Foolish Earth Creatures: May 2025
Foolish Earth Creatures is a duel between the hero and the villain, but they aren't the only people in the story. As I've been filling in my placeholder structure with first draft text this month I've been fleshing out some secondary characters.
The first is Vorak's right-hand-cyborg, General Zorg. I came up with the name on the fly when I wanted someone for Vorak to shout orders at, but as I've done the writing she's developed into a character of her own.
Whereas Vorak is physically puny, General Zorg is a huge, heavily armoured cyborg with super-strength and integrated weaponry. She's also (or so Vorak claims) the greatest military mind in the galaxy (Vorak himself would claim to have the finest scientific mind). When Vorak launches his invasion of Earth, it's Zorg who leads the army in person, while Vorak oversees the invasion from the safety of his orbiting dreadnought.
(Now that General Zorg has become a proper character, I think the name might be a bit too on the nose even for the genre pastiche I'm going for. I'll think about changing it later in the writing process.)
On the other side of the duel, where would a space hero be without a loyal sidekick? In the spirit of letting you create your own space hero, I'm also letting you name the sidekick.
When naming both the hero and the sidekick, you can click on the dice to fill in a random name. The sidekick names are drawn from the same pool as the hero names. I was thinking of assembling a separate sidekick name list, but I got the code working using the hero name list as a placeholder and I decided I liked it. (I've added a check to stop it generating the same name for the sidekick as the hero.)
The sidekick gets introduced a little way into the story, and their exact relationship with the hero will depend on what's happening at that point. If you're blasting off in a space fighter to intercept Vorak's command ship before it lands, the sidekick is your wingman, but if you start the game another way they'll be someone else.
Adding a sidekick means I can have moments where you choose whether you or the sidekick will do the dangerous thing, or whether you'll prioritise rescuing them over completing the mission. Also, without wanting to spoil the plot too much, it's possible that they might be captured and need rescuing later on.
Anyway, work is continuing steadily on the game. Here's what my Twine outline looks like now. It doesn't look all that different from last month's image, but if you compare them you'll see that the passages in the first part of the story have moved around a bit and some of them have changed from red to yellow or green.
My objective at the moment is to get the first part of the story (up to the first bottleneck in the structure) first-draft complete. Once I've done that I might ask for some playtesters to see whether the game will appeal to anyone but me.
Can our hero and their sidekick defeat the evil General Zorg? Learn more in next month's developer diary!