IF – Page 3 – Dhakajack

IFcomp 2018

A quick post about IFcomp 2018, which launches today. Last year, I reviewed all the submissions on this blog, but will not be doing so this year as I have two games in the comp. It’s been a few years since the rules change that removed the gag on authors, but I’m still not comfortable commenting in public on other games, when I’m a participant.

I’ll certainly play through as many of the other games as I can and will be posting some comments privately on the closed forum for authors.

I’m looking forward to reading reviews of all the games in the comp — I’m sure all the authors are in the same boat, sitting on the edge of their seats this morning waiting for the first feedback to drift in.

Some Thoughts About Cragne Manor

I’ll add more comments as time permits [these were written in August 2018, about four months before the game came out — but I didn’t know that at the time], and Ben will probably do the same on his blog at some point. Whatever other comments we add on about our work on the Cragne Manor project, I’ll link it back to this page.

Design

We wrote up a design document to serve as a reference in writing the characters and their situation. It was particularly helpful in putting together a consistent time line. Initially we stuck closely to the design document, but as writing progressed, the story and characters took their own directions, and we ditched some of the design elements — there is no iron golem, for example in the final story. In some instances, we redacted portions that would either not have worked as IF or that were unnecessarily cumbersome in terms of mechanics relative to their narrative contribution.

Model Transcript

While Ben started thinking about coding and integrating standard parts of the Cragne Manor project, I began writing the transcript. Perhaps not the best way to approach a project based on dialogues because it tends towards the linear, but given the time constraint versus volume of text needed to tell the story, we though it would be efficient because Ben could review and implement behind me as I wrote. That mostly worked for this project, particular because we kept the dialogue and NPCs relatively simple — not much in terms of forking dialogue or variability based on earlier knowledge, emotional state, etc. I worked within GoogleDocs and for the sake of loading quickly split the model transcript into part 1 and part 2. The final game resembled these transcripts pretty closely.

The Code

As usual, we wrote the code collaboratively, using version control to fold our efforts together, in this case the whole project lives on github.

The French IF Competition: 2018

The cover is meant to be evocative of a similar design used in the landmark Infocom title, A mind forever voyaging. The subtitle of Faute De Servo is "Un voyageur sans esprit", that is, "A voyager without a mind". — Faute De Servo was meant to be a play on words — at one point in the game, a servomotor fails, so “Servo Error” on one hand. The words also sound the same, however, as “Faute de Cerveaux”, which could mean “lack of brains” or maybe “but for want of brains”, which also makes sense in the context of the story. Cover Art by Ben Collins-Sussman.

This year, I experienced the French IF comp not as a reviewer, but as an entrant. I’m ecstatic to report that not only did I survive the comp, but I came in second in a field of five thanks to a lot of help from proofreaders, editors, and bêta-testeurs/bêta-testeuses that helped me polish my not-so-fluent writing into something presentable. I’d like to share some thoughts about the comp, the community around it, my motivation for entering, some design decisions, and how it all worked out.

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IFComp2017: All Games Considered

I played through all of the entries in this year’s IFcomp during the first month, so it’s been at least a couple weeks since the last game. I’d like to share a few thoughts about some of the entries now that the dust has settled and I can look back on them as a whole.

In general, I am happy to stick with my initial ratings, even for those games that I played early in the competition, as my scale is based on several years of IFcomp. I do think that my scale will need some weighting next year to put the average game closer to midscale, though.

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IFcomp 2017: Extended taxonomy

This year’s crop of games is large enough to be divided up into any number of categories by subject, e.g., RPGs, sci-fi, murder mysteries, or structurally, e.g., parser-based, limited-parser, hypertext, CYOA, etc. I’d like to propose a number of new and entirely arbitrary categories based on this year’s submissions. Please let me know in comments if I’ve gotten any of these wrong or missed some.

Games…

…mentioning cheese in some capacity (including in the context of Macaroni and Cheese): Eat Me, What Once Was, Absence of Law, Run Of The Place, Nightbound, A Castle of Thread, The Skinny One, The Castle of Vourtram.

….involving conversation with birds: 10 pm, Harbinger, Eat Me, Alice Aforethought, The Dragon Will Tell Your Future Now, Goodbye Cruel Squirrel, The Adventure of Esleralda and Ruby on the Magical Island, The Wand, What Once Was, A Castle of Thread, and kind of, The Owl Consults.

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IFcomp 2017: Preliminary Scores

I just posted my 79th review for this IFcomp, which means that I’ve now commented on every entry. I tried to get through them quickly to provide feedback early enough in the competition to be useful to both authors and players.

I’ve sorted every game according to my scoring rubric, which may or may not reflect how other people feel about these games. But first, I wanted to flag the about 15% of games that I awarded a “Je ne sais quoi” point. Probably the best way to define that undefinable point is to say that there is something in these works that I wish I could capture when I’m writing IF:

* Absence of Law

* Eat Me

* Guttersnipe

* Harmonia

* Sea Monkey

* The Owl Consults

* Unit 322

* The Very Old Witch

* Charlie The Robot

* One Way Out

* Swigian

* VR Gambler

I tend to score these games highly, but other games with good writing and high production quality have scored higher than some of these, even without the JNSQ tacked on to their score.

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Review – What Once Was

This Quest game is spread out in four dimensions. It is set on a university campus, and the protagonist is an OWUPSOABD (over worked, underpaid, stressed-out graduate student), who discovers that his mentor is missing and suspects that it has something to do with their experimental time travel project.

For those that haven’t played, I have some advice to offer: first, check out the help command. The response is short, but note that this game includes the verb “use”. Most of the time, the game is looking for a more specific verb and when a non-standard verb is required, it is usually clear from context or suggested in the wording of a prompt, but if nothing else seems to work, the game might be looking for “use”.

I was stuck for quite a while at one point because I forgot about “use” — the walkthrough is more conceptual than procedural, so it doesn’t help with specific phrasing. I only managed to keep going by watching Lynnea play through that part of the game on her twitch stream.

The other piece of advice: wear physical protection from the puns in this game. I prefer sharp wit, but puns are almost by definition bludgeoning.

There are a lot of puzzles in this game and many are people-centric, i.e., they revolve around finding the right person to help with a specific item and then figuring out what motivates that person or what you need to give that person to get the job done.

If I recall correctly every NPC encountered has some relevance to the game, so it behooves players to examine everyone they come across and to take in their surroundings. Talking to NPCs is also helpful in some situations, but only if you nail the topic exactly. Otherwise, responses will be unhelpfully generic or you will just be ignored.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

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Review – VR Gambler

I like role playing games, but I am not a big fan of simulations of role playing games. Ironically, I found this simulation of a simulation of a role playing game fun. This was not the highest-end RPG in the comp this year in terms of production quality, mechanics, or implementation depth, but it really played well and I found it strangely addictive.

In this parser-based game, the player visits a near-future casino in which one of the attractions is a virtual reality role playing game, along the lines of a holodeck. It is a veneer, but the running gag sprinkles flavor throughout the story. For example, complimentary drinks continue to be served to the player even while he carries on slaying and pillaging his way through the adventure.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

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Review – Temperamentum

This is a lightly implemented parser game written in Adrift. I found gameplay impossible without the walkthrough, and the walkthrough itself contains errors. I bailed after about fifteen minutes, so my evaluation is limited. This is one of those games that I think a lot of reviewers would have summarily skipped: no instructions to players, about, credits, help, or hints. Standard responses. Minimal Descriptions. Lack of Proofing.

There is the briefest frame story around what I suppose are a series of dream sequences, each taking as a theme one of the four humors. Just an observation: why does IF so frequently make sets like this a central theme? The seven colors of the rainbow (Rainbow Bridge, The Wand, The Cube In The Cavern), the four elements (Domestic Elementalism, The Cube In The Cavern), and the four humors (Temperamentum)?

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

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Review – Word Of The Day

This is an obsessively detailed parser-based sci-fi story that took me the full two hours to play, albeit not all in one sitting. The richness of the game’s background, character backstories, and the number of rooms and detailed objects in them more than makes up for however many stories I have criticized as under implemented in this IFcomp.

The amount of detail is at first overwhelming, but I am sure it is only a fraction of the world that this author has generated. I don’t doubt that in creating this game, the author generated extensive histories of each alien world and extensive character sketches for each character, but had to make some tough choices about how much of this material to hold back on in order to condense the story to two hours of playing time.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

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