A new User Interface, with its own layout and art, can help attract players and convey information and character in a way that’s unique to your game. I want to talk about our experience with Restless – a small(ish) game where you haunt a house and try to make peace with its inhabitants. I hope this post can be a useful tool for others looking to make their own UI, especially in text-heavy games, or those where the bulk of the game is in its interface.
It’s been a couple of years since we first released Dialogue: A Writer’s Story, and I wanted to take this opportunity to view it with a lens we don’t usually use. Minor spoilers for the game ahead, so feel free to go play it right now =)
When talking about the game, we often highlight how it is an everyday sort of story. It is about exploring Lucille’s life as a writer and her relationships with others. The stakes are low and your choices do not create wide sweeping changes. All of this is true, but there is also something else, something complementary, beneath all that. Dialogue determinedly avoids clean conflict resolution, and this can feel ‘off’ to a lot of people.
Hello everyone! Now that we’ve shown the new demo of Elemental Flow at a few events, we’re feeling pretty good about where it stands. We’re still brewing up the world, but there’s a specific part of it we’d like to talk about today: the Elemental Plane.
The game takes place in two separate but connected areas. In Reality, things look quite normal; there are people you can talk to, buildings and streets, tables and chairs and everything else you would expect. However, you’ll also have the opportunity to explore a parallel place called the Elemental Plane, where things are a bit more… odd.
It’s time for something a little bit more personal than usual – we don’t talk as much as we should about our development process. The two of us at Tea-Powered Games have a tendency to avoid spoilers of every kind, for any forms of media, if we’re in the middle of experiencing it or we think we’ll get around to it in the near future. Discussing the media we love with others is valuable and enjoyable, but we like to come to that discussion uncoloured by others’ opinions when we can (except between the two of us, but we’re married and working together so that’s bound to happen).
Hello everyone! We’ve been pretty busy in the last month or so – Dialogue launched on Steam and Flo released two free games: The Felidae Phylogenetic Tree, an interactive exploration of feline species, and The Dream Self, an entry to the 2017 Interactive Fiction Competition.
Now that all those are out in the world, we’ve been focusing on Elemental Flow’s new demo, which we’ll be showing at Adventure X. We learned a lot from watching people play the previous demo, so we’re taking everything we learned there (and adding a few other ideas) to make this new version. We’ve outlined a few of the larger changes we’re making, but do note that these might not all make it to the final game – they’re steps towards a better version of Elemental Flow!
You may have heard, Dialogue on Steam is only a week away (Sept 20th)! We’re using it as an excuse to talk about the mechanics of the game in more depth than we have in the past, and this is the second part of that discussion: Active Conversations. The first part (about Exploratory Conversations) can be found here.
Hey everyone! We’re excited to finally be counting down to the Steam release of Dialogue: A Writer’s Story – Sept 20th is less than two weeks away! To celebrate, we’re doing a couple of blogs to talk you through the two main conversation types of Dialogue and the mechanics therein. In case you don’t already know, Dialogue is a game about conversation which sets you in the everyday life of a writer, Lucille. Different types of conversations have different mechanics to better reflect their nature (if you want to read a bit more about Dialogue in general, you can find out more here). Today, we’re kicking off with Exploration Conversations.
In our first post about Elemental Flow, we mentioned that we wanted to keep what we love about RPG systems, but use non-violent mechanics to tell a different kind of story. High levels of customisation is a feature that’s on the top of our list.
The menus and user interface are still bare bones, but customisation is something we want to play with from the start!
After revealing Elemental Flow and its art and setting, we want to talk about encounters. In Elemental Flow, rather than using violence to defeat someone or something else, you have encounters with other people, where you attempt to reach an understanding of each other’s point of view.
A tutorial encounter from the current build of Elemental Flow. The player is holding B to speak using the fire element.
After our initial reveal of Elemental Flow, we’re ready to share a bit more information! Elemental Flow is set in a fictional, modern world. The main character1 will explore different cities, each inspired by a real place, but with a few twists to give it its own identity.
A work-in-progress screenshot of our first city, whose inspiration is probably given away by the red phone booths. Click on the screenshot to see a higher resolution version.