Storyteller uses String IDs heavily, and I want to store them in collections but don’t want to risk duplicates, which is what the Set data structure is for.

Unfortunately, Actionscript 3 does not feature a set collection. So far, I was using the Dictionary class, but since it is not exactly a set, I tripped up several times because of its odd interface: myset["id1"] to ask for containment, delete myset["id"] for deletion and there’s no built in way to ask for its amount of elements.

I searched Google for collection libraries like AS3Commons and Polygonal, but they had a few shortcomings: the former does not implement builtin iteration (using the nefarious Proxy class) and the second does not support a set of String out of the box nor builtin iteration.

Since I don’t want to worry about sets in my game, I made my own StringSet class that has several features:

• It is pretty type safe because it uses the String type explicitly everywhere (unlike AS collections, in which the push method traded safety for versatility).
• Is implemented using Dictionary, which is pretty fast when asking for containment.
• Can be iterated using for..in and for each…in, and can ask for containment using the in operator (ie if(“mydog” in dogset){}).
• Provides several convenience methods like joining, intersection, clone, toArray, toVector, etc.
• Caveat: it does NOT retain the order in which keys were added.
• Caveat: may have bugs. Report them on the comments so I can fix them!

Download StringSet.as

Storyteller might allow characters to lie.

Characters in Storyteller have perfect information about everything that happened in the story. While this allows plenty of interesting situations, I feel I need to take things a step further, and allow characters to have incomplete or downright false information. This means I will have to rewrite the solving algorithm again to have a global, true model of the story and individual models of the world for each character.

I am particularly interested in characters lying to each other, and acting upon false information. This would make some stories trickier as players will have to remember who knows what. Some Shakespeare stories would become possible, as in Othello:

Iago is Othello’s ambitious friend. Othello promotes Michael Cassio and Iago is deadly jealous. Othello elopes with Desdemona but Iago starts to plot against them. Othello becomes jealous and suspicious of Desdemona. Othello returns to the castle to kill his innocent wife. Emilia tells Othello the truth about the scheming Iago. Othello wounds Iago, then kills himself. Iago kills Emilia.

Another kind of deception is “impostoring“, where one character poses as another, surprising the victim with the eventual revelation. The Crying Game comes to mind.

The goal of this feature is for players to be able to play not only with external events like murder and theft, but also with what each character believes:

Shocked and surprised, I stumbled to get the Nuovo award at this year’s IGF and gave an unusual, improvised acceptance speech.

This means that the game might be able to get more credibility with the press and increase the chances of being published by Steam and Apple. Since I started attending GDC I sort of fantasized with getting an award at some time; and finally achieving it, I have more mindshare to spend on the game itself and in some ways, being more honest with myself.

The other news is that I am staying here at San Francisco for three months at Chris Hecker’s house working solely on Storyteller in a forced march, hanging out with other very smart people like Jonathan Blow and Marc Ten Bosch, so I am extremely happy.

So my main goal now: make a great game out of Storyteller!

Storyteller has a simple interface: you drag actors into panels to give form to a story, but you don’t directly control how each character behaves. Each actor reacts according to his nature, of which there are several: villain, lover, hero, amnesiac, etc. All living characters have a common behavior: they all suffer when someone they care about dies or dumps them, and other common-sense rules.

The challenge of each “story” (or level) is to figure out how to make actors do what you want, how to fit that in 3 or 4 panels AND somehow match what the story goals.

In example above, Tim is missing Lucy because he fell in love with her the first frame. Lucy, however, is playing a villain so she is not only uninterested in Tim but also annoyed at his crush on her. What happens between the first and second panel is that Lucy left for some reason and Tim is still in love with her, thus him missing her. This is called closure, the core of what makes Storyteller work. Another, simpler example:

Adam here dies because the game concludes that since there’s a tomb in the second panel and only Adam is missing, he must have died. That’s the nature of the tomb in Storyteller.

Each one of the stories check if its conditions are met, but often they are not very specific, so you can find multiple solutions to the same story:

Some stories actually detect some interesting variants and hints you of their existence!

Right now, I am trying some new submechanics like flashbacks, that allow out-of-order story arranging:

Storyteller has been picked as finalist for the Nuovo category by the Independent Games Festival, one of the biggest and well-respected festivals of the world. I’ve been on a trip for the past 20 days so I am dealing with all this just now, but these news are exciting and morale-boosting.

During the next two weeks I will finish the new version of the game, where I have rewritten the whole story-building algorithm, allowing me to write rules that give players more freedom. Now “The Lover”, who can fall in love with anybody can do some new interesting things:

(click to view fully enlarged)

Storyteller is a new game I started a few months ago which takes an idea I prototyped a while ago (unfortunately also called “Storyteller”… I wish I didn’t do that), and explores it much further.

It’s more “gamey” than Today I Die or I Wish I Were the Moon, and the mechanics borrow heavily from comic techniques of storytelling like closure, points of view, captioning and frame transitions. Each “puzzle” is a story that must be built. I will write a bit more about it on future posts.

This is going to be my most ambitious project and I want it to offer a very high quality experience. I am still at the point of exploring variants of the core mechanics so there’s still a long way to go! I will probably also hire someone to help me with the visual aspect of the game, which is totally programmer-class right now.

I am planning for the game to take me around a year to finish it!

My initial target platforms are PC, Mac and iPad.

Today I Die *Again*, a complete rewrite of the flash game with new scenes, overhauled audiovisuals and revised gameplay has launched on iTunes recently at $0.99.

I want to thank Thomas Hahn and everybody who sponsored this release of the game… Thank you!

Today I Die was selected as a finalist at the IGF (Independent Games Festival), one of the most prestigious events of the world regarding indie development.

The category it was selected into was “Nuovo”:

The Nuovo award honors abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games.

I always dreamed about being an IGF finalist. The happiest thing about being a finalist is that I can forget about chasing the award. I want to fully focus on my craft.

Meanwhile…

note: fonts used in this prototype were developed by Anna Anthropy (sorry about not linking to this before, Anna!)

Last month I took a trip to Los Angeles to attend Indiecade, an independent game developer/artist festival that grows bigger each year. I Wish I Were the Moon, Today I Die and Storyteller were picked as finalists (packed as “Moon Stories”), together with lots of very good games like Osmos, Closure and Tuning.

It was a four day event, comprised of several lectures, presentations and social events. A quite varied (albeit small) audience attended, but the greatest takeaway from the event was the opportunity to meet up with other indies and industry celebrities in an intimate environment. GDC has grown far to large to be able to offer this, so I was very happy to discover that the trip to Indiecade exceeded all my expectations on this front.

So I am grateful towards the organizers for making all possible efforts to get me there, and even host me for one of the nights. I definitely recommend attending this event if you are looking for a reason why being indie is so much better than the mainstream industry.

Some highlights:

VIP Opening Party

The first night a party was thrown that featured food, drinks, and all finalists presenting their games in 3:12 minutes each:

Indiecade 2009 Awards

Moon Stories received the “Jury Award”! In this picture: John Sharp, Brenda Braithwaite, me and Jonathan Blow.

Brenda Braithwaite, Eddy (Osmos), Tyler (Closure), and Andy (Osmos).

Closing Party
Last night of the event Robin Hunicke boldly invited the whole bunch of us to a closing party at her place, which was one of the best thing that happened during this trip. Robin is the ultimate social hub of the industry:

All in all, I very happy to have attended this event and made me feel even more confident about the future of the indie universe.