More Homer in Silicon

About the zombie-fighting game Sonny, and branching off into some general gripes about how games handle the ends of stories.

Several Small Things

1. This was effectively true some time ago, but the IF Cover Art Drive is officially finished and closed and over now, in the sense that I have taken down the flickr page. In the unlikely event that anyone reading this (a) got my email about their cover art and (b) really wanted to answer and accept it but (c) has been trapped under a big log for the last five months, you can email me — I still have a copy of the submitted art on my hard drive. But I’m assuming we’re done now.
2. We draw near to the opening of IF Comp 2008! Now is a good time to donate prizes. (No, I’m not entering this year myself. I just thought I’d mention it, because a couple of people have floated interesting prize ideas in my hearing in the past few months but, er, I’ve forgotten who some of you were. So: generic reminder.)

   I am donating a copy of Second Person, which has great and provocative stuff to read by Jeremy Douglass, Nick Montfort, G. Kevin Wilson, Steve Meretzky, Chris Crawford, the authors of Facade, and others.

Further Guilty Pleasures

I tend to variously rant and rave about the casual-type games that cross my path: it’s a genre I want to love, but often don’t.

But here’s one that offers considerably more depth of game play than you might initially expect: Gabob’s “Now Boarding”, a game about airplane routing. You own an airline and airplanes; you get to direct them where to pick up passengers, but you also get to hire and fire airline employees, decorate the terminal, and buy upgrades for your equipment.

Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble, Part 2

Web stats show that my post on Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble is getting a lot of traffic — clearly Mousechief has done something such that everyone is playing this game right now. Which is terrific, but I should issue a disclaimer: my comments on DHSGiT were based on an old demo version of the game, before the full version was completed.

I’ve since tried the new demo, and it is improved over the original in several ways: the cumbersome and confusing introductory stuff is gone, the most boring mini-games have been replaced with better ones, and the dialogue has in some places I think been made a little less arch. (At least, I found it easier to understand what was going on.) I haven’t played the full version yet, but my old critiques don’t necessarily stand.

Homer in Silicon

On Monster’s Den: The Book of Dread, and some thoughts on the mechanics –> characterization process.

Saugus Halloween Contest

I notice that the Saugus Halloween Contest is once again open to IF submissions. Finished, short ghost-related games are due Oct. 23.

Inform 5U92

…is now out. To people who were not waiting for bugs to be fixed, this may seem like a pretty low-key build: a huge amount of work went into it, but much of that work had to do with improving internal code in preparation for an eventual release of the Inform source, rather than with producing new features. Assorted things are now more cleanly implemented and a better foundation for future improvements, but that doesn’t make for glamor in the change log.

However, of possible note to readers here: the latest build does (as I mentioned in an earlier post) allow for scenes to be given properties, which means that it is now possible to make rules about what is allowed to happen during a type of scene — as in

Instead of going somewhere during a restrictive scene: …

We do not yet have the ability to write generic rules about when types of scene begin and end, which I would also like; but this may improve matters somewhat for heavy users of Inform scenes.

In other news, it is now possible to define new directions freely — something that we felt was an omission from the outset, so I am glad that is checked off the list.

IntroComp and Hooks

In a post explaining the purpose of IntroComp, Stephen Granade wrote

I think IntroComp has benefit beyond people turning specific intros into games. Neil deMause started the competition because so many games’ openings were terrible, and he wanted people to think more about how they hook players.

In practice, it feels as though IntroComp is used this way less than I’d like. Many of the entries turn out to be alpha-tests of one kind or another: the author is showing us an unfinished system that doesn’t have its narrative in any kind of shape, because he wants to know whether the mechanics work or whether the setting strikes people as interesting.

It would be useful if IntroComp were more of a referendum on Writing a Good Hook, because we need some more of that. IF hooks have to accomplish two separate things:

Some impressions on Introcomp

I tried the IntroComp 08 games and was turned off by most of them on the first playing (and wrote up notes about why). Later I felt guilty about that and gave several a second try. So the comments for some of these are divided into first impressions and second impressions. Sometimes the second impressions are warmer.