Just a quick note to fill the empty void as there hasn’t been a release for a good long while. I am still working on the project, or rather I was until I got very busy helping in a shop over the Christmas crazy, and the New Year stock take. While I am finally back home now, there’s a lot of other things taking my time. Trying to get money together is a pressing priority even though I’d really rather be coding.
Progress is being made intermittantly, but there’s not going to be an imminent release. Sorry.
If anyone feels like helping out or inspiring me to devote more time to this you can make a donation via Ko-Fi
I’m working on the story line so you can finish Orion’s quest in one of several ways: hack and slash; sneaky; and by talking your way out of it. Unfortunately there’s a few things I need to get working first. The biggest is the NPC job system. This will allow the NPCs to go through routines like guarding, eating, resting, and sleeping rather than just standing around waiting for you to interact with them. So far sleeping is more or less working. It sounds simple, but there are a lot of little bits that have to work together. A happy side effect is that the PC can now sleep too - but all that is in the current build rather than any released version.
I guess I’ll have to settle on being a cat then. I have found a bug while I was playing the game. I can’t change my Family name when creating my character. It changes my given name when I type in the family name box and press enter. Can you fix that? You might also want to give a tooltip on both of the name boxes that tells players that enter must be pressed to enter in the name. Thanks.
Well spotted and thank you - that’s certainly something I can quickly fix. I need to look at the events around those text boxes as it’s unhelpful that you have to press Enter - it isn’t clear. I’d rather fix the behaviour if I can than add tooltips.
Right now I’m in the middle of making a Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes mod for Confuzzled next week. The theme is “Spys”, so there’s even more of an excuse to run the game than previous years. It’s mostly working, but I need to test it more with the VR rig we use.
Once the con is over I can unwind some of my development projects and get back to Yaffaif.
Thank you! I do intend to work more on the transformations so a complete transformation can happen. The game is already capable of transforming you or NPCs into any of the species it knows about; it’s just that there aren’t any items to invoke any of the other transformations at the moment.
Note: this is in reply to @Tag365’s post but the forum unhelpfully auto-deleted the quote which is a bit shit.
Sorry for the confusion, your post was straight after the one where I mentioned a Keep Talking mod I was working on.
Yaffaif is a project I’ve wanted to build for many years before I started it, and it contains lots of ideas that I’d wanted to try out, particularly in the engine. It’s hard to pick which bits are my favourites. Most of the things I’m proud of are very much under the covers.
If I had to pick one bit, I’d probably have to go with the way it internally handles actions; the things the character and NPCs do, as it’s pretty unique. There are two traditional approaches:
Traditional text adventure: take the player input text and then try to parse the text against the game model to work out what the player meant. This leads to the standard problems with text parsing. Some variants have links or buttons for common actions, but this tends to lead the player into an illusion that they can do everything with these links - Inform and Quest can both suffer from this. I wonder how many players know that “x me” is a valid thing to type into Quest’s text box? It’s kinda important for the games we play!
Build a GUI: Have buttons/controls some of which are standard (like direction arrows) which are enabled/disabled, and others which are set up from the game model. This can lead to problems with actions the player wants to try not being available in one context when they are in another.
Yaffaif takes a different approach. The game model/control creates a list of all the “possible” (not necessarily successful) things a character to try before you get to interact with it on each turn. The UI then turns these suggestions into the controls you see. It also vastly simplifies text parsing - and allows the text box to do predictive completion as it knows all the valid things that you could ask to do at any point (getting around verb/noun guessing).
In the engine there’s no difference between the player character and the NPCs save for a single variable indicating which character the player is currently controlling (you can play with this in debug mode). This means I can use the same system for NPCs; on each of their turns a list of possible actions can be built, and then the code that controls the NPCs can choose from them just like the player can and the same actions invoked - I don’t have to code one way for the PC to do things and a separate version for NPCs. This saves a huge amount of coding, once you get the hang of it. It also means NPC-NPC interactions can happen (this will be a thing!).
The obvious problem with building my own engine and trying to stick to a very pure separation of model/view/controller is that it takes much longer to get things done. Part of the development is me exploring what is possible - which gives me a lot of satisfaction. Right now there are lots of things the engine can handle that aren’t exposed in the story. I’m working on that at the moment, the path(s) for Orion’s quest will open some more of this up.
Uhm… I could use some help with the Kobold throne room? I keep getting attacked.(How is Rochaine supposed to frisk me?)
Also, how do I reverse transformations? Or transform back into a human?
I did a job at the bar and noticed the text said I spilled beer down my shirt, and when I looked at the shirt it said it had beer on it, which is a very cool touch!
Also, do male player characters have to have boobs, or did I miss that during customization?