

PS: Sorry if I sound terse, been struggling with Storynexus all night and am nearing the end of my patience.

edit: We’re running this in tandem with our own interactive webcomic (and eventual interactive webcomic mmo/social game-thing): http://www.rebuildempyrean.com

edit2: On a similar note, how does one DELETE settings, areas, and decks?
edited by shadowclasper on 2/4/2013

2

Yes. A deck will only appear if it has at least one card available to play, and each card can be specific to a setting and area, if you want it to be. Put those two things together, and you have decks which appear based on setting and area.

Note though: if you allow your character to move between areas, then any cards they dealt before they moved will still be available to them (in other words, moving between areas doesn’t remove cards which are already in your hand). The opposite is true of settings: changing setting clears your hand.

Yes, that’s simply the way it works. All settings share all areas, and all areas share all settings. So if you’ve got 4 of each, say, you have 4x4=16 combinations. You might not choose to use them all, obviously.

Again, a deck will appear only if it has at least one card in it, so you just set conditions for cards to appear and the deck will appear (or disappear) as if by magic. So for example, have a quality which records the technology you chose, and test that quality in the “root event” for all the cards in the technology deck.

I’m not going to say exactly that, but I will point out that if you set things up so that any individual player can see (say) only 25% of your storylets, then you’ll need to write 4 times as much to give any one person the same experience. http://wiki.failbettergames.com/wiki:combinatorial-explosion If that’s what you want to do, then good luck to you.

I don’t think you can. There are quite a few rough edges in StoryNexus, and this is one of them. Just rename it to something like NOT_IN_USE and then recycle it later when you need a new one.

Cheers
Richard

3

Thank you so much!

And yes, we have read that one, we’re working (for the moment) on only having ten “random event cards” per deck, and possibly using areas less for random event generation and more for “repeatable” events and controlling them through forcing players to spend more actions upon them.

4

I am having trouble getting the hand to clear.

I want to force the user to choose exactly one of the three cards drawn. I thought I could do this by adding a second Setting, and causing all the plots started by cards to go through a chokepoint where they cause travel to that Setting. In that Setting, there is a single Always card with Must priority which sends them back to the normal setting.

  1. I wish there was a less klunky way to do this; that’s a lot of clicking.

  2. And it isn’t even working. After the second transition they still have the other two cards in their hand.

5

On point (2), I’ve seen that happen too, and I would define it as a bug. My guess is that the system only clears your hand at the point where it wants to display your hand - so if you go straight into a Must card, it never shows your hand and the relevant bit of code never runs. That’s purely guesswork though. You should email support@storynexus.com to raise it.

On point (1), an alternative way of doing it is to make each choice set a quality (let’s call it Made Your Choice), and set “Made Your Choice: Max 0” in the root storylet for each card. Then, critically, turn on the Transient box, which says that the card should disappear out of your hand once it no longer meets the criteria set on the root storylet. That’ll do what you want, though the user experience isn’t great.

The bottom line though is that this SN doesn’t really picture you using Sometimes cards in this way, so you’re fighting against it. You might want to think about whether there’s another way to achieve what you’re aiming to.

Cheers
Richard

6

I have a setting that clears the hand by using one sometimes card that only appears in that setting and explains what happened. I use it a lot, but it appears buggy as often I get stuck with no cards to play. I’m thinking of removing it.

7

[color=#009900]I’ve been thinking of adding CLEAR_HAND and FILL_HAND_FROM_THIS_DECK exotic effects to the task list, if it’s as minor as I hope. Watch this space.[/color]
edited by Alexis on 2/8/2013

8

Huzzah!

9

ooh, those exotic effects would be really perfect for what I really want to do. I didn’t even look at that dropdown.

The transient flag occurred to me after I went to bed last night; it would also avoid some of the extra player clicks too. So if the exotic effect isn’t in yet I can do that.

Thanks all!

10

[color=#009900]As of a small patch this morning, the CLEAR_HAND exotic effect is now in. FILL_HAND isn’t, because it’s more complicated, because reasons.[/color]

11

Can’t wait to try it. This hopefully will stop me from getting stuck via so many setting changes.

12

Thanks so much. This will make the early experience (when lots of challenges fail) in my game a great deal smoother!