The Beginnings and End of my Game Development Phase

Kay
October 29th, 2021

Check out my new text-based game: Text Based Novel Game, Anti Destiny Storyteller!

In order to retire, I must find methods of generating income and one such method was to make a text based game. The idea was to start with a basic text game and then gradually improve upon it. Eventually creating an AI variant, similar to AI Dungeon. In my foolish mind, this would be simple task and wouldn’t take too long. Oh how wrong I was.

 A US Navy general remarked that you should not integrate more than 2 new technologies into a ship, anymore becomes widely expensive to get running. Considering that the US’s newest aircraft carrier has blown it’s budget, doubling the billions spent, I’d say he’s correct. 5 new technologies were far too much and the results speak for themselves.

As someone who watches anime, Visual Novels were the original game type, where it’s a bunch of images with text flicking through. That would’ve been perfect, except I can’t draw nor want to spend the enormous funds to draw hundreds or thousands of images. Thus I stuck to text-based. The new technologies here was designing a text-based game, using React/NextJS for the website and then writing a story. It turns out creating a good game and story is no easy task, so much that my initial dreams of an AI powered text-based game went into flames. To add AI when I was already struggling with the existing technologies would be a death sentence.

 Without any external motivation in terms of funds, everything is quite dependent on my internal willpower. To have the game stalled for weeks due to figuring out tech would kill any motivation and thus the entire project would die. For it’s very easy to start things, when everything’s new and fresh, when all the simple things take less than an hour to complete. Each completed task is another burst of inspiration to keep going. However, as time ticks on, tasks no longer become so easy, so simple. Fatigue, boredness and motivation plummets to nothing.

Thus, making something simple first, and keeping the new tech to a minimum is the only way to keep that internal fire going and create something. So this is the basis of my text-based game. The story is what you seen in the last post. The gameplay is reading. What mattered here was the tech, which would eventually result in the AI version. So please do checkout my text-based novel game.

https://linear-text-novel.vercel.app/