The Dink Network

Are you interested in making your own D-Mod? Have you made a few half-finished D-Mods, but never found the motivation to finish one? Do you only make D-Mods when a contest gives you a structure and a deadline? Well, then here's something for you!

Yes, we are holding another contest. This time the contest will be about a Silent Protagonist. This is a fairly common trope in video games, from Zelda to Half-Life and Portal. It isn't very common in D-Mods, which makes it a bit of an interesting challenge.

See the comments for details.

The Rules:

1. The theme for this contest is Silent Protagonist. This means that, outside of the introduction and/or finale, the player character can not talk. The spirit of the contest would be to create a standard Dink-style D-Mod, but one in which the character does not (or cannot) talk. The player can be Dink, another character from the original game or another D-Mod, or a unique character.

This means that the player might be able to Nod, or shrug their shoulders, but they wouldn't be able to say("Hi", 1); They could still examine things, and prompt NPCs to talk to the player. Choice statements for a shop would be fine, but for choosing a conversation topic probably not (unless you say the player is pointing at a list of things).

Also, you cannot use say/say_stop commands to show the player the thoughts of the protagonist. And, Smashing-Barrels-Voice (or any other voice in the protagonist's head) would also be disallowed (sorry).

D-Mods like Triangle Mover would not fit the spirit of the contest (as it has no protagonist).

2. The D-Mod should be fairly short. The map must be 60 screens or less. Ideally, it would be a Romp (or small Quest).

3. The D-Mod may not have been uploaded to the Dink Network before in any form. So, for example, Sharp couldn't take Milder 3, comment out all of Milder's speech lines, and submit it for the contest.

4. The D-Mod must be uploaded via the upload form no later than Sunday, January 4th, 2015 (UTC-11, the best UTC).

5. Anyone is allowed to submit an entry, this includes team efforts.

6. Judging will be done by the contest entrants themselves (where you cannot vote for your own D-Mod). In case of a team effort, that team gets one vote. If someone participates in a team and in an individual effort, they only get a vote as part of a team. In case of participating in multiple teams, you don't get a vote? In case of a tie for first place, a popular vote will be solicited from registered Dink Network accounts.

7. The D-Mods will be judged both on overall quality and how well they follow the theme.

8. The prize for this competition will be eternal fame as the winner of the contest.

9. If anything is unclear or you have any questions about the contest, just post in this thread to ask!

Here are some story ideas to inspire you:

- A wizard steals Dink's voice, and he fights to get it back.
- Dink goes off to fight the Zolan war, and nobody can hear you scream in space...
- Mayhem

Though of course many of you will have much better ideas. Good luck to everyone!

I'm glad to see this contest is official now. I had actually worked out the gist of an idea of a small Romp with these constraints the other night. Now, to find the time to work on such a D-mod...

Is there a minimum number of entrants?

Stickie?

Time to try and get my creativity to work..

So player talking to examine things is fine then?

Random example, player examines a note on the ground, and the player says: "A bloody note, looks familiar.."

Stuff like that is fine?

Nope, that wouldn't be fine. No player talking; I think redink simply meant that you're still allowed to interact with the world. (E.g. you could press space at a bookshelf, and get a book in the player's inventory.)

A pseudo-narrator/player voice would be fine, I assume? For example, you examine the bookshelf, and a choice menu pops up with the description: "There are a lot of rotten, pus-coated books here. You really don't want to touch any of them."

Could the player character react with... say, punctuation? Like, "!!"

Hmm. Last time there was a contest, I had some fine ideas, but I didn't want to make a DMOD. This time I do, but am having trouble coming up with ideas...

I too was contemplating a DMOD where the only things Dink could say were '...', '???' and '!!!'. But so far I haven't come up with a great idea yet, I might just steal from theme hospital though.

EDIT: why is it impossible to place more than two exclamation marks in a row?
EDIT2: Hah! found a solution

Clarifications: I guess there would be a minimum of 2 entrants (and it would go to a popular vote, because each entrant would have to vote for the other).

The space bar could not be used to *talk* to objects (Robj's "A bloody note, looks familiar.."), but could be used to examine a sign to read what's written on the sign: say("`%Seph's Pub", &current_sprite);

A narrator voice would be fine.

Punctuation would be ok ('...', '???', '!!').

Can the protagonist make sounds with their mouth that are not words? Such as grunts, etc?

if weird ones are allowed i have one for it too(as mayham is weird as theme i would assume it is allowed)

But it can't be so weird it doesn't have a protagonist (like Triangle Mover).

For those who enter (unsure yet if that includes me): don't forget to write a custom dnotalk.c and dnomagic.c, otherwise Dink'll talk.

the nomagic one won't be needed as you will start with the only spell you gain (fireball )

Heh, I was just about to post about dnotalk.c...

I'm working on a crazy idea I came up with. I hope it pans out.

My plan was already to modify dnotalk and dnomagic, but not simply making them blank Damn it I really need to find time to work on this contest. Perhaps this weekend.

Well, for the record: I did not think of dnotalk and dnomagic yet, so at least you're helping someone. If I manage to enter anyway, which is a bit doubtful as I still don't really have too much inspiration for the DMOD.

Boy, I am wishing right now that you could store strings in DinkC. Just throwing that out there.

Perhaps you can store small words by encoding them in numbers? I wouldn't know how to go about that though, and Dink's math functions probably fall short for this.

Storing strings isn't the problem, you can store a couple of characters into one int if you want. For example I could give every characters a number between 1 and 26 and store the word 'Dink' like:
4091411 Where 'D' = 4, 'I' = 9, 'N' = 14 and 'K' = 11
You just take the modulus of 100 every time to get the next characters out. Actually it works even more efficiently if you take the modulus of 26 every time and store the characters in reverse order, but then it's harder to see which word it would be in this particular example. The math is actually pretty straightforward and no problem for the Dink engine. In Dink v1.08 there's even a built-in modulus function I believe. (You could also easily write one yourself though.)

So storing strings isn't the problem and retrieving it is not the problem either. The problem is how to make a single line of text out of it. I could basically take the above example and figure out in which order the characters should be, but it won't really help me anything. Here's a bit of scripting to show what I mean:

if (&var == 1)
say("`%a",&current_sprite);
if (&var == 2)
say("`%b",&current_sprite);
if (&var == 3)
say("`%c",&current_sprite);
if (&var == 4)
say("`%d",&current_sprite);
if (&var == 5)
say("`%e",&current_sprite);
if (&var == 6)
say("`%f",&current_sprite);
if (&var == 7)
say("`%g",&current_sprite);
if (&var == 8)
say("`%h",&current_sprite);
//and so on

You could make 26 of these and loop them to say each character in the word. But what you really want is to get all of the characters in the same sentence. To make a script that includes all 456976 ways you can combine 26 characters in a 4 letter word is plain impossible. That's where the problem is, not with storing or figuring out what is stored, but with actually making it back into a string.

Wow meta!! What are you/ did you study? Your knowledge sounds useful and I must have it. Braaaaaiiiins!!

This was something I'd considered for another D-Mod a while back. While concatenating strings and writing out variable sentences isn't really possible, I did consider writing out the characters individually using a say_xy line. So it'd be something like

if (&var == 1)
say_xy("a", &xoffset, 50);
if (&var == 1)
say_xy("b", &xoffset, 50);

...

&xoffset += 10;

And have 0 refer to a blank character, 27 to a full stop or space etc. Then run the thing as a spawn of external function? Presumably you'd either need to be using a font with fixed character widths or have each letter add a different offset though. Ultimately I decided it was a lot of work for something with pretty limited use (and I'd have only wanted it for a one-off joke), but you would presumably be able to display a user-defined string in some situations, like if you had a dialogue box outputting text one character at a time, JRPG style.

(As an alternative to text you could probably have a bunch of sprites and then have the variable call up frame 1-26 when outputting the letter.)

So when is the closing date for entry submission? Briefly scrolled through and couldn't see one.
I'm typing this off my cellphone credit since I don't have internet access for the time being, but I definitely have some interest in creating something for it, minus the fact that I doubt I'll be back to fully online until mid November or later.

4. The D-Mod must be uploaded via the upload form no later than Sunday, January 4th, 2015 (UTC-11, the best UTC).

4. The D-Mod must be uploaded via the upload form no later than Sunday, January 4th, 2015 (UTC-11, the best UTC).

EDIT: Effin' ninjas XD

Ergh... my entry into this contest has been changed to a 'maybe'. As I'm currently working 12 hours shifts, on a remote site and don't have much time. Really it depends how much time I get off work between now and the due date to whether I will have time to throw something together.

Can we get a copy of a basic dnotalk.c and dnomagic.c put up, I'm unsure how to use them?

Luckily, this has already been done.

Maybe this question has been asked, but I'm too lazy to check

Snorts, grunts and groans aren't really silent, are they? Or are they excepted? How about Dink's "oof" sfx when he's attacked??

Schnapper: <Casts spell> Replious Imedioso!!

Schnapper: <Critical spell failure>

Silent protagonists like Link have been known to grunt and groan. I'm sure it's fine.

Does the 60 screens include screens used exclusively in the intro? Because if so, I may need to cut some things...

Make sure the map has 60 or fewer screens. In my view that also includes screens used in the intro or screens never used at all. Just make sure that your map file has no more than 60 screens, that is the only way in which such a limit could be checked.

How's everyone doing so far?

I have a fully playable beta. The map screens aren't decorated at all and look bad.

Procrastination has taken it's toll unfortunately, so not well here.
Too much work on other Dmod projects.

Project abandoned here. I got to make an introduction but I'm busy finishing up my studies which simply eats up all of my time. So I abandoned it over a month ago.

I abandoned my first attempt, and I've just started on my second.

I haven't started yet. I might still enter, but only if I feel particularly inspired on some fine weekday night.

I haven't worked on mine since I completed the intro a month ago. I still remember everything I wanted to do, I just haven't gotten around to doing any of it yet. Hopefully I'll feel motivated to finish it that final week of December

I started my entry. I might even make it by the deadline.

I had an idea for a short romp and started work on it but didn't get very far.

Actually... I had an idea for one scene, wrote a few lines of dialogue and gave it up as a bad job within half an hour.

Pitiful

I've finished the map, and have only a few more scripts to write. The story is a bit rushed, mostly because I wasted a few screens on the intro, but it should be finished by the due date.

The deadline beckons...

I'm fairly confident that my second attempt at a contest D-Mod will be submitted for the contest, but I guess we'll see how polished I can make it over the next week.

How's everyone else doing?

Been too busy with other things including a completely different project... So much so that I've barely got any bones in my contest Dmod.
All of my focus is elsewhere right now.

I'm waiting to get the game back from somebody I'm collaborating with. It seems like it's going well. It should be ready pretty soon.

Just need to write the outro. I hope I can do it in time.

Yeah, I don't think I'll be entering a D-mod into the contest. It has become clear to me that I have no real interest in programming. Good luck to everyone else, though! I look forward to playing your D-mods!

I want to enter but lost track of what to do due to holidays so doubt i can make it on time for the current deadline :'(

I'll be away until the 6th, looking forward to playing everything when I get back

Good luck everyone!

I want to enter but lost track of what to do due to holidays so doubt i can make it on time for the current deadline :'(

Same here. I wasn't able to work on the dmod in over a week, so I'm too far behind to make it by the 4th.

best of luck to you all guys be awesome for some new dinky adventures Looking forward to it
Hugs

Man, I wish I could join you. But time, studies and holidays were in my way.

I have successfully submitted mine. Huzzah!

OK, my entry is submitted. I have a sneaking suspicion that most people will hate it, but *I* like it.

Heh, that's how I'm feeling about my entry too; I like it, but I think most people won't care for it.

Edit: and hooray! With two entries submitted, we can have a proper contest (even if I don't finish my entry in time).

looks sternly at redink - you will go over my knee unless u finish it mr been waiting for one from you forever hehe
GL all!!

I submitted my entry, whew. Almost didn't make it. It will be available with the rest tomorrow!

Hooray, three entries. The DN hasn't seen that kind of action since 2012.

The theme song of this contest should be "Enjoy the Silence" by Depeche Mode.

Or 4 minutes 33 seconds, if you want to embrace the spirit of the thing.