Frayed Knights Development Update

Jay Barnson offers another update on his upcoming humorous indie RPG, Frayed Knights, discussing how he split the main story in three and the rewriting difficulties that came with that.

My choice of doing entire conversations for dialogs has bitten me in the butt. In retrospect well, I’d probably do it the same way, but I’d be more aware of the problems. Having full conversations based on current game state is AWESOME when it works. You can talk to an NPC, and the characters take note of the fact that you have done A, but not B, and that you are still in the middle of the C. Well, if A, B, and C are all 3 stage states (Not Started, Incomplete, and Complete), that’s 3 x 3 x 3 = 18 variations that need to be accounted for! That is a LOT of friggin’ dialog to write. and to test! It would have been much easier to take a more traditional approach, where the dialog is one-sided and delivered piecemeal.

But it’s cool, it’s fun, and worth it, and I am taking shortcuts where I can (only 7 dialogs instead of 18, copying and pasting chunks of dialog, woot!). I really didn’t think that would be much of an (innovation) in this game, but it’s becoming something of a signature piece. So much so that, as my uber-tester DGM has pointed out, it gets disappointing when something interesting happens that doesn’t spawn a commentary from the characters.