What can we do to help?

Beta testers:

Now that you’ve actually used the system, what’s wrong with it? What else does it need?

Could you give us your top three (or two, or one) bugs that you’d like to see addressed first, and features that you’d like to see added first.

I can’t promise anything. But if we can get a consensus on what’s causing problems and what you folks are really after in terms of features, we might be able to alter the technical priority list to get important stuff out faster.

So, what can we do to help?

(Could I ask that replies be limited to folks who’ve actually used the tools? That would be great.)

Bugs

  • ‘See More Options’ on Branches and Results often refuse to open until you refresh the page. This is both frustrating and often leads to new content being lost because I didn’t hit the save button first. (Hitting ‘Back’ usually returns it though).

  • If every Storylet has a Tag, in the Stories list one tag header will not be displayed and the storylets with that tag will appear at the top of the list. It’s manageable (with a non-tagged blank storylet) but… well, ugly.

Feature

  • For me, the must-have feature is menace-states.

There aren’t any bugs which are bugging me especially.

But features:

  • Event-triggering items
  • Autofiring Menaces
  • Nex-lockable content

I realize that this discussion is a bit idle, but as a new beta tester I would like to put my hat in for a few things.

My two biggest feature requests are “must” effects on root branches and modifiable hand sizes. I know must effects are coming but the descriptions I’ve seen have been on branches (such as moving a character to a location forcibly). I’d like to be able to force a character to make a choice and bypass card selection

Modifiable hand sizes: I know this has floated around but I have a couple ideas that depend on the ability to force a character to play a card from a random selection. An hand size of one would be ideal for this.

I noticed a couple days ago that Urgency had been added already. You can set a card to MUST under Urgency (on the root storylet) and it will play as soon as the qualifications are fulfilled.

I’m really excited for images and themes to come, it will help to draw people in a lot. There aren’t really any bugs either that haven’t already been addressed, which is greatly appreciated. I am curious as to whether or not what I posted earlier is a bug or my error:

I somehow mad a card that had stats along the lines of “Red 1, Blue 2, Yellow 0, but you can’t play if Yellow is below 0” which effectively made me create a “Dead Area” to send this card to because I couldn’t play it at all. No matter how I messed with the card, I couldn’t do anything except delete the Yellow 0 requirement and replace it with a Purple 0 requirement to make everything work.

[color=#009900]MUST/urgency shouldn’t have gone live yet - if it’s still in, it may not be stable - but WORLDSMITH, which includes MUST, will be live today or tomorrow.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Deck sizes - we have no plans to change this right now, but MUST cards in decks are coming, as above, which may cover this for you.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Kitsune: what exactly did you use as requirements? Min 0, Max 0, or just Min 0?[/color]

I had it set to min 0 max 0 and it was really unusual because it only seemed to happen with that particular item. I even made a new root and cloned another root with similar requirements but when I changed the requirements to Yellow min 0 max 0 it happened again. I haven’t played around today but as I said, making a whole new item and using that at min 0 max 0 instead worked fine, just made more work for me.

Oh and Yellow works fine everywhere else… I don’t know it is probably user error so I will go back in later today, scrutinize everything, then get back to you.
edited by Kitsune on 9/4/2012

Will there be documentation of the other options under Urgency? I couldn’t figure out what they did, although that makes more sense now that I know it’s not really officially there yet.

Alexis - Urgency will make a couple of neat ideas possible, and I’m excited to play with it. But I’ve yet to figure out a way to force a character to deal with a random situation. Such as a pool of random encounters in a dungeon crawl, where there are multiple possible entanglements, but only one dealt with at a time, and the player can’t pick and choose their favorite of three. Or be forced to deal with more than one to clear their hand.

Does anyone have a strategy that wouldn’t require a hand size of one?

[color=#009900]Erik - if you set some cards in a deck to MUST, then every so often a player will draw a card that they have to deal with right away. But it sounds like that’s not quite what you want.[/color]
[color=#009900]Chrysoula - they don’t do anything as yet. The docs should be updated now (or are about to be)[/color]
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[color=#009900]WORLDSMITH, btw, is now live. :-)[/color]

New here, still making my way around – has anyone considered (or is anyone already working on) building the StoryNexus reference guide as a playable world such that you’re playing the game and learning the ins-and-outs of the platform at the same time?

[color=009900]Jason: you read our minds. :-) Coming soon.[/color]

Alexis: Excellent! Looking forward to it. So much to learn…

Yeah it was actually completely user error… Some how I set the requirements to min 0 max 1. Probably from using my mouse wheel to scroll. So never mind! ^_^

Usable item storylets and MUST storylets:

How do you recommend we set them up so they don’t show up in the regular Opportunity or Pinned decks?

[color=#009900]For item use storylets, create them in an area or setting (NB the ItemUse category in the reference docs) where players can’t go.[/color]
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[color=#009900]For MUST storylets, you want them in the deck - they’ll only appear when the player has the qualifying requirements, in which case you want them to appear.[/color]

Thanks!

[quote=Erik Harrison]Alexis - Urgency will make a couple of neat ideas possible, and I’m excited to play with it. But I’ve yet to figure out a way to force a character to deal with a random situation. Such as a pool of random encounters in a dungeon crawl, where there are multiple possible entanglements, but only one dealt with at a time, and the player can’t pick and choose their favorite of three. Or be forced to deal with more than one to clear their hand.

Does anyone have a strategy that wouldn’t require a hand size of one?[/quote]

Depends on what you want to do.

For the dungeon crawl example above, you could simply have three – or a dozen – identical cards with different results. So the card text on all three says “You hear breathing in the darkness before you. But what is it?”, but when the player clicks the “Go” button they get a slime mold, a gnoll, or a dragon, depending on the card. The card sets a quality called “Fight!” to 1 for mold, 2 for gnoll, and 3 for dragon; your Always deck throws the appropriate monster as a card; and the “But what is it?” branch on the remaining two cards vanishes (because Fight! is not zero), replaced by a branch that says “You can’t worry about that now, you’re in enough trouble as it is!” The character must resolve the Always card and reset their Fight! quality to zero before they can try for another result.

If you want a deck that’s really full of monsters (or whatever), make the “But what is it?” branch a Luck challenge, meaning you can stack up to three (ETA: four! Rare defaults rock!) monsters on a card, nice and tidy.

That’s how I’d do it anyway. I’m still learning though. Someone else may have a more elegant solution.

ETA: Now that I read the documentation for the new MUST functionality, that would replace the “you’re in enough trouble” branch I proposed above rather handily. Damn. That is a useful little feature.
edited by katastrophe on 9/5/2012

This seems trivial, and may already existand I’m just failing to work it, but beign able to order branches within a storylet would be useful.