Next up: Race Against Time by @anon48037171
A zippy sci-fi story instantly rockets you off to an international research station which has been decimated by a killer virus. Your mission is to destroy the station, save Earth, and not die in the process. Moody and somber descriptions of the space station filled with bodies set the tone nicely, and you’re off to be a hero.
I struggled mightily with the parser in this Adrift game, too. Multiple disambiguation problems made me type things like UNLOCK EASTERN DOOR WITH GREEN FOB, which is just too much. Also, this is a game which follows the old-school philosophy of needing to SEARCH everything after examining it. There’s also a fair bit of MOVING things, some of which were very read-the-author’s-mind kind of actions. Fans of the traditional parser mode will be fine here, but I feel like I did my time on the front lines of long commands like ASK LADY MERRIWETHER ABOUT THE PUFFY POMERANIAN PUPPY back in the nineties, and I like a sleeker approach these days.
So after half an hour of struggling I went to the walkthrough, only to be stymied by a command that doesn’t work in the game: X SPACE.
So I didn’t finish this game either, although I wanted to. This was a far smoother experience than the previous game, but it also suffered from a lack of testing and editing. CREDITS and ABOUT didn’t yield any response, so I can’t tell how many testers it had, but it needed more. This, too, could be a great game if it was more user-friendly.
Which brings me to my first PSA of the comp: Get testers. Fix problems. Get more testers. Fix problems. Do this until the game is smooth. There will always be a comp coming soon, so nobody should feel pressure to meet a particular deadline. My games are always a huge awful mess before multiple rounds of testing, and it’s awful embarrassing grunt work to clean them up and keep cleaning them, but if you want people to be able to play your games, this is the only way to be sure they can.