Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

From The Retro Cavern.

(Continued directly from my previous post.)

In the past I’ve tried my best to point out how the various text games I’ve played (despite a very common set of elements) nevertheless have strong fingerprints which distinguish them. This game is no different, and I want to do some compare-and-contrast with two sections. This is useful from both a history-of-games standpoint and a theory-of-games standpoint.

Picking up the action from the obligatory troll’s toll bridge, I tried paying the troll and exploring a bit farther.

I was given the word “diaxos” in one of the rooms (it gets whispered like “Y2” does in Crowther/Woods). The word “diaxos” give a “very loud creaking sound” no matter where it is used, and the trick is to realize that this is the sound of the safe (back on the other side of the troll bridge, by the library) being opened.

By default there’s a bar of platinum but if you hand something over to the troll beforehand, it also ends up in the safe. So that problem’s resolved: you give up a treasure and you just get it back later.

I also had encounters with an ogre, orc, and dragon in that order, but I want to save that for what will hopefully be a final or close to final post, and focus on the Everglades area. I was getting chomped by a crocodile who just needed some food (although the exact sequence of what happens is a bit unexpected).

The upshot of the sequence above is that the trip here is one-time-only. You can safely go back in the Everglades, but the still-hungry crocodile will still chomp you if you try to go by again. Fortunately, there’s no real need for a second trip, because the whole area has no puzzles: just locations with treasures lying around.

Treasure rooms marked with color.

In a sense, this means the game reverts to the type from some early games like Explore or Chaffee’s Quest: just movement and treasures. (Probably. There is one possible secret.) Furthermore, it has the random-placement style of those games; there’s a “yellow brick road” in one spot, some quicksand in another, a treasury, and a fairy grotto.

However, despite just being rooms, there’s some semblance of environmental narrative going on. The quicksand has a plank left by a previous adventurer.

Also, you can safely go “down”, but just end up at a dead-end: “Oh dear you seem to have struggled through that quicksand for nothing”.

Similarly, the yellow brick road was only previously yellow:

And it is possible to make it to the end of the line where the road stopped being built:

The effect is really light and vignette-based. I did mention one possible secret; the fairy grotto has no treasure and it is highly tempting to think a magic word or something like that goes here. On my “best progress save” I am saving nabbing all the treasures in this area because of the fairy grotto, although it could easily be more environmental storytelling.

One other subtlety I want to point out — and this is true of every area, not just this self-contained one — is how the structure of the text is part of the user interface. If we go back to original Adventure (the only reference for this game) there is one major standard established right away:

YOU ARE INSIDE A BUILDING, A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING.
THERE ARE SOME KEYS ON THE GROUND HERE.
THERE IS A SHINY BRASS LAMP NEARBY.
THERE IS FOOD HERE.
THERE IS A BOTTLE OF WATER HERE.

Namely, that objects that you can pick up are separated from the main text. There is, of course, an easy technical reason for this (it is a lot harder to modify the body text than it is to concatenate a bunch of object-in-room messages) but it also serves to make the player have an easier time. By contrast, consider the ICL game Quest:

You are in a small log cabin in the mountains. There is a door to the north and a trapdoor in the floor. Looking upwards into the cobwebbed gloom, you perceive an air-conditioning duct. Lying in one corner there is a short black rod with a gold star on one end. Hanging crookedly above the fireplace is a picture of Whistler’s mother, with the following inscription underneath: ‘If death strikes and all is lost – I shall put you straight’.

The short black rod which you can pick up is placed in the middle of the text, and furthermore doesn’t have the line-skip to separate it. Despite both cases dealing just with prose, the first example more easily highlights the things a player can interact with, and so the text structure itself provides a UI.

Now consider Sphinx Adventure:

The format is

You are in a music room. [Statement of room name] Beautiful melodies echo all around. [Description of environment]
[Break to next line]
There are exits to the north, south, and west. [Listed description of exits.]

Notice how this easily gets across: the room as a short name (for ease of mapping), and the break between description and interactable parts (in this case the exits). When an object is included there is a further break.

You are at yet another dead end. [Room name, no description.]
[Break to next line]
There is another exit east. [Listed description of exits]
[Break to next line]
[Another line break, meaning the break here is different than the break between room name and exits.]
There is a cluster of opals here.

This conveys quite quickly the one direction you can go and what you can take, and the two kinds of breaks subtlety adds another bit of help in reading what the player needs.

This seems like a small and obvious thing (and it was at least started off in Adventure) but certainly not everyone followed the system so cleanly. (Having windows like the French Colditz game I played recently is another approach, but one with different issues.) One major gameplay consideration is if there’s any important objects sequestered in the “room description” portion. This game the answer seems to be no; you can’t refer to the plank at the quicksand, for example. Many a time I’ve been stuck has been when a game seems to establish this “sequestered room description” setup but then violates it. The biggest thing to remember in UI design is consistency, lest your UI gets mocked like like this chart of all the different ways to go left and right in Starfield. (I especially like how in one case it’s the letters Q and E and in another the letters Q and T and yet another the letters Z and C … why?)