«Slay The Princess» — combinatorial narrative
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.
About the book "The Net And The Butterfly"
I bought "The Net And The Butterfly" by mistake when I was in St. Petersburg about 5 years ago and organized a book-shopping day. I bought about 10 kilograms of books :-D, grabbed this one on autopilot without reading the contents. I thought the book would be about the network effect and the spreading of ideas, but it turned out to be about how to "manage" a brain relying on one of the neural networks in it. Which network? For the book and its content it does not matter at all.
My opinion of "The Net And The Butterfly" is twofold. On the one hand, I cannot deny its usefulness, on the other… the material could have been presented 100 times better and 3 times shorter. Sometimes, the authors walk on thin ice and risk falling into information peddling/marketing fraud.
Two years of writing RFCs — statistics
Slightly more than two years ago, I became a Lead/Engineering Manager for Palta's payment team. I left the company at the end of 2023 for another sabbatical [ru].
It is time to sum up. I will start with my favorite initiative.
From the first month, I promoted the idea of preceding major changes with text documents — RFC — Request for Comments.
In this post, I will analyze two years of applying this practice to share the experience, summarize the results, and have convincing arguments for my next job.
Procedural news headlines without complex text generation
A screenshot of the interface for selecting a news connotation (from the prototype of the game about a news agency). News: the arrest of a teenage witch for drunk driving.
From the player preference survey, I gradually moved on to working on a game prototype.
The game will be about a news agency. You will be the chief editor, and your task is to manipulate public opinion by investigating events and choosing a connotation of news: where to draw the public's attention, what to hide, in what tone to present themes, etc.
Therefore, the whole game will be around the text of news.
Creating large blocks of detailed text for each news item looks pointless — the game is not about reading news but about managing them. Therefore, it makes sense to build interaction only around headlines.
But how can we make the displaying of news both interesting and simple?
Hello, World!
Nice to meet you, friends!
My name is Aliaksei, but feel free to call me Tiendil — it is my nickname for the last 20 years or so :-)
A few words about me:
- By occupation, I am a software developer, mostly backend, mainly in Python.
- For most of my career, I've been working in game development on big projects and own indie games.
- I like playing games, reading books, and writing long-reads about partially complex topics.
You can find more about me:
- In the about page
- In my GitHub profile: github.com/tiendil
- In the LinkedIn profile: linkedin.com/in/tiendil
This is my first blog post in English, but not the first one in general. I have blogged in Russian for a long time and have always wanted to share my thoughts with the English-speaking world. At last, I found some time to adapt my blog, and here we are!
Most of the future posts will be bilingual (English & Russian). Also, with time, I'll translate my most interesting old posts.
Once again, nice to meet you! Feel free to contact me by any means.