Oct 7
Two web-based games in a row! I’ll have to go over the list of games and figure out how many more of these there are. This one is The Binary, which is set up as kind of a Quantum Leap meets Groundhog Day thing, mixed with some of the Bourne movies and maybe a dash of Minority Report for that PKD dystopian futility.
It uses a custom Javascript engine that is pretty interesting, so let’s check it out!
Spoilers after the break…
Oct 6
Next up is The Play, an Undum piece by Deirdre Kiai, an indie game developer. This is the first CYOA-style game I’ve played this Comp, and I must say that the Undum framework — at least the way she’s got it set up — is very, very nice-looking. The Play apparently deals with a down-on-her-luck theater director trying to put together a shoestring performance of “All’s Fair in Love, War, and Art”, with a cast and crew that are going to require something more than a standard rehearsal to make the performance a success. Sounds fun!
Spoilers after the break…
Let me be frank about Professor Frank. I can’t tell whether this is a troll entry or not. It’s not a good game. This is not a spoiler, because you will know it’s going to be not good from pretty much the millisecond you load it. The game also knows it’s not good, and references that fact during gameplay. Is it being self-deprecating, being wacky-silly, or taunting the player? I suspect the latter, but… I can’t tell for sure.
I’m beginning to see the point of Emily Short’s refusal to play Comp games that are not betatested. I’m trying to give every game a shot and give all authors the benefit of the doubt, but Professor Frank is putting that resolution to the test.
Spoilers (such as they are) are after the break…
It’s nearing Christmas, you’ve got last-minute guests, and you’re trying get get the heck out of the mall and get back home. Unfortunately, the exit is somewhere beyond the commercial kinderpurgatory known as…
Santaland.
This is the first game I’ve played so far by a known veteran — in this case, Jason Ermer, author of 2006′s Moon-Shaped, a game that I have not played but which did well in the Comp and is highly-rated, so I’m looking forward to this one.
Spoilers after the break!
Oct 5
97k, written in Inform 7. That’s a really small game. And just judging from the well-written introduction I’d guess that we’re dealing with someone who’s done this before. There’s a pretty sure hand on the narrative tiller, and yes! Checking the CREDITS indicates that “Lyman Clive Charles” is a pseudonym. It will be interesting to see if it’s possible to guess who the secret author really is.
The game starts you off in a hut — you’re a farmer who’s lost his axe and thinks that the piskies have run off with it. So off you go into the woods to recover it…
Spoilers after the break!
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a straight, male, single geek in possession of a good job, must be in want of a girlfriend.
It is also a truth universally acknowledged that Elfen Maidens in the popular MMORPG Realms of Realmland are exclusively played by men, so setting up a real-world date with one isn’t likely to lead to a satisfying relationship for the aforementioned straight geek.
Unfortunately, it looks like Jason Watts, hapless exemplar of geekdom — and your owner — is in for such a date unless you, his faithful and long-suffering computer, can do something about it.
***
So next up on the randomized list is The Elfen Maiden: A Comedy of Error Messages, by Adam Le Doux. Adam is apparently another IF newbie, although a Google search turns up some interesting indie game development that would indicate he’s not starting off from ground zero. The premise of Adam’s game sounds great, and the intro text does a pretty good job of letting us know what we’re in for: a lighthearted, reference-dropping farcical piece, focused on carrot-and-stick prodding of a hapless NPC. Can’t wait!
Spoilers after the break…
Oct 3
Wow! It’s IF season again, with 38 new games to get through in six short weeks. This is going to be tough! I’m going to try to get through all of them, and post reviews as I go. We’ll see how far I get. Assuming I’ve done it right, the spoilerish parts of the reviews should be below the cut.
So without ado, let’s randomize and see what we end up with…
OK, so in IF we now have both Curses!, the seminal Inform work by Graham Nelson, and also Cursed, an ADRIFT game by Australian newcomer Nick Rogers. Based on my cursory web search, the only IF work Nick has publicly released previously was an ADRIFT conversion of the classic Adventure, so welcome to the IF world, Nick!
CREDITS is implemented and shows numerous beta testers, which is a good sign. The game also has apparently been tested under both the standard ADRIFT Runner and SCARE, which is what I’m using. That’s a pretty good early indicator that this isn’t going to be a half-baked effort. The intro text is good in that it’s immediately trying to establish a character, less good in that it’s a bit overwrought for what a person condemned to die in an hour or so would likely be thinking.
Spoilers (some pretty major ones at the end) follow…
Feb 28
Curse you, time zones. I’d meant to attend — planned to attend — the XYZZY awards for months. As the date approached, we planned a trip out of town for the weekend of the ceremony, but that was OK because my oldest son had his last basketball game of the season on Saturday afternoon, and we were going to leave afterwards. We were going to leave town at two, the ceremony started at noon — it was all good, right?
Wrong. We needed to leave no later than two Central, and the ceremony started at noon Pacific. Which is two Central. So I’m very sorry I missed it, although it probably spared you having to read what would have been halting, unprepared acceptance speeches.
I’m both gratified and more than a little overwhelmed by the reception and support Aotearoa has received this year. One of the most insightful descriptions I read in the many reviews this year was by Sarah Morayati, who said, in part: “This feels like a gift, both to his children and the adventures he remembers.” It is. That’s exactly what it is.
Like a lot of people in the community, especially those of us who won’t see 40 again, I have a long history with Infocom games, and many fond memories of hours spent playing those old titles. Masterful, powerful games like Planetfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and Trinity taught me that computer games could be about far more than just joysticks and puzzles — that interactive fiction could tell a real, affecting story in a way that was, and still is, unique. Infocom died right about the time that I went to college. I thought the IF era was over. It took me decades to rediscover the IF community and the new tools, but once I did, the old joy came back undimmed.
With Aotearoa, I started off wanting to write an adventure story for (and about) my oldest son — something simple and quick with lots of interesting, wacky animals and a plucky boy protagonist. As I did research and planned the story, it changed and grew, became far more substantial, and took on a life of its own. It’s the first time a story has just jerked itself out of my hands and started off in its own direction, and I’m so glad I decided to let go of the leash and just follow the story where it led.
One of the places it led me was to the Māori. Once I had decided on “New Zealand with dinosaurs” as the setting of the story, I spent a lot of time researching the Māori language and culture. I worked hard trying to do a good job of representing the Māori people in this story, and I think I did as well as I could. But I’m not even a New Zealander, let alone a Māori, so there was no way I could actually get across a true Māori perspective. After the game was released, I had a great email conversation with a New Zealand native who was kind enough to point me to some very good Māori-written fiction. One in particular stands out as a phenomenal work of art. If you, like me, have become fascinated with the history and culture of the Māori, I cannot recommend the book Potiki, by Patricia Grace, highly enough. Written in a powerful, mythic, rhythmic style, Potiki follows an extended Māori family as they attempt to reclaim and hold onto their ancestral land, culture, and way of life. It was a humbling experience to read this book and realize the gulf of culture, experience, and even perception between the West and the Māori, and then further to realize how deftly Patricia Grace bridges that gulf.
So what’s next? For the past few months I’ve been taking a bit of a hiatus from development, playing Mass Effect 2 and Starcraft 2 (both excellent in their own ways, not to mention ridiculously addicting) and reading, but I’ve gotten back into the saddle and am starting IF development again. I’ve recently released version 2 of Keywords for Conversation, the extension I wrote that ties together Aaron Reed’s Keyword Interface and Eric Eve’s Conversation Package. I’ve converted Aotearoa to build 6G60 of Inform 7, and am working on the bug fixes and revisions for version 2 of it. I’m also pulling out the tutorial mode code from Aotearoa and generalizing it into a separate extension, which will be released fairly shortly.
And of course, I’ve got games in the works. I have too many ideas for the time I have available, but I’m hoping to release another shorter game this year, and I have a couple of long-form ideas in the planning stages.
I definitely want to thank everyone who participated in the IFComp this year. I played every game (a first for me) and was really impressed with the high quality of this year’s games. I was especially happy to be part of the fun and camaraderie on the authors’ forum. Finally, huge thanks to everyone who beta tested, played, rated, reviewed, and voted for Aotearoa this year. I’m happy I’ve been able to contribute this to the community, and thrilled to be an ongoing part of it!
Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom
Author: S. John Ross
Rating: 5/5
Warning: Mild spoilers.
I can see why this game is polarizing. It’s got loads of randomized combat, which is a turn-off for some players. It’s a pastiche of old-old-school imbalanced pen-and-paper RPGs, which may be confusing if you’ve never been a role-player. It restricts available verbs to about a half-dozen, and the plot starts off as barely remixed Conan the Barbarian.
But under the covers, this is a fantastic game. It’s tightly-implemented, bug-free as far as I could see, and takes full advantage of Inform technology to make the playing experience smooth and clean. The writing, although it apes the breathless earnestness of early RPG modules, is chock full of hilarious descriptions. Clever responses to unusual commands are liberally sprinkled throughout (try to PARLEY with your DUFFEL BAG, for instance).
This is definitely a game that benefits from sitting down and reading the documentation first. And there’s plenty of it. The distribution comes with a manual that details the alternate history the game ostensibly comes from, followed by the entire sourcebook for the fictitious Encounter Critical RPG that ToaSK is based upon, followed by encrypted clues. Although you don’t have to read the documentation, the Encounter Critical RPG setting is the central structure for everything in the game, and understanding it will make some puzzles far more clear. Also, for me, reading the documentation made the game far funnier as I was able to quickly pick out the references.
From a design perspective ToaSK is very interesting. The decision to greatly limit the verbs obviously limits the potential actions the player can take, but doing that also helps the player get interesting responses more easily. If there are only a few things you can do to a given object, it’s far easier to code meaningful text for all of them. The result is a game that feels more fully implemented, even though it doesn’t have full physical modeling. But who needs Inform’s physical modeling when you have “scientific realism”?
The other consequence of the restricted verb set is that it makes the player seem smarter. It’s easier to figure out what items do when there are fewer interactions, and even brute-force repetition can work to reveal hidden puzzle solutions. This type of design approach wouldn’t work for every game, but it certainly works here, and works well.
To counteract this, the parser breaks the fourth wall constantly and deliberately, and slings gratuitious insults for the slightest deviation in command input. Fauxld English is used throughout (methinks this be, mayhaps, where Tiberius Thingamus got his inspiration).
There is, of course, no detailed conversation model. And anyway, you’re a barbarian — sophisticated conversation would be wasted on you. Your interactions with characters are limited to the same verb set as inanimate objects, but this still allows a surprising number of things you can do (try ENTERing characters, for example…). And the choice to limit character interaction allows ToaSK to include many different interesting characters, from Gina the willing virgin sacrifice to the Viraxian Dark Gods, to the runecarved, peg-legged dwarf Gunwar. And, of course, there’s Vessa, the Delicate Doxy, to whom you will be returning many times.
The game is fairly well paced via its combat leveling mechanic. You’ll need to explore and solve puzzles to gain health points. Gaining health points will enable you to fight more powerful enemies, which will get you more gear and items with which to solve more puzzles. Most combats are potentially fatal, but multi-level UNDO works wonders to get you out of fights where you’re in over your head.
Overall impressions? The world of Encounter Critical feels like a tall, cold Kitchen Sink made with bathtub gin. Think of a handwritten mixture of Gamma World (the original edition, of course), Eldritch Wizardry, and Traveller, with some Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Dune, Sinbad the Sailor, Conan the Barbarian, and a Godzilla movie or two thrown in for flavor. Add snark and sex, then overheat the writing to taste.
Until Christmas Eve, the full version of this game cost $6.95. It’s well worth it at that price (and I paid it on December 23 after discovering it that day), but it’s since been released for free. If you’ve only played the intro version, you haven’t seen anything. Don’t miss the opportunity to play the full game, and experience one of the unsung masterpieces of modern retro IF. Or is that retro modern? Anyway, you should definitely, definitely play it.
In the last installment I talked about the overall goal I had in mind for Aotearoa, and the pros and cons of the various convenience features I included. This time I want to talk about some of the other technologies I included and cover some of the issues and lessons learned based on my development schedule and design choices. There will be some spoilers below, so consider this fair warning if you haven’t played yet!
Aside from the convenience features I talked about earlier, there were a few other things I included in Aotearoa. The first, and most obvious, was the animal naming feature. I’m embarrassed to say that despite many long hours playing Beyond Zork with my friends back in high school and college, I had completely forgotten that you were able to nickname items in that game. Now that I think back, of course I remember doing so (for some reason that is now [probably fortunately] lost, we named the sword ‘Bbob’), but at the time I couldn’t think of another game that had done it.
The basic technique is not particularly difficult — you attach a nickname to a thing (or in this case, an animal) and make the nickname property describe the thing. In fact, I think Emily has an example of doing this in the Inform documentation that I used as a starting point. There was a bit of tap-dancing required to get this to work cleanly — for example, when naming or unnaming, when do you refer to the actual name and when do you refer to the nickname? How do you avoid infinite loops when printing the name of something that is nicknamed? And of course, how does it interact with the keyword system? But it’s not really very difficult, and it seemed to get the most consistently positive reactions of any feature I included in the game.
I also worked up a foley system that didn’t really perform the way I thought it would. If you’re not familiar with the word, ‘foley’ is a filmmaking term that refers to sound effects that are recorded offstage and added into the film in post-production to enhance the quality of sound and enhance viewer immersion. My foley system was supposed to provide a framework for adding in short flavor-text messages that described what was happening in a particular scene or area.
The system was implemented as a table-driven mechanism that could key off of several different conditions, and iterated through a prioritized list of possible messages that were assigned different appearance probability levels. If that sounds complicated, it was! It ended up being quite a bit of effort to set up, for results that weren’t really measurably different than just picking randomly from a list. I used this mechanism for the boat and ocean scenes, and then abandoned it starting from the mainland.
I think that it worked fairly well in the scenes where I used it, but in a lot of cases, the last thing I needed was more text spewed out onto the screen, particularly where there were a lot of other actions going on. Too many one-sentence action blurbs and the text really starts to feel disjointed. Once the animals came into play, the extra foley was just too much.
I still think that atmospheric foley text is a good idea, but I would not go to such lengths to try to systematize it in the future. I think a dozen or so possibilities, tailored to the specific game state that exists at the time, would do the job just as well with much less work.
The radio was a late addition to the game. Up until very late beta, you had to return to Eruera every time you wanted to ask him about something. Since I wanted to emphasize the interactions with him, this caused some serious issues with either pacing (if they chose to return) or delivery of plot information (if they chose to go it alone). Also, once I decided to add the fear mechanic, Tim had to speak to Eruera, and there was a very real chance that folks would become stuck if they didn’t realize that.
Enter the radio mechanism. By doing a bit of manipulation with scope, I was able to allow communication via the survival radios. This allowed Tim to call back to Eruera at any point, and more importantly, allowed Eruera to call Tim at certain points of the story. This allowed me to hint more organically and push plot information without worrying about too much backtracking. Of course, the player could still drop the radio, but it would be clear what they were doing, so I wasn’t too worried about that.
There were some fairly significant technical issues to deal with (some of which weren’t dealt with and need to be fixed in the post-Comp release), including removing visual cues from the conversational sequences when communicating by radio, ensuring proper termination of conversations when moving with and without the radio, and handling conversational state when transitioning between scenes.
Finally, there was the mechanism used to ride the notoceratops. Originally I’d just plugged in Graham Nelson’s Rideable Animals extension. This worked — it was possible to hop on the dino and ride away, but as there was really only one way to go, the quasi-freedom actually served to interrupt the action, and frustrate the player.
I then tried to put the riding sequence on rails, and just carry the player through to the camp, but there ended up being no sense of agency, and the player just had to hit ‘z’ over and over again, which was unsatisfying. Sam Kabo Ashwell pointed out in late beta that a riding system where you had limited control over the beast, such as in The Edifice, might be a good compromise. I had never played The Edifice, but the idea was clear, and I implemented the mechanics that made it into the final release: you can turn the dino and spur it faster or slower, but you don’t have full movement abilities.
I really like the way this turned out — there’s a gentle challenge in figuring out the movement commands, and you have to use them appropriately to get to your destination, so a sequence that could be either “you can’t go that way” frustrating or “z.z.z.z” boring ends up building some involvement and excitement up to the climax of ramming your way into camp.
I have three young kids ranging in age from one up to nine, one of whom has autism, which means I don’t have vast stretches of excess time to put into hobbies. I plowed most of the free time I did have last year into working on Aotearoa, which pushed all my other activities into the shadows for the most part. This added up to hundreds of hours — my best guess is around 400, probably half of which came in the final month — writing and debugging Aotearoa, spread out over almost a full calendar year. This worked well in some respects and caused some serious problems in others.
One of the most obvious issues was sustaining interest in the project given the slow pace of development. I was highly motivated to pursue the project, but even so it was disheartening to look back over a week’s work and see very little progress. When I encountered infrastructure issues that required rewriting, it was intensely frustrating to see several weeks of work slide down the drain.
I tried to get around this by ensuring that I spent at least 4 hours a week working on the project, and by breaking down development tasks into very small, discrete milestones. This breakdown helped in two ways. First, it helped me to better analyze the requirements of individual tasks, which helped to reduce the number of times I got blindsided by something after getting halfway done. Second, it gave me a feeling of progress and accomplishment when I could get through a couple hours of coding and be able to check four bullet points off my list.
Another major issue was keeping a distinctive style throughout the game. Since Aotearoa was written in bite-sized chunks over the course of a year, it was very erratic in style. Early drafts were really rough, and it wasn’t until I got some really good writing advice from Sam Kabo Ashwell and Aaron Reed that I took the time to go over everything, tighten it up, and make sure it flowed well and had a consistent voice and vocabulary. Yes, I said “tighten it up”. I’m aware that it’s still pretty verbose — you should have seen it before!
Even if I hadn’t had a spread-out creative cycle, I’d still advocate a thorough rewrite. Just like static fiction, your first draft is rarely publication-worthy. I was much, much happier with the prose after cleaning it up.
Another major issue, which the extended development cycle just made worse, was the second-system syndrome in the game. In software development, there’s a well-known tendency to try to address every weakness in your first product when you design your second one. You’ve learned all the lessons and you’re ready to make something vastly better! In reality, that overdesigned second system often collapses under the weight of extra features packed into it.
I got lucky in that although I had tons of extra features in the game, most of them were derived from quality extensions and didn’t cause the system to collapse. Even so, the end of development and the beta period were full of frantic scrambling to address strange bugs and unintentional interactions that were the result of feature bloat. I got away with it this time, but my third game will pull back from the full cornucopia of features I stuffed into Aotearoa.
Finally, there’s one last consequence of the longer development cycle: looser, cruder code. This was intentional, and I feel it was a key to the success of the project. If you’ve programmed much, you likely know the phenomenon programmers call “flow”. You get into the zone, the world recedes, and the mental model of the software you’re trying to write becomes clear. You can accomplish amazing things when flowing, but often these things are not as easy to understand when you’re picking them up hours or days later, when you’re out of the flow state.
And getting into flow takes time. When you’re coding for an hour here or an hour there, it’s not easy to achieve and sustain flow, and you risk spending a lot of time staring at complicated code structures that made sense when you wrote them but seem incomprehensible now. The engine puzzle in 2009′s Grounded in Space was like this — so complex that I could only understand it after an involved process of coming back up to speed on it.
In writing Aotearoa, I knew it was going to be a long project and that I was going to be working on it piecemeal over a long stretch of calendar time. So I deliberately tried to avoid clever, complex coding tricks wherever possible. By keeping organized, sticking to straightforward, well-named rule-based code and resisting the temptation to write big blocks of complex logic, I helped to ensure that I could always pick the code back up, get to where I left off, and make progress right from the start. The resulting code isn’t always as cool or elegant, but it’s understandable and functional, and helped me make efficient use of my time. In the end, the important product is the game, not the source code for the game.
Writing Aotearoa was much more work than I thought it was going to be, even though I knew I was biting off a pretty large project. From designing puzzles while waiting in a Federal jury room to researching New Zealand plant and animal life, it’s been both fun and educational, and I’m very happy that most players have found that old-fashioned excitement and sense of wonder that I was hoping to convey. I hope these postmortem reports have been useful to other authors who are considering similar technologies or who are working under similar time constraints.
The Quern is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache