intfiction.org

hi,

Small IF engine and game built from scratch in just 72 hours for a computer game building contest. Theme had to be "Tiny World". A bit rough around the edges, there's a list of things we'd fix if we'd had time. But it is playable I hope.

I should confess to not having played IF since the early 90s, and never writing one. We found writing the text content and adding the puzzles much harder than we'd bargained for, and had to enlist the help of a wordy friend at short notice.

Browser game (Chrome, Firefox or Safari) http://williame.github.com/ludum_dare_2 ... ost_compo/




Game contest link http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-da ... &uid=10313

The wooden jetty is where you had expected Dr Strange's home-made steam launch to moor.
> LOOK
There is bottle
> GET BOTTLE
could not get bottle - for a list of commands, type "HELP"

Shades of http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail94.html
Okay, okay, okay, the game doesn't understand "GET", it wants me to use "TAKE". I can handle that.

> TAKE BOTTLE
you took the bottle
> OPEN BOTTLE
you uncork the bottle; the letter falls out
> TAKE LETTER
could not take letter - for a list of commands, type "HELP"

OH COME ON

I'm acting dense for comedic effect here; I was really going to give the game the old college try anyway. But after failing to "i", "examine hedgehog", "examine plant", or "examine novel", I decided it wasn't much fun to continue slogging through it. I was having to type "HELP" after every command in order to see what had been implemented. Maybe you should have the list of possible commands always on screen, rather than making it available only through "HELP".

did you play the illustrated version with the map?


Sorry that you found it frustrating, it's coded by people who don't know the norms you were expecting. Given more time it'd have:
* better parsing
* auto-completion of main commands
* more command synonyms, eg get = take = pick up.

The idea of putting inventory and/or help lists on-screen has been mused but I'm concerned it's starting to go down the road of graphical adventures. We have a lot of graphics compared to 1980s text adventures, but the interface and story is absolutely a text adventure not a point and click adventure. There has to be some trial and error I think.

If the parser recognizes only a handful of commands I think it's better to have those commands visible, unless of course there's a "surprising" command that would spoil a puzzle if displayed to the player. The thing with full-fledged parsers is that they tell the player why the command was unsuccesful so even invalid input guides the player towards the right command. If the response is always just "command not recognized" you don't get the trial part of trial and error.

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Vorple UI library — Beta testing site — Blog

Thanks.

If anyone has tried the alpha any feedback would be helpful. I'm trying to gauge whether there is sufficient likelihood of a playing community to warrant continuing with the engine.

I think the map interface (illustrated mode) is unique -or is it? And it helps with the spacial dimension so it's less about drawing your own map.

At the moment the puzzles are mostly hidden in the main JavaScript files so not an easily modable engine. There is a basic quest type puzzle in the prototype, with two ways to achieve it. there's also basic non-player characters.

Another Feature is being able to flip between illustrated, basic and work panic mode.

There seems virtually zero possibility to getting new users from outside the existing IF world. We've had over 12000 visits first few days (thanks to reddit and hacker news) with net average time of about 2 mins (so lots got turned off as soon as they realized it was a text adventure, and/or their browser didn't work). Lots of encouragement but only from devs not players. So it's down to people here really.

Is it worth the bother of continuing this engine, making new maps etc? Making it modable, improving parsing, MUDS support, multi-map worlds, dynamic audio...

Unfortunately you really can't develop a playing community without a well-developed engine. IF players expect synonyms; they expect most commands to be parsed on the first try; they expect to be able to examine the objects mentioned in the room description; they expect the exits to be listed without having to type "exits", they expect commands that can't be parsed to give useful feedback. And deservedly so, because there are many game systems that handle all that, and your game is just going to make people think "I could be playing a better-implemented game right now." (I have Augmented Fourth tabbed, so I know.)

Same for non-IF players. I don't think your game is making them go "Oh, I just remembered I don't like text adventures" so much as "Oh, I just remembered what I don't like about text adventures--you type some text and it doesn't work and you spend forever trying to figure out what it wants you to say."

Your prose is also crufty: "I write to inform you of my sincerest apologies for not having made our planned rendezvous. You must forgive me for I am stranded on a small island..." could just be "You must forgive me for not making our planned rendezvous. I am stranded on a small island..."

Aaaand sometimes grammatically incorrect: "There is a plank" and several other sentences lack a period, and the response, "you took the plank", lacks both a period and an initial capital. "The grass has claimed it as it's own" should be "its", while "Its a very heavy iron key" should be "It's". "you think This is the way to live'" needs an opening quotation mark. "Crenellation" has two L's, and so on.

I do like programmer mode! However, in non-graphics modes, the letter should be plain text. I'm unable to see the map in graphics mode (I'm using Firefox 12).

Well we spelt a few words wrong just to give a certain type of person a sense of purpose.

It is a shame the map didn't load, it is the defining feature I think. Curious that the faux work mode did display though. Can you screenshot both modes as it may help us understand where the compatibility issue is coming from. Or you could always try the illustrated mode in Chrome.


I think one obvious problem with this type of engine is that it requires both artistic and language skills to create decent games. I bet many people who like to write IF cannot draw for toffee.

At any rate, the chances of the dev team putting any more time into this genre are rapidly decreasing. All the noise about a renaissance in IF seems overstated.

I think the recent iOs work Frankenstein by inklestudios just proved you wrong. You just need people good at writing AND people good at graphics/coding. You don't need a new programming tool, unless it is as promising as inklewriter seems to be. If not, 20 years of zarf, emshort, nelson and so many others' life can be enough.

There's something you may not understand about the community you're posting this in: Just about everyone here is already writing IF with one or another excellent engine that handles text and parsing much better than the Prof Strange engine does. (As you indicated early on in the thread, Prof Strange was written and programmed by people who aren't actually familiar with the conventions of IF.)

So, when you post here, folks are going to be asking themselves what your engine offers that the engines already available don't offer. From what I can see, while Prof Strange has pretty much nothing to offer in terms of text processing, there is one aspect of its interaction model that is neat and has real potential: the overlaying of text on the map! (I do see this in both Firefox and Chrome, by the way). If you found some folks to improve the design (typography and so on), and rewrote the engine to use native code to improve performance, I think you could have a pretty neat game, or series of games, built on this feature--in the tablet market, you could probably even have modest commercial success, reaching beyond the current market for the kind of interactive fiction that gets discussed here.

However, I don't think that the map overlay feature is enough to build an author community on. It would only be practical for games with a certain ratio of text per location. Most games produced by modern IFers wouldn't work at all using this sort of model for the interrelationship of text and graphics. In other words, I think it would wind up being an engine for producing Prof Strange style games, not for producing IF more generally. Maybe Prof Strange type games would become a thing, and in that case a critical mass of authors wanting to use the engine might appear--but they aren't likely to be drawn from the pool of people already writing IF. That's because, again, there are already much better tools for creating the sort of textual IF that the folks here are interested in. These tools are perfect, there are features that people would like to see available in IF engines that aren't available today (see this thread, for example), but your engine doesn't address that from what I can see.

In sum, I think what you've created in 72 short hours(!) does have potential, but not as an engine for existing IF authors.

(Edited to remove a bunch of first-draft stuff at the bottom that shouldn't have been in there. Sorry.)

_________________
Glimmr: Advanced Graphics for I7
blog | download | bug-tracker

I would put it this way: a new IF system has to grow from "prototype" to "full-featured, street-tested development tool". And historically, this takes two to four years of work. Not "fiddling around with it occasionally" work, but serious use by a group of game developers who are bombarding you with feature requests and bug reports.

This isn't us putting obstacles in front of you; this is us recalling what Inform 6, Inform 7, Hugo, TADS 2, TADS 3, etc really went through.