Beached! ...A brandnew free Interactive Fiction game.

Hi there!
My name is Ewald Bal. I’m the CSO at BrightSight-People, an indie software company from The Netherlands.

I’ve always loved text adventures or Interactive Fiction nowadays. And I am proud to bring you a brand-new and totally free game called “Beached!” An oldschool text adventure with modern-day touches.

In Beached! you play a stranded, cocky castaway roaming a deserted island in the Caribbean Sea. Help this poor guy survive the island, using nothing but it’s natural resources, which is easier said than done, of course.

Beached! Is a small game, as it is the first in a series to come. Survival is your main goal in this first part, escaping the island will happen in later episodes. I hope you’ll enjoy Beached! For its atmosphere and crazy sense of humor if you force the protagonist into wacky situations.

Play Beached! at: beached.000webhostapp.com/
It’s a totally free game with NO advertisements.
Please, mail feedback if you enjoyed the game (or not…) and suggest a good name for our hero, to be used in upcoming episodes.

Greetz,
Ewald Bal
mail: info@brightsight-people.com

The command “look at the beach” doesn’t work but “look beach” does. There’s no “examine” verb too. You might have a problem.

Hi!
Thx for the reply, your feedback is appreciated.
I will dig into that the next couple of days, Some other people came up with that as wel.
Hope you’ve enjoyed the game so far?

Greetz,
Ewald

Everything I type - and I’m not trying to be difficult, these are things like “w” or “look at beach” - I get something like “No, no, no” or “Serious?”. You need to accept more forms of input and, crucially, when the parser doesn’t understand the input, it needs to make this clear without admonishing the player. I know it’s a joke but it put me off very quickly.

It also puts my browser into “Not responding” for ten or twenty seconds when I open the page.

Hi robinjohnson,
Nope, you’re not being difficult! You’re right: the parser is a bit limited at the moment.
I had planned for a wider vocabulary in part 2, but several requests have been made to do this on part 1.
Okay, I will within a few days. Same goes for the rudeness of the parser. Some will be removed, but no all!
I use this to give our protagonist some bad character. Remember: he’s shipwrecked, lonely and very hungry…

Just in case:
Type (or click) help to get some info on the parser.
Type exits to get all a list of all exits from your current location.

Enjoy the game!
Greetz,
Ewald

I was immediately put off by the failure messages as well. On my first turn I typed ‘inventory’, and the game responded with

Using parser responses for characterization is a wonderful technique. But responses like this don’t seem to fit the protagonist at all. Who are “me” and “you”? I’m not asking anyone to stripsearch anyone…I’m looking at what I have in my hands. And the protagonist usually doesn’t know about the inventory being displayed on screen; that’s just the game responding, not the character.

Hello Draconis,
Yeah… you’re right. An update will be released soon and some of the rudest remarks will be removed. I will reconsider the list of responses ASAP.
Hope you’re offended too bad and will play the game again later on? Give me a few days, please.

Greetz,
Ewald

Hi all!
Just to inform you: Beached! has just had a small update.
Some issues, brought up by the community, have been fixed.

  1. A few bugs have been crashed and a few typos have been undone.
  2. The commands list has been expanded with some of your recommendations.
  3. The insolence of the games responses has been turned down a bit.
  4. The interactive map has been updated (click on the ingame blue/black MAP/HINTS button).

The next update to come:

  1. Checking all available location exits in the parser.

Enjoy some more!
Greetz,
Ewald

Hello all!
Beached! has just been updated.

*) The exits problem with some locations have been fixed. You now get the right directions in the location describtions, as wel as after typing ‘exits’.
*) The text parser has been updated to recognise more commands. It starts to recognise commands with more then two words.
*) The map has been slightly adjusted and some more hints were added, in case you get stuck. To open the map, click the map/hints button on the left side of the screen.

Enjoy!

I noticed if you “wait” it says “Sure, take your time. I’ll starve in the mean time…” Now that’s a good response. It’s a little snarky but not mean, and perfectly in character.

In general, though, this game needs a good native-English editor to smooth out the language and fix the typos and misused words. There are too many to list here.

The biggest difficulty is that there’s no way to tell the difference between a command that is completely not understood by the parser vs a command that is simply not used in the right context: a non-comprehension response vs a failure response. For example, I want to fill the shell with water, but I can’t tell if there’s a good reason why I can’t put water in the shell, or if I’m expressing the command in a way the parser doesn’t understand. All the “wrong” responses are the same regardless if I’m giving an incorrect command, trying to go a non-valid direction, or doing something that should work but I’m not using the right object or in the right place. It’s very hard to make progress with such an opaque design.

A possible bug: When I found the aloe vera, it said: “You take some leaves with you for later use.” But nothing new was added to inventory, and I can’t examine the leaves anywhere.

This looks like it could be fun, but it’s nearly unplayable as it is, unfortunately. I hope it will continue to be improved.

Helolo ReikoYukawa,
Unfortunately this episode of beached! will not be updated any longer. Beached! part 2 is under development and will have all the improvements part 1 needs.
I will look into the Aloe Vera bug though, that’s a new one.

The new parser for part 2 is almost complete. I’ve had many suggestions for it and yours are now added to my to-do list. Thx for that. The new parser will not only respond to unknown commands and bad moves in a proper way. I’ve just written a piece of code that executes a command that comes closest to the one you’ve entered, presuming that’s what you meant to do next in the game. I would be so proud if that actually works out well.

This parser will go on display in a few weeks. I hope you’ll testdrive it and find that all your remarks will be implemented.

Hi Ewald,
I’m curious whether javascript is hand-written or generated from some database, or another language.

It was all handwritten. If you know some JavaScript you can tell from the style of writing, I think?
The programming is a bit basic, or so I’m told. But it does the job just fine.
For some better quality, check out Beached! (Prelude) that’s out now.