A simple engine for creating HTML5 choice-based games. Think super-simple Visual Novel. Built with Meteor.
Play/test it here: https://valvolt-storiz.herokuapp.com/
I finally managed to fix the concurrent access issue ! In Meteor, Sessions are shared by all users. So when two players were playing, each click on one button would refresh both pages, making the game unplayable. Now you can register and login. As long as two players run as a different user they should be fine.
I learned a lot more how the refresh 'magic' of Meteor does work in the process, I rewrote almost the engine from scratch and removed code which worked but was really ugly.
'Autologin' will create a user session (without password) which will eventually be destroyed. This is convenient if you don't want to create a user account. Anonymous users won't have access to Achievements and Save/Restore features (on the TODO list).
Enjoy, and as usual, feedback welcome !
cd storiz
meteor npm install
meteor npm install --save uuid
meteor
then from your web browser, go to http://localhost:3000
[New] - Added a profile page for the user, where his achievements are displayed. Added an 'achievement' field as well for stories. As usual, features.json shows how this works. There a some known limitations.
[New] - Added an actual short sci-fi story named D3mons to give you a better feel of the engine - I hope you'll enjoy it :) With this story I come closer to the original idea I had when creating Storiz: a platform for cool stories which intermix with other types of gameplay such as hacking exercises. Don't expect real hacking there though, all you have to do is choose well where you click :) There is a hidden golden ending to show what achievements shall look like, but the feature is still under development as I'm writing this.
[NEW] - Added 'Credits' feature. Use this to credit artists who contributed to your stories. Players can show/hide them from the top menu.
[NEW] - Played a bit with the CSS formatting. Now on laptop screens the text and choices will appear on the right side of the screen, removing the need to scroll back and forth. If you narrow the window or if you play on a mobile, the text should appear under the picture as before.
[NEW] - Instead of creating an account, one can now use the 'autologin' feature. At the login page, click on the 'login as anonymous' or go to /autologin. This will create an anonymous user without a password. Only the last MaxAnonUsers users will be kept on the database (default value: 1000).
[NEW] - I've added a new private collection storing the story flags (e.g. Stuff keys) out of the main PlayerData collection. As this new PlayerFlags collection is never published, this avoids a data leak which could help players to cheat.
[FIXED] - Upon the first story load, the server does not push its data to the client. The workaround is to refresh the page once. I still do not understand why since after this refresh everything runs smoothly...
[NEW] - Now instead of hardcoding your story path, you edit /private/stories.json. This will populate a page where from users can choose which story to play. Also, they can now click 'exit' to go back to the story menu or 'restart' to reload the story
[FIXED] - Since the engine does not handle users, if several users play concurrently each choice made by each user will affect all the other users
[DONE] - create user accounts
[FIXED] - There is now an 'under construction' error message in case a non-implemented tile is being chosen
[NEW] - Added sound support. Looping, continuous music can be played with 'music'. One-time, tile specific sounds can be played with 'sound'.
[NEW] - Choices which require items to activate can now be completely removed ("disable":"invisible") instead of the default behavior which grey them out (same as "disable":"grey").
[NEW] - You can now create several tiles with the same ID. One of them will then be picked at random. Use this to add some replay value to your stories !
[DONE] - make cheating more complex: IDs are now replaced by UUIDs generated at server start, making difficult to predict where each choice will lead (especially if two choices lead to the same page). Item management is now server-side only, making impossible to see which choice gives/uses which item or how to enable greyed-out choices.
[DONE] - only one 'required' item at the moment, should be replaced by an array => you can now specify an array for 'requires', 'item' and/or 'uses' elements.
[DONE] - uninstall 'insecure' package of Meteor (and debug the subscriptions)
[NEW] - add heatmaps (pictures with coordinates, each associated to a transition just like a choice)
[FIXED] - Greyed-out options should be ungreyed from the start when player has the correct item in stock, not only upon choosing the item
[FIXED] - 'required' objects only work on page 1, for some reason method 'enabled()' only works for tile 1
[FIXED] - The current version uses 'name' for storing required object and 'value' for storing the target tile when clicking on a . This should be replaced by something more free-form with dedicated tags (using name and value for this is ugly).
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Achievements are not persisted when exiting from a story, and are not available at all if no story was loaded. This should be easy to fix though.
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CSS is desesperately needed
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An editor should be developed, for that I need to add user roles, create an admin account, and let it edit / create tiles
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UUIDs are generated at server start, not game start, making replay attacks somewhat possible. A better solution would be to generate UUIDs at each click.
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Since all assets are stored in the /public folder, forced browsing is possible if resources have predictable names (e.g. 1.jpg 2.jpg etc.). Not sure much can be done to prevent this (of course you can choose to create assets with cryptic names :)).
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persist progression in DB (for logging / scoring, storing history of visited tiles etc.)
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add a 'save / restore' feature for continuing a story at a later time
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add an 'achievement' system
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make a tile editor (possibly with direct upload of pictures / videos to folder /public)
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update the demo tour Youtube video with the latest content of the sample story (credits, achievements, content floating, ...) and with user actions (registration, login, restart story, ...). I should also resize the video as well as some images which are too large and overlap with the text when displayed side-by-side (max supported width is 580px)