The Disillusionist is a web-based, narrative-heavy video game about a private detective in a world where magic exists. If that sounds like your cup of tea, the most recent release is always hosted at this project's GitHub.io page. Just click on that link and you'll be playing. The game will automatically save after every action, so you can close the window and come back at any time to continue. Note that the game is saved to your computer, so your saved game will not follow you if you move to a different computer.
As a noir-influenced story, this game contains content and themes that some people may find objectionable. It is not suitable for children, tweens, or young teens.
This game runs in a web browser. It has been tested in recent versions of Chrome and Firefox, and these are the recommended browsers. However, it should work in the most recent versions of Internet Explorer and Safari as well. It will not work on versions of Internet Explorer lower than 11.
This game is designed to be played on a computer. It is not optimized for mobile and may work poorly or fail to work on your phone or tablet. My apologies, but I had to spend my limited time during EXPER3 wisely, and redesigning the UI for a second platform was not high on my list of priorities.
In 2014, my wife gave me the best 30th birthday present I could have asked for by challenging me to make some real progress on my dream of making video games. She organized a themed video game jam, which she dubbed EXPER3, for which I had to make either a game a week for four weeks or one game in a month. You can read more about that and check out the results at its GitHub repository.
Since that went so well — except for me not continuing to make any more games once the jam was over — we decided to make this an annual event and run EXPER3 again in 2015. As with the inaugural year, EXPER3 ran from July 12th to August 12th, inclusive. The theme was ILLUSION.
EXPER3 has always had the option of creating either four mini-games in four weeks or one medium-sized game in a month. For 2015, I decided to make one game in a month. The reason being that in the previous year, EXPER3 helped me rediscover my love of narrative in games, but I didn't really have a strong narrative in any of my creations because of time constraints. So for 2015, I wanted to make something narrative, and that meant taking more time. It also meant the game was less technically ambitious than the previous year's games, as I wanted to focus on making the story solid.
The Disillusionist is what Sam Ashwell calls a "Floating Module" game or what Alexis Kennedy calls a "Quality-Based Narrative". I really love Fallen London, and I've read nearly all of Kennedy's writings about the theory behind it. I thought (and still think) that there's a lot of potential in this relatively novel form, and The Disillusionist was my first foray into exploring it.
Unfortunately, every existing QBN game engine had been formally or effectively abandoned. Even Failbetter's own StoryNexus was in maintenance mode after it failed to attract enough of an audience to fund its continued development. And while I could have hacked Twine to work, it wouldn't have been a supremely user-friendly workflow. So I coded my own framework during the first week of the challenge. While far from general-purpose enough to work for anyone else's game, it does what this game needs it to, and the seeds for something more general-purpose are certainly visible.
If you want to build the code for yourself, instead of just using the hosted version, you'll need to have node.js, npm, and gulp installed globally. (or at least somewhere your PATH can find them) All other dependencies will be downloaded to the project folder by npm and will not affect your system configuration. These steps should work on any operating system that has a node.js implementation.
After checking out the code, you'll want to use npm to install the dev-dependencies needed for compilation, which are numerous.
npm installWith that complete, you're all ready to compile! There are several gulp tasks configured, but the relevant ones are
gulp buildto compile all source code to the out/ directory, and
gulp serveto serve up the results from a local webserver that can be connected to on localhost:8080. Note that this task will not terminate on its own and must be terminated (with CTRL-C or your OS's variant) when you are done.
Lastly, the default gulp task
gulpwill build all sources and then serve them up while also watching for changes and rebuilding as necessary. Very useful for development, not so useful for just trying out the game.
The game is written in the following languages:
It uses the following libraries:
Dependency management is handled by npm and task running is handled by gulp, which both run on node.js.