So, I’ve already put Secretnet on Kongregate. It has done pretty well for the two days it’s been up, and at the moment holds #2 in the Saturday-to-Saturday contest. Interestingly, another text adventure holds #1. In any case, Secretnet will likely soon be displaced by other games later in the week, but it is fun to hold a spot on the front page.

So, what about Secretnet’s future? I’m thinking about making a sequel.

It seems a little odd to commit to a sequel for Secretnet when I’m already working on one for Minerbot, but people have said they want them and I agree. In Minerbot’s case, I want to make a sequel that properly explores the concept of collectors with more long-lasting fun. For Secretnet, I feel kind of guilty–as if I didn’t make the story long enough, and I owe people the content.

Why I won’t just write new branches and content into the same engine:

This would be great, right? I could just take what I have, add on branches, write more lines, improve the gui a little bit, and I’d be done. Right?

Unfortunately not. The engine is quite buggy, but even worse is the way it stores data. Instead of some sort of tree or map form (or anything else you would expect from a branching dialogue system) the data is stored like this. If you’re too scared to click through the link (you should be!) I put it on its side and fit it to the article for you.

Here’s that little peek at the data:

There is one other data file–it links between different topics and keywords, and uses a similar formatting. It only has about 1/4 of the lines as the speech file, but that’s also just too big.

This would be fine if this was a linear game. For example, if this was a modern first-person shooter and all I was doing was adding linearly-executed dialogue. This works great for that. The problem is that I’m not doing anything like that–to write a branching game with this format you have to use the text editor’s find command on keywords to feasibly get things done. It was a massive pain, and soaked up a lot of time when I was working on it during the MiniLD.

Now you see why I don’t want to just start adding branches to the current system to make a sequel. That would be torture. I need to rewrite this, no matter what.

After I overhaul the engine, I have two basic ways to move forwards in the plot.

Option 1: Fill in the original

This would be neat, if I can convert my old data to the new format. Then I could just add more branches, and not worry about creating a whole new storyline and any new characters.

Option 2: Continue the story

I like this idea too. My first thought for a sequel was to bring in some new narrator, with a shock plot twist. That would be very fun, and in fact completely changes the meaning of Secretnet’s 100% ending. You’ll see what I mean if I make the sequel with this option.

Either way, I look forward to continuing the game. Secretnet was fun to write, and I can’t wait to write more without the frustration of looking through a gigantic text file to do it.