I’m not quite sure what you mean by ‘closer to IF’, but I would counsel strongly against using Undum for an IF-shaped narrative (that is, one that’s mostly premised on traversing a stable physical map, interacting with objects, and solving puzzles.) I’ve seen it done in a number of games, and it pretty much always feels like a horrible mismatch; you get all the annoying limitations of CYOA without its particular strengths.
(Even before browser-based games, there were paper gamebooks that, as far as I can tell, were basically attempts to simulate an IF game or a dungeon-crawl RPG by people who didn’t know how to code. Playing one is like watching a seal try to crump: sort of charming, but you hate to encourage it.)
Yeah, I remember gamebooks. They were extremely lame.
Can you give a couple of examples of games that tried to combine IF-style inventory and maps with a different type of interface? I had a look at “The Binary” tonight, and perhaps it qualifies. But it was the narrative that failed to engage me – that and the physical appearance of the interface, which I felt was squeaky rather than elegant.
I’m not sure what you mean by the “particular strengths” of CYOA. That’s probably just my innate snobbishness shining through, but I can’t think of any strengths offhand.
It’s clear that puzzles in an Undum story would be easy or nonexistent … although it would be quite feasible to implement story branches where the reader gets killed or just never encounters the meat of the tale, which I supposed counts as a puzzle. You could easily create secondary objects that would only show up when one examined a primary object that’s mentioned in the main text (a brass key lying in the dirt beside a potted palm, to give a hackneyed example). That hardly qualifies as a puzzle, but it does require that the reader be paying attention.
Branching conversation topics (as in “Galatea,” which I guess most people consider IF) would work quite well, I think.
It’s also clear that there would be little need for a physical map. The PC could wander quite freely from one situation to another. That’s very freeing for the narrative. The movement from “room” to “room” in IF is a rather stilted, artificial process that hampers the narrative flow, though experienced players glide past it.
Trying to create a complete IF-style inventory system would be a nightmare, because you (the author) really don’t want the reader dropping things here and there on a whim. But having a small inventory that’s listed in a box in the sidebar, with a pop-up menu for each item (look at the key / use the key / give the key to Susan) that was dynamically constructed based on the situation (in this case, whether Susan is present) should be manageable at the code level. I’m curious whether you think this would be “a horrible mismatch.”
I really would like to know more about why you feel this way! If I’m misjudging the potential of the medium (that is, the Undum-style text medium), I’d rather know about it now than after I spend three months writing something that doesn’t work.
To be specific, I’m talking about a subset of gamebooks; ones which involved an IF-like map that could be traversed in any direction, a focus on examining features of the environment, a need to solve puzzles, an inventory, etc.
You’ve identified one of the important strengths: narrative flow.
More authorial control over focus; deal only with the interesting decisions
Greater authorial control over pacing, which means that…
puzzle devices as a plot-pacing method aren’t necessary, and
longer-arc narratives can be delivered, since events don’t need to be implemented in as great detail.
Some things you lose: a large degree of PC interiority, a deep sense of environment, fine-grained player control, many kinds of puzzle, the conversational aspect of the parser.
I think that CYOA that lets you examine everything is sort of wrong-headed, yes. (I don’t really think that inventory is a natural fit for most CYOA, since it’s far less concerned with manipulating objects.) but I think what you’re talking about is not quite CYOA and more like an old-school graphic adventure interface. Undum lacks some features – drop-down menus, mostly – that are better-suited to this (so you might look at RAGS, but that’s ugly as hell), and I’ve yet to see a game that does this really well (though I’ve yet to check out A Colder Light), but I don’t know that it’s a bad idea in principle.
The interface for “A Colder Light” is an interesting hybrid. It tries to preserve the wealth of commands available in parser IF, which leaves the button array a bit higgledy-piggledy. Hyperlinks in text aren’t removed when you leave the room, which is odd, because they’re still displayed but no longer work. (Undum can remove them.)
“A Colder Light” displays your commands as new output, exactly as if you had typed them, which makes it look like ordinary IF. This is another area where Undum really excels. It constructs what looks like a story, not a mess of commands and detached responses.
I would add that “A Colder Light” reads like IF, which is not necessarily a good thing. Here is the entire description of the wood rune, which was the first object I found: “A broad stroke and three branches.” Size? Heft in the hand? State of being well rubbed or newly carved? History? Cultural aspects? The rest is silence… This bare description is far too terse for what will evidently be an important magical object with which the player (as opposed to the PC) is entirely unfamiliar – and it’s not the only description in the opening of the story that’s terse to the point of being dull.
In sum, I guess I’d say that “A Colder Light” suffers from trying to be totally old-school IF, but without the parser. It still has the command line, even! It just doesn’t have the parser. It may be a good story – I haven’t gone far enough with it to know. But the buttons and links, while an impressive technical achievement for Inform, are not nearly as graceful as what Undum provides.
Starborn is an example of an IF game recast as an Undum one. I find it interesting but quite flawed; there are vestigial elements like the scrollback buffer and the room navigation mechanic which only serve to clutter the player experience. Compare it something like The Play and it’s obvious which game is playing to the strengths of the medium.
Undum is certainly the nicest looking tool we have, but it just doesn’t seem well-suited to IF-style interactions. The user interfaces in “A Colder Light” and “The Binary” may not look as nice, but they’re better understood as experiments in making IF more accessible. For me, the big unanswered question is whether we can capture the spirit of IF while dispensing with the command line, which is the kiss of death on mobile devices.
I think that the Binary’s interface could look as nice as Undum’s with a little CSS TLC from a good designer.
The interface in the Colder Light family of experiments/demos could probably be created more easily using Vorple, and could likely be made better as well. For example, Vorple ought to be able to make it possible to remove links when they are no longer useful.
I agree. I suspect it would not even be particularly time-consuming.
I find it interesting that Undum has gotten so far on, essentially, surface visual niceties. I don’t mean that it has no other strengths (in-browser playability is clearly a big one), but a lot of the reaction to it has been variations on “it’s so pretty!” Of course, if I didn’t believe in the power of aesthetics, I’d be in a different (better paying? ) profession, but even I am a bit surprised to see that effect work so well.
Hm. The example that springs to mind is Duelmaster, a two-player CYOA (Iain Merrick ran a session of it over G+ recently), which, two-player aspect aside, is a lot like Fighting Fantasy moved more towards IF or adventure game (traversable map, time not a strong narrative impetus.) People have mentioned similar things like Fantasy Trip in my CYOA analysis posts (which I should really get back to). The pattern there is that CYOA becomes more IF-like when people try to use CYOA to simulate tabletop RPGs. I’ve played a number of gamebooks where the whole point of the book is to simulate a maze (cordoned off by locked doors and riddles and things), and, presumably out of trauma, have forgotten all their titles.
The Binary is sort of in a similar camp; it has a static map, an IF-like approach to inventory, and it paces plot by restricting access to parts of the map. And if you look at The Race, there are several sections that are clearly trying to be IF – exploring a static map, searching for things.
I agree about both Starborn and The Play, neither of which I had seen before. Also, The Play is quite funny. The navigation map in Starborn is handy, but only because the game is organized in a traditional room-oriented way. I think the story would have been stronger if it had been written, for instance, opening with an extended conversation between the PC and his cousin, in which the main theme is revealed.
I’m wondering what you mean by “the spirit of IF.” It’s not clear to me that, say, Anchorhead and Lost Pig have much in common in terms of a guiding spirit. One way of looking at what they have in common is, “In IF, it’s up to you to move the story forward.” And to be honest, I find that one of the less attractive features of traditional IF. I’m lousy at solving puzzles, so I often get stuck. If the experience of getting stuck is the essence of the spirit of IF, I’d have to say, I’m willing to live without it.
If I reframe your comment as, “Nobody has yet written a story as memorable as Zork or Curses using Undum,” then of course you’re absolutely right. On the other hand, I think we have to look at the fact that the average reader of an interactive story has a VERY different experience today as a computer user than was the case 30 years ago. I think the positive response that one gets from Undum is less, “Ooh, it’s so pretty,” than, “Oh, I get it now. This is how interactive stories will look in the 21st century.” (Insert irony icon here.)
That said, writing an entire story as a switch/case structure within Undum’s situation.act methods does not look like fun. A development tool would be nice…
When I started on it, it was basically a choice between Undum and ChoiceScript. The prettiness helps in that respect, but the two big advantages of Undum were that it allows you to display your own graphics and that, in theory at least, Javascript it makes it easier to do fairly complicated things. I’ve no idea about BloomEngine.
But, yeah, I’m not wedded to Undum on account of the pretty, and the basic layout makes fairly strong assumptions that you’re going to be making a Fighting Fantasy-like game. It seems not impossible that once I7 Vorple has matured a little, it’ll be more attractive to write Undum-like CYOA in I7 code (which I understand a lot better than Javascript).
OK, gotcha. I haven’t tried either of those. I was intrigued by your suggestion that there were books with fully traversable maps that were inspired by IF (rather than by tabletop RPGs). I know of a few gamebooks with fully traversable maps that work pretty darn well–the Iron Crown Middle Earth series comes to mind, and maybe also Fabled Lands–but the inspiration there is all from tabletop, not IF. In those books, the emphasis is very different than it is in CYOA (CYOA is rather one element among others), and there also isn’t the concern with examining features of the environment, solving puzzles, etc. that you would expect in books inspired by IF.
The latter can be seen, though, in Faerie Mound of Dragonkind (recommended here by S. John Ross). I’m not sure whether IF was what the designers were striving for, but it’s what it feels like they were after–and it is a strange beast indeed.
Oh, that’s not what I mean at all. For one thing, it would be way unfair to expect Big Amazing Things so soon after it has started existing, and for another, there are several great Undum games in existence. What I meant was more that I’m surprised that those games came into existence at all, since Undum looks like a huge pain to use, as a development system. From my extremely limited experience with both, Twine seems way more pleasant to create with, but it doesn’t get nearly as much hype.
Right, yeah.
I didn’t bring it up to be all down on Undum, but rather to point out to people working on similar efforts (such as Bloomengine), that the extra layer of polish really makes the difference in getting people intrigued. Surface matters!
It’s probably not possible to come up with an answer that would satisfy everyone. For me, it’s the existence of intuited or inferred actions that imbues the game with challenge and excitement. It gives me the sense that if I am paying attention, there will be a signal to use one of my predefined tools in an unexpected and interesting way.
That’s not to say I enjoy guessing verbs, nouns, or assorted parts of speech. I like to click links. But it kind of ruins the mystery if the unexpected and interesting behavior is spelled out in the link text. And it kind of spoils the interaction if the behavior comes as a complete surprise behind an otherwise innocuous link.
Puzzles are kind of a touchstone for this quality, but I don’t care about puzzles for their own sake. I do care about my desire to demonstrate mastery, which even the blandest puzzle affirms. I like CYOA, but I experience those games in much the same way I experience IF when playing by walkthrough. It can still be fun and rewarding, but it’s a different sort of fun.
For what it’s worth, I felt that “A Colder Light” gave me the purest sense of combining static choices in interesting ways that I’ve yet seen in parser-free IF. In many ways it did a better job of this than “Dead Cities”, despite that game’s ready recourse to traditional mechanics. I find that fascinating and very encouraging.
Jim: Have you played the Undum version of the Clod’s Quest Demo? It’s probably the most IF-like game produced with Undum. (It also uses input from dropdowns in the “Set Options” submenu.) I did have to beat Undum a bit to get it working, though.
Why hasn’t Twine caught on? My opinion is the lack of a good demo. I spent a little time searching, and I couldn’t find any games written in it.
Go to the Undum page, and the very first link on the page is the tutorial game. Googling Undum produces links to “The Matter of the Monster”, “The Cavity of Time”, and “Starborn” on the first page. The Undum blog has links to “Cloak of Darkness”, “The Matter of The Monster”, “The Cavity of Time”, and “Lucy Hardin’s Missing Period”.
Anna Anthropy has a collection (generally quite smutty) games written in Twine. But I think part of the issue is that Twine is basically an abandoned project.
I didn’t find the Twine editor as transparent as I’d hoped; I was hoping to port this into Twine but it wasn’t as straightforward to just open things up and copy and paste into the GUI as I hoped. It probably would be easier if I watched the tutorial videos.
I’ve been blogging about Undum (at midiguru.wordpress.com). I haven’t gotten very far in learning Undum/Vorple – it’s a steep road, especially for someone who barely knows enough about Javascript to add properties to a variable. (That would be me.)
If I knew how to write Perl scripts, I’d write a script that could turn a more friendly text production into error-free Javascript. That would cut the development time approximately in half.
There would still be a lot of amusing issues to sort through. Last night I created a multi-item pop-up command menu as a tooltip for an NPC. Now the reader can select “Look at her”, “Talk to her”, or “Kiss her”. But the way Vorple is set up, I haven’t yet figured out how to give the first and third commands { classes: ‘once’ }. That tag seems not to work within a multi-item pop-up. This is what I mean by “a steep road.”
Also, a text editor for MacOS that would find matching braces would be swell. I’m using TextWrangler, which is pretty darn good, but even though it identifies a .js file as Javascript, it doesn’t seem to care about matching braces.
) profession, but even I am a bit surprised to see that effect work so well.