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