Bay 12 Games Forum

During the Devolver Digital Sale, I noticed that a game I quite enjoyed - Always Sometimes Monsters - was getting a sequel: Sometimes Always Monsters. One of the features advertised for this was save importing and it occurred to me that... I don't have a save ready for when it comes out, not since I switched computers and all. And I thought maybe people that were curious about this game might like to join me on my trip through this game, and also for my first LP here on B12.

Updates won't be very long; for one thing, I'm just going to summarize most of the dialogue instead of providing a screenshot for every line of it. Partially this is because I have slow internet and I can't spend all day uploading screenshots, and partially because... well, you can consider it motivation to play the game yourself too? I'll be the first to say that maybe this isn't necessarily a great game (the Salt City location alone kind of disqualifies it; more on that when we get there) but I found it an interesting exercise; enough to gift a copy to my friend Tiruin a year or two ago, and I don't often throw games I like at people.

So what is Always Sometimes Monsters about? Put simply, it's the story of a failed writer making a last ditch, cross-country effort to crash the wedding of their old flame and maybe see if the spark is still there. One of the selling points is that you don't necessarily have to be a white dude chasing a white girl; you get to select your character and your love interest from a variety of pre-made characters and you can play gay, straight, or interracial if that's your preference. Premise aside, it's an RPG Maker game that focuses mostly on your decisions - usually between the easy, immoral way and the difficult, moral way although occasionally there is a third option. Essentially you ask yourself what matters more: the means or the end. You're on a tight schedule before that wedding takes place; is it worth it to steal the spare change out of people's coats at a concert to make sure you have the bus fare to quickly reach the next city, or do you sacrifice the time to earn the money legitimately?

Hopefully I've intrigued you at least a little; perhaps enough to read the rest? Without further ado, let's begin...


The game begins in a dark alleyway as an older man is yelling at his employee to return. It quickly becomes obvious that the older man is a very shady character as he all but says the younger man is a contract killer, but the young man blows him off and walks away...


...until, at the end of the alley, they are stopped by a bum asking for spare change. The older man gets hostile, but the bum is bemused, noting that this encounter seems familiar. After a few more moments of bluster, the bum escalates matters.



The bum offers them a choice: listen to their story, or pull the trigger. And yes, you can straight up murder them for one of the multiple endings. Since I don't think that would make an interesting post, I chose to listen instead. The bum begins their story at a party, and here we're introduced to our first major player in the story: Larry, the publisher. He's in the center of the picture below.


He's throwing a party at his apartment for all sorts of creative types: writers, artists, etc. You can even find the developers of the game in this first section (they're in the lower left corner) and talk to them a bit, but I chose to skip them in favor of progression. This is how we choose our protagonist; each character in the apartment save for Larry's significant other will offer him a drink, and who you choose to drink with is who you will play as.


This douchebag is Ron. I thought about playing as him because he looks a little like me and bourbon is my drink, but I can choose what I want to look like and in that case it's not going to be someone who looks like me.


This is Donovan. To me he resembles a light-skinned, punk rock Cinder and he has the same name as my middle name. He's the best looking male in my opinion and so that's who we're going to be playing as. Now that we've picked our character, Larry asks us to go get our 'friend' so we can all toast together. So we head out to the patio.


All of these characters (except for the dude with white glasses and light hair and the guy he's talking to) are our potential love interest. The guy with white glasses is our friend Darkeff; we'll talk to him more in Beaton. The dude he's talking to is one of the guys who wrote the soundtrack in another cameo, if that floats your boat.


This is Kira. She's hands-down the best looking love interest of all the available picks; sad to say, most of them kind of suck. However I'm not straight and neither is Donovan so we're not picking her. I just wanted to show her off.


This is Eric. The male love interest selection is slim pickings, and he's the only one that doesn't look like he both carries a pocket protector and can get his ass kicked by a decaying raccoon. Ain't nothing wrong with blasian love, unless you're some kind of bigot. Anyway, once you've made your selection, your love interest asks you to sign the card for Larry, prompting you to enter both your name and theirs. You can name them whatever you want, but I'm going with the canon - as an aside, the only way to find out their 'real' names is to not pick them and then run across them later in the game, but someone was helpful enough to make a guide on Steam that lists most of them.


We head inside as the title drops, and the game resumes with us talking to Larry and his girl. Everyone makes a toast, and we get to choose what we want to toast.


I chose To The Future! because Not Screwing Up! is literally impossible. We fade to black as everyone drinks.


The premise of the gameplay - such as it is - is laid out for us, and then we see our character sleeping as we get the credits along the bottom of the screen and someone slips a letter under the door. I skipped it for your convenience. Eventually our alarm goes off, but it turns out we programmed it wrong and we spend a few moments resetting it before we're given control of our character. There's a few miscellaneous things we can do here, but I immediately hit the menu to save the game.


Now the game truly begins. We're alone in our apartment. There's no cash to our name and all we have in our inventory is our alarm clock, our beeper, a sandwich (yes we slept with a sandwich in our pocket), and thirty blank pages in our journal. I'll end it here with a question: when we begin, we'll need to get some cash. So do we honor a promise, or do we assist someone in need? And just how honorable should we be?

I used to like this browser, but I dunno these days. If I have it open for more than an hour it just gets soooo slooow and laggy. Hell, even right now it's a good five or six characters behind what I'm actually typing. So, can anyone recommend a good browser for me? I'm only looking for a few things in one, from most to least important.

1. It runs smoothly.
2. It has a feature or plug-in like Unplug. (If you're not familiar, here's a link.)
3. It has a feature or plug-in like Lazarus. (If you're not familiar, a quick summary is it saves text entered in a field so you don't lose posts.)
4. It has a feature or plug-in like DownThemAll. (It's basically a download manager, but I like it best of the three or four I've used and would like one similar to it.)
5. I guess themes would be nice, particularly dark ones that are easy on the eyes.

(OOC Thread - discuss things, sign up, or just chat with the players here!)

It is 535 years since the founding of the Kernician Empire, and the fifth day of the fifth month. For the past year or so, relative peace has reigned over the continent - no major wars or border skirmishes have broken out, although there has been a sharp rise in crime that has led to the formation of many mercenary groups looking to get rich quick from killing bandits, taking their loot, and getting paid for it. Our story centers around one particular mercenary unit, the Dog Soldiers (led by the Austrysian loremaster Foster) and begins just after noon, in a low-rent tavern known as the Murky Goblet, in a small village named Merrowcliff. The beer is not the best but it is cheap, and the people here mind their own business.

---

Foster slammed the empty mug down on the bar to get the bartender's attention.

"Bartender! Another round for myself and my friends here!"

Once it was refilled, he raised the mug.

"Here's to another job well done, boys and girls. Good work Adelaide, Elian. I knew when I hired the pair of you, you wouldn't let me down."

The loremaster turned his attention to the prospects sitting with them. One way or another, they had heard of Foster's Dog Soldiers and were looking to join. He'd asked them to meet himself and two of his own so he could get their opinions on these three people.

"Well, anyway. Even if you guys don't make it in, you're getting free drinks out of it. You can't really lose in this situation. So, tell me a bit about yourselves. Nathara, Tyrone, and... Ralai?"

Foster tilted his head to the side. He just could not make out if he should be hitting on this last person or not. Nathara was obviously a woman, but she looked like a hard case that wouldn't appreciate casual meaningless flirting, and he wasn't into guys - even if they were as exotic and unusual as this Tyrone person looked. But the blond... hell, he was clueless.

"For example, where are you from, why do you want to join, and what would you bring to the table?"

Adelaide Sai, Elian Arelet, Nathara Meless, Tyrone Skyveers, and Ralai are in!

I suppose first I had better give a little background. I have almost zero programming experience - absolutely zero if one doesn't count some experience with the RPGMaker series. My goal is to create a program that will assist me in character/NPC creation by generating random numbers to get words from a series of tables and - hopefully, if at all possible - save the results as a separate text document. Otherwise, just printing them out for me to review would be enough but not preferable. I would want the results ordered something like this:

I am (male/female).
I am (fantasy race). (This is probably optional since it might not ever come up depending on what I'm wanting the character for.)
I am X years old. (If I could relate that to race in some way if I do use it, that would be nice. If not, I suppose just making a standard range would be fine.)
I am X inches tall and Y pounds. (If I could somehow relate these to gender, age, and/or race, that would be cool; if not, I could probably just do that manually each time.)
My hair is (color) and (length descriptor). My eyes are (color). My skin is (tone).
My best physical quality is (quality). My worst physical quality is (quality).
My best mental quality is (quality). My worst mental quality is (quality).
I am (descriptor) at (skill). (Probably a few lines of these - between three to six.)
I own a (quality) (item). (Probably a few lines of these as well.)

I heard Lua mentioned in the other Beginner's Programming thread and I'm taking a look at Python right now, but what's the best and/or easiest programming language to learn for what I'm attempting to do? I mean, I don't want anyone to do it for me, I want to learn how to do it myself so I can change, add, or modify things as necessary... although I wouldn't mind a few pointers to get me started. XD Anyway, thanks for reading the topic, even if you don't have any advice.

So I'm attempting a YOU ARE X suggestion game. There are a few things to know going in: players can make only one suggestion per turn. The PC can die; if so, a new protagonist will be created up to five times, after which it's game over. Updates will be whenever I feel like it. We'll begin with a 12-part questionnaire...

The year: 3517. The place: Cerberus IV, an Earth-like planet, the fourth from a yellow dwarf in the Marduk system. It was colonized one thousand years ago, and has been forgotten for almost that long, for shortly after its original discovery all the colonization teams were wiped out by the native life.

But with the invasion of the Algodal, humanity has been exiled to the farthest reaches of the universe. For the past three centuries, mankind has been battling for their survival on Cerberus IV, and has been depleted to a single city of twenty thousand citizens in a massive bunker inside Corryn, the largest mountain on the planet... or so it was thought.

Pocket civilizations grew from starships that had crashed in the jungles and deserts of Cerberus IV, and managed to eke out their survival despite the monstrous creatures that inhabited the planet. Resources ran low, and two formerly warring nations discovered the bunker and raided it, scattering the survivors. Some were absorbed into other tribes. Many were killed. The rest stuck together to rebuild their society, take revenge on the raiders, and unify Cerberus IV.

You are one of those survivors.

I've been playing a lot of Castlevania: Harmony of Despair recently. I've also been wanting to try my hand at running an RTD, so I thought I'd merge those two interests. This is my first time out as a GM, so hopefully I won't do too badly. ^^ This will be fairly serious, so please keep that in mind. Disregard that, I'd rather peeps have fun than take it too seriously. :3