Essays about game development, thinking and books

«Slay The Princess» — combinatorial narrative

My favorite version of the Princess.

My favorite version of the Princess.

It's hard to impress me as a player and even harder as a game developer. The last time it happened with Owlcat Games in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, when they added a timer to the game's plot.

But Black Tabby Games managed to do it. And they did it not with some technological complexity but with a visual novel on a standard engine (RenPy), which is cool in itself.

I'll share a couple of thoughts about the game and its narrative structure, while I'm still under the impression. I need to think about how to adapt this approach to my projects.

ATTENTION: SPOILERS!

If you haven't played Slay The Princess yet, I strongly recommend you to catch up — the game takes 3-4 hours. You'll not regret it.

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Cleaning up the results of the strategy players survey

The survey was targeted at the fans of strategy games. It seems, I was able to find audience quite accurately.

The survey was targeted at the fans of strategy games. It seems, I was able to find audience quite accurately.

Recently I asked you to fill in a survey about strategy games.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to do this. It's time to share the results.

363 respondents filled in the survey. 304 answers remained after data normalization and cleaning.

There will be two posts:

  • This one — about the methodology of data collection and processing, and their cleaning. Cleaned data will be shared.
  • The next one — about the analysis of the results.

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