PSY_WOMBATS'S PROFILE

author=kentona
I am actually ALL of the staff

Ah yes, the Brasington Lane approach

author=SgtMettool
Thinking about multiple endings and how to make them flexible.

Basically, my game has three planned endings. And while one of them is a True Ending, I'm aiming to design my game in a way where it's a bit more difficult to lock yourself out of it. The player has multiple opportunities to put themselves back on the path, and I'm actively avoiding things like "don't forget to talk to that one guy" or "kill one monster and the run is over" that take players off of True Ending paths.

Problem is, I don't know if this is a good thing or not. Do people LIKE one-mistake-and-its-over true endings, or is it better to give players multiple opportunities?

I'd take a page from the VN book. There's a pretty common plot structure in branching games with a big common route and then a single point where the plot splits off into individual routes/endings. Rather than having a single choice decide which fork is taken, there's usually a backing variable to determine which path. For instance, in a dating sim, positive interactions with a character would increment the variable, and then at the fork, the player would be put onto the ending for the character with the highest score.

Sounds like you already have some events, so you could potentially have them all increment a true_end variable if the kill the monster, talk to that one guy, etc, and then at the end, decide to take the true ending if true_end > 4 or whatever. That way you should be able to tune the "difficulty" as you like as well.

I personally dislike games where either 1) need a guide to see major content or 2) have to replay multiple times to get to new content.

For GIMP transparency, I've found it's usually easiest to create a new layer in the layer creation dialog, set its background to transparency. Then you can cut/paste to that layer, select what you need transparent via the Select By Color tool or something, then delete that area.

Awww I missed signups while I was traveling, oh well

This is actually pretty endearing.