A Twine adventure, where you explore the depths of the mysterious Buvay River Basin in search of riches.
Currently, this build is more of a proof of concept than anything, demonstrating the gameplay loop and the general mechanical and aesthetic ~vibes~. There’s ~30 accessible passages, ~4000 words, and no end condition except for what happens when you stay out past sunset one too many times.
I’ll continue to work on this into the foreseeable future. Feedback is appreciated, though keep in mind how early in development this project is.
The game seems pretty cool. I did die a couple of days in, which was mildly annoying. Some weird goo thing got me when I was going west to get some food. Other than that, I had fun. I really like the descriptions, and it feels like I’m reading a Jules Verne novel or something. Just, you know, horny
Very good game, and especially good work on the CSS. Can’t wait to see what gets added on in the future.
+A fun setting/genre that hasn’t been explored (ha) all that much on this forum.
+Great textflow in the main passages.
+A very liberal usage of CSS, giving the game a unique and aesthetically pleasing background as far as Twine games on this forum goes.
+No obvious bugs that I could stumble upon, which is a massive plus for a brand-new Twine game.
-Having an option to restart would be nice. It’s kinda annoying to have to close the tab and reopen it whenever you die.
-It’d be nice if the game made it more clear as to what time of day it is. While the text descriptions of the light do provide a good amount of information, I can’t help but feel like they tend to simply not show up at times.
-Speaking of descriptions: Weight descriptions. The descriptions feel a bit too brief. Piling onto that, since you have to go into the boat to look at your current condition and how little time you have to act in each day (especially if you have the navigational skills I have lol), it feel like the MC’s weight is something that could do with being brought up more. Perhaps when the player goes up a weight stage the description could be displayed. Or more passive text related to the player’s weight.
All in all, a very good proof of concept that I can’t wait to see further built upon, and an excellent initial release.
The visual presentation in a Twine game is something that feels very important to me, so thanks for picking up on that. It’s only a couple of lines of markup, but it does so much to bring the game a level above the sterile black-on-white default.
Making time of day more intuitive is something that I already had in mind for future releases, though I want to do something more interesting than just a number in a passage or on the GUI. My current frontrunning ideas are to add additional time-sensitive descriptions of sunlight to more passages, and/or change the background gradient dynamically to change colour over the course of the day (if dynamically changing the CSS like that is even possible in Harlowe)
Giving the WG mechanic a little more weight is definitely something I want to add in future versions as well. I’ve considered making movement between rooms take longer at high enough thresholds, but I am concerned that may be a little too punishing.
Just pushed out a new update. Expect ~50% more rooms, and an extra end state you can find in the pit.
I’ll admit that the pace of development has been slow and sporadic. The passion for a new project has worn off, and I’m going to have to discipline myself a little more to keep up a consistent pace. I’m still willing to bring this project to completion, though possibly scoped down from my ambitious initial plans.
Found a bug that pops up shortly after trying to step carefully through the vines or what-have-you, which I’m assuming is caused by either an extra or missing quotation mark in a command.
Oops. I completely forgot to go back to that passage and fill in the destinations on the links. I’ll go ahead and publish a hotfix, give me 10 minutes.
Can’t seem to really do anything at all. The random guy pops up almost immediately stopping you from doing anything and just playing the game himself. Might as well just be a novel with how much control you actually have, couldn’t even really get into a ‘gameplay loop’ with how intrusive he is.
Interesting concpt! Given the importance of time management i would push for the indication of time of day be more readily available than just the hub. As of now, players cant really get a feel for how fast the day goes, so with out some in game clock, a player just has to guess to go deeper in or go back.
I don’t understand.
If you wander too long (4-5 steps around), you get the first encounter with the monster. The next day is almost assured it will eat you. The only way is to stay by the boat.
I’m missing something? There is some kind of mechanic to not let the monster appear? Because is getting quite frustrating…
I have noticed that when decieding which way your going at the start (where you can go to the boat / north) it will tell you the sun light, that is how long you can stay on the island.
I’m going to assume the late papan_2021 was asking for an update before their message was flagged and deleted. They’ve already bumped the thread, and now I’m seeing a big jump in views on my itch.io analytics, so I might as well oblige.
No. This project is dead in the water. It simply didn’t interest me enough to continue development, and I was unhappy with the product both as it is and as it would have been. I do want to create more Twine games in this genre, when I have the time and energy, but I don’t see much potential in this one.
If anyone really cares enough, I’ll just say that the ideas and content that’s there so far is free to use and expand on. And if you want a good and complete Twine game from me, go play The Gloucester Estate Spooktacular instead.
