THE HEADLESS CHICKEN INCIDENT: A short interactive REPUNK story

THE HEADLESS CHICKEN INCIDENT is a small interactive adventure (visual novel) set in the universe of REPUNK, 50 years before the events of the main game.

It tells the story of YOU! trying to survive the craziest shift you have ever encountered while working for the Guild of Gardeners and Farmers.

We made this game for the scripto GGJ 2024, using a custom 2D mini javascript framework and scripto!

Technical details

The whole game was developed during 2024 GGJ, it only took a couple days. I used an old 2D framework of mine, which allowed me to focus on developing the game instead of the tech. A small parser was written specifically to handle scripto json files. I had some experience writing scripts, so using the tool felt natural; and I also implemented in the past multiple parsers for narrative games, which allowed me to go straight to the data and use it to our advantage. Having access to "raw" line data and a powerful WYSIWYG editor made the development really fast!

Overall, the goal was creating a very simple structure that was easy to develop and extend - adding new actors, commands or scenes was trivial.

Scenes & commands

The game is split into 6 scenes which are self-contained scripto scripts. "Action" blocks are used both for "commands" and setting "branch points". Scene Headings define the "background" we use for the scene. Actor blocks are used for displaying the name of each character and finally Dialogues are displayed as utterances. These types were powerful and flexible enough to allow us build everything that we needed.

I implemented a few commands which allowed us to completely control the flow of the game from the scripts themselves:

1. scene: loads a different scene (script)
2. sfx: plays a sound effect
3. show: displays an "actor" (preconfigured in the code - could be any graphical object) 
4. hide: hides an "actor"
5. nosteam: special command used to disable background fx
6. sound: plays a background looping sound
7. clear: clears the screen (including all dialogue and UI)
8. fade_out: fades out the whole screen to black
9. game_over: loads a special hardcoded scene "Game Over".

The game doesn't really contain an animation system - whenever you see an actor "moving" it's just swapping graphics from a predefined set available in code (particle effects were handled in code).

Branching points

For this game I wanted to work mostly with natural language, so I decided to set "jump points" for branching. Basically whenever I encounter an action block that is a number, I seek in the script all the options to present the player. Once the player choses one, the "current line pointer" jumps to that position, allowing to have a branching flow with unlimited number of branches. In scripto, it looks like this:

Randomized lines

Last but not least, I implemented in our parser "randomized lines" using | as a delimiter (split the dialogue line using the delimiter and randomly pick one). It doesn't change the overall structure of the game, but makes each run feel a bit more unique.

Thank you for playing! :)

 Credits:

• Almar... programming, writing, worldbuilding (@repunkgame) 
• Yigit... concept designer, art (@yigitcakar)
• LAAB... original music.

2024