You play an unknown named character and you were left behind
by your team to handle a crisis with a material breach in the lab.
Now under lock down, you must try and survive before madness
kicks in. Will you survive the time it will take for the team to arrive
or will you slip into madness and take your life? Do you think you
can survive to your own devices? Only one way to find out.
Ice Station Alpha.7z (275 KB)
I think I can safely say that cvaneseltine is thinking that “everything [she] said about the other two games is also relevant here”. Down to the misspellings, as far as I can see.
We do appreciate you taking the trouble to post the games here, but I assume that means you want feedback, right?
I think Peter’s point is good. Are you trying to open discussion and get feedback on your work?
If not, it would be best if you put them all in one thread, rather than opening a different thread for every single one.
Just to make it clear and add a more positive spin:
You’re making text adventures. Hurray! That’s exactly what we like!
You’re posting them here so that we can play them. Brilliant! Keep them coming!
We’d be even more thrilled, though, if it looked like we could in any way help you improve on your games. That’s the way IF has been going for years - people playing games, commenting on them, trying to make things more enjoyable, more memorable, or just plain old more fun.
On a side note, we’ve seen plenty of guys submitting games to the IFComp who, year after year, just didn’t learn from their mistakes. Basic stuff, a lot of the time. Things that every reviewer talked about. When I see some names, I know exactly what to expect. And on the other hand, we’ve also seen plenty of guys who did take criticism to heart and kept improving visibly. Visibly. Every game was better than the last one. You could see them maturing, it was beautiful - even if you didn’t particularly liked their games, you had to give them points for effort every time.
Given a choice, I think people’d prefer to be in the latter group. Sure, this is all for fun, and I’m sure you have a blast making your games your way - but wouldn’t it be even better if you could make them your way AND make them EVEN more enjoyable for others? It is possible.
Alright, I’ll work on my craft and improve besides the obvious spelling errors. For my next game, what do you folks think I’ll have to add to make them better? Cause I want to make them better, almost infocom good.
“Almost Infocom good” is a good goal to pursue, but for that you’ll definitely want to move beyond BASIC.
From what I’ve seen of your games, the thing that most threw me off is that the game didn’t do anything when I tried a verb or construction that didn’t work. I never knew whether something had happened or not, whether the game had rejected my command - without telling me why; maybe I was just missing a preposition, or maybe I should try a completely different verb, always floundering - or whether it had actually done something.
And this is a parser issue. It’s a problem that you just don’t have if you move to Inform, or TADS, or Hugo, or Alan, take your pick. These tools have evolved to help you focus on your game rather than this sort of nitty-gritty.
If you want to do it in BASIC, I’m afraid you’ll have to somehow include this in your, er, basic framework.
As for the games, I tried out the mouth of the clown one, but all I could do was wander around, I couldn’t seem to get anything else done, or interact with anything. I’ll give it a closer look later on, I guess, but the fact that the game just seemed to reject everything I typed that wasn’t a direction or HELP didn’t really encourage me to continue prodding.
I also seem to remember a mislabelled exit, but I can’t tell you for certain which off the top of my head.