“Phantom of the Arcade”

Escapist magazine is running an Inform-written Halloween adventure. (I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, so I can’t say much other than that it exists. But it’s cool to have IF featured this way.)

Release 8

(At the risk of becoming tedious to people not interested in the Alabaster project — sorry about that.)

Alabaster, continued

Alabaster gets an index, and other news.

Alabaster, Release 4

Alabaster is now on release 4 6. Thanks to everyone who’s played so far; I’ve already learned a great deal. (And I am really enjoying seeing the game develop in ways I hadn’t anticipated.)

I’ve made a few edits to the source code submitted to me, and the most major of these are annotated with comments, so if you hit something surprising in your own code, and think, “hey! …what goes on?”, you can check out why. Almost all of these were edits to the generated source to make it run more smoothly, but one or two were introduced for consistency between the submitted material. Check out the source for specifics.

Besides incorporating new conversation by several contributors, this release makes improvements to the core system or the rest of the game, based on tester feedback, as follow:

• TOPICS is now a synonym for the existing (but undocumented) CHANGE THE SUBJECT feature, and will list other possible discussion topics besides the ones that are currently being recommended to the player.
• Minor refinements now mean that if you type ASK ABOUT (something unimplemented) instead of ASK SNOW WHITE ABOUT (something unimplemented), the game will construct a questioning quip (as it should) rather than a performative quip (as it used to). The same applies to telling. This is unlikely to be interesting to anyone but me, but it counts as an improvement towards the later release.
• Restarting the game no longer wipes out what you’ve stored in NewConversation.glkdata. (I apologize for this. I tried to set this up for the original release — and thought I had succeeded — so it came as a surprise to me that that was not the case.)
• It is now possible to use facts from the collaborator interface. (More about this below, as it is the improvement that needs the most explanation.)
• Some questions are asked more clearly in the collaborator interface; in particular, the system will now let you know if the “immediately after the previous quip” is necessary because the previous quip restricts follow-ups.
• Line breaking in the collaborator interface gives a little more space than before.
• CUT [something] WITH [something] is supported. (As it really should have been all along.)

Re. facts: A “fact”, from the point of view of my conversation system, is a value that represents some piece of information that the player could come across in any of a number of ways, through conversation but also anywhere in the world. Merely saying the name of the fact makes the player know that fact; so, for instance, the following source will set the player to know that the box lid has symbols on it:

The description of the heart-sized box is “It is made of deep black wood, with a sequence of symbols[symbols-seen] burned across the top. You have no idea what they do. Your part is only to bring it back full.”

Similarly, if you want to set a fact to known when writing conversation, you need only add it in brackets (as shown). You will also be prompted with a question during dialogue-creation that allows you to add facts as prerequisites for your new dialogue. (This may mean you want to invent new facts on the fly that aren’t already in the game. That’s fine — I can splice this stuff in when I get it.)

If at some point you just want to review the list of facts currently tracked in the game, type REVIEW FACTS for a table of them.

A Halloween Experiment

One of the things I am hoping my conversation system will facilitate is a collaborative approach to projects, in which one person is in charge of managing the code while others contribute content. To that end, I’ve put together a little collaborative authorship experiment.

I’ve written the beginnings of a one-scene, one-NPC game. (Best to keep this simple to start with.) You’re invited to play with it (and look at the source code, if you want). It’s part Snow White, part Halloween story. (Check here for the latest posts on this project.)

If you come to a point in the conversation where you want to say something but your chosen dialogue is not implemented, the system will invite you to write your own dialogue, and will ask you some questions about how that dialogue should fit into the existing scene. It will generate the appropriate source code and store it in a file called NewConversation.glkdata, in the same directory with your game file. If you email that to me, I’ll compile it into the game and release a new version (and add you to the author list). My theory is to do this for about a week (until Nov. 3), then stop accepting new entries, put in some endings based on the conversation directions that emerged. (Though probably I won’t do that Nov. 4. I expect to spend election day obsessively refreshing CNN, and I’d be lying if I claimed otherwise.)

I’ll also welcome any feedback about how well the system works and/or how confusing you find it to use.

It may be that this doesn’t prove very interesting to people, but that would also be useful feedback — if no one wants to participate in projects like this, then at least I’ll know that supporting them isn’t a top priority!

Anyway, if you want to play along, the opening game is here. (It does require indexed text handling, so you will need a recent Glulx interpreter.)

I Should Have Gone to Business School

In the thread developing on Inform 7 and TADS 3 over here, one of the things that is coming up is that VMs other than the z-machine are at a bit of a disadvantage attracting players, and thus at a disadvantage attracting authors who want to reach those players. (And, for that matter, that some of the tools themselves are better ported to Windows than to any other platform.)

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the question of how as a community we might fill in some of our most significant implementation gaps: better, multimedia-friendly TADS 3 interpreters on non-Windows machines, browser-based terps for both TADS 3 and Glulx, and so on. (Selfishly, I would also be pleased to see a TADS 3 Workbench that installed easily and ran natively under OS X. I7 is likely to remain my main language, but I would enjoy educating myself better about TADS 3; booting over to Windows is enough of an disruption of my other workflow, though, that in practice I never do that. I can’t call myself the primary audience for such a thing, but I think it would be great if one existed.)

The aesthetics of IF languages

I don’t intend to get into a(nother) flamewar with Steve Breslin, but he’s said some false things about me recently, and some provocatively semi-true ones about IF languages and the state of IF discourse. Though what follows starts out with some newsgroup politics, it winds up as some more general stuff about language design and what I consider the strengths and weaknesses of Inform.

Kudos on Homer in Silicon

My latest GSW column looks at the original Kudos. A new version is now out, and I may do a comparison in the future.

However (warning): on my last column it was mentioned that I seem to spend more time critiquing unsuccessful narrative approaches than analyzing good ones. I promised to come back with more positive reviews — and still intend to — but, er, this is not one. Or at least, not in unmixed form.

IF Competition Bonus Round: The Ngah Angah School of Forbidden Wisdom

Another IF Comp review, following my format for this comp. Yeah, I know, I thought I was done too — but then I discovered (apropos of playing Eliuk Blau’s Damusix demo) that my copy of Spatterlight wasn’t as up to date as I thought it was. So I thought, why not have another stab at playing the Alan game, since maybe the problem there was that I didn’t have the latest Spatterlight with the latest Alan insert?

And what do you know: it worked.

(Incidentally, one of the things I really love about Zoom is its ability to check on its own for new interpreter modules, and download them when updates are needed. That is a sweet feature. Too bad Zoom doesn’t cover Alan, or play sounds.)

More after the break, which is to say

shortly.

Apropos of the hardcasual discussion

I just stumbled across an interesting recent post by Zachary Reese, which includes the following observation:

I play a fair amount of interactive fiction, if only because each piece is an extension loaded by a single client of your choice (an interpreter). These are unintrusive entities that can coexist with the important functions of the computer. I can have an indie game minimized with the sound off, then play a few rounds while I’m waiting for an audio mixdown or a video render. Doing such a thing with a traditional PC game would likely result in a massive CPU fire.

People make a big stink about casual games, but I don’t think that label is appropriate. It’s more like transparent games. Games that don’t interfere. The reason games like Rocket Mania and Bejeweled took off isn’t because of some gameplay mechanic that reach a previously untapped market; they became successful because the games became accessible with minimal effort. That audience has always wanted to play games, they just didn’t have the means. They weren’t going to go out and buy a console and they didn’t want to dedicate hard drive space and system resources to the big boxed titles. These are the same people who played the shit out of Minesweeper in Windows 3.1 while on a conference call at work.