The Rule 5-induced cone of silence has lifted, and the results are in!  Grounded in Space did reasonably well, placing 10th out of the 24 entries, very close to where I expected it would be (I had mentally blocked out 8th to 14th as the range I was expecting, based on reviews and my own experience playing the competition games).  I learned a lot and met a lot of cool people participating in this year’s competition.  Here are some of the major lessons I took away:

1.  I probably wasn’t ready to release Grounded in Space.  I vastly underestimated the amount of work required to make the game release-quality, especially post-beta work.  And I definitely did not know Inform 7 well enough to accomplish everything I wanted to; the triage required on the design to get the game playable was pretty severe.  Many of the cool parts of the original design ended up on the cutting-room floor, due to either lack of facility with the language or a self-inflicted lack of time.  I slacked a bit in the middle where if I’d put in more effort I might have accomplished quite a bit more.

2.  I’m glad I did release.  The experience of competing in IFComp ‘09 was invaluable; there are things I learned from the process, from the other games in the Comp, and from the discussions on the authors’ forums, that I probably couldn’t have learned in any other way.  In particular, I believe that I could not have learned the final process of making a game releasable — the testing and tradeoffs required in the end stages of development — had I not forced myself through it, even with a game that ended up deficient in some ways.

3.  Reviewers are all over the map in terms of what they like or don’t like.  I was pretty unlucky in that the first few reviews all either said or implied “I don’t like Heinlein.”  Well, that pretty much meant those reviews were going to be bad, since Grounded in Space is directly patterned on Heinlein juveniles to the best of my ability.  Later reviewers were more kind in that respect; there are some Heinlein fans out there after all!  Similarly, some folks liked complicated puzzles and some probably would have punched me if I’d been to hand when they got to the engine console.

4.  Notwithstanding #3, there were a number of valid criticisms of my game that were widely given:

• The premise was really off the wall, and a lot of reviewers bounced off of it.  Sam Kabo Ashwell was very insightful here — it really was the result of me taking the shortest distance between two plot points.  Even a little more thought and effort here would have lowered the suspension of disbelief bar substantially, I think.
• The introduction lacked interactivity — some objected to this and some didn’t, but there were certainly ways I could have improved interactivity in this section, and I simply didn’t have time to do so.  That was the first section I coded, so it was the one with the least language facility backing it.  I wanted to rewrite it, but bugs with the engine puzzle kept me busy right down to the wire, and I didn’t get the chance.
• I got criticism that the engine puzzle was not suitable for the text format.  I disagree with this somewhat; I think that with a better text interface I could have made this more palatable for a lot of people.  But a subset of players was never going to be happy with a puzzle that required you to SET THETA DIAL TO -1575, and I didn’t realize quite how large that subset was.

5.  The game is likely unsalvageable.  At this point there are enough flaws baked into the design that trying to improve the game experience would require gutting and rewriting large sections of it, and I’m not going to do that.  I started on another work the day I submitted this one, and I’m planning to move forward with that instead.  There will, however, be a sequel to Grounded in Space at some point in the future.

6.  Inform 7 is awesome.  The learning curve is… interesting — you can get off the ground quickly, but getting really good with it requires you to cross the natural-language equivalent of the “uncanny valley”.  But the expressive power of the language is amazing, and I’m sure the pleasure (and it is, truly, a pleasure) of developing in Inform 7 is one of the main reasons — along with the great people in the community — that I’m so excited about continuing to write IF.

7.  Develop like you were developing any other kind of software.  I didn’t do this at first, treating it as if I were typing up an email.  Oh, I designed up front, of course, and had plenty of design documentation.  But I didn’t have source code control, nor any kind of issue tracking/prioritization system, and so I found myself wasting time on trivial issues or, worse, fearing to make changes in complex code (the reflectors, anyone?) for fear of breaking more things than I was trying to fix.  For my next project, I’ve addressed this; I’m now using Perforce for source code control and I already feel more fearless, comfortable, and productive as a result.

8.  Some of your beta testers should be from the IF community.  I used exclusively non-IF friends for testers, and although they found staggering amounts of bugs, helped me with aspects of the story, gave me a great insight into how newbies might interact with the game, and really got me to widen my net of synonyms, a few IF vets in the mix would probably have latched on to the more structural shortcomings of my work and made suggestions early on that might have helped me avoid some of the big design/architecture pitfalls I stumbled into.

9.  The whole experience was great, and an encouragement to proceed.  Even the negative reviews usually had something nice for me to take away.  The good ones (and there were more of these towards the end of the Comp, for some reason) were extremely encouraging.  Knowing my work clicked in a good way for some people, no matter how few, is a very powerful motivator to continue, and I will certainly be writing more IF and entering the Comp again.

So thanks to everyone who played the games this year, particularly to those who took the time to write reviews and let us know what you thought of our works.  I enjoyed writing for you and hearing both what you considered good about Grounded in Space and what you considered bad.  Next year I hope to improve quality on all fronts and produce something that will knock your socks off!

Tags: Inform 7, Interactive Fiction, Programming

The “last” bugs have been squashed.  The walkthrough is written.  The beta testers have been credited.  The file is uploaded.

Grounded in Space is finished.

You won’t hear much from me on the subject until November 15th, when the judging is complete.  As per Rule 5 of the Interactive Fiction Competition, I cannot comment on my game or respond to reviews at any time during the judging period.  I do hope to have an extensive postmortem after that point, where I go into detail about what I learned and what I’ll do differently next time.

I will say that I’m already planning at least one new project; this one was so fun, challenging, and rewarding that I’m sure I’ll be motivated to try again at least one more time.

I’ve put a lot of time and effort into this, but it’s absolutely been time and effort well spent, no matter how I do in the competition.  It’s helped me to learn a new programming language and practice my writing, exposed me to some excellent interactive fiction in a community that I had no idea even existed before, and motivated me to follow through and finish a fairly large project purely on my own, with my own willpower and resources, giving me confidence that I can handle a project of this scale outside of the confines of work.

This last week was a doozy.  At the very last minute, one of my testers found a couple of issues that exposed a whole class of bugs that neither me nor my testers had found previously.  I spent Saturday evening frantically rooting them out, prior to bringing my wife home from the hospital with our new son on Sunday.  I’m pretty confident the bugs are cleaned up.  Of course, I’m also fairly confident there are others, and that there are weak spots in my writing that another pass might have addressed.

In the end, though, you have to call it a day sometime, and I choose now.  Play it and enjoy it; it’s yours now.

Tags: Inform 7, Interactive Fiction, Programming

Depending on how things go, this might be my final pre-submission update.  I’m up to Beta Release 7 at this point — my testers have been finding bugs at a truly staggering rate, which is testament both to their persistence and my questionable implementation decisions.

Beyond bugs, the testers also identified a lot of areas where the flow of the game was bad, or where I was dumping an unreasonably large amount of text onto the user at once.  Also, several of the testers are completely new to IF, so reading their transcripts is really helping me to identify alternate command formulations that I should support, as well as extraneous wacky actions, synonyms, and the like.  One tester in particular has been excellent at triggering almost every conceivable state machine misfire, and thanks to his work the game is much more solid and stable now.

The testers seem to enjoy the plot and writing so far, although not all have made it past The Big Puzzle yet, so we’ll see when they get to the end.  I’m definitely paying the price for some of my ignorance of the proper way of doing things in the early days.  I made some mistakes early on that are not feasible to fix at this point, and that cause some really wacky behavior.  Next time around I will definitely have a much better idea of what things are fairly straightforward to implement and which are error-prone.

I’m also disappointed (as I suspect almost everyone is at one time or another) with how conversation works in my game.  I use the standard “ASK X ABOUT Y” syntax, which is fine as far as it goes, but feels limiting even as it fails to provide any sort of ongoing conversational flow.  The next time I need to implement NPC conversation, I’m definitely reading Emily Short and Mike Roberts before starting.

The competition starts in just over one week, so I will likely be uploading my submission before Wednesday of next week.  What that means is that the next update will probably be a quick post-submission report before the comp kicks in, after which I will have to maintain radio silence as per Rule 5 until the judging period is over, which will be November 15th.  To fill the time, I should have a new son in the next week or so, so I don’t think it will be a tremendous hardship to wait.

Wish me luck!

Tags: Inform 7, Interactive Fiction, Programming

I took the first feedback I got from the beta on Monday and sat down last night to polish up the game.  I finished cover art, entered the competition data on the website, and then added a slew of new actions, synonyms, and objects.  In addition, I cleaned up some of the descriptions and added some cluing for something that was tripping up the beta testers.

The game plays much more cleanly now, and so I wrapped up the evening with a Beta 2 release, which I’ve posted for my testers this morning.  I’m hoping for at least one more round of feedback and improvement before I submit, and while I wait for that I’m planning on just working on the writing.

Getting close!

Tags: Inform 7, Interactive Fiction, Programming