Floating Stories

Floating stories is a story prompt generator in the form of a game made in Game Maker 2, where the player pops balloons to get specific lines of text that in combination create the beginning of a fantasy story.

More details and download:

https://victoria-grunberg.itch.io/floating-stories

Synopsis:

Sometimes inspiration doesn’t strike, but don’t let your stories float away into the sky! Embark on a whimsical journey of knights, queens, dragons and treasures as you pop balloons to spin fantastic tales.

Mechanics and goal:

There are three categories of balloons:

Green - represent characters.
Purple - represent locations.
Blue - represent situations.

Each category of balloons has five different variations of characters, locations and situations clearly marked by a specific symbol, and each variation stores its unique line of text.

For example:

Character: Dragon

Text: A dragon sleeps, waiting for errant knights looking for battle.

The player’s goal is to select three balloons from the available colors, in order to create a story from the combination of the lines of text. The challenge lies in choosing the balloons according to their unique symbols, because they hide intriguing snippets of text that cannot be accessed until the balloon is clicked.

Fact sheet:

Genre: Arcade/Fantasy
Platform: PC
Team: 1
Development: 3 months
Music: Skye Cuillin by Kevin Macleod

My goal: Creating a very simple game where I could explore an area previously unknown to me which is programming, while combining my love for creating stories.

In the beginning of the development of Floating Stories, the game was much more straightforward and simple. I was looking to make an arcade type of game, where the player needed to pop different balloons according to colors or symbols to get the highest score possible. My intention was to achieve a realistic goal considering my programming skills in the time frame needed to complete the project. After much deliberation about the simplicity of the initial project, and having completed the necessary code to get the basic mechanics, I decided to expand on my idea to include my interest in narrative. To achieve this I added lines of text to each specific balloon, that combined in a certain way could create a story.

Prompt generators are something that I use often when I can’t think of an idea, or when I want to be creative but I need something to start with. My goal is for this game to work as a jumpstart to make different kinds of stories. One of the challenges was in writing the lines of text in a way that proved the combination made sense when it was revealed. I quickly realized there was a specific grammatical structure I needed to follow, and as long as I used the correct words (especially at the beginning and end of each sentence) the combination worked.

I chose to use elements that are closely related to fantasy, because I think fantasy is a fun genre that can be very creative to make stories, and allows room for many types of characters, locations and situations. Also, the symbols on each balloon were easier to decide within a fantasy setting.

In the future I would try to expand on this game to make more variations of balloons, with more characters, locations and situations, so the amount of stories can be larger. I would also attempt to improve on the assets to make them more visually appealing, and add animations to make the game more natural looking.

In a hidden castle of golden marble over the clouds...