Zero Summer Released (StoryNexus)

Playing Beta Testing Requests and Discussion
1

Howdy folks,

Zero Summer, a “wordy western” set in the near-future American southwest and built on the StoryNexus platform (also Fallen London’s tech!), has recently been released.

(We’ve also won second place in Failbetter Games’ inaugural world competition! We’re very excited about that.)

Zero Summer features a blend of western, horror, and a little modern fantasy to create a dusty world with a nougaty literary center and a sweet genre fiction shell. Nearly two decades ago, monsters
poured out of Corpus Christi and divided the United States between civilization and the new western frontier. Players assume the role of A MAN WITH NO NAME, a gunslinger in search of his own past.

If you’re interested, please do give us a try.

And we’d love to hear what you think! I’ll keep an eye on this thread, or you could hit us up on Facebook.

UPDATE:

Our first big content update, Day 2/Morning, is now live!

Features include:

  • Ride with the Pony Express! Join the proud men and women of the US Postal Service. Deliver mail. Right wrongs. Rassle the occasional monster.
  • The Society of Galahad seeks to resurrect the legacy of Santo Guerrero, the patron saint of the new west. And they want your help. Will you join them in their search?
  • Enlist a crew for an elaborate heist.
  • Delve deeper into the mystery of Amarillo’s greatest killers, the Harvestmen.
  • Choose sides in the struggle at Amarillo’s home for the broken and destitute.

New mechanics include:

  • Job system! Raise your Reputation by completing Jobs for the Pony Express. Use it to advance our strangest, most intriguing plots ever.
  • Equipment! Earn Dollars through rare successes or buy them with Reputation. Buy your very own gunslinger knick-knacks!
  • Antagonists! The Opportunity deck isn’t always friendly. Contend with the Sergeant or Mr. Lock, the Thin Man or Melissa at the Mission, the Harvestmen, and the Distant Watcher.
2

I started in on this a few days back, and am enjoying it well enough. (I think StoryNexus games, in general, feel a good deal narrower than Fallen London, but that is not Zero Summer’s fault).

Also worth a look is Winterstrike by Yoon Ha Lee, who’s best-known in IF circles for The Moonlit Tower (which won a XYZZY for Best Writing, and was nominated for Setting and Story.)

3

Hey, thanks for writing! And thanks for playing!

I think the question of narrowness is interesting. Some of the StoryNexus worlds are definitely trying to be broad – Maelstrom, Evolve, and to some extent Samsara. They’re in the Fallen London mode: they want to be expansive, they want to be sandboxy, they want to let you tell your own stories.

But Silver Tree, Cabinet Noir, and Zero Summer are definitely intended to be “narrower” – that is, they aren’t sandboxes. I’m about half way through Silver Tree and I get the sense that they’re farming the same row that we are with Zero Summer: a specific character with a specific past who’s circumstantially unable to be ‘themselves.’ I think FBG, and I know we, are trying to tell specific stories. The goal is to let players experience them in their own time, at their own pace, and with their own perspective.

That, at least, is what we consider interactive about Zero Summer. We started out wondering whether we could design a compelling narrative with broad literary themes inside a delicious genre shell. Zero Summer is a lot closer to a traditional novel than Fallen London. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Our goal is to give players a specific set of circumstances to play inside and present them (you!) with the opportunity to consider what it means to inhabit those circumstances. Will you change them? Will you choose to be who you were, or work to establish who you can be? And what’s the difference, and how do you get there? Etc.

4

(Also, Fallen London’s been around for like six years now. We’ve been around for about twenty minutes. We’ll catch up in breadth of content! Although we aren’t like… small right now. :wink: )

5

Mrm; one of the things that has slowed me down on StoryNexus things is how much they feel like Cabinet Noir, which I found kind of flat and disappointing. (CN’s writing didn’t quite attain the very strong standard that’s necessary to make Echo Bazaar-y things work; but there was also the inability to discard drawn cards you don’t want, combined with the fact that pinned cards were only for significant plot-progression events that cost you resources.)

In theory, though, I’m very much in favour of specific characters with specific stories, and things with novel-ish arcs. The trick is, well, StoryNexusish things have a fair bit more interface friction than a standard CYOA: you fiddle with cards, you’re offered a good many options that are long-shots until you level up your stats, you often have to wait to earn more turns. So it kind of needs to offer something that justifies that friction, some good reason why you didn’t make this thing in Varytale or whatnot.

In EBZ, the big reason on offer is definitely breadth; at any time you can dip your toe in many, many different stories, focus in on them and invest a lot of time and effort on them, or let them wait while you go and do something else. (Though that level of freedom isn’t always to its advantage; as with other open-world quest games like Fallout: New Vegas, I often find myself in the position of having started fifty different plotlines, all dissolved into a fragmentary soup.) I’m still not quite sure what the answer is for the typical StoryNexus game.

6

I found the biggest turn-off in EBZ, myself; nothing I did really seemed to go anywhere much, and all the while I was surrounded with lots to suggest there was content there, but I hadn’t found it. So I became more and more convinced I was “missing out”, and not enjoying what I was playing/reading enough to keep going.

The StoryNexus structure is a lot more to my tastes - a lot more focused, with more zip behind it. And I’m sure a lot of the issues having too many high-level carrots, and undiscardable cards, and repetition, etc, can be fixed with good logic? I’ve not played with the system’s gizzards at all, but part of the game design is presumably ensuring that players get enough opportunities waved at them… but not too many.

jon

7

I’ve only played a little of Zero Summer so far, but I’m finding the content fairly meaty – lots of interaction arcs with other characters that run for multiple storylets in a row, more of a sense of scenes than typical in FL. (Overall, I think there are lots of ways to take the SN system.)

Edited to add: okay, I got sucked in enough to a) play a bunch more than I was supposed to on a lunch break and b) go ahead and post the positive review I had been working on, for those who are interested.

8

Broadly at @maga: I think we’re all trying to figure out what StoryNexus is. That includes Failbetter Games. It’s probably not fair to compare Cabinet Noir or Silver Tree to Fallen London, because Fallen London’s been going for six years! And there are some pretty significant differences between the StoryNexus and Fallen London platforms. Discardable opportunity cards is one. The absence of a visual map is another. And authors don’t have control of their action pools and refresh rates yet. Once those features go in, I think the StoryNexus games will really start to sing –

(Although – biased! – I think a lot of them are pretty swell already, especially Evolve, Samsara, Silver Tree, and of course Zero Summer.)

From my perspective, the advantage StoryNexus has over (e.g.) Varytale is that StoryNexus offers a little more gameish bells and whistles. StoryNexus worlds handle like video games. Which is great if what you’re trying to do is write a video game, or disguise a piece of literature as a video game. It seems to me like the successful StoryNexus worlds to date are more self-consciously gamey, while the less-successful ones don’t quite have the narrative/mechanics balance down yet.

I think you might enjoy Zero Summer! Would you give it a try and let me know what you think? We’ve tried to be thoughtful and intentional about dealing with proper difficulty balance, grind (1 click in 10, minimum, is all new text) and discardable cards (we’ve included discard branches on most of them). This community has a lot of experience with IF game design, and we’re always looking for more input.

This is veeery intentional. We think it’s one of the things that sets Zero Summer apart, both as a StoryNexus game and a piece of interactive fiction. We don’t often try to be emergent or too branchy-branchy*, but we’re focused on giving longer-form, more meaningful interactions with our NPCs.

(I think it shows that all of us on the Zero Summer team are tabletop and live-action role-players from old times. We try hard to stay on target with the plot and setting, but sometimes what we really want to do – Becca especially – is write a bunch of character studies and use them as emotional/social lenses.)

Grateful for it and excited by it – thank you! Zero Summer has been a labor of love, and it’s thrilling to see that a lot of what we’re trying to do has been successful. :slight_smile:

* although I did spent a couple of days writing a big branchy chunk in “Fifty Miles South of Lexington,” currently our only Nex-locked branch

9

I’ve just started and I’m a bit intrigued, but every time I click on anything it’s so very slow…

10

How do you mean slow?

11

There’s a good few seconds after I click something before anything happens. Maybe all it needs is a spinner to say its waiting for the web server.

12

Oh, I see. Theory: the StoryNexus servers just aren’t used to the influx they’ve seen post-WotS contest. Hopefully it’ll speed up soon!

13

Just a quick update: our first big content update, Day 2/Morning, is now live!

Features include:

  • Ride with the Pony Express! Join the proud men and women of the US Postal Service. Deliver mail. Right wrongs. Rassle the occasional monster.
  • The Society of Galahad seeks to resurrect the legacy of Santo Guerrero, the patron saint of the new west. And they want your help. Will you join them in their search?
  • Enlist a crew for an elaborate heist.
  • Delve deeper into the mystery of Amarillo’s greatest killers, the Harvestmen.
  • Choose sides in the struggle at Amarillo’s home for the broken and destitute.

New mechanics include:

  • Job system! Raise your Reputation by completing Jobs for the Pony Express. Use it to advance our strangest, most intriguing plots ever.
  • Equipment! Earn Dollars through rare successes or buy them with Reputation. Buy your very own gunslinger knick-knacks!
  • Antagonists! The Opportunity deck isn’t always friendly. Contend with the Sergeant or Mr. Lock, the Thin Man or Melissa at the Mission, the Harvestmen, and the Distant Watcher.