You guys are all very exciting but can i ask for a few things too?
Allow me to have cards take actions(on top of drawing them). Currently I am trying to have a system that allows me to have decks of cards- 1 uses cards that cost resources and the other ones uses cards that cost actions(but no resources) This is currently impossible unless i invent a workaround( like an item that requires 4 actions to make and is consumed by second deck) and such way of doing thi9ngs is very sloppy.
A way to hide quality changes( if the quality didn’t change there is no reason for a player to know that) and to make “hidden” qualities which are not shown to the player unless they are of a certain level or a player has a different quality( an example- invisible" airs of London"-type quality which you can only see if you have a gypsy’s crystal ball.)
is it even possible to make requirements on a card invisible? Like the card requires you to have at least 1 sandwich and there would be nothing to indicate that.
If I have an "Injury" quality that increases as the player takes damage. I would like to have a branch where I challenge the Injury quality and if it "succeeds" I get the default (bad) result. I.E. climbing a mountain has a greater chance to fail the higher the injury quality is.
Essentially we can do this by having the good outcome on a default branch and the bad one on a success branch. It is a little confusing, however, that the programmed notification in SN will say "You succeeded an injury challenge!"
So essentially it would be a matter of a tick box on a challenge line "Invert Challenge" which would notify Story Nexus to narrate the success as a failure to the player. The only thing it changes is those words.[li] edited by HanonO on 9/1/2013
Another option would be to use a luck challenge, with difficulty proportional to the player’s injuries. That would appropriately mark failures, but wouldn’t communicate the relevance of wounds. Still, I think it may be a better option for you, because this is a challenge you want to fail is something you pretty much have to slip out of fiction to communicate, whereas it should be easy to fictionally convey the significance of any injuries.
[li]
Okay, can you explain how this works then? I’ve used a luck challenge before, but pretty much at 0 - even chances. If I recall correctly, luck is less on your side the higher the challenge number gets? So I want to write a luck challenge with the number =[q:Injury]. I’ll try this for real in a second, but I’m predicting that the game will be telling the player that it’s a matter of luck to climb the rocky hill…without indicating it has to do with their injury level. (If that’s what you wrote, I’m sorry, haven’t had any coffee yet.)
[quote=Dmitri Zhiriakov]You guys are all very exciting but can i ask for a few things too?
Allow me to have cards take actions(on top of drawing them). Currently I am trying to have a system that allows me to have decks of cards- 1 uses cards that cost resources and the other ones uses cards that cost actions(but no resources) This is currently impossible unless i invent a workaround( like an item that requires 4 actions to make and is consumed by second deck) and such way of doing thi9ngs is very sloppy.[/quote]
The authorities have stated that authors are deliberately not allowed to charge actions for drawn cards from a sometimes deck. This is because the player has already spent an action to draw the cards, and this would be double-charging them. Since actions are specifically tied into the potential monetization of the world and is also meant as an organic buffer to server bandwidth (keeping people from playing Fallen London 24-hours at a stretch for free), overcoming this mechanism is discouraged. Also it’s pretty much part of the ground rules of a Story Nexus game that using a "known" card costs more than those in a chance-random draw.
[quote=Dmitri Zhiriakov]2. A way to hide quality changes( if the quality didn’t change there is no reason for a player to know that) and to make "hidden" qualities which are not shown to the player unless they are of a certain level or a player has a different quality( an example- invisible" airs of London"-type quality which you can only see if you have a gypsy’s crystal ball.)
is it even possible to make requirements on a card invisible? Like the card requires you to have at least 1 sandwich and there would be nothing to indicate that.[/quote]
Not inherently. This has also been asked for many times, and FailBetter’s position is that qualities should be completely transparent to the player since that is how the game is played and not providing player feedback is another thing they want to discourage. This has workarounds. In Fallen London you’ll notice an occasional message something to the effect of "The winds are changing…" and I believe this is a global sort of randomizer for certain mechanics that doesn’t make its use directly clear to the player.
One way might be to use a "circumstance" quality. These do not display their QLD in the player’s interface. With some tricky/vague QLD and QCD descriptions you can sometimes conceal their actual meaning to the player. It’s a hassle.
The easiest thing to do is just write your game so that any branch requiring the "Super Secret Map to the Caverns" is hidden if the quality requirements fail and doesn’t even appear as a choice unless the player has the SSMttC quality. If you need to indicate that there might be a way into the cave when the player doesn’t have the map, you can write a branch describing this and make it unplayable but visible with the "Impossible!" quality so there is no way for the player to choose it. If they have the map, a new branch will appear indicating they can go in because they are carrying the map. They will still see the "Impossible" branch, but a new thing will have opened up. If you can make the entry branch higher priority, it will jump to the top over the impossible one when it appears (in theory – sometimes branch-ordering can be buggy as well, but in ideal circumstances, branches the player qualifies for jump to the top over ones they do not qualify for.)
[li][/li][li] edited by HanonO on 9/1/2013[/li][li] edited by HanonO on 9/1/2013
That was kind of the point >_> guess I’ll have to go with "item made of actions" route
Also the question about hiding quality changes was more about stuff like
" Your perceptive hasn’t changed because it’s more than 0" on a storylet that sets it to 1 in the first place. This is pretty annoying as it either forces me to create duplicates for whenever you already have perceptive or to make the player suffer through a flood of messages,
( I really wish they fix that persistent qualities bug)
[quote=Hanon Ondricek]Okay, can you explain how this works then? … I’ll try this for real in a second, but I’m predicting that the game will be telling the player that it’s a matter of luck to climb the rocky hill…without indicating it has to do with their injury level. (If that’s what you wrote, I’m sorry, haven’t had any coffee yet.)[/quote]Yes, that’s exactly it. My thinking was that it’s easier to indicate that it’s really testing their Injuries through the way you describe the situation than it is to indicate that they want to fail the challenge. (For that, you probably have to explicitly say so, like FL does in the Exile and Madness Menace states.) Does that make more sense?
A better solution would probably be to create a completely new Quality which, like Luck, always has a value of Zero, and test the player against that. You could call it Tenacity, or something; it would a) have the standard success/failure text, rather than the fortunate/unlucky stuff, and b) if you need to do this on other occasions, maybe even with other Menaces, you can train your players to understand that all such challenges are made harder by high Menaces.
That was kind of the point >_> guess I’ll have to go with "item made of actions" route
Also the question about hiding quality changes was more about stuff like
" Your perceptive hasn’t changed because it’s more than 0" on a storylet that sets it to 1 in the first place. This is pretty annoying as it either forces me to create duplicates for whenever you already have perceptive or to make the player suffer through a flood of messages,
( I really wish they fix that persistent qualities bug)[/quote]
Oh right! I had a huge problem with that. I had to mangle my original idea and avoid using "if less/greater than" which is what triggers that. I had lots of "set to zero if greater than zero" which announced everything, and I ended up just saying "set to zero" which I believe does not print a notification. That may not work with what you’re doing though.
Am I missing something or is there NOT a way to add quality values like [q:Shield] in to the descriptions or into the Change Level Descriptions of a Quality?
I do not believe you can put them into QLDs or QCDs. You can put them into main card branches.
I worked around this in order to have the character’s current clothing listed in the sidebar by having an “Attire” quality, with each QLD listing a different outfit. When the character equips a specific clothing, it increases the attire quality by that much so it will display correctly. You could do the same with armor. If you want the QCDs to change on result branches, that might possibly be made to work in the same way.
Another question … Is it possible to use the “Actions” to effect qualities? Like if you use 10 Actions it changes the quality Day/Night? Or something like that. Or if you use 20 Actions you “Tired” quality would decrease by 1.
@ferguson - this kind of thing was already proposed somewhere and considered good idea by the developers, so it should probably show up on StoryNexus in the future, but right now it’s impossible without a workaround - giving every card using actions increase in ‘Time passed’ quality, which triggers a Must card when it hits 20, and that Must card reduces Tired by 1 and sets Time passed to 0.
Actually you can do this, but it has to be on a Must storylet (not one that is drawn from a deck for a cost of one action).
Make separate branches for:
Sleep a little! In the branch root click the drop down and change the branch action cost (not nex cost!) from 1 to 5. Have the result branch increase your Stamina or whatever quality it effects, and describes a nice little catnap.
Sleep a lot! Same deal, only the branch root change the nex cost to 10.
Sleep all night! Have the branch cost 15 similarly.
If the player does not have enough actions, they will not be allowed to select the branches.
The thing you can’t do that I’ve requested is to have a branch or a card trigger based on the number of actions (have action count be visible as a requirement, but not allow the author to change it) so you could say - force a card when the player is low on actions warning them that their session will come to an end when they run out of actions.
New here! I’ve only been using the platform for a short while and am yet to publish something, but lots of feature requests have already come to mind! I’ll stick to just one though, which is usage statistics.
I know there is already a limited system for this, but it strikes me that a pretty easy way to give full-on stats for creators would be to leverage Google Analytics’ event tracking. Just put a _gaq.push() on everything (within reason) that a player can click, with the character name and information on what they’ve just done. Negligible additional server load as well.
Of course, you’d then need to allow creators access to Analytics for their own worlds. The easy way would be to let them set this up for themselves and give them a field to add their tracking ID (perfectly possible as Analytics allows tracking of separate subdomains as different properties). The downside of that is that FB would then lose the data they’re already collecting. A slightly harder way, possibly involving manual intervention (and therefore perhaps only available upon request?) would be to set up a separate profile for each world, filtering out everything but traffic for the appropriate subdomain. FB would be able to keep all the data as well then.
Anyway, I used GA’s event tracking for an in-browser game I wrote a while back and it is very, very useful. Works perfectly.
Not sure if this is the appropriate thread (couldn’t find one game-specific), but for Fallen London, I’d like to see advantages for having specific lodgings as your current one. As it stands, hand size is the only benefit, so of the 4-card lodgings, there’s no difference whatsoever which one you currently reside in. Maybe, for example, a small weekly profit from the bazaar premises, or a nightmares reduction if you stay at the royal beth? Just a couple of random ideas off the top of my head.
There’s a Fallen London general feedback thread over here, which includes guidelines for suggestions posts. In this case, I think you’d be justified in starting a thread in the Bazaar subforum - it’s a subject ripe with food for thought!
Oh wow! I just now noticed that you can search through storylets based on what qualities they affect–that’s new since the last time I was really poking at my game, and it’s SUPER helpful. I know this is probably way after the fact, but thank you guys for implementing that!
I think that’s been there for a while! It is super useful though. What’s even more useful is that you can now go to a quality and search for which storylets affect and require it. That’s relatively new.