Weaver 2010/08/18(Wed)19:22 No. 21988 ID: 05dd93
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As for characters, when I designed the cast, I had only their roles in mind, though for my own convenience I sometimes referred to them by their shorthand names, as indicated in the only writing in the quest: the title card. I imagine they speak some manner of very short, simple language, and their single-syllable names are represented in the title card. The hunter is Ch, the sage is Ab, etc. The castaway's "civilized" name is presumably long and too difficult to pronounce, so it is shortened to just its first letter E. Color reference became the standard in the eyes of those playing the quest, unsurprisingly.

With the exception of the hunter, I avoided ever explicitly revealing any genders, either for the villagers or for the protagonist. Myself, I have an idea of who is which, but the protagonist was intentionally kept rather androgynous in order to let the narrative take a more open format, since in terms of storyline it was one of my least open-to-interpretation products thus far, despite the lack of language.

Weaver 2010/08/18(Wed)19:27 No. 21989 ID: 05dd93
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Which brings me to the 'gimmick' of the quest itself: The lack of text and dialog.

I thought it would be an interesting thing to try a textless quest, and the narrative of Chromhabere is textless as a means of representing a language barrier. The lack of words and visual shorthand is a bit hard to follow, especially during heavy character interaction, but this is actually intentional. The trouble the player has in interacting with the story reflects the diegetic trouble that the protagonist would have interacting with the villagers -- a cultural and linguistic barrier separates them, and communicating with and understanding them is somewhat difficult.
Somehow I failed to realize, of course, that this would result in very few suggestions. It's understandable and I shouldn't have complained, but the difficulty understanding the quest certainly would lead to something like that.

(incidentally, Chromhabere is a fake latinization based on the term for "one who has color")

Weaver 2010/08/18(Wed)19:32 No. 21990 ID: 05dd93
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All in all I enjoyed the little experimental quest for what it was. I have trouble letting go of ideas I like and just letting them end, so I'm tempted to expand on this in a more thorough way (and at times I wish I had included text after all, at least for narration) but neither of these are probably good ideas, and I really should just leave it be and get back to the other projects everyone has been waiting for.

There's not much to this quest, really. There's not a lot of ways to interpret it, because despite the lack of definitive text I tried to tell it in a way that is simple and universal, so understanding should come quite unambiguously. There's not much symbolism or metaphor or commentary at all really; it's very much a literal story, and the only exception I can think of is E's coloration at the end, where he/she turns from white to cyan, gaining color as a way of symbolizing they are now part of the group, and have accepted being (and been accepted as) a new member of the tribe.

So many words for a quest with none.
Thanks everyone, for playing along. I'd like to get your thoughts on this too.

I know it was short and surely not my best work but I wanted to try something different.

I liked it, but it is very difficult to convey abstract concepts without words, so a lot of things probably weren't as clear as you wanted them to be. I mean, I got that E was a castaway (because this was explained clearly with images), but I didn't even think to try and get him back to his home. :o

(Also y'know it's not like every quest you run has to move at that crazy fast clip you tend to run at. You could always wait longer between updates to get more suggestions [like many of the rest of us have no choice but to do most of the time] especially in a quest like this where you have to sit and think about things for a good bit longer than in a normal quest with words all over it. :V)

It was sometimes I didn't know what there was that we should do next. Suggesting took some thought and creativity. More than just problem solving and/or course correction, which is what the norm is, and what I'm used to...

Otherwise it was pretty neat, and only seldom confusing as to what was going on. Usually I just had to sit and look at it for a little while, running various possibilities through my head to see what fit best. I guess I'm just not used to it.

I'm going to guess at the genders now!
RO: Male
MH: Female
AH: Female
Er: Male
E: Female

It's the hips!

I think the experiment sort of didn't work. It was cute and all, but I don't think the 'textlessness' translated into an analogue for a language barrier, because there was also no narration or movement. More than anything, this just made the frames confusing and the action harder to follow. You had to use comic-style pictures to explain that the character was a castaway, which is really no better than having the character tell 'e' what happened - it was sort of a copout way of not having text and still explaining a story you couldn't clearly show through the images alone.

There also wasn't really much to the narrative, but even the very simple story was confusing instead of clear. I think Beakie did a much better job of doing a quest with no text. The goal was clear after the first few frames, and the action moved along to tell a complete (if ridiculous) story from start to finish.

There were good things about chromhabere too, though. The character designs were great, the pictures were cute, and what you were trying to do was interesting, you just relied too much on other characters in the story to explain the story or move it forward, rather than what was going on in the picture itself.

The textless interaction didn't hold an problems for explaining what was going on, but it DID make it hard to tell what effect, if any, suggestions had. That feeling of impotence may have contributed to the drop-off in suggestions.

>>331800
I'd attribute that more to the indirect control. For example, when black bandaged red, I thought "who told you to do that?", not "oh, cool, implicit interpretation of suggestions as rendering medical assistance". It was much the same kind of effect as railroading, even if the path there was substantially different.

I think the experiment has shown that indirect control is even worst for questing than an uncooperative protagonist, since at least the latter's personality can be considered an constraint of the game to work with. When Muschio doesn't want to be a direct puppet for the whims of the orb, it is at least due to a well-defined personality, and if we really want to make him, say, hug Finesse, we have to instead orchestrate or cajole things such that hugging Finesse becomes something he'd actually agree to do. There is still a direct and observable connection between player input and results.

>>331793
I made a big written-out post the other day about how this was more the effect of chronology than anything. If I'd started the story with the shipwreck it would have been fine, but what I couldn't think of a way to illustrate without shorthand was a flashback/memory sequence, so it had to be presented chronologically. In my defense I think pictures are far from cheating since they make sense diegetically, a touchstone any culture could move to in case of a language barrier.
But I lost that post so whatever~

>>331805
Very good insight. I suppose this was rather sub-par as a quest but as an experiment I rather enjoyed it and it's taught me a lot about questing as a medium.

Well, I thought it was pretty darn cute.

>>331808
Good god Weaver. You turned a textless quest into one of the smartest things I've ever read.