I’ve now completed my first IF game, namely “Isle of Statues”, written in Inform 6. If you’d like to try it out, you can find it on my Ontos weblog.
Please consider this less of a serious game and more of a training exercise on my part to bludgeon I6 into submission – after all, I’ve only started to learn I6, and this is my first “product”. I’d be most grateful for your feedback, either here on the forum, on the blog itself, or through the bug submission channel on the blog. Of course, I’m open to praise and cheap flattery, but I’d also be interested in bug reports, playability hints, and comments on the source code. I’m pretty sure, there are lots of things which I could have been coded much more elegantly.
Thanks in advance for everyone dedicating their time to this little game,
Congratulations on your first game, but man, I just gotta ask…
z6? I’m just curious - it’s mostly a relic, unsupported by many, many interpreters. What particular features of z6 are you using that made you choose that format instead of z5 or z8?
It’s not a problem, the biggest issue is that, as I said, many interpreters just don’t support v6 - that was a format that Infocom hacked into to support graphics and other extras of the sort, but in such a head-achey way for modern programmers (especially for interpreter authors!) people just tend to forget about it.
I would reccommend using z5 or z8 (or even z3 if it would fit, heh - I don’t think interpreters have issues with that one, but good luck fitting a modern game into it!), yes, mostly for portability.
[edited after Erik Temple’s post] Also, the 6 in Inform6 has no relationship to the 6 in Z6. [/edited]
A few comments about the links on your download page:
No love for Parchment? iplayif.com/?story=https://dl.dr … statues.z8
For people new to IF, please just recommend Gargoyle: code.google.com/p/garglk/downloads/list People used to IF can have their own favourite interpreters, but for new people its best to recommend one interpreter which runs on all 3 OSes.
Don’t point people to browse the IF Archive directly - point them to IFDB for games, and the IF Wiki for development systems.
thank you for your game!
I’ve sent you a PM with a transcript of my playing session attached; it would be cool if you could provide your e-mail address within the game, e.g. in an “about” text. I didn’t find an address on your blog, and to be honest, I was too lazy to submit each issue separately via your blog’s bug report form. My comments are marked with asterisks, so that you can easily search the text file for * to find my remarks concerning several typos and bugs.
I liked the game in general, but there are two rather serious problems (apart from some typos and unimplemented objects):
two locations (the southwestern forest and the southeastern cliffs) have no description, they just produce “Library error 11”;
in my opinion, the time limit is much too tight, considering that each action seems to take ten in-game minutes.
