Æon Sage (Work In Progress)

Game: If you’ve come back here, you’ve got to wait for it.

The story of the Æon Sage is a bit of a “closed circle” or “enclosed space” hard sci-fi murder mystery. Specifically it takes place aboard a spaceship on a ‘cruise’ between two planets in the twenty-sixth century, where humans have colonized the stars, running into numerous aliens (including a handful of sentient species) with the help of “Jump Drives”. Jump Drives allow jumps of parsecs at a time, but face the problem of needing to be a great distance away from large bodies of mass (like the planet), so ships take more conventional methods of space travel out to a point where they can jump, then use the same methods to reach their target planet. You are a security guard (one of only six) aboard the Æon Sage, an interstellar cruise ship which holds more than 800 people (including crew). Predictably, everything goes wrong. You end up stuck trying to fix the problems of a small city trapped in a can some millions of miles away from the closest help, and all the while a killer is loose.

What you’ve done so far is great. The branching choices was a good idea and didn’t even know it was possible to do that. The setup and backstory are intriguing. Balancing hard mode and easy mode with verbose or brief is a lot to maintain.

I hope you keep it going and I’ll check back in to see the progress.

That’s was very good. I only played through it once, but I really enjoyed the story. It was clever how you input choices, such as choosing what kind of cyber- body part you could pick and with the gender choice. Very nice game. I will definitely follow up on any updates to come.

I played again on hard, and chose the choice of not having cybernetics. Then, I clicked on making a comment on the man who annoyed Kirst. With the next screen, this weird error coding message showed up. Thought I should alert you to that in order to fix it…

I am very impressed so far. I was sucked into the story until I hit error line 737: expected choice body. This really sucks as I was deply engrossed then yanked out, only to be reminded this a work in progress. Keep up the great work look forward to updates.

@JimD Thanks. That actually means a lot coming from you. Yea, the verbose/brief thing does add a bit to maintain, but not nearly as much as you’d think. Basically, all I’m doing for that is finding things that can be cut, indenting them, then adding “*if verbose” on the line before. Like the bit where I describe the different species, If you select verbose, their just cropped out. The Hardmode option is also surprisingly easy so far (knock on wood). Mostly 'cause there is only like two or three things that call it up so far.

@IyashiiOtaku Thank you. I took forever and went through three or four tries before I decided on how to do the gender choice. I eventually settled on the bathroom, 'cause it’s the only choice I could come up with that: a) Didn’t sound extremely sexist, b) Was a normal every day event, c) Didn’t leave a dry taste behind, d) Couldn’t conceivably lead a “none of the above” option. The last one is important because there are actually a couple of places where your gender matters (which will not affect the main plot line).

@IyashiiOtaku / @lordirishdas Yea, I’m a horrible, horrible person when it comes to error checking. Add on the fact that I completely mangled my code and ballooned it two twice what I need with no real easy way of figuring my way out, and… Well, I’m going to try to fix the errors today, along with opening a few new lines.

@Everyone mentioning errors: Could you mention your what “party type” you went to? Currently, all my errors are located in one pile of code, which is heavily reliant on what kind of party you chose. Also, if you picked a commenting mentioning Kist’s arm, could you mention if you yourself have one? Also, whenever mentioning errors, give a line number if the error mentions it (Not just for me, that really helps anyone that is using ChoiceScript). Thank you, both in advance, and for those of who who have already shown support.

@lordirishdas Could you give any more info? I’m having some trouble finding what exactly the error was, as that is a choice (#) line, and I have no clue what could be the error. Are you sure that was the correct line?

Æon Sage error reports

  1. . I went to the dark club with the rough atmosphere and this happens to both men and women. You can have cyber arms or cyber eyes and chose to make a comment about the man. Problem: no choices and an error message pops up… Line664: Invalid expression, couldn’t extract another token: # You’re a girl too, and are just trying to be understanding. It’s not as if you’re hitting on her.
  2. On Hard Difficulty, Chose to quickly step out and talk to them and you will get an error message. Line 107 : Non-existent command ‘persuasion’
  3. It happens to both males and females with cybernetic eye replacements in the dark club with the rough atmosphere who complement her arm and had the same 664 error.
  4. I chose to go to the gentle club with talking and had a cyber arm and chose to talk about the man. It also happens with cyber eyes. Line 737: Expected choice body

I picked as follows: Verbosity High, Difficulty Normal, action step out and talk to them, approach cautiously, step forward, Something gentle played in the background, while people talked about everything from economics to quantum physics over wine and other drinks, I, of course, used the men’s restroom, Your cybereyes suddenly dim everything as a huge spotlight dances across your window, and I pick making a comment about the man is when I encounter the error. Hope this helps.

@Sovereign2Lilith
2) Fixed. I apparently decided to “persuasion” rather than “set persuasion”. Derp.

@Sovereign2Lilith @lordirishdas
Line 664 error fixed. I often forget that parenthesis are mandatory on *if/*selectable_if choices.

Line 737 error fixed. It seems that under certain circumstances, *else commands are mandatory. Annoying because I often disregard them in favor of another *if command. It helps me to navigate my code (which is otherwise a horrid mess) a little better.

Thank you.

Sorry about the erroneous “bug fixed” post above. That line 737 error (or whatever number it was by the time I actually squashed that damn bug) is now fixed. You know when you find something and once you find it you’re wondering how in the world you missed it? Yea, that stupid error was from setting up a choice (which isn’t selectable in the first place) which doesn’t have any body and therefore can’t display anything when called on. The worst thing is I fixed that bug already on one of my test games, and it took me literally hours to find it while it stared me in the face the whole time.

Some how I did not put my foot through my fricken monitor, but I want to cry now. Instead, I’m going to put on some Powerman 5000 and Die So Fluid and finish that damn scene once and for all. I’m not getting up from typing until I complete it (at least to the point of playability, I’ll go over and touch up my writing afterwards if necessary, which it will be). Or to poop. That’s important too.

lol I feel for ya. :smiley:

I made it to the end of the seection you are working on, I will try to run a few other options next time, but sleep is trying to creep in to my eyes making it hard to read. Keep up the good work.

I ran into an error 765 I think it was. Mentioned I couldn’t help but watch the way you move when I chose couldn’t help noticin the guy bothering her. if it helps, I was female, chose the rough club, I had no cybernetics and she came up to me while I danced.

Tried a few other paths no problem, but one. I know have to wait until you update the story. lol

Very nice. I like it so far!

I like what I think the setting might be like… but it’s far too short to really tell. Hopefully you keep working on this because it looks like it has the potential to be interesting.

@Blade and @Shoelip Thanks.

@Shoelip Yea, it is short. I mostly posted it because I abandon so many projects, and I thought having some feed back might force me to want to continue. I haven’t worked on it in the last few days because of RL problems (including my internet going down), but I should shore up the current scene (getting a drink) by today and start on your conversation with Kist, which will be the true character generation portion of the game. Also, I will post if I ever abandon it.

Hopefully once there is more to it I can think of some more actually useful feedback than “Looks like it could be good.” :slight_smile:

Lol, I hope that I’ll produce more so that there can be better feedback than “Looks like it could be good.”. :stuck_out_tongue: Anyways, I’ve finished all the paths to the current cutoff point, except for hitting on Kist. (Picking a cybercomm will get you a TODO SCENE message in place of an actual scene describing the cybercomm, but other than that it works fine. I just got frustrated with writing that scene as it kept coming out badly and so I’m just going to go back to it later.)

Additionally I’ve fixed a small error when the game didn’t actually let you pick a drink if you didn’t try to enter a name for yourself (and instead picked a ‘preset’ one). I used a *gosub command for choosing your name and drink, then had a *return if you picked a ‘preset’ name, rather than having it skip the bits to write in your own name and continue onto the drink selection (where it would then return you back to where you were properly).