# Overview

A revisit of one of our older games, Xermatt Zero. This time we chose to see how much polish we could crank out in the 3 day window, when we already had an idea of what to build.

Conceptually it’s similar to Zero, but the monster requires more active management instead of the passive approach we used in Zero

# Design

We tried to mimic the feel of older visual novels like YU-NO. Aesthecially, I feel like we hit that vibe pretty well.

Mechanically though, I’m not very happy with how it turned out. Giving the player a button to delete the threat de-fangs the monster. By the time they realize these were a limited resource, it’s too late. Zero succeeded here by simply giving the player a very clear single answer to the monster: Hide.

The monster in Redux went through a few different designs, originally I wanted each item to have a different effect, with the lures holding the monster in a specific room for a few turns. Players would constantly trap themselves with this though, so the items quickly turned into “turn off the monster” buttons. If I had more time, I would have workshopped more ideas, but I had to write the story too.

# Narrative

Zero didn’t have a real cohesive story. I sort of just wrote dialogue between three weirdos and we sort of decorated it with some story beats as we went.

Redux follows a lot of the same design principals, but I had a better framework for what I wanted to happen this time around. We had planned there to be additional chapters of Redux later, with the trio landing planet side, where they’d discover the monster had no trouble surviving atmospheric re-entry, while dealing with broken and abandoned hardware and a less than sane scientist who had stayed behind. This would culminate in a third chapter where they would escape the planet.

But for the Jam, we knew we didn’t have time for any of that, so most of the work here was just spending more time letting the player get to know the cast. I wrote significantly more than I did in Zero, and I feel like the characters had hardened a bit more form the gelatinous blobs I had created in Zero.

Overall I’m mostly happy with the writing, even if it’s a bit painful in a few spots. It was a good chance to spread my wings and grow in that front since Redux didn’t have a ton of code to write.

# Tooling

One of the big changes was the new narrative tool. Zero was written with a tool I wrote called Butai, which was my first stab at narrative work. I learned a lot from that tool, and had a bunch of ideas I want to implement to make it faster and easier to build branching stories, as well as just solve common patterns I would fall into with Butai.

Thus I created Flow.

Flow mostly started as just me porting Butai to Imgui, since the tech I’d written it with originally was falling apart at the seams. BUt it quickly grew into its current form, which included comments, live text previer, and custom nodes that could easily be written per-game to meet those needs.

I’m quite happy with how this version of the tool turned out, and as of the time of writing, I’m still using it.

# Play

The current web build can be found here.