A discussion about Team Alphachronism

[thatreevesgirl]

I love the really great conversation we have going in the intro post. There are so many other things I want to know about everyone, so I got the okay to start another discussion post.

Let's start with our lovely OT4. Here are some questions that might spark some good discussion about our favorite alpha kids.

1. Do you have any particular headcanon for Dirk, Jake, Jane, or Roxy? Like having to do with their personality, sexuality, past, etc.
2. playerprophet shared her headcanon for how she ships the OT4 in the welcome post (with a diagram and everything). How do you ship it?
3. Do you ship anything inside of the OT4? (Like Jake<3Jane, Roxy<3Jane, or Dirk<3Jake)

Random Bonus Question:  Everyone kind of eluded to what mediums they do in the intro post, but I'm curious to know where you think your strengths are going to be when we get going with the HSO.  Art, fiction, other media, cosplay, both art and fic, etc.

Comments

[fayharley]

Do you mind me asking more details about your video game problems? Was it mainly the text and flash games, where you have to try different things before getting the story to continue, or did the visual novels and choose your own adventure games where the choices are spelled out bother you as well? I think the second type would be the easiest to do transcription for, as well as the easiest to incorporate images if we do go the game route.

There's always the option, if someone has webspace, the we could just build a choose you own adventure game using linked pages rather than having people download a visual novel. It would allow us to put a lot of text on one page rather than having people click through a conversation bit by bit on a smaller game screen.

[ferrrox]

Ahh I don't mind at all! I'm sorry to be making any sort of deal out of this??? Seriously I'll draw for whatevs. :>

Re: your question, though--my gaming vocab is SUPER LIMITED so please bear with this fumbling explanation, haha. Like, I don't really know "types of games"--I quite literally do not know the difference between a text game, flash game, visual novel, or a "choose your own adventure" game, sorry.

Maybe examples would help? Like, from last years HSO, my fave entries were usually fic/art or fanadventures, because I usually need to be sold on a pairing, and those kind of straightforward narratives seemed to be best at making me feel emotionally involved. I think part of this might be inherent in the media--with fic/art and fanadventures, if there's a part that really hits you hard, you can spend more time on it, and revisit it, and dwell on it, while skimming any boring stuff. I do think some of the fanadventures I really liked probably were "visual novels", I'm just kind of fuzzy on the definitions there, sorry!

However, with all the games I remember from last year's HSO, you were smoothly conveyor-belted along at a pace that was usually slow, but also might have kept you from settling on any really tasty parts. IDK OPINION SOUP.

As far as games from last year--mostly just remember being really irritated at this one? It was gratingly slow and my browser crashed at some point during the dang thing and I had to start from the beginning. IDK I guess I just really want us to avoid pitfalls like this one had. I do remember thinking that the "skip" functions on this game were handy, and being kind of charmed by this one, but being ambivalent about this one.

I know that this is probably not even a passable explanation about I'm carrying on about, haha. Sorry! Let's just make sure that if we do a game (which will be super excellent and would be supremely badass!) we don't miss the forest for the trees in regard to our media vs. our content. It would be a shame to focus a lot of effort on planning/programming a game and accidentally scrimp on the important stuff, which is--excellent characterization, interesting plot, and great images located where they have the most impact. In short, emotional manipulation of the reader/viewer. Anyway, we're kickass and are going to win at sportz! Sorry to go on and on! :>

[fayharley]

No, don't be sorry. This is actually really interesting and informative. Please allow me to get my nerd on for a moment.

Most of those examples seem to be some form of visual novels. Visual novels are a Japanese kind of video game, or at least they're most popular in Japan. They're pretty much a fancy Choose You Own Adventure novel. You click along, reading a story, and eventually get to a choice. Then whichever you choose takes you on a different branch of the story and eventually you get a different ending. There's more complicated versions but that's the basic idea. The most popular ones are dating sims, where your choices lead you to wooing different characters. Japanese ones are famous for having "Bad Ends" where if you choose the wrong thing you or your love interest gets horrifically killed. So yeah, dating sim/visual novel/choose your own adventure game are all kind of a same thing. They can be pretty flashy with sound and pictures while still being simple to play, so I can see why they were popular choices last year.

Visual novels are pretty easy to transcribe, which would be one advantage if we wanted to make something that was also accessible to people who didn't want to play the game itself for whatever reason. You can just write out the whole branch of the story on a page and have links to the next bits. For example, you would write the whole chapter and then instead of saying "turn to page five to head home" and "turn to page twenty to continue along the road" you would have hyperlinked choices that take you to a new webpage with the next chapter depending on the branch you took.

I get what you're saying about straightforwardness. Some of the games from last year didn't really need to be games. The Dave/Jade one in particular struck me as something that would have worked just as well in text with illustrations throughout. But again, that's true for a lot of the mini flash games in Homestuck itself.

It's a matter of taste I suppose? I like the idea that we could make a game about a mystery, so the player gets to be Jane playing detective, but for everyone who likes that there would be someone who found it too tricky and annoying. We would probably want to include a walkthrough if we did one like that.

On a silly personal note, I like the idea of a visual novel/choose your own adventure thing because we could throw in bad ends. I just love ridiculous over the top bad ends.