Anyone heard of this game? It’s a roguelike/city sim/rpg where you control a group of dwarves, design their fortress by hand, and eventually build up a huge city (at least until you delve ‘too greedily and too deep’ and run into some new friends… ) and it’s been generating a huge amount of discussion on the Something Awful and Penny Arcade forums. (And I think Gamespy and probably lots of other sites too.)
I’m plugging it partly because it’s a great game that manages to be an insane amount of fun despite still being in the alpha stage, and the developer seems to be a great guy as well, but also because I was wondering if it would be possible to do something like that with IF?
Obviously an IF game would be nowhere near it in scale, but I’m just talking about the concept in general. I know with most interpreters it’s possible to do a lot of things besides your typical ‘text adventurer’, but besides CYOAs I could probably count on one hand the number of games that break out of the typical mold of you as the PC going around examining things, talking to NPCs, solving puzzles, and generally being the only one that gets anything important done. (Actually, right now I can just think of one, and that would be Lock & Key. And even that still had you as the main character solving a puzzle, though the snazzy interface made it really stand out as something different.)
Would it be possible/plausible to make an IF game that was more of a simulation than an adventure? Say, a functioning castle or space station or whatever, with NPCs running around on schedules you could either directly or indirectly influence. You wouldn’t even need a main plot for a game like that, just enough freedom and interesting things going on so the player could create their own.)
Now, I could see this being done on two levels; either with the player being a ‘manager’ type figure who gives orders and is distanced from the action, sort of like with Lock & Key, (but a lot more complex obviously) or with the player being your typical PC who’s turned lose in this world and can directly interact with it.
I don’t know if I’m making much sense here, and at any rate I can’t picture anything like this that wouldn’t be a nightmare to implement, but as a person who loves games that include a ‘sandbox mode’ I guess one of the things that’s always frustrated me about IF is how inherently linear it is. IF is all about restrictions, leading the player along and trying to keep them from wanting to try anything too weird, and even a game that tries for multiple endings and multiple solutions to puzzles is still railroading players down a handful of set paths, no matter how hard the author tries to disguise it. Even something like a hugely simplified Nethack-type game would be incredibly hard to pull off, just because of the way all the different elements interact with each other.