Voyage of the Marigold – Author's Notes

Summary

It has been over a year since I released Voyage of the Marigold, my similar-but-completely-legally-distinct homage to old-school Star Trek - high time for a retrospective post mortem. This post will contain spoilers, so I suggest you play Voyage of the Marigold at least once if you haven't already. Everyone gets audience award ribbons in the Spring Thing but these are mine, damn it.I was overjoyed with the reception that the game received in the Spring Thing 2024 festival. VotM did not trouble the best in show competition but received some very flattering reviews both in the competition forum and on the IFDB page. Even better, it was nominated in several categories in the 2024 Best of the Year polls, where again it didn't come close to actually winning but it gave me no end of pleasure to be noticed. VotM started life as one of those one-page solo RPGs that were popular for about a week during the pandemic. The original plan was to navigate around a 6x6 grid with random encounters. As I started designing the encounters I realized that it work better as a computer game. VotM is written in a combination of ink and javascript. ink is a idiosyncratic language but one that allows you to just sit down and write without worrying too much about coding. Although ink is very capable with some advanced data structures I found it much easier to do the really complex stuff in javascript and link it in. Speaking of which... The Map Taking inspiration from games like Slay the Spire and FTL, I wanted to provide the feeling of exploration in a cool maze that would be satisfying to wander through but not impossible to solve with limited information. I implemented Eller's Maze Algorithm (adapted from Tom Cantwells web page on the subject) which made mazes that were a little too hard. I spent a few evenings tweaking the algorithm until I had something I thought was difficult but fair. I had planned on a 6-by-6 maze for the original one-page design but figured I would never be able to w...