What's your IF White Whale?

I have a concept for space travel game where Pascal’s Wager is used as the core of a spaceship engine. Players need to alternatively “bliss” and “torment” the brain of Pascal himself, which they have in suspended animation, to triangulate the locations that they need to go to.

In theory the choices that are made in subpassages would add or subtract to Pascal’s brain state/the ship coordinates, but I need a way to make it not tedious and repetitive. Ideally there would be gambling minigames that adjust the values. And I need a plot too.

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Your concept just blew my mind.

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Haha, thank you. I might need to look for collaborators so if anyone has further ideas please get in touch.

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Oh, I had missed this great thread. I’m only going to say the title and leave it there: 14 planets.

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This sentence made me laugh:

It’s bleedin’ hilarious how you offhandedly mention they happen to have Pascal’s brain in suspended animation.

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It’s bleedin’ hilarious how you offhandedly mention they happen to have Pascal’s brain in suspended animation.

In what I have of the plot so far, the player character actually doesn’t have Pascal’s brain. It’s Pascal’s brain that has them – they’re a teenager or child and it’s their legal guardian. Somehow I need to tie this in with Pascal’s presumable father issues with a dad that didn’t want him to learn math…and also preferably without touching religious aspects of fatherhood as much as possible.

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will be interesting implementing it in Pascal (the programming language…) :smiley: aside that bliss.pas and torment.pas are two nifty sourcefile name :smiley:

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Haha, I will have to work that in! I’ve heard of the language but I’m not much of a programmer beyond Twine and Inform. I’ll have to use it in a joke though.

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Are you familiar with Pascal’s Wager ? (Completely different concept, but worth mentioning.)

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Yeah, that was the idea behind the “bliss” and “torment.” I’m trying to work out some way to use chance-based minigames around that idea to progress the story.

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Sorry, but did you realize that the “Pascal’s Wager” that BadParser linked is a game from Spring Thing 2008? (I say this because I almost skipped over it thinking it was a link toto Wikipedia or something, and I can’t tell from your response if you noticed…)

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This binary choice just reminded me of a semi-game I always meant to write but didn’t. I have a Spring Thing backyard entry now!

@JoshGrams, I’ve had fun beating my head against Pascal’s Wager. Hopefully I will figure it out soon. It’s a creative premise, and the failures are funny.

Oh, back on topic? I’d like to write an Adventuron game with decent graphics. Graphics I made on my own. It wouldn’t have to be a big whale, but it would be neat to have done. Especially since I’m still trying to learn how to draw.

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Sorry, but did you realize that the “Pascal’s Wager” that BadParser linked is a game from Spring Thing 2008? (I say this because I almost skipped over it thinking it was a link toto Wikipedia or something, and I can’t tell from your response if you noticed…)

Oh, I assumed that it was a Wikipedia link too. I will dig deeper.

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Regarding Adventuron graphics, take a look at some of the existing games. They come in all sorts of styles. Some of the best include ‘Dungeons of Antur’ by Ricardo Oyón Rodríguez (done using a 3D modelling program, possibly Blender), ‘Sentient Beings’ by @Grizel (done using Canva), anything by John Blythe (hand-drawn bit-mapped graphics) and the wonderful Cryptex Hunt games, where most of the graphics were done by Errol Elumir (also hand-drawn bit-mapped graphics).

The graphics don’t need to be brilliant. I really like the simple graphics in ‘A Troll’s Revenge’ by @8bitAG. I think these were hand drawn, then scanned in black and white and coloured. I think Dee Cooke used a similar approach in ‘Barry Basic and the Quick Escape’.

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I think they’re rubbish myself, but yes they were quickly done that way in a couple of hours. They were added simply because the game jam required the adventures to have an “8-bit-like” graphic for each location and the artist who’d agreed to provide them dropped out at the eleventh hour. The idea was to have something that would be very simple and could work on the ZX Spectrum with minimal modification; which is what the Adventuron game was ported to. I’m not a big fan of graphics; good graphics can be cool and often get games noticed, but they do take up a lot of screen real estate when you’re working on retro platforms which can affect playability.

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Thanks for the publicity. :smiley: First time I’ve seen my game mentioned in over a decade. I recently replayed it myself. Weird playing your own game after so long away.

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Credit to @BadParser, really. Interesting game, though!

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Ofc my White Whale is That Trilogy Closing Chapter that I will probably never make.

Among the reasons:
• the second installment had so much in it that it gives me the cramps just thinking about adding them in a third
• I have the story outlined, the characters, the beginning and ending sequences in mind and also “That Great Moment” but it is just too much work to combine them into a full-blown story
• I don’t have time for this kind of large project anymore (this is an excuse, I know: if I’d written 200 words a week it would have been probably done by now)
• I’m trying other systems (like PunyInform) and so I’m forgetting Inform7
• I prefer (due to my attention deficit) to fixate on much smaller projects I can do in 3-6 weeks as I tend to get bored or blocked very fast
• My attention disorder has become the more and more difficult to overcome, with age and kids and work and booze…

and, finally:

• I don’t think anyone would care anymore. When the saga had a momentum for itself, I could just surf on it. Now I believe it’s too much of an effort for 7 players :slight_smile: (whoever you are: sorry for letting you down).

I’m making other things, though. And until I die I will.

PS: I have other 6/7 Whales. Probably greyish if not white. But it’s better I don’t think about them. :slight_smile:

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I’ve mentioned it at least three times to my IRL coworkers and students in the last sixth months. Very topical.

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Have, uh, you seen the new D&D movie yet?

Given the confluence of genres, you might have a hard time convincing folks that this wasn’t your inspiration for the project.

In late 2008 I wrote a short story about a planet tidally locked to it’s sun and what life was like in the fringe tolerable areas along the transition zone from eternal night and eternal day.

I settled on the sensible name of “Twilight.”

Literally a few weeks later the film came out in Theaters. :joy:

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