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John F Bennett posted:But isn't that just a CYOA game? Or do those also count as text adventures these days? Yes, they do. If it's mostly text, in whatever form, it's IF.
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May 29, 2016 19:44
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Megazver posted:Yes, they do. If it's mostly text, in whatever form, it's IF. I thought hairs were split between nonlinear and interactive fiction. Twine is CYOA only, right? I'm guessing Choice of... games are largely written in that kind of software rather than inform.
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May 29, 2016 21:26
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So, I'm writing a Choice Of game with the plan of getting it hosted by them. I'm about halfway complete. While I've had a lot of experience with Choicescript games, and IF over the years before that, I'm wondering if there's anyone here who has any hints or tips that they could pass along, just to make sure I'm not missing anything.
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May 29, 2016 23:48
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John F Bennett posted:But isn't that just a CYOA game? Or do those also count as text adventures these days? Choice-based text adventures has had a huge renaissance the last few years compared to parser stuff - Twine has brought a heap of new people into the area and it's great. Parser IF's always going to be around I reckon, but it really suits some game styles more than others.
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May 29, 2016 23:50
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Milky Moor posted:So, I'm writing a Choice Of game with the plan of getting it hosted by them. I'm about halfway complete. I'll be honest, I think the rarest kind of game is the one that isn't X-but-totally-on-its-head. I enjoy proper games. Quirks rarely work for me unless they work in the story, rather than the story based around the quirk. So please just don't decide you're going to parody the medium and fourth wall break all the time. We get it, old medium, meta, etc. e: And I dont think I'm contradicting myself saying that after posting the gehenna meta joke. They made an entire game before hand and established a full world before it. They fleshed out their own world enough to meta it. wit fucked around with this message at 00:21 on May 30, 2016 |
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May 30, 2016 00:18
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Hadean Lands got an update today with a new interpreter. It's got autosave, a built-in map, and a simple UI for the journal/memory system. Also it's launching on Steam June 20, and the price is going up to $12 at the same time, so you've got a few weeks left to get in at $5.
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May 31, 2016 21:54
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Milky Moor posted:So, I'm writing a Choice Of game with the plan of getting it hosted by them. I'm about halfway complete. Their model feels pretty unfair to me if they didn't give you a contract, TBH. You get 25%, they get 75%? Dang, son. Personally, I've decided if I ever do a similar game, I'll just write something on my own. I doubt association with their brand is worth that much, if they're not giving you an advance.
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May 31, 2016 22:00
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Megazver posted:Their model feels pretty unfair to me if they didn't give you a contract, TBH. You get 25%, they get 75%? Dang, son. There's no doubt about that, but it's a starting point. Even if I'd rate my writing higher than, say, Zachery Sergi, I can't exactly negotiate a contract without much of a folio beyond fanfiction, long forum posts and Masters work.
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Jun 1, 2016 02:12
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http://store.steampowered.com/app/449150/ PataNoir is now available on Steam, featuring an amazing simulated book interface, a never before seen map of the city, and 19 Steam achievements, the achievement of which will lead you through the hidden content in the game! I believe this is the first parser game to make it to Steam, beating Hadean Lands by several weeks. I have three Steam keys set aside for the first three people who PM's me here to request one.
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Jun 1, 2016 20:11
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SimonChris posted:http://store.steampowered.com/app/449150/ Very glad for you. This is a good game. How did you do the interface?
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Jun 1, 2016 20:29
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Megazver posted:Very glad for you. This is a good game. Unfortunately, Silverlight is a dead technology now, but I was able to reuse most of the UI code for a WPF desktop application. This does have the unfortunate side-effect of making the game Windows exclusive, but I thought that was a sacrifice worth making for the sake of the cool book interface. I plan to open-source the WPF code some time in the future.
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Jun 1, 2016 20:34
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Good wordplay IF is a ton of fun to me. I'm getting a kick out of this already.
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Jun 1, 2016 22:29
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SimonChris posted:http://store.steampowered.com/app/449150/ Hey, congrats! Sorry I wasn't really able to offer feedback on the beta, but it's because everything was working great  Looking forward to playing through the whole thing.
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Jun 2, 2016 03:10
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Movac posted:Hadean Lands got an update today with a new interpreter. It's got autosave, a built-in map, and a simple UI for the journal/memory system. Also it's launching on Steam June 20, and the price is going up to $12 at the same time, so you've got a few weeks left to get in at $5. If you kickstarted, you'll get a Steam key and zarf is ok with passing that on to others "if you don't have a Steam account."
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Jun 2, 2016 08:30
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I really like the idea of designing puzzles and mechanics but has IF just moved pretty far from that lately? CYOA games seem to largely ignore those elements and stick with meatier prose. They seem to be the heavy hitters of the niche these days whereas the inform type games pale as some niche retro thing.
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Jun 3, 2016 00:23
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Intriguing idea, but some things with interaction with NPCs could be tightened up, perhaps? - The baron says he has "a problem that will need to be handled.." but ASK BARON ABOUT PROBLEM gives "No reply." - Likewise, after "do you think you can handle it?", YES gives "that was a rhetorical question", which may be narratively true but.. - When swimming near the surface, EMBER DARKNESS gives "making the distant sun warmer would not be helpful". - When you have the luminescent fluid, you can dive to the bottom of the lake, but the previous room descriptions that talk about it being dark don't change, which made me think the fluid wasn't providing light for some reason. hyphz fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 00:57
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wit posted:I really like the idea of designing puzzles and mechanics but has IF just moved pretty far from that lately? CYOA games seem to largely ignore those elements and stick with meatier prose. They seem to be the heavy hitters of the niche these days whereas the inform type games pale as some niche retro thing. Pure parser is an antiquated control scheme and is never going to used in really popular games outside of very clever novelty interpretations like Her Story, but there's nothing wrong with puzzles in text games and world model IF. I think both are due a comeback. I've been thinking a lot recently about how one could do a mildly puzzle-y, world model game with the production value and ease of use of an Inkle title and I think I figured out a pretty good way to do it. Just gotta keep learning this Unity poo poo. If you're interested I'll try to write this dumb poo poo up.
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Jun 3, 2016 07:46
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I'm interested. My take is that a puzzle in CYOA is more along the lines of 'can you interpret the clues in the text and pick the right answer from the ones supplied?' whereas a puzzle in parser-based IF is more 'can you put these things and those things together in a way that makes sense?' I suppose both reward close reading of the text in their own ways. I've got a sort of half-started experiment in Twine where I'm trying to replicate the discovery of 'secret areas' by having some css formatting on certain links that makes them look just like regular text. I have no idea if this is a good idea or not.
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Jun 3, 2016 08:17
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hyphz posted:Intriguing idea, but some things with interaction with NPCs could be tightened up, perhaps? That's the problem with parser games. There is always more interactions to tighten up. hyphz posted:- Likewise, after "do you think you can handle it?", YES gives "that was a rhetorical question", which may be narratively true but.. This was actually a very popular response, though...
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Jun 3, 2016 08:25
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potatocubed posted:I'm interested. It usually means that the player will train themselves to run their cursor over every piece of text, just like JRPGs train players to break every pot. Better to just let it be highlighted and have the player decide if it's good or not.
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Jun 3, 2016 08:28
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Here's a dumb idea: What if you broke a link up so one part of the word took you to one place, but if the player can see the hints you leave they will discover that there's a trick to getting to the secret area? You'd have to change the highlight color to be the same as the non-highlighted link color, though. And the already visited link colors.
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Jun 3, 2016 08:37
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God I loved to play this stuff a few years ago. Mainly because I could play them at work and it looked like I am sort of working. There are some real masterpieces out there, they were mostly listed in this thread, so I'll list some of my favourite not in the top 5 star award winning category: The Granite Book http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=2fpdg173z3fyglrm - really cool surreal little thing about (I think) a demon. Aside from just solving things, try varous other actions like fly and jump. They give you a little insight on what you are/were. Degeneracy http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=teyeu9x87mf2tbhv - it is in a lot of ways text adventure meta, (pay attention to game version nr as you progress). Was never able to finish it 
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Jun 3, 2016 08:37
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SimonChris posted:That's the problem with parser games. There is always more interactions to tighten up. That's fantastic. Anyway, I think it's a great idea, I was just mentioned them in case they were useful. One other one I found: in Camino's office, >PUT WATER IN COCOON says "the cocoon is just a simile, it can't contain literal things", but the river is also a simile.
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Jun 3, 2016 16:46
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hyphz posted:That's fantastic. Anyway, I think it's a great idea, I was just mentioned them in case they were useful.
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Jun 3, 2016 21:49
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SimonChris posted:Unfortunately, due to the way Inform saves work, I cannot make any changes to the game logic whatsoever without breaking all existing savegames. I am obviously not willing to do that unless there is a very serious bug, so I will just have to make a note of your suggestions until then. If I ever make another Inform game, I will probably implement my own checkpoint based save system. This is good to know, haven't seen that mentioned in the two manuals I'm working through. They're well written but do not feel like they were written by coders. Does it have a stack or anything?
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Jun 4, 2016 01:45
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wit posted:This is good to know, haven't seen that mentioned in the two manuals I'm working through. They're well written but do not feel like they were written by coders. Does it have a stack or anything? Inform savegames simply dump the contents of virtual memory to a file, so whenever you compile a new version of your game, those memory adresses will no longer have any meaning.
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Jun 4, 2016 09:11
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Ugh, that's lame! I quite like Inform but I didn't realise it had that kind of limitation
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Jun 4, 2016 21:00
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hyphz posted:Ugh, that's lame! I quite like Inform but I didn't realise it had that kind of limitation SimonChris fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Aug 20, 2016 |
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Jun 4, 2016 21:23
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I have declared my intent to enter IFComp this year. ...now to finish my game. (Any other goons entering? Thinking of entering? You've got until the 28th of September to actually finish something!)
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Jul 1, 2016 08:48
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What are you going to use to write it?
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Jul 1, 2016 08:56
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Doing it in Twine, since it's a branching narrative rather than a puzzly puzzler. I have a couple of puzzly game ideas half-constructed in Inform too, but now is not the time for second thoughts.
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Jul 1, 2016 10:42
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SimonChris posted:Unfortunately, due to the way Inform saves work, I cannot make any changes to the game logic whatsoever without breaking all existing savegames. I am obviously not willing to do that unless there is a very serious bug, so I will just have to make a note of your suggestions until then. If I ever make another Inform game, I will probably implement my own checkpoint based save system. Oh hey, you made PataNoir? We actually played that at the local IF meetup a few months ago.
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Aug 20, 2016 05:10
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Fuschia tude posted:Oh hey, you made PataNoir? We actually played that at the local IF meetup a few months ago.
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Aug 20, 2016 10:27
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SimonChris posted:Cool, what did you think? I'm still not entirely happy with all of the puzzles. I'm really, really bad at puzzle games. Our meetup is more like a book club, we talk about what we played for the month, so I mostly read playthroughs that month. Jacq's transcript seemed to go pretty well, from what I remember? 
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Aug 21, 2016 06:20
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So I vaguely remember an IF game. There wasn't much in the way of graphics (if any? Maybe a picture at the top of each screen). All I remember is it ends with you taking drugs at a camp for homeless people (I think? maybe addicts or something) and you going insane from them. Which uh, isn't much to go on, but it's all I've got. It was very short; definitely less than half an hour, probably significantly shorter if you know what you're doing.
fronz fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Aug 21, 2016 |
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Aug 21, 2016 23:08
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That's the original version of beep boop bitcoin, yeah?
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Aug 22, 2016 05:54
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drat, that looks like it. Thanks!
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Aug 22, 2016 06:07
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Choice Of have put out their design outlines on their forum. Heroes Rise violates just about all of their 'Common Problems'. I wonder how well they actually vet these things or whether the criteria have changed.
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Aug 26, 2016 06:55
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Milky Moor posted:Choice Of have put out their design outlines on their forum. I'm not sure I agree with the hard and fast rule that all Choice Of games submitted must let you pick race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation regardless of the setting or the premise, and that your cast needs to be as close to 50/50 male/female as possible and have as diverse of a cast as possible unless you're literally in the ancient past where africans might not be found in feudal japan, and if you are in a historical setting where sexism might be a thing you should be able to genderflip the sexism. While it can work for some styles of CYOA, the more open-ended you /force/ the player character to be the less personality you can actually give the character in your writing and the more generic and flavorless your character can feel. I find a lot of the best CYOA storytelling is a compromise between a completely generic nonperson and a completely fixed preexisting character. Otherwise the CYOA becomes entirely about the world and less about the characters. And making minorities fill a 'mandatory minority' quota comes off as insincere and ends up with just taking a non-minority character and changing their skin color.
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Aug 26, 2016 07:11
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Wolpertinger posted:I'm not sure I agree with the hard and fast rule that all Choice Of games submitted must let you pick race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation regardless of the setting or the premise, and that your cast needs to be as close to 50/50 male/female as possible and have as diverse of a cast as possible unless you're literally in the ancient past where africans might not be found in feudal japan, and if you are in a historical setting where sexism might be a thing you should be able to genderflip the sexism. I mean, it's the guidelines for the poo poo they publish. So yeah, must and needs. That said, I do agree with you that I'd love to see more CYOA explore a fixed main character well instead. Witcher 3 really pushed me hard into the "you can explore poo poo with fixed protagonists that you can't with generics" direction.
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Aug 26, 2016 07:19
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