I don't know about a reboot, but the non-interactive sequel to this (and my other interactive fiction game) is about 85% done -- feel free to read it here and leave any comments if you (or anyone else reading this comment) would like: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tOaAliopX50DHNaaDl9FYzzTHGTXy44mp3hk_nalrTM/edit?usp=sharing
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I would like to get all the endings, but at the same time I'm often just too incapable of making my fictional avatar do the things required to get them. It was already difficult enough gritting my teeth and telling other me to call the police (I've seen movies before, I'm not stupid), now you're expecting me to grab the parachute and let the otter and kitty (and I guess the hot chick) die? I can't do this man, I'm still recovering from having to publicly admit to wanting to read victoria's secret. It's too much pressure!
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I found this on Twitter today and for some reason I felt compelled to share it here: https://twitter.com/Scuffdere/status/957612335098728448
There's one very early on that a lot of people miss, if you just refuse to go along with the story. Otherwise check the "Endings" link on the title screen and see which number you're missing. Send me a private message with whatever it is and I'll give you a hint! :)
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Best ending?
---SPOILER ALERT---
God taking mdma and stopped hating on humanity and living peacefully with them, so aww
Yeah, there are actually a few sentences like this intentionally sprinkled throughout the story, where there's a second meaning if you read her name as the lowercase "faith," but the example you mentioned is probably the most overt. Faith's character was intended to be a metaphor for exoteric religious dogma, but admittedly I only went 90% of the way with this because sometimes her character steps out of this representation a bit. Or maybe that's just because she's growing out of it, and her personality is developing?
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*Rolls eyes another antitheist on the internet. These days even China is less anti-religion than the internet. The internet has been a foul hive of incessant mockery of religion for a decade now.
This is a fair criticism, and honestly one that I thought would be more common. There was a conscious decision on my part to push an anti-religion/drug war message with this story, and there are a few parts where it crossed a line and came at the expense of the actual storytelling quality itself. I'm making an effort to not cross this line again with any future fiction-writing projects.
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So, i know this game is 3 years old now ( wow that's crazy to think about ) But i love to revisit it from time to time to experience it again. It's one of my favorite if not my number one favorite thing on kongregate, I would like to congratulate the author on a very polished piece of art, And wish him the best of luck with his novel.
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I haven't played this game since last summer in August, after which I left a comment asking for a sequel. How far how have you gotten on the story you were talking about?
I have gotten into the beginnings of a few first drafts, but they've all been pretty terrible, so I've had a few "back to the drawing board" moments. This game also had quite a few terrible earlier drafts, so I'm thinking/hoping that I just need to get all the terribleness out of the way before anything good comes out. Still working through the terribleness, though! We'll see how much of that is still left... You can read a story summary here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aTjWSc9spov7R5qDG86CVzma_cNWqRjnuTs_eOJPDCI/edit?usp=sharing But I'm really unhappy with how the first drafts have turned out so far, and I think I'm going to try another draft where all the events are out of chronological order, but more thematically related in their "flow" from one to another.
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Good god, the descriptions of the drugs are so... *vivid*. Even weirder, some of the trips, especially the ones from the mushrooms, are so familiar to me, and I've never done drugs! I get that whole OH MY GOD THIS IS SO UNBELIEVABLE I EXIST OH MAN pretty regularly on the nights I can't fall asleep.
I'd SO do drugs if they ever become legal. :)
Congrats on being more spiritually awake (through non-chemically-induced means) than the author might have been when he wrote this! It sounds like maybe you don't need the extra "help." :)
It's probably still a few years out. :( I have the outline done, but I keep changing things. And I need to actually write it... I'll probably post the outline soon, though, if people want to provide feedback and have everything spoiled. Later edit: I have now done this! http://www.kongregate.com/forums/5-the-arts/topics/687326-summary-of-reality-tunnels-a-graphic-novel-i-havent-actually-written-yet
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Revisiting this piece a couple of years later, I think I can appreciate this game a lot better than when I first played it. This is a fundamentally different story from TDS: it is much more humourous, though much of it is derived from irony, the storylines keeps branching out instead of converging together, and while there is buildup, there is no climax, only acceptance. And all of these quirks are not necessarily a bad thing, and I've come to enjoy them quite a bit, but they weren't an easy pill to swallow when I was still busy being enchanted by TDS and expecting the same sort of story. But now I do, and I'd like to both thank and congratulate you for this great piece of writing. Here's to hoping that I can read more of your works in the future, <3.
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Best interactive fiction i've ever seen!Who could think god,satan,alien and god's drug taking daughter will get involved when purchasing a new tv set?
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Ah, I remember playing this game when it first came out in Kong Beta. Now revisiting it 2 years later, it gives a new perspective on me wanting to become an aerospace engineer, haha.
Do it! For humanity! The cosmos are ours for the taking, just begging for conquest! On a related note, I watched "Gurren Lagann" right after writing this -- that series conveys some of the same themes and messages way better than I did, and I can't recommend it enough in the context of feeling motivated to pursue aerospace engineering. PIERCE THE HEAVENS!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLiqvHYi4mo
This game/story was an enormous passion project for me. I'd been writing and rewriting about a dozen different drafts in my head and in Notepad for about 16 years (this game is by far the most condensed version -- I wanted to make the whole story as short as possible). I eventually wrote this final draft down and paid for the art and music out of pocket, with no plan to generate any revenue. Seeing everyone play/read/react to this is the REAL payoff for the main project I'd been working on in one form or another for most of my life. So, yeah, I'm going to stick around and respond to the comments for a while!
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Well, I went through all the endings. I demand a sequel or something. Maybe for a sequel Satan/Stan's Assassin since he planned to take over the City of Gods in the ending that you kill God?
I am actually working on a non-interactive novel that will simultaneously be a sequel to both this story and Thousand Dollar Soul (my earlier game). You can read a timeline (which is basically just the prologue) at reality-tunnels.com. Ending #4 from God's Assassin is considered the "real" ending for the purposes of the sequel, which is (spoilers) the one where you tell Faith God's plan to assassinate her, and she fights with him in the alien bar. God/Stan/"You" will be very minor background characters in this new story, though Faith will play a central role, as she'll be seeking revenge against her father by empowering the human race as much as she can (aligning herself with Stan). So she'll be rebelling, and there will be a lot of destruction in the story's universe, to the point where I probably won't have any room left to do another sequel after this one. Anyway, the City of Gods won't be part of this story, but still, you're not far off from the general themes that I have planned!
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Sometimes i just turn this game on and click a few options to get to the songs! They're really good, and I think Greg should put them on Youtube. + if you agree.
Here you go -- I should probably update the game info or something:
http://we-are-1.net/Revelation_Amongst_the_stars.mp3
http://we-are-1.net/Sneakin_5_master_looped.mp3
http://we-are-1.net/Requiem_2.mp3
http://we-are-1.net/Mystics_5.mp3
http://we-are-1.net/Fight_the_movement.mp3
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This was... not what I expected, but still really really good. Very compelling. And definitely things from this will come back to me and I'll end up dwelling on them, for the next few weeks.
Very interesting. Good job.
This is actually one of the very few elements of the story that is never explained in any of the paths, because the whole point of the event is that it IS unexplained, and even God is confused by how it could occur. In reality, this sort of thing really does happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals And no one is really quite sure how or why. But just because we don't know how or why something occurs does not mean that "God did it." That's the whole point I was trying to make with that story element.
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Fantastic game, and I liked the Angelfire reference from your other work.
I feel like *SPOILERS* I either missed something in the alternate dialogue or Yahweh was secretly helping the main character out at certain points. I was disappointed that this story thread wasn't concluded after I found all the endings, but I guess it didn't really need to be. It's still a pretty interesting story.
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Oh, nevermind, 5/5 but the endings need a bit of expanding on :/ most of them feel so incomplete..
Still, I love the concept and game and the way the characters are so callous.
To be completely honest, the reason I didn't expand any more of the endings any further is just because I was all tapped out of ideas. Just the ideas/events that are in here already took a tremendous amount of time and mental energy to come up with and plan out. Basically this whole story was more like a linear novel at one point, then I chopped it all up into little pieces and spread everything significant across different paths. The game is intended to be read with the alternate paths in mind; it's not really intended that any one particular path is "complete" just on its own. (Random side thought: If anyone has read The Seth Material -- which I didn't until after I wrote this -- there's a lot of similarity between how I intended this story to be read and how higher dimensions of consciousness operate with consideration for multiple timelines of reality, if you're into that sort of thing.)
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I swear to Stan I combed through this perfectly..
Yet that ever elusive ending #21 evades me... :? Help, Greg? Please?
People either get ending #21 right away or very last. I guess it's just a matter of how interested you are in pursuing the story's events, so, glad to hear you didn't get it right away! (To anyone else who's stuck on #21, just pretend that you really don't want anything to do with the game's story.)
(spoilers) It's the heartwarming tale of Jesus's evil twin sister (who's on a mission from God to wipe out all human life on planet Earth) and you, Satan's bumbling puppet who doesn't really understand what the hell is going on, but will nevertheless decide the fate of all life throughout the entire universe.
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Voice narration along with this would probably rank the game up to the top. Lovely little story book you got there mate!
Thanks! Voice narration was beyond the scope of this project, but maybe there's some alternate timeline out there where someone makes this into a major motion film.
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So that drink makes the Character unable to recognize umbers Vocally? He/She can sort that out by writing the Numbrs down on a Piece of Paper and reading them in his/her mnd or aloud.
It's like swapping numbers. Let's say that 1=otter. One just needs to swap the Numbers in the other Situations as well and he/she is done (π = 3,otter4otter59...). "If conventions and rules are subjetive, anyone can make them up.
Haha, good point! This assumes that the animal/number correspondences are consistent, though. And it might get tricky to keep track of everything if the numbers get too big... like, what if you run out of animals? What do you perceive then? Man, I didn't think this through enough.
Wow, pretty generous! Terry Pratchett had an enormous influence on my writing style with this story. I'm not going to claim that my writing is even close to being as good as Terry Pratchett's, but I will say that my writing is much better for having been exposed to his influence.
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Woah... this Game confirmed and infirmed so many of my Points of View and so much of the Informaion I alread know.
I'm not even sure if I should coment about how my Brain already works the way its described to work if consumed Mushrooms or DMT, the Fact that Stan is one of my favorites "Villians" (if he can bcnsidred one here, due to the fact that Morality has been reduced to a Pile of semi-subjective Scrap in this Game), the Idea of Plant-like Animals (opposed to Mushrooms from m Point of View; maybe that's why Mushrooms seem "Evil" to some?), the Spoilers included at the beginning of the Game about Thousand Dollar Soul or the fact that I've thought of Time Accelerators and their Isolation before, but not for Active Space/Time Travelling.
One could get a PhD nowadays just by thinking of these Things!
Hey, no one has given me my PhD yet! I'm glad this story meshed with thought processes you were already having. When I wrote this story I was writing it as 100% fiction, but then later I went back to some of it and I started to wonder if maybe there were some higher truths kicking around in my subconscious when I set out to write this thing. I wasn't consciously aware of them at the time, but now I'm sort of like, "Oh, yeah, of course we all connect to higher-dimensional entities that are composed of our individual fragments of consciousness, duh." I mean, it seems so obvious, right?
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"Have you ever gone back in time,convinced your past self to drug your high school crush,stood idly by as she was arrested,then fought violently with your past self in a jealous fit of sociopathic rage fueled by decades of regret,loneliness and sexual frustration?" Future Todd:'That's my life,babe!' (TDS reference?And drs Madison is infact Angela from TDS?
Help me Faith!Help meeee!by the way...4/5.The evil quiz teached me to give me my opinions.IT NEEDS MORE BADASS ENDINGS!Gud joub Greg ^-^!)
Dr. Madison is indeed Angela from TDS! I wanted to establish that the stories take place in the same universe for the purposes of the sequel to both. It's mentioned in TDS that Clint's last name is Madison, so the implication here is that they're married in the "real" world in God's Assassin. Angela also has a theme with practicing medicine in both stories. Oh yeah, and the character profile thingy says "Angela" above her artwork, even though her first name is never given within the text.
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I love this game; I'm sort of not strictly atheist but definitely not Christian, so I found this parody pretty funny. Though, I've noticed that in these RPG stories I always somehow name my character one letter different from a character in the story. *_*
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Interesting game, even if I do not particularly agree with some concepts portrayed therein I have to say the characters all have their own charm. I really liked the music - mind if I ask what the names of the motorcycle chase and God's explanation songs are? I will finish reading the linked site tomorrow.
Thanks for the comment! The motorcycle chase song is called "Fight the Movement" and can be found here: http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/545373 I don't think the musician ever uploaded the other song, but it's called Revelation Amongst the Stars, and I uploaded it to my own server here: http://we-are-1.net/Revelation_Amongst_the_Stars.mp3 Let me know if you have any further thoughts about stuff.
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Not much can scare me, but for some reason reading scary stories scares me. Not horror movies or any of that other stuff.