Yo.

As mentioned in my last post, I’m making a tycoon / time management game based on Kafka’s A Hunger Artist. The theme tie-in is that the game only presents the cutesy surface to a deep dark story. I haven’t decided yet how cutesy to make it. I don’t think I can pull off Ikuhara*-level cute to fucked-up ratios, but I might try.

Anyway, it’s too early to code, so here’s an update:

Spectators now have stats and names randomly assigned from a list of Czech names. When you mouse over them, you get a summary including their names, genders, and ages, whether or not they have season passes, and whether they have specific personality traits. Also, unless someone can help me think of a better word, the trait name opposite charismatic is introverted. They describe opposite ends of a stat that affects the likelihood that that spectator drags along friends or moves other spectators to be more or less skeptical.

Ludum Dare Moment of Victory: I replaced all the háčeked characters with their plain versions instead of spending time looking for a font that looked good in Flixel and displayed them correctly.

Ticket Sales are now counted. Units are Austro-Hungarian Krone. People can buy day tickets, season tickets, or child tickets. You cannot currently change ticket prices, but that’s something I might implement later.

Ludum Dare Moment of Victory: I made some effort to calculate the exchange rate between 1908 Krone and 2014 USD so I could get a sense of how much tickets should cost. After a setback in converting 1909 Krone to 1909 French Franc and 1909 French Franc to 2014 Euro, I decided instead to simply base ticket prices on the cost of a newspaper in 1913 Krone.

I had to rethink the way time passes. The story calls for 40-day fasting performances, and that number totally has like symbolism and stuff, so I can’t change that. I was originally thinking each performance would be like a stage in a game – you play it quick, go to the main map, and save, but I was also thinking that the game would move slow enough that you could interact with the audience and do other things that take time. The first number I wrote down when thinking how long a day should last was “5 minutes”. That would make each fast performance last over 3 hours. Even 1 minute a day felt rushed to me. Anyway, I’m making some changes. Most importantly, 1. You can save every day, not every fast performance, and 2. You don’t have to play night hours even though there are night hours in the story.

Oh, and I made some mediocre music last night using abundant-music. I did this thing where I kept everything the same except for the scale seed, which allowed me to make several songs with the same structure and melody shaping but different moods. If I don’t have time to do music properly, I’ll throw something from that set in. If I do have time, I’ll do it again but spend more time getting the song to sound good first. And if I don’t make the Compo and do the Jam, I’ll say “fuck it” and pick some music from the public domain production music you’ll probably recognize from Ren & Stimpy.

To do list – highest priority:

1. Stats and stat display for The Hunger Artist and The Impresario
2. Action controls for The Hunger Artist
3. Day controls
4. Improve Audience Behavior algorithms
5. Tighten up Feedback loop between Audience mood and Hunger Artist mood
6. Background Art
7. Character Art

I leave you now with a drawing by Franz Kafka himself that might resonate with all of you who are working your asses off to make a game this weekend. It’s hard work, but don’t despair. You can do it.

*If you don’t know Ikuhara, imagine David Lynch making shows for Japanese 12-year-old girls.