/geekparty4

Visual novel from GeekParty 4, recreated with Jekyll

Primary LanguageCSS

"Falling apart"

An interactive novel for game jam "Geek Party", held in June 2013, dedicated to "visual novel" genre.

Originally written in russian from scratch (but jQuery and Twitter Bootstrap) in 10 hours, that version and drafts are still kept in this repository as a reference for recreation, which is now complete.

Why recreate

A while ago I've discovered an awesome static site generator Jekyll.

Though it's designed to create multi-page static sites, its simple yet versatile Liquid template language allows for easier scene composing from a set of files. If you look at the drafts, you may find that I've been doing somewhat the same, but assembled the result by hand.

That is, given a set of scenes written as Jekyll blog posts, one can compose a final accordion with all the scenes controlled by Bootstrap's "collapse" jQuery plugin. A convenient system for managing and building scenes has been developed in Liquid through the use of post-specific variables in YAML front-matter.

I've run into several minor bugs because of the need of assembling this novel by hand. Automating this stuff greatly decreases the risk of bugs popping out and reduces the amount of time required to fix them. I did have bugs at release, sadly. These have been fixed, with some minor text additions.

Repository structure

  • master branch contains original source, written at GeekParty
  • gh-pages branch contains the rebuild version, avaliable at http://apart.dside.ru