Deirdra Kiai Productions

Here’s a brand spanking new game I worked on at my day job: Masters of Constantinople. It’s a web-based Encarta MindMaze-like trivia game, with an underlying story and colourful characters and stuff. I worked on co-designing the gameplay and on implementing it using Undum, the same library that I used to create The Play. Anyway, do give it a whirl; I’m quite proud of the work our team did on it. You might just learn some interesting new things about medieval history…

A couple of weekends ago, I went and got myself a (used) iPad. A little while later, using Flash CS5.5′s handy iOS export features, I managed to get this to happen:

What you can’t see/hear is the old timey animation, music, and singing, but I assure you, it’s working even more smoothly than I’d hoped, Flash’s usual quirks aside. My plan is to have a one-room intro demo ready in time to show people at GDC next month, [1] so if you’ll be around, hopefully we’ll run into each other.

Here’s a current screenshot of the first scene of my stop motion musical point-and-click adventure game-in-progress.

I wasn’t originally planning on making the game black and white, but after doing some art tests, I decided to try it out. I’m pretty happy with the results, and I haven’t used B&W in a game since Cubert Badbone, so the style’s definitely going to stay. Gives it a neat classic movie feel, don’t you think?

Anyway, I’m hoping to get some music and singing into the game soon so I can see how it all fits together. I have some super primitive automatic lipsyncing implemented for characters (ganked from this tutorial) through which I ran some test sound clips, and so far, it’s looking pretty good. For the game engine as a whole, I’ve been taking a little inspiration from Quinn Stephens’s open source ALPACA engine — I was originally thinking of using said engine, but then found there was so much weird custom functionality I wanted, not to mention built-in stuff I didn’t need, that I found it easier just to start over from scratch. Good thing my AS3 skills are half decent, right? [1]

First off, I’ve released a new game! It’s called “The Play”, and it’s a text-based interactive story about a theatre director trying to make sure a dress rehearsal doesn’t go horribly wrong. Except, well, there’s a bit more to it than that. Anyway, go play it if you haven’t already. It’s not very long to get through, and it even plays well with mobile devices! [1]

I also entered this game into the seventeenth annual Interactive Fiction Competition and it managed to win third place! Not bad for a first entry, or so I’m told. Squee!

Anyway, below the jump are some of my assorted spoileriffic thoughts on the game. Hello, sweetie!

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Since my radio silence re: a certain new game of mine in a certain competition still isn’t over yet, I figure I ought to say something about another project I have in the works.

So, the thing is, ever since I played that one scene in Curse of Monkey Island, I’ve always thought it’d be really cool to do a whole game full of interactive musical numbers. I also always figured I’d never actually get around to doing one unless and until I had an AAA-sized budget, because, you know, doing an interactive Disney movie would add up and such. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about ways I could do an interactive musical on a shoestring budget, aiming less for Disney and more for, say, Colma: The Musical. Start small, build a proof of concept of sorts, then maybe pave my way to something bigger. That sort of thing.

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My good friend Corvus Elrod has a project on Kickstarter at the moment, seeking funding for his fabulous tabletop roleplaying system. Called “Bhaloidam”, which aptly derives from the Proto-Indo-European words for “story”, “play”, and “community” (and is just a damn cool name), its goal in a nutshell is to help people tell stories together. Plus, the handbook is being written as a comic book — how awesome is that? Anyway, you can find out more at the official website, and back the project here. [1]

As for my personal experiences with Bhaloidam, in the 2-3ish years I’ve known Corvus, I’ve played a handful of games in various iterations of the system, and had lots of fun every time. I’ve even co-designed a variant of the rules specifically for running dialogue-based games, as depicted in this here gameplay sample where you play as siblings at a funeral. Since Bhaloidam isn’t tied to a specific story, you can basically pick whatever subject matter you want; the rules are there to give your storytelling some structure and encourage an egalitarian mindset among players. Fierce advocate for social change that I am, this is a design philosophy I’m happy to get behind. I’m already thinking of some ideas for games of my own to run using the system, and look forward to playing them both in person and online.

Anyway, the funding deadline’s in exactly one week, so back the project now and help Corvus hit his funding goal. $9 gets you a digital version of the handbook, while larger amounts of money get you hard copies, game boards/pieces, guest appearances in the handbook, and even opportunities to get copies of the game out to kids’ charities. Definitely a good cause all around, I say.

In what appears to be somewhat of a departure from the narrative-heavy stuff I normally do, here’s a Flash game I worked on about… sieging castles! It was made for a neat-looking upcoming documentary TV series called Battle Castle, so quite a bit of historical accuracy and research went into the game — you can say it’s one of those “edutainment” thingies, in a sense. Anyway, check it out. I did the bulk of the game design and some of the programming, and now know way more about siege warfare than I’ll probably ever need to.

In other news, a more narrative-heavy project of mine has been entered in a certain annual competition, which, as an entrant, I have to keep mum about until next month or thereabouts. Another personal project, for which there is no reason not to talk about freely save for the fact that I’m a lazy blogger, is currently being poked away at, and I’ll be writing a separate post about it soon. Finally, GeekGirlCon‘s coming up in a week, and I’ll be doing some speaking there, so if you’re near Seattle on the 8th/9th, come see me and say hi!