K Station: An adventure game of disappearing lives

[yparghi]

K Station is my Space Quest-inspired sci-fi adventure game.

Vote for us on Steam Greenlight!: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=649211984

It's New Year's Day, 2319, and the happy denizens of K Station are disappearing one at a time. That's all you know.

You are Maya, a lab assistant and government employee working on K Station. You're hung over from the New Year's Eve party, cranky, street-smart, and a little tired.

K Station is an adventure game where the world and story are collapsing, room by room and life by life. Discover new lives, new hopes, new dreams and new disappointments -- all from the friends and coworkers you thought you knew.

Trailer:

[yparghi]

Oh, if anyone can show me how to embed the YouTube trailer, that'd be much appreciated. Curse you, computers!

[bitano]

I like the old school look as well as the adventure genre. it reminds me a lot of certain commodore 64 games i played.

What i never liked though was the command line input. It suggests an amount of freedom, but instead often resulted in "I don't know what you mean".
I loved the SCUMM(tm) interface that was incorporated in all the LucasFilm / LucasArts games

[Laurent]

Oh, if anyone can show me how to embed the YouTube trailer, that'd be much appreciated

Just use http (not https) in the link and it automatically works

[yparghi]

What i never liked though was the command line input. It suggests an amount of freedom, but instead often resulted in "I don't know what you mean".

I hear you, though my personal preference is the text input for exactly the freedom you describe. But like you said -- when they're bad, they're terrible. So I'm making mine good.

[bitano]

I hear you, though my personal preference is the text input for exactly the freedom you describe. But like you said -- when they're bad, they're terrible. So I'm making mine good.

I'll hold you to that!

[eXpl0it3r]

I'm a big adventure game fan, so I'll certainly look forward to this!

One suggestion for the trailer: Would be great if you could include multiple sceneries and try to provide some more information on the story.

[yparghi]

This is a minor technical demo. I was researching particle engines because I needed to vent some steam (literally, in the game). I ultimately tried a simple one-class solution with a VertexArray, and here's how it came out (gifv link):



I think it's not bad! And I like how my simple code inadvertently captured the way the steam ebbs when it's turned off.

[FRex]

Did any of the Chzo Mythos games inspire this game?

[yparghi]

Did any of the Chzo Mythos games inspire this game?

No because I hadn't heard of these, but I'm going to give it a shot. I see there's one that uses text input. Thanks for the tip!

[FRex]

Yes (Trillby's Notes), and one another (7 Days a Skeptic) takes place on a spaceship. That's what gave me this Chzo vibe. I'm not into adventure games so my experience is very limited (in 2D I played just the 4 Chzo games and in 3D just Post Mortem and History of Violence) but the Chzo games were very good and enjoyable despite me disliking the genre. So if your game is anything like them then that's very good.

[yparghi]

Does anyone here use a particular library or approach to menu screens?

I have various interactive UIs in the game, and I put together an ad hoc configuration system using JSON (same as the rest of my game's content/config). It processes key-downs, and updates visible sprites and sf::Text contents, according to the currently focused element.

It works, but maybe there are canned approaches for this. (Also, I should've used Lua, not JSON, but it's too late to change.)


For example, here's the typewriter UI:

...And the time machine:

[DarkRoku12]

We have several good-looking (sfml) games this year.
Great art and animation! Hope your game become successful. 

[eXpl0it3r]

For maximum flexibility you most likely want to stay with your own solution. Otherwise there's also TGUI, but I don't know how customizable itis.

[yparghi]

We have several good-looking (sfml) games this year.
Great art and animation! Hope your game become successful. 

Thanks a lot, I appreciate the support.