Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my last post.)

I have been making progress in the game, but in a weird scattered way that is hard to write about.

Via Andy’s Arcade.

I was getting tripped up by how you look at things in the game. When a text adventure author wants to hide things in the items of a game that gets revealed, they have a few options:

a.) Just have one consistent command, like LOOK, for everything.

b.) Have examining and searching be considered separate actions.

c.) Add in LOOK UNDER or LOOK BEHIND.

d.) Require some specific “movement” command like MOVE or PUSH.

In addition to all the above, a game might have a “second order” style looking, where a description of an object has something inside it that can be looked at (as we saw with El Diablero and the thread).

Now, none of the above necessarily are “good” or “bad” design on the face of it, but they need to be implemented in such a way that the game is careful about feedback. Jigsaw (1995, Graham Nelson) has finding hidden objects as a mechanic, and introduces this early with a rolling stool.

Vestry
The vestry once held surplices. Today, it holds a surplus. Debris, broken furniture, blown-in leaves, panes of dusty glass and mildewed cloth, all unwanted.

There’s even an old Victorian piano stool, but no sign of a piano.

>examine stool
An old wheeled piano stool, wide and tall, with a hinged and padded seat.

>search stool
You can’t see inside, since it is closed.

That makes the bit after not-so-frustrating:

>look under stool
There’s a charcoal pencil underneath the stool.

>move stool
It rolls a little.

>look

Vestry
The vestry once held surplices. Today, it holds a surplus. Debris, broken furniture, blown-in leaves, panes of dusty glass and mildewed cloth, all unwanted.

There’s even an old Victorian piano stool, but no sign of a piano.

On the floor, underneath where the stool used to be, is a pencil.

You can incidentally just move the stool; either way, the game is training you that LOOK UNDER works different than EXAMINE or SEARCH. At the very least, there are no conflicting messages, where a player thinks they did a thing, but did not actually do a thing.

Now, back to Pulsar 7, and first off, something I had on my map last time and neglected to mention.

This is a “wrecked cabin” that is inside the maze. The only thing you can see is “Wreckage” and EXAMINE WRECKAGE responds

I see nothing of interest

If you instead SEARCH, or, weirdly, FRISK the wreckage:

I’ve found something!

This reveals a bunk. The bunk appears to have nothing.

Despite the bunk-with-vent picture being re-used, I don’t think there’s meant to be a vent here.

I even tested EXAMINE BUNK and SEARCH BUNK, keeping in mind Arrow of Death Part I had a moment where you could search the name of the room you were in (even though it wasn’t technically an object). I still found nothing (and later in the game, where I tested every verb on my list for reasons you’ll see in a second, I still found nothing).

This would normally be a discouraging dead-end, but thinking about the situation later, I realized I hadn’t done the same test in other bunks. Normally, EXAMINE NAMEOFROOM gets a “missing noun” error, but it at least lets you examine the bunk. I remembered it being weird that the captain’s room had nothing in it…

…so doing GO BUNK and then EXAMINE BUNK, I hit paydirt:

These are sleeping pills (which you can verify by trying to eat them, you fall asleep and get eaten by the creature). If you’re holding them with the other cake ingredients when you MIX CAKE, the tablets disappear from your inventory too, so I’m guessing they made it in.

I realized while I had looked at everything in the game, I hadn’t done both EXAMINE and SEARCH. It turns out SEARCH is (maybe) only useful at the wreckage, whereas EXAMINE works on more things. I had mentally been mislead by “I see nothing of interest” since I had (essentially unconsciously) interpreted the act of searching to be equivalent to examining, even though I was well aware authors have a tendency to separate them.

So my progress after came in pinpricks, finding out things I could examine and gathering more stuff:

Marking where I found things, or was able to make progress since last time.

Back where I was able to MOVE COUCH at the start, finding a rod underneath, I tried EXAMINE. (Which, again, I thought I had already done, but apparently I just used SEARCH.) This found me a small key (no idea where it goes) and a note.

Says:
…as the only surviving member of the PULSAR 7 crew…

That is, it is a note you wrote! This doesn’t seem to be amnesia as much as the protagonist has more knowledge than you do (which has been a odd running theme the whole time — surely the protagonist knows the layout of the ship).

Newly inspired, I finally found at the PILLOW DISPENSER I could MOVE PILLOW and find a circuit board. Using the circuit board, I then went over to the bridge and the “Console Control” and was able to INSERT BOARD.

Outside at the console, I tried EXAMINE CONSOLE and found a white and a black button. The black button does nothing, the white button says “something happened” but I have been unable to figure out what that things is. I assume it comes up later.

Not part of the examine-fest was finally being able to open the locker.

I was trying to direct actions against the locker (and had tried every single one on my list) with no luck; I needed to be directing my verb on the tool I was using. USE HAMMER breaks open the locker, and then EXAMINE LOCKER reveals it has as spacesuit.

Which I can’t use yet, because I need the magnetic boots the creature is guarding still. Hmmf.

To give my current issues:

a.) I still can’t use the oven even with the pill-poisoned cake mix. I noticed FIX OVEN seems to give a coherent response, just I don’t have the right item for it, and EXAMINE OVEN notes a round hole. My guess is I use the lathe to make something that goes in.

b.) Except I can’t get the lathe working either. I assume the socket is a power plug so I need a cord to connect the two. Is it just hiding out there? Do I need to start frisking everything too in case that’s considered a separate verb sometimes?

c.) I still have a key I don’t know the use for, and I don’t know what pressing the white button did.

d.) Surely there’s something at the wreckage with the bunk? I tried every verb I could both in the “bunk room” and standing next to it.

I’m hoping I’m just missing one item that will chain-reaction the rest of this thing. I will take a hint if anyone knows one of the examine-spots is ridiculous somehow.