Archive for the ‘IFComp 2015’ Tag
By Naomi “Norbez”. Played to completion three times using Firefox.
In The Speaker, you are human (Riviera) helping an alien (a “Satunian” named A. A. Arthur, AA for short) write responses to questions on his blog.
This could have been sort of a riff on My Dinner With Andre with an alien concept (if you’re unfamiliar with the movie, it involves a long philosophical dinner conversation … and that’s it). There are certainly vibes the story could go that way, but it gets undermined by:
a.) Being too short. I normally don’t like leveling this criticism — I have found some one-paragraph short stories to be brilliant — but here the premise never really had a chance to pay off. There are two questions the alien answers and you can choose to type what he wants or not. There’s no chance for the relationship to develop. (There’s another relationship story including, woot, a knitted scarf, but I didn’t find it nearly as interesting as the relationship between Riviera and AA.)
b.) Having facile philosophical content. I especially groaned at the bit where random gibberish (“erbqergfqgoinoiqrpgnqrgia”) somehow represented the profundity of infinity. Philosophical arguments can start with naive notions so I assumed the story would just develop from there, but it instead settles on “yep, that’s profound” and rests its case.
“They hate your gibberish, Riviera.” It seems the laughing will never stop. “They hate our infinity.”
I do worry I’m missing something because the file size seems rather large for the content I saw. If there’s some extensive plot branches I missed, I would appreciate a ping about it. Otherwise The Speaker needs more substance to be a satisfying game.
By Matthew Holland. Played to completion using Firefox on computer.
This bridge is much younger than the solid stone constructions of the rest of the city, and isn’t built to nearly the same standard. It crosses a deep ravine, joining the city to the north with more natural rock passages to the south.
This bridge is just about serviceable, but with the right tool you could weaken it so that heavy or careless pursuers fall into the darkness.
Pit of the Condemned has neither impressive plot nor writing nor setting nor characters. What it does have going for it is a complete variant of traditional text adventure gameplay.
The player is condemned to die and dropped into a ruined city doomed to be chased down by a ravenous beast. Fortunately, there are some supplies left over so the player can fight back.
There are specifically various points on the map that can be made into traps, if the right item can be found. All the time this is happening the player is being chased. Careful attention needs to be paid to the sound of the beast and it’s possible to be chased into a corner. The only other puzzles are locked doors which have matching keys.
Partial map of the environs.
So far nothing of note, but:
While the locations stay the same from game to game, the location of the beast and the objects are completely randomized.
This drops Pit of the Condemned into the genre of the tiny roguelike, in the same category as works like 868-HACK and Hoplite. It doesn’t represent a fullly fledged roguelike like Kerkerkruip, but rather zooms on a particular interaction — evading a beast and setting a trap — and bases the gameplay around that idea.
Mapping what would normally be a dull layout because much more interesting when one is paranoid about being trapped in dead-ends. Also, the status of keys and locks are much different than a traditional IF game: while they’re simple enough to almost be a non-puzzle, when key locations are randomized they represent branches of game possibility. Perhaps the key to the barracks is hard to find on a particular run, but the barracks have the tripwire needed for the spike trap, so the spike trap is essentially out of service for the game.
Having said that, I don’t think the implementation was strong as it could be. On one run I found the item I needed to set a trap immediately next to the right location; this led to a trivial win. Probably it would be best if the item generation was such that the player was required to use at least one key to win; this would require enough back and forth that there would likely be several near misses with the beast on a winning run.
Also, once the game is mapped it isn’t threatening enough; it’s almost possible to just ignore the beast until ready for a win. I might also suggest something like “alarm traps” that would cause the player to generate noise that can be heard across the map, or alternate obstacles other than just the beast to worry about. As it is this is the stub of an idea for a possible new branch of interactive fiction development.
By Claudia Doppioslash. Finished using iPhone.
The Man Who Killed Time pushes the limits of minimal interactivity. Cat Scratch at least had multimedia elements, but this is almost a literal ebook written in inklewriter with no multimedia and almost no choices (two of them, both minor).
A sample: here you click on “I give up” to continue reading.
Therefore, let me switch reviewer hats and ask: does it hold up as a short story?
Before getting into the plot, I should mention — contrary to the author’s apology in the blurb — the writing is pretty good. I noticed some wonkiness in the grammar:
Outside it was a shabby, and overgrown day, in some metropolis or other, in the years when those fascinating cars, that resembled more horses drawn coaches than anything else, were in fashion.
(Way too heavy on the commas. Plus, “horses drawn coaches” likely should be “horse-drawn coaches”.)
On the other hand, there are parts that could go toe-to-toe with any author, professional or not:
It was the case that he never forgot a good building. They all resided somewhere in his memory, in their own sort of Heaven, surrounded with picturesque valleys and enchanting woods. In life they couldn’t each have their own surrounding park, but he made sure that in his mind they had a grand one.
The story has the form of a traditional detective story; an angst-ridden protagonist is visited by a stranger with a case.
Excerpt here, the angst is due to the protagonist … well, not “killing time”, exactly, but developing a form of energy which uses potential unrealized reality as power. I am unclear why this kills time or has the effect it does (which has the Detective trapped in an unfamiliar universe) but I was willing to let the mysteriousness pass with the notion it would be cleared up later. Unfortunately the clearing up never happens, and I was reminded of one of those dangling plot threads of the TV show Lost with a grand setup leading to no reward.
The mystery is similar: a visitor brings a photo (mentioned in the top excerpt above) which is of herself, in the future. She requests the Detective investigate, although I was not 100% sure what she wanted to know. Again, this might have been cleared up later, but it was not.
The ending involves the Detective departing though “time” I suppose, and has one of those dangling artistic endpoints which can occasionally mark a good short story, but doesn’t work here. In the cases I’ve seen it work, some sort of satisfying action occurred in the plot, and while there might be incidents before and after, they clearly aren’t what the author is interested in nor is it necessarily the business of the readers to know.
I was instead wanting to learn more. Having said all that, if the author plans a sequel I would very much like to read it.
By PaperBlurt. Played to completion using the Chrome browser.
Capsule II involves a long spaceflight where hundreds of millions of people are kept asleep in cryotubes, but a series of “sandmen” are awoken throughout to take care of any problems on the way.
There’s a lot of snazzy changes in graphics and fonts, which is good, because a large chunk of the story isn’t interactive.
(Clicking all the links above simply assert that the ship is okay.)
The protagonist goes along their daily routine and fends off boredom. I oddly found this the most compelling part of the work, because when the accident happens, I started to feel uncomfortable.
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Out of the hundreds of millions of passengers in cyrosleep, a single tube breaks. Heading to the problem, the main character discovers Todd, who awakens and is miraculously alive, but with brain damage.
The main character then treats Todd … badly. I’d rather not recount details, but note this is still in the essentially non-interactive portion of the game.
(“of course I’m not crazy!! I just wanna manipulate people a bit!! nothing wrong with taht, adn Im jstu gald tot haev a freind aigan woh I cna paly wiht adn gte to kown IST GONA BEE SOOO MUTCH FNUUUUUU!!!)
Todd eventually is rechristened is Nilo and disturbing things start to happen. Entire sectors of cyrotubes start to break down for mysterious reasons. Nilo discovers fresh meat and the Sandman cooks it.
There’s a small measure of interactivity near the end, but as far as I can tell, it is token and not where I’d want to have it. I could easily see this being a much better story if
1.) The weird abuse of the mentally damaged Todd was skipped over. He could come out apparently normal but with the same sort of actual strangeness as Nilo.
2.) The interactivity starts far before things get out of control. The player can reject the “meat”. The player can try to do things to confront Nilo early. Perhaps none of those things might work, but as things are designed, the interactivity might as well not be present at all.
On top of that, I found the entire premise far-fetched. Who would design the flight to only have one Sandman awake at a time? Barring the obvious mental problems already highlighted, what if a current Sandman has a run-of-the-mill heart attack? What if there is a problem — not implausible on a giant spaceship — that requires more than one person to fix it?
How is it the main character consumed all the books and movies on the ship so quickly? Was nothing digital? Even just a plow through Project Gutenberg’s current selection would take almost a lifetime to get through.
Would a ship sized large enough to house 500 million people be even remotely practical?
Would 500 million people agree to be watched over by only one person?
By Felicity Banks. Played on iPhone to completion.
After many IFComp games which subverted their genre premise, Scarlet Sails was something of a relief. It’s a straight pirate romp in a magical universe. It’s in the ChoiceScript engine, and is the power fantasy you’d expect; it’s possible to end by being captain of the largest pirate fleet on the seas.
Scarlet Sails came at the perfect time; struggling to understand (let alone review) the crazy gimmicks I’ve seen so far came close to draining my sense of fun, but this game was a blast. I cranked my gun fu to maxmimum and sailed off to a happy ending.
The downside of being firmly enmeshed in genre is there weren’t any memorable bits of prose. I would like to spend a moment analyzing structure, though.
The standard ChoiceScript format is delayed branching (I’m not even extrapolating here; this is an official statement by the CEO of the company).
While the “main nodes” reach the same plot points each chapter, decisions in prior chapters can affect later ones. This is done via the use of statistics, and is subtle enough I think the typical “node chart” is underselling the gameplay short.
Here is a straightforward example: early in Scarlet Sails you have a choice between buying certain items (like fresh fruit or a new sword). This drains your selection of gold coins, meaning that if the gold coin count is reduced too much it shuts off options later (like bribery or gambling). Since the options are numerical, it isn’t easy to draw nodes in a cause-effect sense. Maybe there’s enough later to gamble and not bribe, but winning at gambling will allow bribery again.
The items you buy aren’t straight open-a-branch type purchases either; they provide enhancements to various statistics which can make it easier (but not guaranteed) to reach certain plot points.
That is, buying a new sword isn’t necessary to be good at swords, but this decision will need to be compensated for later via sword practice.
Is this sort of numerical adjustment even possible with a straight node chart? If the game was done as a stateless chooose-your-own-adventure book, it would explode into a blizzard of nodes.
Many choices were along the lines of: out of two different choices in chapter one and two different choices in chapter two, if you pick three of them then you’ll have a particular plot point available in chapter five. This sort of dynamism leads to long-term planning and the feeling that each choice has some story effect (rather than, say, the feeling of reading a footnote).
In other words, the combinatorial explosion of choices led more to the feeling of playing a game rather than just reading a story. I don’t necessarily have a problem with the latter (my favorite of the competition so far is very ungamelike), but I’d also rather not pretend two games are equivalent just based on their maps.
By furkle. Played on iPhone. Not finished.
SPY INTRIGUE is a Twine game about someone who enters a futuristic spy school and goes on missions. This is a terrible way to describe the actual feeling of playing.
First, to clarify, “Not Finished” is not because I got frustrated or something like that: SPY INTRIGUE is a very long game. After more than two hours I was — I’m guessing a bit here — only halfway. I would have kept going, but the game crashed upon trying to pick the 3rd mission (“SyntaxError: Unexpected EOF”).
I should also get out the way that everything (with an interesting exception) is in ALL CAPS like the clip above. The general effect is not like an angry internet commenter but more like an ancient TRS-80 game or perhaps an essay by FILM CRIT HULK. I’m not sure if the net result was good or bad, but it did allow for some interesting effects where the text read more like poetry than prose.
However, the game also freely mixes high poetry with random humor. The player is the only spy at the school because all of them died of “spy mumps” causing their heads to explode. Instant oatmeal is used as a weapon (OATMEAL TIME OATMEAL TIME OATMEAL TIME OATMEAL TIME). The main character’s attitude is of a stoner out of their depth (who is it one point subjected to actual drugs).
At some points the humor and poetry happen at the same time. The protaganist flies to the second mission on a rocket, and midway thinks they are going to die and goes into a beautiful monologue about the first dog in space … whose name they don’t remember, so they call him “Skywalker”.
So far with all this, SPY INTRIGUE would be a fun and goofy and mostly puzzleless romp, but then the deaths elevate things to the next level. Whenever the character dies the game switches to “no caps” mode and gives a short story:
I am unclear if the stories are meant to be out of the life of a single person or multiple people. The very first one (in a ridiculous whismy part of the main portion of the game) involves a haunting suicide.
The effect was to have me actively searching for ways to die; in a weird bit of gameplay finesse I would backtrack from successfully passed obstacles in an attempt to fail them so I could read another death story.
All this means there’s a meta-level I haven’t worked out yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s all a dream in the mind of an old man who only exists as part of a virtual reality simulation. Due to the length I would recommend SPY INTRIGUE for after the competition; rushing doesn’t do it justice.
By Hanon Ondricek. Played in browser with Firefox. Not finished.
Keeping with the “busting expectations” theme, The Baker of Shireton was what I expected from the blurb (fantasy universe game about a baker who turns into a hero) but there were two crazy wrenches in the mix. One is both terrible and genius while the other is just terrible.
The just terrible part first: the opening scene is a time-management baking simulation. Figuring out the appropriate ways to type the actions I wanted caused intense frustration. I still do not know the syntax for picking up just pans with dough in them; if you put pans in the oven without dough, they simply disappear from the game altogether. I kept having to juggle items in a meta-game sort of way that had absolutely nothing to do with the world itself.
Finally checking the walkthrough:
Baking bread is much easier than my testers made it. Don’t mess with the pans. Don’t struggle with specifics.
The people testing your game are there to inform you when something is wonky with syntax. Fix the thing they’re having trouble with. Your players will have the same trouble. There are multiple appropriate choices here, one being simply jumping in with [You don’t need to pick up the pans; just BAKE BREAD and the pan will get moved to the oven automatically.]
I kept having trouble. Trying to GET BREAD FROM OVEN doesn’t work. Type GET BREAD just would get one bread but not necessarily the one from the oven.
From the walkthrough I learned about TAKE ALL BREAD. Grr! I pretty much gave up on trying to communicate and started to rely exclusively on the walkthrough.
So that was the terrible thing. After the spoiler space I’ll into the terrible/genius thing:
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So the baker is not just in a fantasy universe, but a massive multiplayer game in a computer; he or she is a bread-selling NPC.
The “world simulation” system needs to be exploited to make any progress. For example, it is possible to accidentally set the bakery on fire and die; after doing this, this message comes up on restart:
*Age of Aeons Patch Notes*V.12.017
*Patch#0000009712733094
*Fixed situation in which vagaries of the physics engine
*could cause some buildings in Shireton starting area
*to burn down unexpectedly, breaking multiple
*low-level starting quests. We apologize
*for any inconvenience over the weekend and request
*you contact Customer Service if you
*have any questions. Thanks! -o=O AoA Team O=o-
I fully acknowledge the brilliance of this; restart did not actually restart, because the events of the last life caused the programmers to change the world.
This is on the other hand terrible because I have no idea how I’d figure it out. I always save and restore, restart is an absolute rarity, and there is no clue to the special meta status of restart before seeing the message above.
Even with the extra advice from the walkthrough I didn’t get much farther at all until my 2 hours had elapsed. I’m fine with how character action was communicated, generally (I’m used to combat MUDs with people swarming in text all over the place) but I couldn’t stop picking up the wrong bread or dropping things in the wrong place and when I had something bad happen it was more often because my intent was misunderstood than anything else.
By Moe Zilla. Played using Firefox to completion.
In Forever Meow you are a cat who is upset about an empty food dispenser, triggering a bit of an adventure.
It has a variant choice interface where advancing when there is no choice involves pressing a key rather than clicking a link. This was actually quite a good idea, and I wouldn’t mind having it mimicked even in other circumstances.
You rush toward the bottom drawer, targeting its rim for a mighty pounce from your furry hind paws.
You leap powerfully, as though up into the sky…!
Part of the fun of this sort of game is inhabiting another creature; doing all the meows and hisses and so forth of a real cat. While the game delivers on this front (even letting you do the persistent repeated meow if you like) it lacks … well, the actual feeling being a cat.
This is one of the weird times I think a parser might do a better job; the freedom to be able to >MEOW at any point in the story (not just those given by the choices) or experiment with easter eggs like >PURR or whatnot would lend a great deal to the atmosphere.
There’s likely a way to maintain a typing-less interface while still maintaining the simulation feel, but I’m not certain how. Possibly a series of consistent buttons that can be used at any time? That still runs the risk of the feeling of mechanized responses rather than discovery.
By Brendan Vance. Played with Firefox to completion.
If there is an overall theme I’ve seen so far in the competition (as far as a random collection of work by entirely different authors of different backgrounds can have a theme) it would be “subversion of expectations”.
In the case of In the Friend Zone, I expected from the slightly jokey title and initial quote referencing the “friend zone” (the place “nice guys” get banished to when they get rejected from a more serious relationship) that this game would be an over-the-top metaphor for bad dating. Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus in Twine form, perhaps.
While I suppose the metaphor idea isn’t 100% false, it’s delivered in such a surreal fashion it’s more reminiscent of The Prisoner:
“Was the preacher not persuasive? Will you not wait in the pews for their master’s return? Heh. Trust me, Pilgrim: Priapus ain’t coming back.”
The bouncer peers close at you. “Now, hold up a second. Where’s your number? You just gonna show up at The Eye without a number?”
The bouncer wears a shocked expression, yet their eyes flash with mirth. “Is that wise?”
“Tell you what, Pilgrim. Let’s trade faces. You give me your name, I give you lucky number seven. Then you can jump the line.”
After a sustained time of trying and failing to understand what was going on, I entered what I call “zen clicking mode” — randomly picking whatever choices came up and reading the text in random excerpts rather than trying to make sense of it all.
“But then, one day, awaken: realize your dreams were all the same one. The people you desired were all the same person. The appendages you coveted were all the same appendage. The images that filled your blood were all the same image. Recognize the same fragmented mask peering back at you from everywhere; the same howling want you sought to fill with each acquaintance. Feel the shroud of Doom chewing at your guts.”
After getting to the end, I then replayed to try to get a better sense of what happened. It only marginally made more sense.
I’d like to ask some questions about specifics of the story, but a few words on the interactivity first: this is another map with keys-applied-to-locks structure, where the keys are “questions” the player accumulates. There are hence no puzzles, just obstacles and exploration. I found it less problematic than the similar structure of To Burn in Memory because of the simpler geography and the fact the questions aren’t matched to specific locks. Still, it made me wistful: is there a better way to allow geography in a puzzleless game that still requires some measure of exploration to complete the story?
Spoilers — really, more like questions for discussion after playing — begin after the mask:
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So the protagonist is searching for “{player’s choice of name}” (I’ll refer to them as Bob) but in the first scene they enter a church to Priapus (who “built the walls” of the area of the story) where it seems _everyone_ is searching for Bob. So is this some sort of metaphor where Bob isn’t even a person, but some generalized idea of perfection? If so, what does being a “friend” mean? If not, does this imply there’s an actual person with many suitors, or are all the people in the protagonist’s head and they simply represent different variants of desire?
Trading your name for a “number” in the excerpt above changes your face to a “Nice Guy”. What is the difference between a Nice Guy and any of the other characters searching for Bob? What purpose do the numbers serve? None of the Nice Guys of any of the numbers actually seem to be able to see Bob.
Why are questions necessary to get closer to Bob?
At the ending, the guard says “We didn’t build the walls. They’ve only ever been yours.” implying the protagonist is somehow acting as Priapus, but then says “You’ve come as far as anyone, Pilgrim. Far as Priapus himself, I’d say.” which implies the opposite. What’s going on here?
By Tom Delanoy. Finished three times on a computer using Firefox.
The Insect Massacre casts you as a computer monitoring a research lab; a PhD student named Sally has been murdered, and you switch parts of the lab to monitor as the investigation unfolds.
The text is done entirely in dialogue. The most noticeable issue is a delay with each …. line …. being …. delivered …. slowly. It is a bad sign when my gameplay consists of clicking, doing some other chore or switching to another window, then coming back a minute later to continue reading.
Also, an uncomfortable amount of the dialogue is devoted to how beautiful Sally is.
I wish I had her hips.
If you had, you’d be dead now.
You know what I mean.
Sure, but don’t you think it’s morbid?
What?
Being jealous of a dead person.
Hey, that’s not what I meant! I only wish I had better hips. That’s all.
Thus the primary adjective I’d use to describe this game is “awkward”. The awkwardness is doubly amplified by a severe lack of choices. These only occur at the very end, so to discuss them I’ll need the traditional spoiler space.
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(seriously, only read if you’ve already played or have no intention of playing)
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So it gets revealed by the options given near the end that the computer itself was responsible for the murder, in collaboration with Sally who killed herself so she could upload herself into the system. That makes it sort of a … love story? However, the only way to reach the appropriate ending is to murder a group of people in the hydroponics bay by locking the doors and shutting off the oxygen. This consists of a sheriff, biologist, and a deputy. If the murder doesn’t happen, a scene occurs in engineering with engineer Soto who wants to shut down the computer to stop getting accused of Sally’s murder, but since Soto doesn’t die in the earlier scene, I don’t see how this particular fate can be avoided. Either a.) it becomes obvious the computer was acting on its own to murder the trio in the hydroponics bay, and gets shut down or b.) Soto still gets accused and shuts down the computer anyway. I supposed the intent might be this is a doomed romance, and Sally and the computer will be deleted no matter what the circumstances, but things were ambiguous enough it felt more like “plot hole” than “tragedy”.
To summarize: The Insect Massacre is a mostly static story with far-too-slowly appearing text and the only significant choice occurring near the end. I find the plot concept as a whole interesting, but the interactivity and endgame needed a better delivery.
Renga in Blue 