25 games: A retrospective and review of my own work to this point

(I wrote this series of posts weeks ago but wanted to wait until IFComp voting was over.).

With the recent changes to IFDB’s search capabilities, I started searching more often for games that I hadn’t reviewed, and my own games popped up a lot. It reminded me that I haven’t played most of these games in a very long time, some of them almost a decade. I’ve always been hesitant to read my own writing and don’t like the way it feels, but I figured that with the benefit of a long period of time it might almost feel like someone else’s writing.

I’ve gone through and replayed all my old games, starting from the lowest-rated on IFDB and going to the top:

Playing each one, I recorded my thoughts and impressions, kind of a mix between a review and a post-mortem. For most of the games, I did bugfixes and added a new release to the IFArchive, fixing some dead links and improving the process. I appreciate all the volunteers there! I also added cover art to 7 of my games. So the goal of these posts is twofold: one, for me to revisit the games and to improve them; and two, to share my thoughts with others and hopefully encourage people to try them out.

I plan on posting 2 game retrospectives a day until there are 5 left, then doing one a day. On the last day I’m going to release the new version of Never Gives Up Her Dead, including a commercial version with installers, graphics and hyperlinks.

I realize that this whole enterprise is at least somewhat narcissistic and self-serving so feel free to mute this thread (by clicking the bell next to the post and choosing ‘muted’).

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(These are in reverse order of IFDB rating. That order has changed since I started this essay series)

Book of Mormon Adventures

This was a series of three games I made during Covid when churches were shut down. Each youth and adult in our church is assigned to be a ‘minister’ or helper to other people in the ward, to bring them cookies or help them out when moving or to stop by and give a lesson. During Covid, I was the minister to some families with small kids, and we couldn’t go in person, so I made some games to keep them busy during Sundays.

I compiled all three and put them on itch. They’re made for young children, targeted towards faithful LDS believers with pre-existing knowledge about the Book of Mormon, and are generally accurate retellings of the original stories (with some embellishments).

It makes sense this is my lowest-rated game; it wasn’t made with IFDB users in mind. It’s probably my most authentic game; I have to hide all of this stuff normally so people don’t think I’m weird, but I’ve spent more time reading the Book of Mormon and Bible than I have playing IF.

I like the way chapbook looks. The interactivity is pretty low; all the stats at the end are there because kids asked for it. I mostly glazed over the text while reading, although I liked the ‘naughty’ options as you can fully commit to them and still get to the end of the story.

Overall, I don’t see this one getting much attention or enjoyment from IFDB people but I might send it to some of my family and friends again after replaying.

Also, my son made the cover art by drawing over a well-known painting!

Fridgetopia

This is one of the earliest games I wrote, I think the fourth (including two other really short IF games). It’s honestly just terrible as a game. There was a website called euphoria.io/room/if that was brand new after IFComp 2015 and was very similar to the current Neo Interactives Discord, where a lot of IFComp 2015 participants would hang out (and Emily Short was there, too). It was fun but, as often happens to chat groups, it eventually lost focus on IF and became a general friendly chat, and, as often happens to social media, the site eventually disappeared.

Like the Neo Interactives, they organized jams sometimes, and this one was the Tiny Utopias jam. The idea was to make miniature games that represented Utopia in some way.

I took this in a literal kind of sense and made a place where anything could happen by making a refrigerator filled with magnets, one for each letter of the alphabet. By taking and dropping them, you could make any word appear.

It was on the playfic website, where I did all my Inform coding. I didn’t have my own dedicated laptop back then and shared a chromebook with my (now ex) wife, who didn’t really like me working on IF, so I kept it online to be hidden. The playfic website (like the current borogove.io website) lets you compiled Inform online, and that’s what I used (one reason I never used extensions at first). I eventually got my own laptop.

Poking at the source code here, I see that I made another room with more magnets (accessible with XYZZY) and that opening the fridge gives you a gruesome death. Gruesome easter egg deaths were a recurring theme in my early games, many of which have never been found.

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Barroom Brawl

This was the third game I ever made; I entered it into the Ryan Veeder Quadrennial competition, the very first one. It was designed with him in mind, what I thought he would find amusing, and it took 2nd place (with 1st place being Foo Foo, a fully-fledged amazing game that recently did well in the Free IF Playoffs).

The game was written really quickly. The idea is that you are a cowboy in a saloon and everyone starts fighting each other in randomized combat. If you survive the first melee, a giant cowboy called El Pollo Diablo comes and beats you up.

The ABOUT text mentions that you can KICK or PUNCH or try ‘smash’ attacks in different directions. Being inexperienced, I didn’t tell people how to do the smash attacks. I know how to actually do it, but when I played just now, I tried ‘SMASH EAST’ to see if I coded that, but I didn’t. Instead, you just type the direction you want to go.

The different smashes are all based on the direction you go, like ‘north’ freezing everyone and smashing ‘south’ kicking someone in the crotch.

I also added diagonal directions that lead to longer stories and end the game, like going ‘Northwest’ makes you get an education and leave it all behind.

Poking at the code, the game is a masterclass of mediocrity in terms of not telling the player what’s actually going on. It looks like kicks do 2 damage while punches do a damage equal to your ‘rage’, which starts at 1 and goes up every time you kill someone. You are healed when El Pollo Diablo appears, and it never mentions that.

I tried adding some pathos originally by having italic text about you feeling depressed when you’re dying. It doesn’t really match the tone of the rest of the game.

I also saw in the code that I implemented IN, OUT, UP, and DOWN, which I had forgotten about, as well as LEFT, RIGHT, and some code for FORE and BACK which didn’t quite work.

After writing this review, I edited the game to provide a few more details.

Halloween Dance

This was the second game I ever made, done for EctoComp. At this point, my whole goal in making games was to ‘fix’ things or do things no one else had done. For Ether, my first published game, I handled 3-dimensional movement.

For this game, I wanted to ‘fix’ conversation. I thought, 'Parser games are great at handling normal objects, with inventory, examining, handling, etc. but they’re bad at conversation. So I’ll make a system that treats conversation topics as inventory objects.

Unfortunately, I had a 3 hr time limit in which to create this conversation system and game (Ectocomp didn’t do 4 hrs until years later). So the game itself is pretty sketchy, with a cooler you can’t look inside of (but a friend can give you something out of). I think this was also written on Playfic due to my technology limitations.

Looking back, I think this is cute but clearly unfinished. I’d probably rate this a 2 or 3 if I were rating it (with 2 being more likely and 3 if I felt bad for the author).

The system though did exactly what I wanted, and all of my later ‘big’ games use it, like Never Gives Up Her Dead, Color the Truth, Absence of Law, and The Magpie Takes the Train. The only exceptions are Impossible Stairs (which uses Dialogue’s menus) and Grooverland (which uses traditional ask/tell). So the few little hours invested back in 2015 have born a lot of fruit!

It’s included as a 3-star example in my clues and conversations extension.

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IFComp or ECTOCOMP?

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Ah, you’re right, thanks! I probably have other errors in my upcoming things, so I appreciate you catching this! I’ll edit it.

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ok, now I understand why you don’t review IF with adult content.
Being a Mormon, you’re excused, at least by myself.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Twenty-five games. TWENTY-FIVE. 25. That’s amazing. It’s a bona fide oeuvre. Congratulations on such a milestone, Brian.

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9 Secret Steps

I honestly am not quite sure what’s going on in this game, coding wise.

Non-coding wise, I couldn’t remember what the game was about for the life of me, just knowing the it involved clicking 9 things.

So I was amused to see that there was some kind of evil ritual, but when you click on things, they become mundane. All of the language about removing and destroying things is just you discarding some ritual objects.

I think the idea is that the objects themselves represent something, so you can discard them or drop them to get one of three different endings.

It’s part of the nanobots They Might Be Giants album. What happened is that in 2012, a group of authors collaborated to make one game for each track of the album Apollo 18+20. This resulted in some well-known games, especially Jenni Polodna’s Dinner Bell and Jacqueline Lott’s Fingertips: I Hear the Wind Blow.

In 2017, someone (it may have been Andrew Plotkin) floated the idea of doing it again with another album but in Twine. They chose ‘nanobots’. Despite Plotkin’s participation, the album didn’t take off and only 8 games were made, including mine.

This is another example of my recurring problems with opaque game mechanics in my early years.

Indistinguishable

This game was better than I remembered, although the Play Online button didn’t work and I had to go to the website.

The website in question is The Second Ryan Veeder Quadrennial Exposition’s website. This game was entered with my randomly generated pseudonym as part of the second event, where we had to create a zoo.

This game uses just waiting and E/W directions. I remebered that, and I remembered that the idea was to base a game off of Arthur Clarke’s 3rd Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” with going one direction getting more and more magical and the other more and more technological until they looped.

What I didn’t realize was that the game actually has 15 times as much content as I remember. Each ‘zone’ has 3 rooms (with birds, tigers, and insects) and 5 times of day, which you can cycle through while waiting.

So I thought that was pretty neat. The interactivity is low so I wouldn’t give myself over a 3. The ABOUT text didn’t work and my source code was missing about 1/3 of the material, so I reconstructed it from the game and fixed the ABOUT bug and have posted both game and code on the IFArchive.

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It would be great if you could channel this ‘weirdness’ – that is, you being you – into a game one day, Brian. Authentic is good. And I’m sure you can be authentic while making a game that does not require, e.g., agreeing about what is the correct religion with the author. I might not really want to play a game that attempts to convert me to the LDS Church, but I’d certainly play a game that is informed by the experience of belonging to and having one’s life and belief system shaped by the LDS Church. I don’t buy Dante’s views on religion, but I love his book – not that I want to lay the bar that high. :wink:

(If you’re interested in doing this, of course. Maybe you’ve decided that you are not!)

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I agree. I regret to say that all my knowledge of Mormons comes from a Broadway musical, a true crime book, and living in the same state as Warren Jeffs. I’ve never met a Mormon IRL that I know of. I obviously don’t have a complete picture. I’d love to see something that introduced me to it as the background life for a game.

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There are a couple of games tagged ‘Mormon’ on IFDB (I recently added the one from this thread).

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Thanks! I think Rachel Helps’ work is really interesting, she’s talked to me before about her research in this area.

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Completely agree with Victor and Amanda. It would be very interesting to see an IF-piece from a Mormon perspective, be it slice-of-life or a sort of retake of your Book of Mormon games, especially with the amount of experience and skill you have built in writing Interactive Fiction through the years.

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I’ll have to make an adaptation of Joseph Smith’s last gunfight some time. Anyway, here are today’s games:

Untie

Wow, I don’t know where my headspace was when I wrote this but this is a perfect description of depression when I’ve gone through it. I don’t know if I was experiencing it at the time or just thought it would be neat to make a game about things unravelling in life.

This game is a very short twine game where clicking on your plans for the day slowly unravels them until there’s nothing left.

I wrote this game pretty early on; it was my fifth game, and was written in between my first and second IFComp.

I joined the IF community in earnest around the time of IFComp 2015, and joined a chatroom called Euphoria. Both on the forums and on Euphoria I was surrounded by people who felt artistic and author-y, who had won awards and who praised each others’ writing. Many of that group would go on together to work on the high-concept story game Where the Water Tastes Like Wine before entering into the video game writing business. I had come from academia where I was slowly failing out of professor-dom due to my biggest paper being rejected twice by different journals, both citing that it was written poorly.

So I had a chip on my shoulder, and was convinced both that everyone around me thought my writing was bad and that if I could convince people I was good then I would be happy. But I did most of my coding online due to not having my own laptop, and most of my forum posting was from my phone, and I rushed a lot, so I had tons of typos. And my stories were more genre fiction rather than literary. In short, I was worried that the circle of IF intelligentsia despised me and my writing.

So I tried several times over the years to ‘see how people really feel’ by entering things anonymously. This game, written in Twine, and with a more (hopefully) literary/poetic feel, was my attempt at seeing if I were any good. And it ended up being positively received, which strengthened my perception that ‘the IF cabal was out to get me’.

Later I would realise that I was mostly just projecting my insecurities, but that I also was a lot worse at writing then than I am now. I’ve also realized that seeking specific people’s favor doesn’t really bring you happiness even if you get it, and that most of the people I saw as writing gods were just regular people that had their own strengths and weaknesses.

I still kept entering games anonymously, which went well until it backfired with the next game I’m going to cover.

Untitled Relationship Project

This was a fun little game. Like I mentioned in the last post, I sometimes enter competitions anonymously to see what people really think of my rating.

In this case, I made a Twine-like game using Bisquixe, and wrote a little ‘click for more text’ randomized game about beginnings and endings of relationships. I wanted to make it wistful and sweet and used things from my own life.

The first review it got mentioned that the protagonist was kind of creepy. It was based on me, so I was very embarrassed! I thought of deleting it, but I’m a big proponent of not removing media.

So instead, I decided to expand it by recruiting other people to add their stories. Then no one would know which were mine and which were someone else’s.

Replaying it just now, I love the creativity people put into it. Thanks for everyone who helped me out! It’s still just a little snack but it has surprising depth given how much text people wrote into it.

It’s pretty funny that one of my earliest and one of my latest games were both attempts to see how people felt about my writing through anonymous entries into mini-jams, and that they had such different results. I am happy that now, almost a decade later, I have so many friendly interactive fiction writers that I can work with and get help from.

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Duck Diary

This was my first game that won a ‘big’ competition (which I think of as Spring Thing, IFComp, Ectocomp, ParserComp, and XYZZY). It was the Petite Mort portion of Ectocomp.

It came at a time I was pretty discouraged. I had published my game, In the Service of Mrs Claus, but it was selling pretty abysmally. I had lost confidence in myself as a writer, although I was in the middle of some pretty good projects.

Around this time I found out that someone I worked with was also an author, and was, in my mind, better than me. I asked for advice, and they sent me a bunch of writing exercises and challenges to try. They helped me a lot, I’d go on to use a lot of that material to make a creative writing class and got a lot of writing practice over the next few years, bouncing ideas off of students (like one guy who wrote scripts for over 200 episodes of a Tiny Toon’s-themed car animated show).

This was my first project I wrote using those writing tips in mind, and I was really pleased when it won; it made me feel like I had the capacity to grow and develop as an author.

In this game, you encounter recurring nightmares that involve your new rubber duck. Simultaneously, you have to deal with people in town who are changing their behavior and moving away.

I remember my idea with this was to leave all the frightening parts up to imagination; so any kind of jumpscare or horrifying thing would be replaced by your rubber duck. I also wanted to tie fear of the unknown forces to a more concrete fear of change of loss of identity. I also threw in some cognitive behavioral therapy stuff.

I like replaying this game, it was more fun than most of the other games so far.

If You Had One Shot

This game was really fun as an author, but I must admit it can be frustrating as a player.

There was a Single Choice Jam last year where games could only have real agency for one action, while all other actions were outlawed. Most games in the jam were twine games with a single choice page, but there was some variety.

I wanted to make a game where you literally only had one choice, and even restarting wouldn’t fix that choice, so I used Inform’s infrequently-used system of writing to files and checking them that endures past saves and restores.

I thought of Eminem’s lyrics ‘If you had one shot’, and made a game based on the song. But I didn’t feel confident in the writing, so I invited some of my favorite authors to collaborate with me, which they did. I love the result, although I admit I cheat by deleting the file it makes to restart.

Love the writing the others did, loved working on this, don’t love not restarting very much (even though it was my idea lol).

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These are the last two of my smaller/less polished games.

Scarlet Portrait Parlor

This game was part of event 1 in the Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction, where the goal was to design a game with beautiful source code. It took 3rd place; the other games in this event were really very creative and some remain popular to this day (like Caduceus and Antique Panzitoum).

I wrote the game as a Shakespearean sonnet. Which means the source code looks neat! But the game itself is complete trash to play: undescribed exits, no custom responses, no help text, no hints as to what to do.

The source code did cheat by including some comments, which of course can be any words and don’t contribute to the final game. So it comes close to being really neat, but falls a bit short. Caduceus was able to do a lot more, and I recommend you check it out!

Buggy

This is the last of my small/micro games. It was pretty fun to make, and was entered in Ectocomp 2022, in the Speed-IF division. The idea was to take a game about a buggy that was buggy.

Your brother Everett was modelled on Ernest from the Ernest Goes to _____ stories. My idea was to take normal Inform errors and make them actually have an effect: so you can take scenery, but it’s commented on, and you are chased by a ‘suchthing’, which, if you try to see it, says ‘You can’t see any suchthing’.

Except…there was a bug where you would never see the suchthing, which I’ve fixed in preparation for this essay series.

Also, I used AI for the original art. In 2022, AI art was still nascent and was laughably bad. I wanted to use that to good effect, since having purposely awful AI art would fit with a purposely awful game. But since then, my thoughts have soured on AI art, and I feel more confident about my own artistic ability, so I used some python code to manipulate an image of a buggy.

I’m not sure why this is the highest-rated of my micro-games; my guess is it’s just because it’s the most-rated one. It and Barroom Brawl have 9 ratings, while all the others have less.

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This reminds me of works of yours I forgot to look at, so I’m glad of it!

More selfishly, it reminds me to update some of my older stuff.

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Thanks!

Yeah, I was shocked at how many of my old games wouldn’t even open up, or had obvious little things I could fix. With your extensive back catalog that still gets a lot of plays, I think it would definitely be worth it to check up on each game!

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I think Buggy is highly entertaining to anyone who’s played enough underimplemented Inform games. Very inside-baseball, but if you’re in the target audience, great stuff. It was one of my favorite Petite Mort games that year.

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In the Service of Mrs. Claus

This was a wild ride playing through this. I haven’t done it for a few years. I have a lot of bad feelings associated with this game; when I started it I was at a stressful point in my marriage trying to pay thousands of dollars of veterinary bills. When it ended I was divorced and living in a new state with no family around. Writing the game was a painful, excruciating experience where I realized it had problems but had to fulfill a contract, so would spend 3 hours working on it: 2.5 hours of overcoming self-loathing, and .5 hours of writing.

Replaying it, the errors were obvious. I had, after I published it, become the lowest-selling game of all time for Choice of Games. The subject matter doesn’t help; I write a lot of campaigns for Battle for Wesnoth, and I have a Christmas campaign there that’s the least-played of all my campaigns. I felt so bad about not selling anything that I asked the company to analyze their other games to find out what went wrong. After playing every other game, I discovered some patterns in low-selling Choice of Games entries, which I wrote up in my book.

And chapter 1 of this game had all the classic signs, even though I’d edited afterwards. The stats are confusing; some choices force you into combinations you may not have wanted to use. You can try to aim for one opposed stat in one direction (like being happy) but one big ‘wrong’ choice can send you the other way at the last second. It’s not clear if choices are setting a variable or checking it. It’s not clear what variables factor into each choice.

Playing that first chapter felt pretty bad.

After that, it gets better. Later chapters are mostly just ‘pick your highest stat and win’, and as long as you have three powers above 70%, you should be fine.

I was feeling great actually about the middle part. I even had a romance with Mrs Claus going. But then I failed a major check in the second to last chapter after I forgot what I was supposed to do, and she died, so that really sucked. The design was pretty annoying in that respect.

The romances were added on last-minute, but they were the most engaging part to replay. I realize now why romances are so popular in Choice of Games. I don’t think it’s just that that’s what the players like (although it is!). I think that they fit the Choicescript format better than most other kind of interactions. Having different romances forces tradeoffs and avoids win/lose conditions. It’s usually easy to guess what another person might enjoy, avoiding inscrutable ability checks and changes. And different romances naturally lead to different paths. So I’d say that romantic options are as natural to Choicescript and medium-sized-dry-good puzzles are to Inform.

Overall, I felt fantastic about the middle 80% of this game, especially the Poltergeist movie parody chapter, but the outer 20% felt bad. But I’ll take the good with the bad! This is my first ‘full game’ on the list and my lowest-rated full game, and is also the second-longest game I’ve ever made.

77 Verbs

This was my final game in the 2nd Ryan Veeder Exposition. That competition had three divisions, with increasingly greater time for each division. The final division was three months long. I had already been working on this game, but didn’t get past a page or two’s worth of code. The competition was an impetus to finish my idea.

This game is a tutorial, and that’s it. It’s goal is to use every verb that Inform recognizes by default. When I first entered it, I thought there were 85 such verbs. After, I counted 77. So the name changed.

It’s completely guided; the game tells you what to do, and you do it. The story is that you are a wanna-be Interactive Fiction PC, competing with others like detectives and aliens and so on, but you are sentenced to death. With the help of a friendly fellow named Skrit, you have to escape.

The game goes through a lot of actions, like a room where you have to BREAK things or PUSH them or son on. Out of world actions like SAVE, RESTORE, and VERSION are shown by NPCs who say these things randomly.

It was pretty fun but not that much due to the easiness of it. I did get stuck on the SEARCH section because I didn’t notice a rock shelf I needed to examine. I would probably give this game a 3 or 4 if I encountered it in the wild.

I do think it would be useful to someone who has started parser games and has an idea of them but doesn’t know the conventions. It covers some tricky stuff like how IN is a synonym of INSIDE but OUT is not a synonym for OUTSIDE.

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