Behold: the cover of Rage Quest: Disciple of Peace! This image won’t appear in the game itself, but will appear in the list of games on the IFComp website, and then on my own website when I move the game there. The image is from game-icons.net, an excellent resource of Creative Commons images.
The cover style is very loosely inspired by the covers of the UK editions of the Lone Wolf Gamebooks (title in white text on a coloured rectangle, with series title above and author name below).
It’s less than two weeks before the competition deadline, and the game is pretty much done. I’m going to spend some more time playtesting, proofreading, and doing final tweaks, but there’s nothing major missing and I’m fairly happy with how it is now. It’s about 30,000 words in total, including both text and code, and a typical playthrough takes about half an hour. It’s fairly easy to get a good ending but pretty hard to get the best ones.
I’ve found the development of this game more difficult than I expected, and I’ve learned a great deal from it. I’ve never written a game this non-linear before, and I wasn’t used to planning out the large-scale structure so that it would be satisfying. I changed my mind about the structure a couple of times during development, which probably made more work for me than was necessary, but I don’t think I was capable of planning a game like this properly before I’d written one, so the next time I write something like this I’ll know what I’m doing.
The game is on track to be released with the other IFComp entries on 1 October.