• Member Since 22nd Oct, 2012
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  • 298 weeks
    Also I'm going to Bronycon

    My first Bronycon! :> My first convention ever, really. I've wanted to go for a while now, since I usually knew a few friends that would be going, and this year's the first that I can!

    Read More

    8 comments · 431 views
  • 341 weeks
    Share a :)

    Howdy. :>

    So there's a "Share a Smile" blog thingy going around started by Crystal Wishes. I really like the idea and want to hop on board:

    The more of you who participate, the more our chances increase of bringing someone a smile. That's what the Magic of Friendship is all about, right? Well, if you can, please take a few moments out of your day to help brighten someone else's.

    Read More

    6 comments · 768 views
  • 347 weeks
    Thank You 🙏

    Today was a good day. I snagged a screenshot when I had the chance. 😃

    Thank you all. Balance has been restored. 👏

    I have one qualm though. One. 👆

    This happened on July 29th. 😬

    July 29th, 2017. 🤢

    And not. 😨

    July 28th, 2017. The big day. The return to form of modern cinema. 😩

    Read More

    9 comments · 672 views
  • 348 weeks
    Delay on the Cafe

    Hey guys, so the last chapter of petting cafe is gonna be delayed a bit, just FYI. Gonna post it next Sunday instead of tomorrow since this week got really busy. I am working on it though, and it's 70% written, but I just need a bit more time. Sorry, and thanks :)

    5 comments · 451 views
  • 354 weeks
    New Avatar

    It's been, what... three, four years since I updated my avatar?

    Well, here's an update. Now with 20% more cute. :D

    boop :twilightsmile:

    6 comments · 483 views
Aug
12th
2016

My '80 Days' Story and What I Learned · 2:29am Aug 12th, 2016

Thought I’d take a moment to talk a little bit about Pinkie Pie and the Search for the Missing Adventure and the backstory behind it.

A while ago, fellow Fimfiction user horizon posted a challenge, offering anybody to play the game 80 Days and write a story inspired by it. In this blog, I’d like to describe the game and my experience with it, and the things I learned about story and writing in the process. I’ll break these up in sections to make it a bit more skimmable. xP



The Game and the Challenge

The game is an interactive fiction adventure game based on Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. It starts the same way my story starts: You play as Passepartout, the valet to a rich guy named Monsieur Fogg. You, as Passepartout, choose which cities to travel to with the goal of arriving back to London before 80 days is up, because Fogg made a bet that he could. There’s a couple game mechanics, like Fogg has a health meter that goes down over time and you have to try to keep up. Travel also costs money, and you can either withdraw money from a bank (which means you have to wait a few days), or you can sell stuff, which, some stuff is more valuable in some cities than others, so trading strategically will get you more $$$.

The storytelling draw is that you get to choose both which way to go, and how you react in interactions with other characters—you can choose the snide remark or the innocent one, you can lie or tell the truth, etc., and the story reacts to you. It’s not always outright about which choice is the better one—it’s up to you how you’d like to act, or whether saying one thing will cause another character to either hate you or befriend you. They also use this mechanic when you arrive in a city to either hear about the steampunk stuff in the city, hear about political turmoil, interact with citizens, explore, or just skip all that and go to a shop or bank.

Horizon offered the challenge because he praised the game for its strong narrative elements—mostly for its use of catharsis (which I still have yet to fully grasp the concept of)—and offered the following tidbit which stuck with me:

And what really got me is that this game is at its finest when you fail.

To summarize some of his points (check his blog for full reasoning, as well as his experience with the game, too), the draw with this game is that the worse you do, the more the protagonist suffers, and the deeper the emotional impact. To see an accomplished author praise the game for its use of storytelling elements inspired me to take up the challenge. If anything, it’d be my first foray into interactive fiction, and there was the possibility that’d I’d learn how to words better :o So I threw my hat in the ring and gave the game a try.


My 80 Days Experience

My initial goal was to "win"—to get there before 80 days was up. That was what drove my first playthrough. However, about halfway through it, on the ship (the Waterlily to San Francisco) I accidentally became the leader of a mutiny, and I started getting excited—this was a pleasant change of pace from the usual trading in shops and having conversations with townspeople in passing. This was actively participating and following the adventure threads the game offers.

I realized what horizon was getting at in his blog—it was more about the journey and the hidden stories along the way that made the game fun. It was when I started getting excited as I led the mutiny--and the abrupt end of the mutiny is where my disappointment began.

There are mini-adventures within the game, sure, but they feel so mini. I never really felt like I was in total control, because once a short adventure thread ended, like the mutiny, that was all I'd get and it was on to the next thing, disconnected to the previous mini-adventure. I wanted to linger, I wanted to explore those threads just a little further, but the mini-adventures took a back seat to (what felt like) no choice but to move forward.

I felt like the game was pushing me back to London, that I had no choice but to go through the motions of selling stuff, talking to the conductor, etc. in order to hop from one thread to the next. That’s the origin of the lost purse thing—because I’d go out of my way to explore and find characters to interact with, only to help someone find their lost purse, over and over again, with my only reward being a tidbit about how item x can be sold for a good price in city y. It got repetitive and boring after a while, and the mini-adventures were becoming less worth the trouble. (The same could be said about the characters--can't think of any in-game examples, but like Applejack from my story: Interesting characters that I wanted to spend more time with, but the narration ran out and I had no choice but to travel the next day.)

So I followed horizon’s advice strictly after that--the worse you do in the game, the more it rewards you. My decisions were about as drastic and comical as Pinkie’s were in the story. :P In my second playthrough, about halfway through Asia, I sold everything. I bought a train ticket four stops away and got off at every stop (this was the most efficient way to lose money). I had no luggage, no money, and Fogg had, like, 5 hearts out of 100. I was stranded on an island in the Phillipines. I was like, "All right, now I'm gonna see some adventure!" However, there was some shaman on the island that was able to heal Fogg up to 55 hearts, and I got a free boat ride to the next town with a bank, which gave me no other option but to withdraw money. :| The game gave me no choice but to keep going, and it felt like losing was impossible. I threw my arms up in the air when I reached San Francisco. "Screw London," I said. "I'm going as far south as possible." But no matter how many mini-adventures I tried to follow by merit of being poor and inefficient, the game forced me to keep going east to London. That was when everything felt inconsequential, because no matter how much money I’d waste or how much I’d try to tangent, I'd end up going in the direction of London anyway.

At that point, it felt like me versus the game. I was trying to find these adventure threads and do poorly as horizon suggested, but it just didn't feel like it was worth the tedious stuff in between.

I can't fault the game for this, really. To think of the effort that went into creating this whole thing, all the mini-adventures themselves and their possibilities... it would already have taken a lot of work on the developers’ part. I feel like I was expecting out of the game more than was reasonable, maybe. The small taste of narrative freedom that I got made me want more, but to ask for that would be to make the game more complicated and more work to make than it probably already was. I think the issue was my expectations were too high.

I enjoyed parts of the game, though, and I felt like I learned some things firsthand about storytelling:


Things I Learned

(this section probably doesn’t cover everything I learned, but at least everything I’m able to articulate :p )

I think losing in a story should feel like a real possibility. Not only did I feel like I had no other choice but to get to London at the end, but also that the mini-adventures don’t compound and raise the tension. I feel that in between every mini-adventure, I returned to the same state of normalcy, where I was still able to continue on and nothing felt considerably worse. That’s another problem, too, I think: the mini-adventures weren’t connected, which is again something I can’t hold against the game, but the consequence is when I cared about a character or thought the story was going somewhere, it’d be over and I’d be back to the normal state again.

However, there were also some things the game did right, which I liked, but are a bit unrelated to the negative things above.

I learned about characterization in dialogue, and I tried to emulate that with the story I wrote. When a character spoke, you were given a choice as to what to reply with. Sometimes it wouldn’t be clear what would make the character happy, or what would anger them, and before long I realized I had to pay attention to the cues from what characters were saying. I tried to show that with Applejack’s interaction with Pinkie in the story I wrote—Pinkie changes the course of the conversation based on Applejack’s responses, in an effort to befriend her:

“Hey, stranger!” Pinkie said, changing course to walk alongside the machine, to Madame Rarity’s annoyance. “That’s an incredible machine you have there!”

“Incredible,” the pony said, coughing and yanking on a jammed lever. “Incredible how fitful the controls are. Why this sputtering behemoth was recommended for street use goes beyond me.”

Pinkie kept pace, waving to Rarity that she’d catch up with her later. “Um, beats me, too. Who built this?”

“Some good-for-nothin’ in the Canterlot Elite,” the pony said. “His type can’t tell the difference between flushin’ two gears and engineerin’ a sound automaton. It’s political, ‘course. Wants to impress the Guild by waving his wrench around, when I’ve no doubt he’s never even used one himself.”

Pinkie shrugged. “Um, yeah, tell me about it. Making an automaton is a skill, for sure. If you can’t respect that, then don’t pretend to.”

“Exactly.” She stopped the automaton, smiling at Pinkie over her glasses. “What’s your name, young filly?”

The game gave me more insight into showing vs. telling with dialogue, and more insight into characterization, especially in such a short span of words. The game did this very well and it made for a very engaging feature, as I was sometimes able to pick up on the hints if I looked closely, and able to choose the “right” response for what I wanted (thought sometimes I picked a “wrong” one accidentally :x ). Coming up with “right” responses for Applejack was fun, as well as coming up with both “right” and “wrong” responses for the soldiers.

Overall, I’m glad I experienced the game, because not only did I get to write a fun story based on it, but I learned a thing or two.

If you’re thinking of picking up the game, you might enjoy it. The enjoyment of the game lies, for the most part, in the narrative—the quality of it, the interactions with characters, exploring cities, and going on fun mini-adventures. You might find more to like about it, too! It's steampunk and the aesthetic is nice. :>

If you’re thinking of reading the story I wrote for it, don’t worry, you don’t need to have played the game to enjoy it. I’ve been told it’s fun :> horizon himself even said it’s good! To quote directly from the blog: “This has got to be one of the most” “flawless” “and” “genuine” “stories” “I’ve” “ever” “read”, so you know it’s good -v-

(jk, the direct quote is: “Recommended For: Its catharsis (especially if you disliked the game), and its strong Mane Six character work.” Figured I’d give the real context if I was going to go ahead and butcher his words xP)

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