http://sicpvn.sdf.org
Does anyone have a copy of this? It looks like it was abandoned, but there could be more to it.
It was abandoned before anything was made.
>>2
I can relate to this
>>2
How tragic. How likely.
sad
I feel like this could easily be started back up. I don't know who would really be down to do that, but I'm sure there's someone here who would love to work on something like this.
>>6
I've made VNs before, and I considered posting something like "leave it to me." However, at this time I am preoccupied with some other nonsense and cannot devote sufficient time or attention to writing something that would be worth waiting over ten years for. I could halfass it, or I could do proper research and actually read the rest of SICP.
common op, stop being a sloppy faggot and do the fucking drawings
What's stopping us from just making it
>>9
Really nothing. Any of us could just crack in and get something made with no preparation, and it might even get finished.
The trouble comes from trying to meet your own standards of quality while working within your skill level and time budget. It’s easy to say "what it's missing is voice acting" or "the plot should contain an allegory for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand" but every scope increase is a footgun for any kind of creative work. I think this was the downfall of the revival project linked in the OP. Maybe the people behind it hadn't done anything like it before. Again, I like to think my experience lends me some wisdom in that regard, but I can't launch into it just yet.
True. Well just let us know whenever you plan on starting it (if you do lol), would love to see how it turns out :)
>>2
Sad! Many such cases. (╥_╥)
>>9
MAGIC! ╰( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )つ──☆*:・ﾟ
I Want to Believe.
Let's make our own VN of true SICP Quality!
>>16 gives the game a title
>>17,19 describes the setting
>>18,28,35 designs the characters
>>22-26 writes the H-scenes
>>21,27 picks the music
>>29 does the voice acting for the H-scenes
>>20 creates an antagonist
>>30-34 writes the twist ending
>>36 provides more instructions
>>15
No, pick the title last, after having some kind of plot synopsis at a bare minimum
Or just call it SICP VN
I agree. Just 'SICP VN' works well
I do think the snake needs a name beyond just "snake" and I was planning to call him Yomi, which in Japanese can mean "reading," "hell," or (more rarely, and if my memory serves) something along the lines of a sampler or preview you offer someone to pique their interest.
The other characters obviously have to be elaborations of Alyssa, Eva, Ben, etc. from the text of SICP itself. Cy could be short for Cyrus. Eva could be short for something. Not sure what.
The setting must of course be the magic tower, where spells are cast to conjure the spirits of the computer.
The wizards in the magic tower are misled by a cunning evil spirit to cast spells in C++ instead of Scheme, leading to a corruption of values that were once pure.
music
Pick your favorite SNES/MD/Genesis soundfonts and I'll write some stuff
The main character recounts past trauma of the snake trying to bite his dick off. Whether this should constitute an H-scene or not is up for further debate.
Since >>17-san didn't describe any setting, classical /prog/ literature dictates elements from the Touhou series, along with original ones like the functionally pure deserts of the Haskell Nomads, and the Land of Java where The Sussman sends his enemies. Those, along with the Camls could serve as the homelands of the warring factions which play a crucial role in the overarching story.
>>21
Could you do some in the soundfont from Umihara Kawase? It has a classic anime/VN feel to it, and I also just really like that game and it's music.
>>22
Sure, I'll give it a try
Alyssa rushes into my room, tears streaming down her face. "Eva broke up with me. Can I stay here tonight?" I give her the thumbs up. Then I put on my robe and wizard hat.
How's this?
Oh, Marisa... Ah~! Don't- Not there... No! You b-baka, I said no.. Ah, M-Marisa- No- not in there! Not with the snake!
Suddenly, a huge black snake head with retarded looking eyes materialized over her.
HAVE YOU READ YOUR SICP TODAY?
It said in a booming, ear piercing hiss. Alice shot up in a cold sweat and the snake disappeared in a cloud of parentheses before she could make out what it was. It was another one of those nightmares, she thought.
Alice took the butterfly dream pills from her nightstand, and popped one from the capsule into her hand. The puddle of piss under her soaked through to the sheets, so she rolled over to the other side of the bed. The dolls would clean it up in the morning.
She gulped her medication down with the cold tea that had been sitting there overnight, forgotten. The tea was bitter, and left a film in the roof of her mouth.
>>22
The SPC rips I found only had eight tracks, and there weren't too many different instruments
Do I have the wrong game or something?
In any case I threw something together as practice while I get used to the software I'm doing this with
https://files.catbox.moe/0edz4m.ogg
>>25
Sounds not bad! As far as I can tell most (or all?) of the tracks from the game use the same few instruments, so I wouldn't be worried. If you try using them all, it'd probably sound legit.
If you can find rips of them, the SM Choukyoushi Hitomi games might also be worth picking sounds from.
SM Choukyoushi Hitomi
Those were unlicensed and the usual places don't have rips, so obtaining them is way more involved
For now I'll supplement this with whatever I find lying around
What's the game engine we're using. Just Ren'Py?? or should we write a vn engine in scheme lol
>>28
Obviously it should be written in Scheme and compile down to Hitachi SuperH machine code to run on a Sega Saturn.
That might be too much work, though. Does anyone have experience with (for example) Dendrite? I'd like to avoid ever dealing with Ren'Py again.
Ren'Py
That is a heretical suggestion. Snake language will not be tolerated. The Scheme inquisitors have you on file.
>>28
That's the most reasonable option, and the choice of the original. Using Ren'Py has it's advantages since it's popular, free, and there's likely to be Python programmers here. It'd also make it easy to embed a Scheme interpreter into the game, the only other VN doing this being Mahou Gengo Lyrical Lisp, an NScripter game: http://lyrical.bugyo.tk/
If anyone through some sheer miracle ends up contacting the anons who last worked on it, we could pick up where they left off.
>>30
To eliminate as many lines of FIOC as possible, one could try using Ren'Py with an embedded Lisp like Hy.
Does anyone have experience with (for example) Dendrite? I'd like to avoid ever dealing with Ren'Py again.
My searches bring up zero results for anything called "Dendrite", please tell me more.
there's likely to be Python programmers here
I have my doubts.
Anyway, the ending. The protagonist has an existential crisis and/or mental breakdown over the inherently subjective character of meaning, even with all the power of symbolic computation at his disposal. The snake taunts him and leads him on a wild goose chase through his own unraveling sanity. Finally, he comes to terms with his unsettling phenomenological questions. It appears he may have somehow merged with the snake. He looks in the mirror and declares, "I have read my SICP today."
>>33
https://github.com/ChrisBlom/dendrite
It seems dead, but I couldn't think of the names of any other projects like it.
>>34
Very nice. Reminds me of how I reacted when I first read the Touhou kopipe.
>>35
I see this is meant to work with Chicken scheme, and if we were really going to use a Scheme-based engine that calls into question which implementation to use. Is Chicken versatile enough? For obvious reasons MIT Scheme is a worthy contender, but its audiovisual capabilities are primitive at best. Racket might be promising, but that would require writing Racket, and not Scheme.
As for the instructions:
>>37-40 decides which engine to use
>>41,48 writes the prologue
>>42,46,49 picks more music
>>43,45,51 writes the character bios
>>44 gives the chapters titles
>>47,50 writes the epilogue
>>52 provides more instructions
>>32
In theory, you don't write any actual Python when scripting a Ren'Py game. All the dialogue, animations, and even UI layout are supposed to be done through a custom language that is parsed and expanded into a graph of Python objects. The engine traverses this graph to predict what assets need to be loaded at what points in the story, thus allowing you to play through the whole game without ever seeing a loading screen. This is not a bad idea on paper, and any competing VN engine should more or less aim for this same design.
The problems are with the implementation. The documentation is extensive, but not thorough, largely because the DSL layer is a leaky abstraction. You can "see through it" to numerous internal details of the engine itself. Interacting with some of these does involve writing Python. Understanding their behavior usually involves reading the source code. In some cases you have to write C and rebuild the entire engine to change how things work.
Introducing another language to this mess would not fix anything. Use Ren'Py with its DSL or throw it out completely and write something better from the ground up.
people are actually considering using python for this
>>38
I'm >>7,10,18,34,37 (and a few others).
There are always tradeoffs to be made between doing something correctly and just getting it done. As I have said, I am against it both on principle and because of past experience with its flaws, but if people are so eager to get this thing made that they can't wait another couple months to see some text superimposed on a background image, then fine, go ahead and use Ren'Py and make a proof-of-concept. You could even use PowerPoint for all I care. Port it to an engine written in Scheme once you run up against the limitations inherent in the tools that are close at hand.
If people can have slightly more patience, but can't contribute enough effort to write it in Scheme, maybe Common Lisp is a better compromise. That Shinmera joker made a game with SBCL. I've had my eye on the dialogue engine for a couple months. It wouldn't be a bad starting point.
>>39
I don't think anyone should reasonably assume the whole game to be written in Scheme, despite the major hack value that might bring; having parts of the game utilize an embedded Scheme interpreter would be novel enough, IMO.
If it turns out Ren'Py truly is too limited for our needs and if someone actually conjures up a usable alternative, then we should surely make it happen.
As for using CL I am much more familiar and comfortable with it than Scheme, so there's 1+ potential programmers.
In other news, I made an IRC channel for this board, as evidenced here: http://textboard.org/prog/715
Assuming there's real interest present we could house less pedantic discussion there if need be. I'll try to be as responsive as I can.
>>40
I acknowledge your IRC channel, and I won't be joining it at this time. Later, possibly, once I've decided how much of an identifiable persona I want to attach to my involvement in this project. I'd prefer (near-)total anonymity, but productivity requires sacrifices and this may turn out to be one of them.
That said, I do have some thoughts for a prologue. I'll need to set up my thought process here. Bear with me.
Before people jumped in and started pushing for collaboration, I was actually planning to do this without sex scenes; I've been writing too many of those lately, I invariably make them weird, and I wanted to take a break from doing that. However, people talking about them like a foregone conclusion has helped me develop mental images of some of the characters.
(I'm still focusing on names and personalities from SICP itself and ignoring the touhous; I don't "get" Touhou and can't do a decent job of writing those characters without first researching the franchise and its outrageously prolific fandom. That really sounds like a lot of work I don't want to do, on top of all the work this project will already involve.)
Alyssa and Eva are central to SICP and its "fandom." For now, I'll treat them as the primary heroines. Because of memes, I've decided they must be dating each other already, but the player can to some extent romance either/both of them.
They need a strong contrast between them. Eva is tall and Alyssa is short. Eva is rigid, serious, and definitely autistic; Alyssa is playful, maybe even slutty. Eva is a rationalist (hard R) and Alyssa is a pagan or even a Discordian.
The player first encounters Alyssa in a crowded public place of some kind, maybe a train, before discovering she's his classmate. They bump into each other as total strangers and flirt somehow. Maybe she grinds on him or invites him to grope her. When they run into each other again on their first day of class, things are a little awkward. Eva picks up on their chemistry and acts jealous and protective. Maybe she doesn't like or trust men.
At this point their relationship is destabilized. By getting closer to either of them, the player might destabilize it even further, and one of them eventually ends up in his bed. After that, they can reconcile, or just continue dating the player, or they all have a threesome. Whatever.
I can add more romance options, but after these first two, I will make each of them increasingly ridiculous, especially if they're touhous. Pick your poisons, people.
While >>21 is (hopefully) busy composing a memorable and heartwarming soundtrack, I'll suggest this: http://daifukkat.su/files/We%20conjure%20the%20spirits%20of%20the%20computer%20with%20our%20spells%20(Extended%20%60%60Satori''%20mix).mp3
>>41
For romancing/sex scenes, making them weird and even far removed from what one could consider romance or eroticism should be part of the appeal. I don't know if you've read any of the old /prog/ kopipe but a lot of it is centered around bizzare fetishistic situations.
If you don't want to write about Touhou then someone else like me probably will, we can stitch it all together haphazardly at the end anyway. I thought what might be cool is have each character will have a parallel with another, like one SICP character will have a Touhou counterpart, etc. That might mean having to accommodate their personalities, but Touhou characters are pretty open to interpretation by nature.
If you ask me attaching names beyond the site itself goes against the spirit of an anonymous project, so I wouldn't worry about needing an 'identifiable persona'. One nice thing about IRC is you just pick a name and connect, you can just use a different one every session if you want.
threesome
sex scenes
Sex is not allowed because society would prevent minors from reading the visual novel. Any decision that would cause the exclusion of minors from the indoctrination of SICP is detrimental to the long-term survival of SICP and Scheme.
Apart from the biblical characters and Mickey and Minnie, no SICP character has ever had or will ever have sex. Oliver Warbucks prefers employees who are virgins, chaste, and celibate. The company name, Microshaft, is a reference to the small sausage of castrated males. Ben Bitdiddle is rumored to be an eunuch who was castrated to avoid being sexually distracted when conjuring spirits and casting spells.
>>43
I am hereby enlisting Ben Bitdiddle as the third heroine/gay option. His sex scenes will comprise pages and pages of "AAAAAAHHHH!!! AH! AAAAaaaaaaaargh, ah, AAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!" while the player fucks him in the ass.
>>44
I second this
>>42
That was surprisingly difficult to listen to.
epilogue
I thought about this for a while. The ending I described in >>34 has the line "I have read my SICP today," which is (obviously) a reversal of the meme, and it will hit hardest if it's the very last line in the game.
So, an epilogue of sorts is fine with me, as long as it occurs in between the final confrontation with the snake and the moment when the player looks in the mirror. That more or less implies it will be an inner monologue. I just have no idea what the player character would actually be contemplating apart from the setup for the last line. It would depend on the rest of the story.
I feel like the people who are going to be doing one thing (writers, artists, etc) should each make their own board. I know most of us want to keep our anonymity, but trying to do it all on one board would (and has been) way too much
>>48
When has it been too much? I can understand the difficulty of following an indiscriminate stream of everyone's ideas, but that's just how an anonymous project like this ought to work, and it's a terrible idea to try and fragment it when nobody can be sure that anyone's committed. I understand and respect that anonymity is part of the site's spirit, and it's perfectly adequate to keep it that way. Like I tried to say in >>42, we should be able to gather in another place like IRC if we want to, and using pseudonyms isn't really a big deal; however keeping all potential interest in one place should be the goal.
>>48
You want one board for writers, one for artists, one for musicians, etc.?
Did you mean "thread?"
>>50
Yes, sorry. Long day
at this time I am preoccupied with some other nonsense
That's finished now.
I'm writing the prologue. Will check in when I have more to show for it.
I'll avoid bumping this thread for a while while I gather research materials.
Interactive map of MIT buildings:
Map of the main campus with the tunnel system highlighted in red:
https://web.mit.edu/facilities/maps/mit_Tunnel_map.pdf
Blog post about hanging out in the tunnels:
https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/underground/
I'll base some details on real locations, but I've never actually been inside any of these buildings and I don't want to bother traveling to Massachusetts any time soon. Most of the action will take place in an imaginary "magic tower" or "ivory tower" that supposedly gets built in the future. It could either replace the Strata Center (and be a parody of that building) or one of the other buildings that looks like something normal instead of a nightmare. I haven't decided yet.
Synopsis of prologue:
The player is a freshman, on his way back to campus for the first day of class after partying at some other school (like Northeastern). He boards a red line train and bumps into Alyssa for the first time. They get off at the same stop, not realizing they're classmates, and have an awkward walk to the lecture hall together. Substitute instructor Yomi (the SICP snake) begins class and assigns whatever homework. (Their "real" teacher is mysteriously absent throughout the story.) After class is dismissed, Alyssa rushes to talk with the player. Eva intrudes on their conversation to size him up. Her first lines are some sort of thinly veiled threat.
After that, they'll have several more classes together where the player gets the chance to become closer to different characters (Alyssa, Eva, Ben... maybe others) before the routes fully diverge.
The actual curriculum is very malleable, and in different years they skip some parts and focus on others. I'm considering incorporating that into the story and using different material for different routes, but I haven't decided how much actual SICP content to intersperse with the drama. I'll start out leaving all of it as placeholders while I work on the story. It can be rewritten into real excerpts/exercises during later revisions.
I will include some Touhou references, and imply that the Touhou characters are real and working or studying at MIT, but they won't be a major presence because that would be too much of a distraction from working on the core content.
Some of the characters are very well-formed in my mind. Eva is the best-developed right now. I can get a lot of mileage out of her special combination of confidence and social awkwardness. For example, during Alyssa's route, she will appear out of nowhere to tidy up Alyssa's clothing. When informed that she's interrupting a date, she will tell the player, "You can leave now."
Ben is the least well-developed. I need to read more SICP.