Jay Is Games CGDC#7 Thoughts

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Unlike the IFComp, there was no rule in the CGDC that forbade authors from commenting during the judging period. Even so, I didn’t feel inclined to comment publicly on other people’s games during the competition itself. Knowing how much I like receiving feedback, and how helpful it is in terms of making the game better in subsequent releases, I did privately send some comments and transcripts to a few game authors.

I haven’t played through all thirty games in the comp (notably, Ka and Roofed are still on my to-play list), but I’d like to jot down a few quick impressions of what impressed me in this batch of games. I’m not going to do into detail on each game, although there are some excellent reviews by Emily Short , Matt Weiner, Matt Wigdahl, and the fluffy bunny known only as “gruelove“.

These aren’t listed in order of preference; in fact, every time I look at the list, the games slide back and forth. Each of them has unique strengths, and that’s what I’d like to highlight here:

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Hoosegow wins Casual Game Play Competition

I got an email at work earlier today congratulating me on having won the Jay is Games CGPC#7. The site is blocked by policy where I work, but I logged on with my cell phone’s little browser, read the news, and fired a message off to Ben. Up to that point, all we could see were the “hearts” ratings on the competition page (where people rate the games from one to five hearts). According to that metric, few people had played our game, and many other games had higher ratings. I’d written off even placing in the top five at that point, and was thinking that Ben and I would have to sit down after the comp to review comments and figure out where we had misjudged what would work in a casual games competition. So, it was a very pleasant surprise.

Thanks go out to everyone who worked on the game. The process for developing this game was described in issue 57 of SPAG, but briefly, we had two phases of review. First, we asked a somewhat broad group of reviewers to take a look at the plot and structure of the game, and to critique the game from the perspective of design and writing. A couple weeks later, we started rapid beta-testing cycles. Our first wave of concept reviewers included David Anderson, Conrad, Matt Wigdahl, John Lodder, Duncan Bowsman, Jenni Polodna, Sam Kabo Ashwell and Yoon Ha Lee. Our beta-testers included Adrian Colley, Beth Vanichtheeranont, Jacob Lee, John Lodder, Peter Olson, and Rob Dubbin. Sarah Morayati gets special thanks for being both an early reviewer and a tenacious beta-tester. Rochelle Lodder also deserves credit for copy editing the entire work in record time. Without all of this assistance, Hoosegow would not have been half as well-written, and would have had (at least) twice the bugs. Thanks, everyone.

Hoosegow, released

A picture of an Old West sheriff''s office
Hoosegow

After several weeks of furious work, Ben Collins-Sussman and I have released a new game, Hoosegow. The game was written for the Jay Is Games Casual Game Play Competition #7, which solicited preferably single room games, with a theme of “Escape!”

You don’t have to dig too deeply to find either element in Hoosegow. You’re in a one room jail cell, and you’re going to be hanged at dawn. It is in your best interest to escape.  Luckily, your best buddy, Muddy, is there to give you moral support, if not helpful advice on escaping.

The game was submitted to Jay Is Games on the evening of January 31st, a couple hours before the deadline. It sounds like they’ve had a good response to their call for submissions; their forum for the Casual Game Play Competition #7 indicates that 30 games have entered. These games have not yet appeared on the Jay Is Games website, but their staff are presumably getting the site ready and perhaps thumbing quickly through the games to make sure they don’t post something inappropriate for their general audience.  As soon as Hoosegow appears on the Jay Is Games site, we’d like to steer people over there to play all the submissions and vote on their favorites. In the meanwhile, the Hoosegow game file is available for download at the game’s main site. You can download the source code and walkthrough documents from the same site. For the sake of convenience, we also listed the game on the IFDb and IFwiki sites.