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

Faery: Swapped

This was fun to replay. It’s my most recent ‘large’ game, though it’s still pretty small, and won SeedComp this year.

In it, you have a new baby brother but you’re sure he’s not human. A gnome appears and offers to help you out, but steals your name, leaving you nameless but also able to swap the names of other things.

This led to some fun moments where a refrigerator was barking at a cast-iron tennis ball, which got confusing at times but ended at what I feel is the right spot. It does feel a little under-cooked; the writing seems less descriptive than it could and a lot of items and locations feel under-utilized. I wonder if I could spruce it up and expand it a bit in the future, but for now it was neat just trying it out.

It uses Bisquixe to slowly change the background color but I’m not sure it needs that effect. If I do a re-release, it’ll probably be just a bare blorb.

The idea could definitely be reworked into another game. Maybe an ectocomp game? But probably not this ectocomp.

The Origin of Madame Time

This is my lowest-rated IFComp game, and it makes sense. I had promised the previous year to offer it as a prize in IFComp (i.e. writing a sequel for someone’s game), and it was chosen by the authors of The Owl Consults, a superhero game. I looked forward to making it, but I had grossly overextended myself. Not only was I writing this game, I also had one year to finish my Introcomp game, Sherlock Indomitable (which is the next game on this list). Then our cat went to the ER, and I took out a $4000 loan for her healthcare, so I submitted and was accepted to write for Choice of Games, and also submitted and was accepted to write a Twine game for another (now defunct) publisher. This was in addition to my day job.

So Madame Time took a back burner, and was rushed. At around 12K words initially (now 16K or so), it’s my second smallest IFComp game (only beaten barely by my minimalist game Swigian). I kept it simple. My idea was, how can you have superheros without having to code a ton of conversation?

Easy: stop time.

So your character’s ability is to stop time. While time is stopped, you can see other heroes and villains and use their powers. My goal was to let the player use the powers of other heroes as much as possible: turning into a wolf, rusting metal objects, and so on.

It was a lot of fun writing the character’s backstories and powers. I accidentally created a name that had been used before (I think it was ‘Lensman’) so I changed it. Some heroes were based solely on utility (like ‘I need a hero that can change shape!’ while others were based on just being silly.

The game had numerous faults: a puzzle that requires you to drop your inventory multiple times, a lack of emotion in descriptions (coming from an experience with Ether I’ll detail later), and a moderate lack of cluing. While playing, random messages appear saying things like, ‘I doubt if that was the right thing to do’ that had no effect on the game.

I felt bad about its lower quality, and went back and updated it a few years back to include more puzzles (by adding a tiny doggy-door to the map and changing the final puzzle). Replaying it now, I felt dissatisfied with it, so I rewrote the opening and took out most of the frustrating things mentioned above (like decreasing the amount of time you can’t carry things).

But looking back just now, I was stunned to see that most reviews at the time were 4 stars. My own negative view of the game has endured so long that I hadn’t realized that others had a good time even in the original version. So maybe I’ll lay it to rest now that I’ve done version 3. This is not a bad game, I suppose, and now I wish I hadn’t spent so long feeling bad about it.

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I didn’t realize that you wrote additional essays in your history book! I went and read your chapter on things that you noticed about good choicescript games and I really enjoyed it.

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Connie Willis once wrote an Isaac Asimov tribute story. It portrayed Asimov publishing his 1,000th book: Asimov’s Guide to Asimov’s Guides.

Not sure why that came to mind.

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Oh that’s great! Thanks for letting me know!

Sherlock Indomitable

This one was fun and simple to replay. I love Sherlock Holmes, and after Color the Truth, people suggested I make more murder mysteries with the clue system it has. I thought it would be natural to adapt Sherlock Holmes games to the same system!

It turned out to be really hard. I wrote a series of essays about that challenge, which now is part of my recently released IF History book. The main issue is that a written work is by its nature linear, and IF is not. If I add a lot of deviations to the plot, then I have to both devise writing (which will inevitably be compared to Doyle’s) and new plot and activities. When the original author is involved, like in Hithchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it can work out well. In my case, I ended up making the game very linear, and for things not part of the main story I combed through the collected works of Doyle to find quotes that were similar. For instance, at the beginning of the game, when Watson approaches Sherlock, their depressing quotes are straight from later Holmes stories.

This game adapts two Holmes stories, with a framing narrative. I made it this way to win Introcomp; basically, most Introcomp entries are either tiny openings to choice-based games or unfinished parser games. My idea was to make a modular game and enter one complete, polished module (in this case, the Case of the Speckled Band). Then, to finish the game and fulfill Introcomp’s prize requirements, I added another module of the same size: The Case of the Six Napoleons.

This is another one I’ve long regarded as a failure, but looking back, people have treated it well, with the main complaints being linearity and an overabundance of mechanics. It was taught once in university in Jim Loughlin’s course, which was nice.

I did originally preserve the story of The Speckled Band, but a review from Emily Short alerted me that that story included racist depictions of Romani people. I didn’t even know who Romani people really were or that the common name used for them is a slur, so I was horrified. I quickly modified the game to change them to stonemasons who are speckled with mortar.

Overall, I don’t really see a good way to ‘fix’ this game. It fulfills its purpose, it’s just that that purpose isn’t as fun as many other purposes.

I also have an easter egg here for Sam Ashwell, one of the winners of the Best Reviewer competition for the previous IFComp. The XYZZY text takes you to a room where he’s a Moriarty-type villain.

Ether

Wow, this one was really eye-opening! (I didn’t intend this as a pun but I guess if you look at the climax of the game it is…)

I went back and read some earlier things I’ve written on this game. This was the first game I ever published. But it’s not the first game I ever made! My first game was a small toy game designed to learn Inform, about Abraham and Isaac. It was called Simple Things. I posted it on the forum, but I felt embarrased by my first feedback (which I recall as negative but may not have been). So I changed my forum name to be anonymous (something I now realize is a recurring pattern) and made Ether.

Ether was my attempt at doing something no one had done before. I was, by this time, already the top IF reviewer on IFDB, with 200 reviews. I had noticed that games with vertical movement tended to be hard to play (outside of the fun Threediopolis). So I wanted to ‘solve 3d movement’ by making a game centered around it.

You play as a god-like being shaped like a Nautilus (a kind of tentacled creature with a shell). Throughout your history, you have used magic to hop from world to world. The world you are currently in is a study in contrasts, with one direction being hot, another cold; one dense, one light; one chaotic, one peaceful.

Movement is in 3d, so new commands like NEU (i.e. north, east, up) were added. Gameplay revolves around chasing after moving objects, moving them to new areas, and gaining new abilities.

I had a blast replaying it now. I had looked back on it as a weaker work, and felt like I developed more as a writer since then, but for my personal tastes I really enjoyed what old me wrote.

And I got a lot of positive feedback, both in testing and reviews. Sean Shore was my star tester; he had won IFComp the previous year and gave me amazing feedback on my game that made it much more solid. He would later go on to test many of my other games, and when I made Never Gives Up Her Dead, he was one of two people I kept in mind as my audience.

Unfortunately, I got into IF writing because work was going bad. In the academic world, I was getting rejected over and over on a paper I wrote due to it being poorly written, according to reviewers. And the one school I had hoped to teach at my whole life and who told me I would probably get hired there rejected me. So I was hypersensitive to negative feedback on writing from authority figures.

Emily Short reviewed my game and said something (I purposely didn’t look it up so I could record my impression) about how the emotional climax of the game didn’t feel earned. I didn’t realize at the time that people simply have different tastes, and I also had trouble telling what made writing good or bad, so I took this to mean that emotion in my games was bad and I should strip it out to be a better writer. I took this path for years, and it wasn’t until 2019 when I worked with a writing ‘coach’ at my work that I got over the mental idea. Nothing in her review told me to do that, but I really shied away from expressing any emotion after that.

But on replaying it now, I see it was just fine. Some people like sentimental stuff, and some don’t, and the specific story in the game is one that I think resonates with me, and several other reviewers said they liked it.

Its bigger issue imo is how linear it is. There are some puzzles but you mostly just walk into things and then carry them to extreme corners. So I feel like it could have had a bit more satisfying interactions, and the paragraph structure could be modified a bit as well and some repeating messages modified.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of the most current source code, which is version 2. For most other games I have an old backup of all their code, but not for Ether. So I won’t be updating it, but it felt really rewarding to play after years of thinking it was an example of poor writing only to personally enjoy it (especially since I had forgotten much of it). I also liked the poems I included; I really love boxed quotations but didn’t use them since Glulx displays them weird, so I think maybe I’ll try making a Z-code game that has them.

After writing the above thoughts, I went back and saw the original review, which said, “I found Ether least effective when it explicitly went for pathos in the writing, because it was asking me to empathize with a rather abstract being that I mostly hadn’t envisioned as capable of having feelings to start with, and it hadn’t put in the time to build up that empathy. Similarly, the ending reached for an emotional point that it hadn’t done the work to earn, at least for me.”

I should have realized that this contained both fact and opinion, since I think Emily Short did as well; she included a ‘guest post’ on her forum by Lucian Smith, who liked the game quite a bit more. So, I appreciate that!

Finally, I originally used a wikipedia image for the cover art, but I later used an IFComp prize to commission a twitter artist to make new art for me (years later).

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For the last few games, I’m going to just do one game at a time, so I can finish on October 30th (and not run into Ectocomp).

Swigian

This game, I think, succeeds in its goal.

This is the last of my pseudonym shenanigan games. I had noticed a pattern in IFComp winners (and high-placers) over the years: they were all (before Twine) long, polished, parser games that weren’t repetitive. And no game like that placed low. Genre didn’t matter, writing quality didn’t seem to matter (outside of typos), puzzles didn’t matter, and so on.

So I decided to test my experiment by making a ‘fake game’. I’d create a minimalist parser game that lasted 200 moves (the approximate amount many IFComp winners last), and which never repeated large chunks of action, but otherwise had as little content as possible.

I made a forest with an axe where you chop wood, and find a flint for a fire. I think I was thinking in Minecraft terms. But then it was hard to come up with a concept, so I decided to throw in some Scandinavian mythology to theme it all together.

I put it under a pseudonym (Rainbus North, an anagram of Brian Rushton) and watched. I also had my ‘real game’ in the competition, Absence of Law. That game was at least 4 times larger and had been very carefully crafted.

I was amused, shocked, and intrigued by early reviews; it honestly seemed at first that Swigian was receiving at least as popular a reception as Absence of Law! I was especially shocked to see many of the avant-garde authors (who I respected but who hadn’t liked my main work) say they enjoyed Swigian, which was really nice.

In the end, though, it did in fact place 21st, while Absence of Law was 4th. 21st place definitely isn’t bad, but it showed that my hypothesis is wrong: it’s not enough to just have non-repetitive content, you need something more.

I liked the gameplay on replay just now, but not as much as my other last few games on the list. I think the atmosphere is fun, and I love the graphics. Marco Innocenti very kindly volunteered to make graphics for each location, which seriously improved the game so much; I’d say that the appeal of the current version of the game is, to me, 40% graphics and 60% games.

I’ve shared Swigian with middle school students studying Beowulf, where it’s been fairly popular (usually one or two kids will get obsessed with it but struggle since its parser, so they get hints until it’s done). I also rewrote it in Adventuron to learn the language, which was a fun exercise.

So yeah, I don’t have a lot of strong feelings about Swigian. It was a fun experiment that Marco Innocenti beautified, and I’m happy with where it places in my list of games and with its overall reception.

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The Magpie Takes the Train

We’ve reached the part of the list that contains my ‘full effort’ games, where nothing went wrong making them, I did extensive beta testing until I was completely satisfied, and I was attempting to make a good game that would do well in competitions. None of the earlier games fit all of these criteria.

This was the second game that I made as an IFComp prize. It is of course based on J.J. Guest’s magnificent game Alias ‘The Magpie’. My idea was to set a sequel in an American train where costume changes were the main method of doing things, and the player would have to outwit a dog. J.J. Guest suggested switching the dog to a bird to better fit the Magpie theme, and on we went. He also commissioned the beautiful cover art for me.

The idea of the game is that you want to steal a beautiful jewelled rose (inspired by David Edding’s Sapphire Rose, the Bhelliom). It’s right out in the open, but Cornelia Hogg, its tycoon owner, is very sneaky and suspicious. In addition, her pet parrot Horus and a mysterious Viscount constantly observe you.

One of the original Magpie game’s greatest strengths is its PC. Just copying his mannerisms, appearance, and modus operandi already makes a great game. I had to come up with a lot of quips during the game, and beta testers and the original author gave me a lot of advice. Replaying it this time I found a lot of moments that made me laugh, especially the Magpie’s various insults to the Viscount every time he changed.

This game took 5th in the competition but it also took first in Miss Congeniality. Up to this point, I had been looking for validation by hoping to win one of the big competitions, either by winning IFComp or by being nominated for a Best Game XYZZY Award (since often the nominees are just as good as the winner). Winning Miss Congeniality here, meaning that other authors voted for me to win, made me feel like I had that validation. After this point I didn’t strive to perform well in IFComp anymore, just continuing to focus on fun tributes to other people and passion projects.

This game has received some negative reviews recently, with 2- and 3-star ratings, but I think that can be explained both by the negative comparison it suffers to Alias ‘The Magpie’ (which is much more substantial) and by the constant interruptions of darkness and light that can get annoying. So I’ll take the good with the bad. It’s also my 3rd most popular game by play count, again due I feel to the large bump from the original Magpie game. That’s why I like making these tribute games; it’s a win-win situation. The author gets the satisfaction of someone making a loving tribute to their game and I benefit from being associated to their great creation, and players like having a series. That’s why I hope to offer this prize again in the future.

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Grooverland

This one was interesting to play. It was my first ‘bigger than IFComp length’ parser game. It had been cooking in my brain for years: take the rich, dark, imaginative and unique games of Chandler Groover and put them into a cheap, gaudy, theme park with traditional parser interactions.

The result is a game made up of a bunch of side-games. You have a long street, with little side attractions to the north and south. You play as a kind of make-a-wish recipient (based on my own experiences with make-a-wish) who is ‘queen for the day’, and your goal is to enter the Queen’s castle by collecting all of the Queen’s regalia. As you collect more objects, the park gets more grim.

Designing a longer game like this was pretty tricky, and, while the result is a good game that I’m very proud of, there are many flaws. Replaying it just now I felt like it lacked direction frequently; it was difficult to get a sense of what I should be doing. Each new puzzle, even though I wrote them only a few years ago, took a bunch of thinking to figure out (especially the Creaky House, I can see now why it got called out in several reviews). I also found a few bugs (I wondered why no one ever mentioned the vorpal swords), so I’ve sent a new version to the IFarchive.

One major design flaw in my mind is linearity. Many people never met or talked to Alice, your sister, because she disappears after a set amount of puzzles are finished, but she’s further back in the park, making it so that players who just ‘lawnmowered’ the puzzles one by one never see her. That led directly to my major design decision in Never Gives Up Her Dead, where all 10 ‘dimensions’ rely on at least one other dimension to completely solve, making it so that players will see much of the map before completing any one world.

Another issue I had was with ASK/TELL. For years, I had relied on my own conversation system, but I thought that people would respect ASK/TELL more. I have about a dozen characters that can talk, and I was determined to allow you to ask each of them about any noun in the game. I spent a month coding that in, using some procedural generation (so that several people would say the same thing but add their own greeting and variations of words).

It really ended not being worth it. Replaying it just now, there’s no point in talking to most characters, and the procedural nature means that most of the common questions have boring answers. There’s no indication that I could, for instance, ask the Ceviche saleswoman about the monkey, so all of that content is hidden. That’s why, in Never Gives Up Her Dead, I went back to my old ‘topic inventory’ system.

Grooverland got a lot of good reviews, and it won the first ‘new’ Parsercomp, which felt really cool, since the old Parsercomp winner, Chlorophyll, was an amazing game. I am proud of Grooverland and glad I was able to make a tribute to one of my favorite authors. I do think I relied too heavily on his deep cuts (specifically Fallen London exceptional stories which are expensive and inaccessible to most players), but I hope I’ve introduced his work to a few new people.

(Edit: This was written before Chandler won the recent IFComp. Maybe I’ll write an expansion one day with the Bat!)

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Grooverland 2: Further Battractions!

Grooverland 2: All Bats Are Off

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Grooverland 2: Descending in the Bathyscape

Grooverland 2: We Replaced the Pathos with Bat-thos

Grooverland 2: Does This Cut Need Batcitracin?

Grooverland 2: Amusement Park of Chiropterror

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Some of these puns are causing me physical pain…

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Grooverland Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Bat

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Grooverland 2: Assault and Battery

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Grooverland 2: Bat-rachomyomachia

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Grooverland 2: Electric Guano-Loo

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Color the Truth

I think that, outside of Ether, this is the game I had gone longest without playing. I could really detect my enthusiasm for the setting, which was fun to read.

This was my second IFComp game. Unlike Ether, where I just wanted to try fixing a problem in IF, Color the Truth was ‘scientifically’ engineered to win IFComp. I had studied all the past winners, analyzing how many puzzles they had, what kind of tone, the average number of steps in a walkthrough, etc. I worked hard on the setting; basically, I took Ballyhoo (which was released around 30 years earlier), and thought, ‘what is the equivalent of the circus setting?’ I figured that since the circus had been declining for many decades before Ballyhoo was written, I should pick a location with some kind of entertainment that had been decaying for decades before the 2010s. So, this is set at a radio station.

I wanted to base the story on Rashomon and have different retellings of the same story. Everyone has a statement that you can experience as a player, but the statements are all lies. By using my inventory-based conversation system, you can link contradicting statements, expose the lies, and get new version of the story.

To complete my ‘IFComp Killer’, I wrote a bunch of past IFComp winners, asking for advice and testing. Sean Shore and Marco Innocenti were able to help, which was great. I had a ton of testers overall.

And with all that…I took 2nd, to another detective game (the excellent Detectiveland). Detectiveland was funnier, longer, and had trickier puzzles than my game. At the time I was determined to try harder and do better, but I’ve never actually been able to reach 2nd again.

Playing the game now, I can see a lot of things that needed fixing, so I’ve made a new release. The character transitions looked weird, and I looked in the code and saw that they had had a visual bug for years. Similarly, the ‘plug in’ action on the fan was ‘an action applying to one thing’ but I wrote “understand ‘plug in’” as the action, which means it doesn’t take any inputs, so it was completely messed up.

I also added some cluing. I remember Color the Truth was the first game I really tried to get my family to play, but my dad couldn’t get through the first scene. Replaying it, years later, I realize that I never hinted that LINKing was possible except at the end of a long ABOUT text, so I added that in as well. I guess my dad was right! He later played a tricky area of Never Gives Up Her Dead that he was really supportive of.

I mentioned before that a negative review of Ether stuck with me and influenced me for years. Well, a positive review of Color the Truth stuck with me for years. Doug Egan had been reviewing the comp and lamenting the very low amount of parser games (around 18) and had played a bunch of buggy ones in a row. He had written a post about the death of parser games. When he played Color the Truth, he title his review, “Parser Fiction is Not Dead Yet!” That positivity made me feel like writing these games was actually worth something and made people happier, and has been a positive support in my mind over the years.

Color the Truth has been played a lot over the years, and is in the top 10 games on IFDB for most ratings out of games published since the year it was released (2016). It is not super-highly rated though, appearing only on the third page of results for ‘highest rated’ in the same time-frame.

One of the ten areas in Never Gives Up Her Dead is based on Color the Truth. It has four suspects, just like before, but instead of two statements each, there are three. While Color the Truth has, I think, a cooler setting, I think the gameplay in Never Gives Up Her Dead is stronger, and is quite a bit larger.

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The Impossible Stairs

This game was recently featured in the Free IF Playoffs, where it did pretty well. I thought it was silly at the time, as I thought I had other, stronger games that could have done better.

But having played through almost all the others again now, this game is a lot better than I remembered. I don’t know if it’s because Dialog has such a smooth and easy-to-use conversation system or because of serendipity, but I felt the story flowed a lot better than other games like Grooverland or The Magpie Takes the Train where I was left not knowing what to do at times.

This game is an authorized sequel to The Impossible Bottle, which is one of the most popular games of recent years. Rather than trying to follow up on that game’s compelling spatial puzzles, I chose to focus instead on time. I was inspired by a lot of time travel stories I had read as a kid, including the story Rainbird by Lafferty. For the setting, I wanted to follow up on the family setting of the first game. This desire was strengthened by the fact that, during this game’s development, my grandmother who I loved and was partially raised by passed away, and my grandfather whom I was similarly close to had passed away a year or so prior. I feel like I put a lot of my feelings and love for them into the story, as well as for my other family members (Uncle Joe is like my Aunt Julie).

The idea of the game is that you need to get the house ready for dinner, but every time you go upstairs, you go 20 years into the future, and every time you go downstairs, you go 20 years into the past. Testers really wanted more and more puzzles where actions in the past affected the future. I put a bunch in, but I’m sure even more would have been appreciated. I also put a lot of dumb jokes in, like a can of yellow wax beans that sits in the pantry for 80 whole years; this is based on real life, where my family had a can of yellow wax beans in our pantry that I saw sit untouched for my entire childhood.

Playing this definitely made me think of Grandma and Grandpa and tear up. In my belief system they still exist and are waiting for me one day, so it felt nice to connect with them. I hope other people can get similar good feelings when playing!

I did find one bug in the game that I corrected for version 3. Grandma is supposed to have different dialog depending on what’s on TV, but it was stuck on the same dialog no matter what channel the TV is on (it’s because in the Dialog code, I was checking Grandma’s channel rather than the TV’s channel).

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I’m glad you were able to change the Dialog to change the dialog!

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----brrrbadoem-tzingg!----

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Impossible stairs is one of my favorite IF ! Thanks for the retrospective !

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Re: Grooverland,

I guess there are design flaws that are felt by players, those felt by both players and authors, and those only felt by authors and only in retrospect. Obviously the third category’s the most forgiving because players don’t experience anything negative. They usually don’t miss what they don’t know is there, unless it fulfils some crucial need in the game they perceive a lack of. I don’t think missing Alice made any problems for any players.

-Wade

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