Random coding advice: Avoid Duplication

A lot of code I see from new coders shows a thought process like this:

– I’ve got a bunch of matches the player can burn
– after a match is burned, it is moved to a container for used matches; that way I can count how many matches have been burned by writing “the number of matches in the used matched depository”.
– after writing that enough times, I get tired of the verbosity and want to be able just to write “the number of burned matches”. Okay, I’ll also give the matches a “burned” property when I use them up!

Now the burning code looks something like this:

 Instead of burning something with a match:
     [other stuff];
     move the second noun to the used match depository;
     now the second noun is burned.

and other places in the code uses both “number of matches in the used matches depository” and “number of burned matches” to refer to (what the author hopes is) the same information.

This is asking for trouble. Sooner or later you’ll move the object but not set the flag, or change the way the multi-process destruction procedure happens in one place and not in the other. As soon as you do, there will be bugs.

So here’s the advice:

Do not put the same information into your world model twice.

Two From the List

I’ve been playing with a few things on the enormous to-be-played list from a few days ago, though of course there are so many things on there that it will take quite some time to get through.

Braid: I have now finished. It’s of course a masterpiece in the game-play area, and doesn’t need me to say so. I usually have a really hard time getting through platformers, since I don’t have the right combination of patience and skill. As advertised, Braid minimizes the amount of frustration involved in playing a platformer while offering a diverse range of genuinely interesting puzzles; and while there were still a handful of these that were too finicky and that I would have been happy to skip, nonetheless it was the best time I’ve ever had with the format.

As far as storytelling goes, it’s a bit more confused: there is some really intriguing material in the final level, in which the meaning of events is revised and reinterpreted in a way that naturally connects to the gameplay itself; and even before that point, many elements of the game are framed so that the play is metaphorically significant.

But what I get out of all that is not really a story (good luck finding two people who even agree on what happens in Braid) so much as a series of meditations on some of the common problems in relationships and self-definition. Some of it’s thought-provoking, some a little on the obvious side. Admittedly I usually find this kind of content under ask.metafilter’s human relations tag rather than in a game, and I’m generally encouraged when a game branches out to incorporate new material. So hooray for that.

Nettestadt Troll was recommended to me as an example of good Ren’Py work, and I’m afraid I didn’t get nearly as far with that. The premise is uncomfortable to start with: girl gets abducted and raped but discovers she kind of likes it and/or falls in love with her captor. This is a fantasy to be found in many forms of literature from Menander to a certain genre of 1970s romance novel, but it’s something that would need to be handled with a fair amount of psychological sensitivity in order to be a story I want to read. Otherwise, what you have is basically porn for a specific audience.

I wasn’t crazy about the art or the prose quality, either, and the pacing left me kind of bored during the first few chapters; as for the world-building, it’s extremely vague and careless, featuring both alchemists and telegrams, feudal hierarchies and shops with “receptionists”.

I did stick with it for a while, though, in case this was a case of poor writing craft combined with a strong storytelling sensibility. Unfortunately, once there started to be choices to make, they were often on the level of random and incidental choice: e.g., what dish do I make for my supper while waiting for the troll to come home and rape me again? It’s a bit less inane than Dream Day Wedding, but the choose-your-own whatever aspects display the same lack of significant agency that I complained about there.

Dead Like Ants on JIG

JayIsGames reviews CEJ Pacian’s Dead Like Ants.

Recent Playing

A Small Favor. A point-and-click adventure that I found particularly engaging. My mileage varies a lot with these kinds of games: sometimes I like them a lot, sometimes the frustration level is just too high for me to tolerate. But this one worked for me pretty well. I only had to look at a hint for one thing, and in retrospect it was a completely fair puzzle that I was just failing to think through right. It is as far as I can tell impossible to make unwinnable.

Minim. It’s a set of 35 mathematical and spatial puzzles, very simple but elegantly presented. No story or anything here, but I liked this one a lot — though I think the game isn’t very well laid-out in terms of escalating difficulty, because I got really stuck for a long time on one of the middle levels and then found the rest of them pretty easy. Maybe I’m unusual, though — to judge by the JIG comments, other people had problems with other puzzles in the list.

Spirited Heart. By the author of Heileen and co-author of Summer Session, Spirited Heart bills itself as a “fantasy life sim”, sort of similar to Kudos but with demons and elves and magic. The aesthetic style will, I’m sure, immediately select for a limited audience — my eyebrows kind of went up at their own accord at the sight of the demoness character with her gown cut down to her navel and little decorative bat-wings, who nonetheless has an adorable schoolgirlish face. It’s that sort of thing. Beyond that, though, it’s reasonably smooth and well-constructed in its genre, but there aren’t enough options to make for very diverse and interesting gameplay, and it’s possible to run into a lot of random bad luck that keeps you from getting anywhere. Story elements drop into the game at random if you’re hanging out in the right places; and while this is better than having no story at all, it’s still too arbitrary to make for a compelling narrative.

I’ve also started Braid, now that it is (hooray!) available for the Mac. It is really clever, but even with the ability to rewind time, I suck at platformers. We’ll see how this goes.

New Homer in Silicon

On the time-management game Kate’s Fix-it-up Adventure.

Playing Sam Fortune

I’ve been playing (and reviewed) the second noir IF game in the last couple of months: Steve Blanding’s Sam Fortune – Private Investigator. It’s not one of those must-play pieces, but it’s entertaining and reasonably solid; if you’re looking for something to play for 30-45 minutes, you could do a lot worse.

Haven’t forgotten “Inside Woman”, but it was looking like it was going to take a while to finish, so I put it aside until I have a bit more time.

Interactive Storytelling Must-Play List

A few days ago Skye Nathaniel took me to task in comments for “[making] a point of playing Portal when there is science to do elsewhere”. I don’t regret playing Portal — it was awesome. But this makes me wonder about other things that I’m missing. What belongs on the “must play to understand interactive storytelling” list?

Here’s my own list to start with. It is, I know, both woefully incomplete and IF-slanted (and that even though I was fairly sparing about what IF I allowed on the list). I’m probably also forgetting a bunch of things that I’m planning to play myself. But that’s why I’m posting. Input?

Have played and consider relevant

Commercial

• Planescape: Torment. Didn’t come close to finishing, but played enough to be impressed.
• Portal. despite Skye’s comments, I did think it was worth playing through, for the characterization of GlaDOS if nothing else. And it’s popular enough that it provides a good example for discussing any of the techniques it does use — because people are likely to know about them.
• Something in the Myst series, as a milestone of atmosphere and development. I liked Riven best for its overall structure and gameplay. But I’d include it more as source of history to understand than because it’s currently cutting-edge.

Indie but not freeware

• The Path. I really don’t know whether I liked it or not, but I played to a finish. I thought it was both broken and kind of brilliant, and whatever you think about it, it will really stick with you. I have a Homer in Silicon column on this to come, though probably not for a while.
• Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble. Very unusual gameplay in many respects, and there are some semi-boring patches in places, but it’s taking on issues and ideas that are worth discussing. (HiS column)

Persuasive

• Oiligarchy. Most persuasive games incorporate their point into their rules and allow it to emerge procedurally (Airport Insecurity, The Redistricting Game) or allow the player to play with the simulation of a problem (Ayiti, Budget Hero), or, well, dress up Space Invaders with the face of whatever we’re supposed to dislike this week. But Oiligarchy is really telling/selling a narrative. (HiS column.)

Casual

• Miss Management. Gamelab’s excellent time management game with memorable characters and a distinct plot arc. (HiS column)
• Emerald City Confidential. It’s really a graphical adventure, but it puts itself in the casual category via its marketing, sort of. Categories are hazy, did I mention? Anyway, it’s not too formally innovative except in its attempts to make a graphical adventure accessible to a casual audience (and even there, it’s adopting a new set of genre conventions more than inventing); but it does take the story to some places that aren’t completely common in adventure games. (HiS column.)

IF (long more because I know about it than because I’m making some statement about its relative importance)

• Anchorhead, for the complexity and extent of the plot and the uniformly high quality of writing and atmosphere.
• Photopia, as an exploration of linearity.
• Rameses, as a classic example of the value of complicity.
• Shade, for the changing player/protagonist relationship.
• The Baron, for adventures in protagonist motivation and the value of choice and philosophical thinking in an interactive story.
• Varicella, for its development of the accretive protagonist.
• Slouching Towards Bedlam, for its excellent articulation of the different choices available to the player, and the sense of true freedom within the story.
• Everybody Dies, for its inventive combination of image and text to accomplish subjective effects, and because it’s an especially strong use of multiple, differently-voiced protagonists (though see also Being Andrew Plotkin).
• Blue Lacuna, or exploring player reaction and expressiveness as well as player choice; for the experiment in drama management, even though I think said drama management does not always work to keep the pacing tight.
• For historical reasons, probably Trinity and AMFV; possibly also Deadline, Plundered Hearts, and Wishbringer. Maybe The Hobbit, though honestly it drove me insane when I tried to play it. I don’t get the impression it was a terribly successful adaptation as narrative, but that people really enjoyed getting the NPCs to do weird things.

Ren’Py… I don’t know. I have no specific recommendations here about works that were too awesome to miss, and yet I think a knowledge of the form doesn’t hurt. I’ve played a few of these, especially by Tycoon Games and Hanako Games, but I’d be interested in any suggestions if there are Ren’Py games with really fabulous stories that I’ve missed.

Various games in the newly emergent retro/art genre

• Passage. Because it gets talked about so much. I wasn’t a huge fan, but I feel like it’s kind of necessary to know about.
• Don’t Look Back. Terry Cavanagh’s platformer version of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, for its use of the challenge and frustration of gaming in service of the story.
• Cavanagh also collaborated on Judith, which rediscovers some of Photopia’s techniques — temporal reordering, inevitability, narrowing of interactivity — but in a different medium. So, from my point of view, most of what this game does with interactive storytelling techniques has actually been done better and earlier in IF, but it may have introduced the ideas to a new audience, which is good.
• (I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors. My favorite, I think, in this game line: it’s intuitive and moving and unique.
• I Wish I Were the Moon and perhaps also Storyteller (same place) for the way that they allow the player to select elements that should go into a story, rather than controlling any of the characters.

Other/unclassifiable

• Façade. Unique and entirely obligatory, though far from perfect.
• Ruben and Lullaby. Uses touch and gesture on the iPhone as a way to communicate feelings to the protagonist. For my taste the actual story aspect is a bit vague, but it’s a fascinating attempt and worth a look. (HiS column.)

Want to play (some of them rather old)

• The Blackwell Legacy. While I have a dual-booting Mac laptop, I don’t have a two-button mouse for it, which makes some games unplayable. I know, I could fix that for about $20, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
• Neverwinter Nights. Again, I just need a $20 two-button mouse to make this go on my Windows boot partition, so it’s probably going to happen sooner than the others; I know it’s old, but I’m particularly interested in exploring the player-designed content aspect, and I’ve just never gotten around to playing with it. (I know there’s also a Mac version, but as far as I could tell it didn’t come with the editor, which makes it vastly less interesting to me.)
• Half-Life 2. I don’t have anything up to running this.
• Bioshock. Ditto.
• The Mighty Jill-Off.
• Braid. Planning to play it when it’s available for the Mac.
• Ico.
• Shadow of the Colossus.
• The Longest Journey.
• Fable. I have the impression that people were disappointed, but I’m still curious about what it attempted, perhaps unsuccessfully, to do.
• The Witcher.

In Praise of the Glorious Practice of Beta-Testing

Juhana Leinonen has just announced a new site for IF authors seeking testers and vice versa. It takes a slightly different approach from the IF betatesters’ mailing list, in that you can subscribe to an RSS feed rather than getting email at times of year when you might not be in the mood for testing. There’s also a small selection of articles on the art of testing, and the opportunity to specify what kinds of games you’re willing to test.

I mention this not so much because I have a vested interest in pushing one site or another, but because it’s worth reminding prospective authors as we head into summer and the season of comp-game writing:

Please test your game and credit your testers.

It makes your game better, and it offers your players some kind of promise that you made an effort. Also, please give your testers enough time to work that you will be able to fix what they find — ideally get the game into testing a month or more ahead of the comp deadline. This especially applies if you’ve never written IF before. It takes a lot more testing time than you think.

(My personal plan for the coming competition is not to bother reviewing games that don’t credit any testers, just to spare myself the annoyance of writing the same dull rant ten or fifteen times. I realize this isn’t foolproof and that someone could stuff in the names of a half dozen imaginary friends, but still. Worth a try.)

Conversation Methodologies

My latest Homer in Silicon column is a bit of a departure from the norm: instead of offering a critique of a game or set of games, I discuss conversation modeling methods, in an attempt to share some interactive fiction theory with a wider audience and to encourage more discussion about conversation modeling in general.

ETA: there is some further discussion of the ideas at TIGSource.

Non-IF Roundup

Recent playing:

Now Boarding 1.2. This game has been out for a while, but it’s just received a new expansion covering Caribbean airports — a free upgrade for people who have older versions of the game. Now Boarding is an airport game, which makes it perhaps very superficially resemble, say, Airport Mania.

Fortunately it’s considerably more inventive than that. What I really like about Now Boarding is the way that gameplay evolves. It starts off as a time-management kind of deal, with the player responsible for putting individual passengers on planes, dragging planes to the gate, and doing hands-on customer service. Gradually, though, it becomes more like a tycoon game. You get to hire employees to do the menial customer-management tasks while you yourself take a more high-level view and devote yourself primarily to laying out routes and upgrading your terminals and fleet. Towards the end of the game, you may find that instead of repeatedly creating custom routes for all your planes, you are instead optimizing a set of repeatable loops for the different planes in your fleet. Congratulations: you’ve ceased to be a charter company and turned into a regular scheduled carrier.