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KickStarter ATOM RPG - Wasteland Soviet style! - now with Dead City update

Will you back?

  • I will consider it!

    Votes: 39 54.9%
  • No! I would never!..

    Votes: 9 12.7%
  • kingcomrade

    Votes: 23 32.4%

  • Total voters
    71
  • Poll closed .

Deleted Member 22431

Guest
Sorry, man! I just never saw it that way like at all, though I can totally get how it can be seen that way. We always worked from the opposite idea. Make texts, just because everyone should be able to speak, and if player chooses to speak to unneeded person, give him EXP for doing so. None of us cares for these texts so much we wanna deviously lure players to read them all. Even I don't read all of them. It's a real shame that it can be interpreted like that and right now I don't have any idea on how to make it not look like that :\

But XPs are rewards for quests since the dawn of time. You can’t expect players to abandon their ingrained assumptions for whatever reason. They signal a reward for a game event. If you use them differently, things get muddled. Besides, this is a game, not a book. If a NPC has something to say, it must be an opportunity for a quest, otherwise, what is the point? Narrative for narrative sake should have no place in a cRPG. It doesn’t matter how well written your fiction is. It’s a cRPG, not a novel. The novelisation of cRPGs is a subtle form of cancer. Not only because it can get in the way of good gameplay but also because it wastes so many quest-related opportunities. If all those isolated walls of text assumed the form of quests the game would be so much better.
 

Shadenuat

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
11,955
Location
Russia
Oof! Sorry dude, I might have missed the part where you said
I dislike dialogue because of all of these reasons. The references are too much, I don't much like the language/humour, and there's too much of writing as well. And yes, it is graphomania, like the term or not - don't pretend you don't understand what I mean by it.

Not reading is an option, though!
Let's take for example KNZ militia thing.

You are taken advantage of by one of them near the gate who makes you pay the money to enter the city. Every militia-man has unique dialogue (one even has miniquest about his mother), and has some unique replies about this, and one even tries to get another bribe from you. You can write a formal complaint to the main man, after which he shoves it into the desk so it's understandable that nobody would help you and the whole system is corrupt. However, for every guard there is some dialogue about this. So you'd think you can dig something about them and get some sort of reaction from them. I don't really expect to punish the gate guard or do something about the matter, but maybe if I ask too many questions they would later gang up on me and beat me up or threaten me, and I won't just get away with paying a meager 1000 rubles.

However, I did not find any particular consequences for talking to all of them and writing a report, so all that dialogue is just a red herring for the player and doesn't add much to the game. The only thing which mattered was me paying some money to enter the city, that's all there is to it.
 

Deleted Member 22431

Guest
Atomboy, good writing in cRPGs means good design, which on its turn implies good quests, world building, itemization, etc. To judge a cRPG like a book is misconception. cRPGs can be high art, but they can only be judged by aesthetic principles that are dictated by the nature of the medium. Some developers want to make them more sophisticated by emulating other mediums because they suffer some sort of inferiority complex. This is a trap and it should be avoid at all costs.
 

Atomboy

Atom Team
Developer
Joined
Oct 1, 2016
Messages
713
Sorry, man! I just never saw it that way like at all, though I can totally get how it can be seen that way. We always worked from the opposite idea. Make texts, just because everyone should be able to speak, and if player chooses to speak to unneeded person, give him EXP for doing so. None of us cares for these texts so much we wanna deviously lure players to read them all. Even I don't read all of them. It's a real shame that it can be interpreted like that and right now I don't have any idea on how to make it not look like that :\

But XPs are rewards for quests since the dawn of time. You can’t expect players to abandon their ingrained assumptions for whatever reason. They signal a reward for a game event. If you use them differently, things get muddled. Besides, this is a game, not a book. If a NPC has something to say, it must be an opportunity for a quest, otherwise, what is the point? Narrative for narrative sake should have no place in a cRPG. It doesn’t matter how well written your fiction is. It’s a cRPG, not a novel. The novelisation of cRPGs is a subtle form of cancer. Not only because it can get in the way of good gameplay but also because it wastes so many quest-related opportunities. If all those isolated walls of text assumed the form of quests the game would be so much better.
I get that, but we use XP for any successful action. Lockpicking something isn't a quest, but it's an action and you succeeded. So is learning something through dialogue, or winning an INT check or something, so we can't not give at least some XP for it. We never intended for it to look like a book, man! The thing about talking NPCs is that our immersion into a game breaks when we stumble upon a furniture person that just stands there to make the world look more populated. I know that it doesn't irritate most players, but for me, being able to talk to everything that has a mouth and knows language is an absolute musthave in a game. So I just won't be honest with myself if I remove this ability. However, with all that you said, I'm completely open to finding out how to make it seem we are NOT forcing the player to read everything and believe it's a novel. Not giving EXP is kinda against the thing we have now. I'm currently thinking about making quest NPCs even more obvious looking.
 

SniperHF

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Joined
Aug 22, 2014
Messages
1,110
lines of my Codex Advice txt file

There's a kernel of truth to what some of the folks above are saying but you've got a relatively successful game on your hands and it's probably worth keeping in mind that the people who like it and the things it does probably aren't sending you walls of text.

I'm currently thinking about making quest NPCs even more obvious looking.

I didn't have many problems with this, for example. Usually their placement on the map made it obvious enough.
A few more custom models/textures wouldn't hurt.
 

Deleted Member 22431

Guest
I get that, but we use XP for any successful action. Lockpicking something isn't a quest, but it's an action and you succeeded.
Lockpicking something isn't a quest, but it’s an obstacle that you need to overcome. Talking to someone is not an obstacle unless you need to convince them to do something that they would not do under normal circumstances, which would require specific talking skills or attributes. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated the ingenuity of many bits of flavour dialogue. It’s cool that you can lie about your name in order to protect your identity, but it would be even cooler to tie these choices to a quest-related event. I mean, you already bother enough to trouble yourself with a ton of additional work. It’s natural to expect that this additional investment would be tied to quests, don’t you think?
 

Shadenuat

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Messages
11,955
Location
Russia
Does it ever matter in game that you tell your name? I always straight told my name to everyone, don't think it ever mattered.
 

Deleted Member 22431

Guest
The thing about talking NPCs is that our immersion into a game breaks when we stumble upon a furniture person that just stands there to make the world look more populated. I know that it doesn't irritate most players, but for me, being able to talk to everything that has a mouth and knows language is an absolute musthave in a game.
There is not much difference, is there? You are just adding more NPCs with things to say in order to make the gameworld look more populated and alive, but at the same time most of them don’t do anything in gameplay terms, which makes them pointless. They are just there for narrative sake. At least with dummy NPCs I know I don’t have to waste my time with them, whereas with ambulant walls of text disguised as NPCs I don’t have the same fortune. I will be condemned to read them in the hopes of having more quests.
 
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Deleted Member 22431

Guest
Does it ever matter in game that you tell your name? I always straight told my name to everyone, don't think it ever mattered.
In this case it should matter because you are an undercover agent in a special mission, and you can't tell from the get go in who you can trust.
 

Atomboy

Atom Team
Developer
Joined
Oct 1, 2016
Messages
713
Oof! Sorry dude, I might have missed the part where you said
I dislike dialogue because of all of these reasons. The references are too much, I don't much like the language/humour, and there's too much of writing as well. And yes, it is graphomania, like the term or not - don't pretend you don't understand what I mean by it.

Not reading is an option, though!
Let's take for example KNZ militia thing.

You are taken advantage of by one of them near the gate who makes you pay the money to enter the city. Every militia-man has unique dialogue (one even has miniquest about his mother), and has some unique replies about this, and one even tries to get another bribe from you. You can write a formal complaint to the main man, after which he shoves it into the desk so it's understandable that nobody would help you and the whole system is corrupt. However, for every guard there is some dialogue about this. So you'd think you can dig something about them and get some sort of reaction from them. I don't really expect to punish the gate guard or do something about the matter, but maybe if I ask too many questions they would later gang up on me and beat me up or threaten me, and I won't just get away with paying a meager 1000 rubles.

However, I did not find any particular consequences for talking to all of them and writing a report, so all that dialogue is just a red herring for the player and doesn't add much to the game. The only thing which mattered was me paying some money to enter the city, that's all there is to it.
"I dislike dialogue" as you put it is completely respectable. "Dialogue is not likeable" is another can of worms. Would I address you in this way if you said YOU didn't like the dialogue? Nope! An opinion is sacred, while posing it as fact and finding proof for an opinion is kinda weird. I argued that, and not your opinion, my man! We have a whole army of folks who personally, in their opinion believe dialogues are utter monkey shit, and I love them like my own sons! On graphomania, really, pretend that I don't know what that is, because I was always told it means writing for the sake of writing, which is obviously not the case in Atom and I'm kinda devastated because of the fact that it looks like we're forcing the dialogues on people. What is it then?
The KRZ bribe situation was made to: fulfill the want of some players to go snitch on the guard. You just paid a bribe to a cop, you go through the gate and there's another cop standing right there. It would be pretty silly if you didn't have the snitch option. Also, it was a meta-quest by it's own right. Your reward for it is finding out that militia is corrupt and dudn't do nothing to bad cops. Most players do KRZ before they do Peregon, so this distrust to authority figures saves them a failed quest in Peregon. The guards beating you up for your big mouth is a cool idea though, a shame that we didn't think of that. But even without it, this little group of optional interactions had a purpose.

The thing about talking NPCs is that our immersion into a game breaks when we stumble upon a furniture person that just stands there to make the world look more populated. I know that it doesn't irritate most players, but for me, being able to talk to everything that has a mouth and knows language is an absolute musthave in a game.
There is not much difference, is there? You are just adding more NPCs with things to say in order to make the gameworld look more populated and alive, but at the same time most of them don’t do anything in gameplay terms, which makes them pointless. They are just there for narrative sake. At least with dummy NPCs I know that I don’t have to waste my time with them, whereas with ambulant walls of text disguised as NPCs I don’t have the same fortune. I will be condemned to read them in the hopes of having more quests.
The thing is that in the end of the day, the main reason they are how they are because me and the guys wanted them like that. For me, having an actual talk-on-at-least-4-subjects NPC as furniture instead of having a 1-liine NPC as furniture is like this cool thing! Like, whoa, I'm gonna talk to this chair NPC because I want to for no reason, but then he's like hey collect 20 dog horns for me. Whaaat?! A hidden quest in a rando furniture NPC's dialogue??? So cool! Oh man! This furniture NPC has a check for my Posessed skill! 69 XP??? WOW AND I THOUGHT IT WAS A POINTLESS NPC! This game is so mysterious and random! That's literally my inner monologue as I stumble upon hidden stuff. But I completely understand this position you are describing. Though we never thought about being artsy or mixing RPGs with books and shiet, you showed me that it does kinda look like that, and that's scummy. I hate it and I wanna get rid of that.

lines of my Codex Advice txt file

There's a kernel of truth to what some of the folks above are saying but you've got a relatively successful game on your hands and it's probably worth keeping in mind that the people who like it and the things it does probably aren't sending you walls of text.

I'm currently thinking about making quest NPCs even more obvious looking.

I didn't have many problems with this, for example. Usually their placement on the map made it obvious enough.
A few more custom models/textures wouldn't hurt.

Just like SniperHF said, custom models and textures won't hurt, so I guess we'll add them and won't hide quests in passers-by anymore.
 
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Atomboy

Atom Team
Developer
Joined
Oct 1, 2016
Messages
713
Does it ever matter in game that you tell your name? I always straight told my name to everyone, don't think it ever mattered.
We wanted to make a little quest around telling 33 folks your name is Agdam and then Agdam appears and confronts you but we forgot about it. Now it serves the mighty role for the players who are larping characters that are not comfortable with giving their Powerwords to strangers. A few times there's also a little twist, like you say your name is Dima Toilethands, and the dude is like fuck you! Dima Toilethands was my brother who died two years ago! And attacks you.
edit: oh and there's another very important purpose for this: some of the names you can pick are silly, like Vadim The Immolator or something, and it's funny when an NPC greets you like Hello, Vadim The Immolator and it sounds all silly and funny.
 

Deleted Member 22431

Guest
However, with all that you said, I'm completely open to finding out how to make it seem we are NOT forcing the player to read everything and believe it's a novel.
The point is not whether you force players to read or not, but what is the role of reading and NPCs in a cRPG. NPCs are there to provide quests. That’s their role. That’s what they signal to players. If you design NPCs in a different way because you are eager to tell a story about your gameworld, you are muddling things and confusing players. This problem is exacerbated in Atom RPG since each NPC has a unique portrait and each dialogue provides XPs. The player is lured into believing they are special in gameplay terms, but most of them are just filler. With dummy NPCs you don’t have this problem. You can tell by their portraits or answers that they can be safely ignored. They don’t waste the players’ time.
 

Atomboy

Atom Team
Developer
Joined
Oct 1, 2016
Messages
713
However, with all that you said, I'm completely open to finding out how to make it seem we are NOT forcing the player to read everything and believe it's a novel.
The point is not whether you force players to read or not, but what is the role of reading and NPCs in a cRPG. NPCs are there to provide quests. That’s their role. That’s what they signal to players. If you design NPCs in a different way because you are eager to tell a story about your gameworld, you are muddling things and confusing players. This problem is exacerbated in Atom RPG since each NPC has a unique portrait and each dialogue provides XPs. The player is lured into believing they are special in gameplay terms, but most of them are just filler. With dummy NPCs you don’t have this problem. You can tell by their portraits or answers that they can be safely ignored. They don’t waste the players’ time.
Well now I see that pretty clearly. It's a damn shame. I want them to be optional, and to like signal the player "Hi, I won't give you quests and maybe I'll give you some XP if you mind rape me with a CHA check but nothing more" without actually saying this. Making helpful, useful NPCs distinct as fuck might work I guess. What do you think? I want them to seem like optional timewasters for people like me who love this stuff, not scummy hidden timewasters.
 

Shadenuat

Arcane
Joined
Dec 9, 2011
Messages
11,955
Location
Russia
For me, having an actual talk-on-at-least-4-subjects NPC
Why 4?

This is an issue with people who get their hands on dialogue editor. Anything less but War and Peace is not enough for you guys for some reason. Did it ever occur to you at all that maybe you're not good enough to pull this off, especially on first try, and it would be more reasonable to focus on something more simple but put more effort into it, like that militia guard example I gave?

The Possessed (or Cursed Sniper, which also has unique dialogue in game) is cool; but in New Vegas Animal Friend perk allows you to solve one of the final quests by using a dog to find explosives in comparison.

We wanted to make a little quest around telling 33 folks your name is Agdam and then Agdam appears and confronts you
Why plagiarize other games?
 
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Atomboy

Atom Team
Developer
Joined
Oct 1, 2016
Messages
713
For me, having an actual talk-on-at-least-4-subjects NPC
Why 4?

This is an issue with people who get their hands on dialogue editor. Anything less but War and Peace is not enough for you guys for some reason. Did it ever occur to you at all that maybe you're not good enough to pull this off, especially on first try, and it would be more reasonable to focus on something more simple but put more effort into it, like that militia guard example I gave?

The Possessed (or Cursed Sniper, which also has unique dialogue in game) is cool; but in New Vegas Animal Friend perk allows you to solve one of the final quests by using a dog to find explosives in comparison.
Oh yeah, right, War and Peace! Most of the lines don't take up more than 5 game screens! Fast an snappy all the way. I see that you're stubbornly trying to label me as a generic Russian gopnik graphomaniac turned 100% non original Fallout maker. But despite EVERYTHING being evidence you are correct... Sir, you are totally wrong! And it's 4 because when 6 years ago I lost hope we'll actually ever have the balls to throw our careers away and make a game of our own, and I modded RPG Maker software to make a game about Alexander who was back then a space marine sent on a secret mission to locate the Tzar of the Russian Space Federation Gordiy the First who crash landed on a savage planet of dog people or some shit like that, I could only make it have 5 dialogue options without crashing it and the first 4 were questions and the last one was Exit Dialogue and the first dialogues in Atom were ripped from there (but despite that I was making a fallout clone... sure, sure!) happy now?! Mock me all you like! Yes, it's because of ancient weeb software! There!
P.S. It's not even plagiarizing and you know it...
 

Shadenuat

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
11,955
Location
Russia
I see that you're stubbornly trying to label me as a generic Russian gopnik graphomaniac turned 100% non original Fallout maker.
That sounds about right, although I'm not sure why you'd be offended by this, it is not the worst role to play. I mean, Vince is a Ukranian--

Okay, you like 4, I get it.

P.S. It's not even plagiarizing and you know it...
You can make your own meta jokes based on the setting.

The reason for Adahn was that Planescape was a setting where Belief affects reality and names matter, because names matter for magical things. It was a joke/consequence grounded in the setting of the game, it can't happen anywhere else but Planescape or a setting with similar rules for magic, where names are important (like Earthsea maybe).

If you just blatantly copy it out of its true setting you're just left with another pointless reference.
 

Atomboy

Atom Team
Developer
Joined
Oct 1, 2016
Messages
713
I see that you're stubbornly trying to label me as a generic Russian gopnik graphomaniac turned 100% non original Fallout maker.
That sounds about right, although I'm not sure why you'd be offended by this, it is not the worst role to play. I mean, Vince is a Ukranian--

Okay, you like 4, I get it.

I get offended by this because it's a very narrow-minded, pompous assessment usually made by pseudo intellectuals who watched half a letsplay and got offended by evil, uncultured low-brow prison humor and fart jokes because true respectable art (because games are actually art, you see, and not something a bunch of dudes conjured up because they wanted to play something like that) never says naughty words and real artists never shit or fart and also if you recognize a reference or heard the joke somewhere before, it's a bad joke and a very dumb reference. I usually laugh at those and copypaste the best ones into the dev chat. But here we have a codexer who played the game and has this awesome bear thing from the skeleton latinx game on his userpic who says the same stuff while simultaneously saying really smart stuff I can agree with completely. So I'm naturally half-shocked half-suspecting this to be a successful trolling attempt. Apart from that, I really am kind of a gopnik non original Fallout maker, nothing bad about that!
 

Atomboy

Atom Team
Developer
Joined
Oct 1, 2016
Messages
713
I see that you're stubbornly trying to label me as a generic Russian gopnik graphomaniac turned 100% non original Fallout maker.
P.S. It's not even plagiarizing and you know it...
You can make your own meta jokes based on the setting.

The reason for Adahn was that Planescape was a setting where Belief affects reality and names matter, because names matter for magical things. It was a joke/consequence grounded in the setting of the game, it can't happen anywhere else but Planescape or a setting with similar rules for magic, where names are important (like Earthsea maybe).

If you just blatantly copy it out of its true setting you're just left with another pointless reference.
Quit editing!!! You're making me look like I'm nitpicking to what do I reply to! He wasn't planned to be MADE by you calling yourself Agdam, he would hear of some guy using his name all the time in a neighboring region, and come at you...
 
Joined
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Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
However, with all that you said, I'm completely open to finding out how to make it seem we are NOT forcing the player to read everything and believe it's a novel.
The point is not whether you force players to read or not, but what is the role of reading and NPCs in a cRPG. NPCs are there to provide quests. That’s their role. That’s what they signal to players. If you design NPCs in a different way because you are eager to tell a story about your gameworld, you are muddling things and confusing players. This problem is exacerbated in Atom RPG since each NPC has a unique portrait and each dialogue provides XPs. The player is lured into believing they are special in gameplay terms, but most of them are just filler. With dummy NPCs you don’t have this problem. You can tell by their portraits or answers that they can be safely ignored. They don’t waste the players’ time.
Well now I see that pretty clearly. It's a damn shame. I want them to be optional, and to like signal the player "Hi, I won't give you quests and maybe I'll give you some XP if you mind rape me with a CHA check but nothing more" without actually saying this. Making helpful, useful NPCs distinct as fuck might work I guess. What do you think? I want them to seem like optional timewasters for people like me who love this stuff, not scummy hidden timewasters.
its been a while since I played, but there's a way to 'highlight'/'outline' NPCs, right?
Give them a different highlight color.
 

Atomboy

Atom Team
Developer
Joined
Oct 1, 2016
Messages
713
However, with all that you said, I'm completely open to finding out how to make it seem we are NOT forcing the player to read everything and believe it's a novel.
The point is not whether you force players to read or not, but what is the role of reading and NPCs in a cRPG. NPCs are there to provide quests. That’s their role. That’s what they signal to players. If you design NPCs in a different way because you are eager to tell a story about your gameworld, you are muddling things and confusing players. This problem is exacerbated in Atom RPG since each NPC has a unique portrait and each dialogue provides XPs. The player is lured into believing they are special in gameplay terms, but most of them are just filler. With dummy NPCs you don’t have this problem. You can tell by their portraits or answers that they can be safely ignored. They don’t waste the players’ time.
Well now I see that pretty clearly. It's a damn shame. I want them to be optional, and to like signal the player "Hi, I won't give you quests and maybe I'll give you some XP if you mind rape me with a CHA check but nothing more" without actually saying this. Making helpful, useful NPCs distinct as fuck might work I guess. What do you think? I want them to seem like optional timewasters for people like me who love this stuff, not scummy hidden timewasters.
Give them a different highlight color.
That's actually a sweet and non-intrusive idea I'd never think of! Thanks man. I'll have a talk about this with the guys.
 

Shadenuat

Arcane
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Messages
11,955
Location
Russia
You need some finesse even when using stuff like references. You have your own story about ATOM agent, but you were thinking taking a reference from a completely different game as if it would be "fun". Why not work within your own writing? Game could have had people trying to undermine your secrecy, agents which would spy on you and find inconsistencies in what you say; so if you'd use one name at one place but real name at other, you could fuck up, get ambushed, put on lie detector, whatever, the story just writes itself from these dialogue options and you could use all the fun references suiting your own narrative.

But here we have a codexer who played the game and has this awesome bear thing from the skeleton latinx game on his userpic who says the same stuff while simultaneously saying really smart stuff I can agree with completely.
Cause game is inconsistent.

The beginning for example is quests like gather some corn, gather some mushrooms, and quest to find traitor is just clicking on correct person. Not very interesting.

Maybe people who are turned away by your presentation of the game (and writing/jokes) are not just all trolls.
 

Atomboy

Atom Team
Developer
Joined
Oct 1, 2016
Messages
713
You need some finesse even when using stuff like references. You have your own story about ATOM agent, but you were thinking taking a reference from a completely different game as if it would be "fun". Why not work within your own writing? Game could have had people trying to undermine your secrecy, agents which would spy on you and find inconsistencies in what you say; so if you'd use one name at one place but real name at other, you could fuck up, get ambushed, put on lie detector, whatever, the story just writes itself from these dialogue options and you could use all the fun references suiting your own narrative.
Like I said! Bear from the skeleton game! :D References are as much of a holy cow for me, as are talking furniture people, but for slightly different reasons. My bud doesn't have this, so he made like 2 references in the whole game although he wrote about half of the dialogues. It's really silly, but I feel like I have a duty to the steps I climbed in order to drop everything and start writing for a game. When I reference something, - even though it sometimes looks like "hey member that thing??? hahahaha funny cuz that's a thing that you know hahahha" - what I'm actually saying is - this is a part of what inspired me, this is something I like, remember it, play it, read it (if I'm referencing a book), do not forget this thing because it's so important I placed it into the text I made. We had these ideas you mentioned in one form or another, and these are really good ideas, though very hard to make, because of the things we need to keep in our minds while making this. Like, say you have an NPC and you can tell him a fake name, but you can tell another dude another fake name. So dude 2 says: eyyy my buddy told me you were called X not Y!!! So naturally, you must have separate lines for -what to do if you messed up your names, -how the dialogue will look if you didn't mess up names (e.g. "X, huh? Yeah, my buddy told me about you, X", -How the dialogue will look if you killed the first dude or did something else bad to him (Because since the two dudes know one another and share info, dude number 2 must have a reaction to what you did to dude 1) etc. These are very, very cool things we didn't have time for. But they just might pop in Trudograd which will be very compact and will have an improved clique system which will allow for making these things much, much easier!
 

Shadenuat

Arcane
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Messages
11,955
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I know how dialogue and just C&C scripting works, I did it myself and I know it is a total fucking bitch. I still think if you're using a reference you need to at least use correct one. And if you're not using correct one, at least make dialogue matter enough so it doesn't matter if people don't find what you're writing good.
 

Atomboy

Atom Team
Developer
Joined
Oct 1, 2016
Messages
713
You need some finesse even when using stuff like references. You have your own story about ATOM agent, but you were thinking taking a reference from a completely different game as if it would be "fun". Why not work within your own writing? Game could have had people trying to undermine your secrecy, agents which would spy on you and find inconsistencies in what you say; so if you'd use one name at one place but real name at other, you could fuck up, get ambushed, put on lie detector, whatever, the story just writes itself from these dialogue options and you could use all the fun references suiting your own narrative.

But here we have a codexer who played the game and has this awesome bear thing from the skeleton latinx game on his userpic who says the same stuff while simultaneously saying really smart stuff I can agree with completely.
Cause game is inconsistent.

The beginning for example is quests like gather some corn, gather some mushrooms, and quest to find traitor is just clicking on correct person. Not very interesting.

Maybe people who are turned away by your presentation of the game (and writing/jokes) are not just all trolls.

You're twisting my words dude. Not only do I completely understand people who think Atom is a really shitty game, especially people who thought it was going to be an FPS or a modern style RPG, I don't idolize it myself. What's flawed is flawed. I smell a troll when an obviously smart dude starts saying things that I usually get from mama's little art critics. Some of the things Atom isn't are cashgrab, soulless ripoff, clone, and 99% of time I get that from uninformed people, not actual players! So do understand my position!

And yeah, we made a ton of mistakes in the beginning, that's very true. The corn thing was supposed to be a joke on paper, cuz we thought everyone would pick corn to later eat it because it's right there, and then the grandpa would be like - hey can you get my corn? And you'd be like - oh... I already have it... Sorry... But most folks don't get corn before talking to grandpa, which makes it into a shitty gathering quest. Same with the shrooms. The bunker robbery is really bad, the early combat, lots of things.
 

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