This month, after going dark for a year, we pushed a massive update to magehand.ink.
I’ve Been Working On This Full Time for A Year
If you were part of the Secret of Gloam Lake beta test over a year ago, you probably assumed this project is dead. I’m happy to report the opposite: I’ve actually been working on this full time over that year. Meanwhile my friend Andrew has been consistently working on the engineering side of it in his spare time. That early beta told us what we needed to know: that the concept wasn’t crazy.
What concept, exactly? What we’re calling “fantasy roleplaying fiction,” basically a fantasy RPG that’s 99% reading. No graphics, no battle system, no spreadsheet simulator, yet still delivering most of what I want out of a story-driven RPG. Things like character creation, compelling NPC companions, choices that affect the plot, exploration, puzzles, secrets, random elements, and of course, dramatic storylines within a compelling high fantasy world.
But the goal was never to make a one-off indie game for Steam or Itch. It was to create a solid foundation for a growing collection of interactive stories from multiple authors with an interconnected storyline, with a few tricks up its sleeve that could only be done in an online game. To that end, here’s some of the big changes with this update.
The Big Picture - A Roleplaying Campaign
Think of Mage Hand as an episodic fantasy campaign, and Secret of Gloam Lake as the first episode. Secret of Gloam Lake now exists as an “adventure module” of sorts within the web app, separate from character creation. Character creation is a bit deeper, without being numbers oriented. It’s more rooted in the world and connected to the story. The revised UI reflects all this, with a new landing page, a new “Campaign” screen, and a new Character Sheet.
Save Files
We’ve added a proper saving and loading system, with save slots like a typical video game. You can’t quicksave everywhere, as that might be too tempting to ruin the tension of choices and dice rolls. Instead, you can save at predetermined checkpoints, be it at the end of pivotal story scenes or at in-world, “Save Rooms” in the style of Resident Evil or Metroid.
Butterfly Effects
While each story has a separate codebase, the save file can include all your choices from all stories, and use them to affect any scene. It’s not just big choices that matter, either. Perhaps a character remembers a snide remark you made months ago. You might find a hidden key in one story that fits an optional door in another. Anything from Episode 1 could affect something in Episode 2, even if I didn’t think of that ahead of time.
The Need For Speed
Andrew re-engineered the app to run mostly on your own machine in the browser, while only pinging the server when necessary. This makes the user experience much, much faster and smoother. But it still allows us to still add some sneaky online-game features in the future, like having one player’s choices affect another player’s experience.
On our end, the way it compiles locally means it’s also much faster and easier to test stories as I write.
Improved Text Flow
Before, whenever you made a choice, the screen cleared to load the next chunk. Now, the next chunk of content can load in as you go. That makes things like conversations with a bunch of small choices feel more integrated and readable. The screen still clears at the author’s discretion, such as at the end of a scene.
Gloam Lake Improvements
If you played the last version of Secret of Gloam Lake, the story isn’t radically different. However, there’s a large number of small improvements and changes. Besides the general things mentioned above, the story now better accounts for your character’s identity. The location better reflects the world’s lore, which was a bit more vague when it was first written. Some bugfixes and bloopers were taken care of, too.
This Forum Now Exists
Discord is great, and we’re going to keep using it. In fact, you can use it to log into both the game and this forum. But given the nature of this project, I wanted a more permanent home for long-form posts like this one. For more thoughts on why I like forums so much, see Welcome! Or why I started a forum in 2023.
Collaborative Worldbuilding
Part of the grand plan is for the world setting of Mage Hand adventures to be a community project, easily usable by other creatives. For more about this, take a look at my Introduction to Veiled Age and Open Source Fantasy Worldbuilding posts.
What to Look Forward To
With the concept refined and a lot of the architectural hurdles cleared, we’re positioned to start updating things more regularly.
In the next few months, there will be a short intermission story, Friends of The Stranger, and then a second proper episode that’s even longer that Secret of Gloam Lake. Both are already drafted and mostly coded, but they need some more editing and polishing.
I’ll also be posting monthly updates here to highlight what’s new and how things are coming along. I’ll also use the forum to invite discussion on specific aspects of the project, from the story to the mechanics to the business model.