@Adam_S: playing your game but can’t figure out the command to get water from the fountain to the bottle. Tried many, many variations on “put water in bottle”, “put bottle in water”, etc. Can I get the correct command? I’m out of ideas.
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Hi Amanda,
I did different versions of “Fill Bottle”, sounds like I did a schoolboy error and didn’t include Put in there. 
Fill Bottle does it. 
Thanks
Adam
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Next Up: Zugzwang by lastpawn (no obvious handle)
I LOVED this game. LOVED LOVED LOVED it. Oh joy. This is a limited parser fighting game in which you can do a very few things: go directions and gain attack skills which, if you use them correctly, allow you to defeat ever-tougher enemies and gain more skills. The writing here is fantastic, really top-notch, funny and vivid and strange. Just one example should hopefully convince you to go play this right now. After attacking with your flower-power:
The Pawn summons forth flowers but for each bursting bouquet the King matches with his own more verdant volley. He is, for now, the greater combat-florist.
See? Go play it. It’s not long, but it’s just oozing with charm and fun. A terrific limited parser game and the clear stand-out game of the comp for me so far.
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So relieved…
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Next up: Iyashikei - The Fountain by @Adam_S
This short game is meant to be peaceful, and it succeeds. It’s a dream of a beautiful place, of all the beautiful places: rivers and waterfalls and lakeshores and cool caves. The writing is evocative and there is no real goal except to explore the world, and exploring it is lovely. I think this might be called a walking simulator?
I’m aware that the author has had some quite serious health problems of late, and it’s great to see him put out any work at all under those conditions, and that the work he’s putting out is of such a calm and meditative nature. Good for you, Adam.
I do wish more had been implemented; a lot of the beautiful things you see aren’t recognized by the game. And I struggled with getting water in the bottle, although really FILL BOTTLE should have occurred to me. But some more synonyms would be good. The game is such a pleasant stroll that having difficulty is a little jarring, and I would have loved to be able to examine more. But again, I’m impressed that Adam is keeping his hand in given the circumstances, so this is more a wishing nudge than criticism.
Very soothing little game.
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Mystery Isles is a Z-code game. The package contains disk images for various retro systems, but also a z5 file which you can open in any Z-code interpreter like Windows Frotz.
If you click on the Download link on the submission page, it doesn’t seem to ask you to pay anything: Rate Mystery Isles by Oz Realms for ParserComp 2024 - itch.io
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That link doesn’t yield any game file. The link on the game’s page, which I went to after not getting a game file on the comp page link, does ask for an optional $2.
If the first download had yielded an openable file or game, I probably would have had no trouble. And I didn’t complete the second download because I was irritated and I won’t play or review a game while irritated.
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I have no idea why. I tried it in Chrome and Firefox now, and I get a zip file containing, among other files, a z5 file.
Yeah, it sounds wise not to play while irritated.
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Huh. For me in Safari it just yielded an unclickable icon. But this is an excellent reason to make games playable online-- there are lots of people who aren’t tech-savvy, or who don’t want to download files, and they just won’t play your game if they have trouble.
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Unless I’m mistaken, there’s no technical reason why almost all games cannot be playable online. Don’t all the major terps have online versions nowadays? Or are there other reasons.
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A lot of parsercomp authors use custom engines, whether because they saw it on itch and aren’t familiar with current engines, or because they know or believe that parsercomp generally has a better reception for custom-engine parser games than IFComp does
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I remember a tester tried to MOVE something in I Am Prey before I learned that this was a thing Adv3Lite could handle by default, and the tester immediately went through the stages of grief when the default success response appeared, just because of the sudden increase in implied complexity.
I imagine a dev’s first thought is “wow this opens up so many possibilities”, but I feel like the player side of it can see this very differently.
When there are a lot of objects in a room that could be MOVE destinations for another object, and a lot of things that cannot be picked up but could be reasonably expected to be PUSHed around, suddenly every room is a minefield of confusing failure messages if the dev tries to limit MOVE to certain objects, or it’s a chaotic storm of actions which seem like they could be progression, which also do not indicate that the player has expended an option to its fullest extent, and quite a lot of convoluted time can be spent before any kind of conclusion is reached.
I feel like SEARCH (I’m guilty as charged) and MOVE/PUSH are both boxes of Pandora, where once it’s confirmed that a game uses them, every room becomes quite a lot more complex, and it’s extremely difficult for a dev to figure out a good way to signpost under these conditions.
Amen.
With all of my time spent writing software, about a year of it was spent with Python. Installing stuff with Python, whether it’s on Windows or Linux is a very smokey and confusing task where a lot of people seem to not be aware of a lot of steps they take for granted or forget about while they write instructions.
And this is coming from some with a decade of software experience.
This is also why I don’t develop in Python if it’s something I plan to make widely available. It’s great for DIY tools, but setting up an environment and installing dependencies is too convoluted with too many unknown pitfalls for me to ask someone else to do it. If possible, it should be compiled to a standalone executable with no Python environment dependencies to install.
Similar issue with Java, but to a lesser extent. Once your code requires something above JRE 8, 80% of your userbase will bail because everyone has a common understanding that “installing Java” means using the installer from Oracle, which is usually JRE 8 (iirc; it’s been a while). The packaging tools also have sub-par documentation which requires a bit of live-testing to determine how any of it actually works in practice, if a dev wants to make a standalone package.
Anyway, rant over.
WHAT.
This.
Y’know, I recently cancelled a project because the process a player would have to endure just to get the game to run was way too convoluted, and I couldn’t find a way to simplify it.
Not exactly. Some of them are partial implementations, largely because of a myriad of factors.
Custom engines are great, but they still need to be easy-peazy-squeezy-lemon to get running.
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This is a game title just waiting for a game.
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This is what i think as well. Maybe it should be added to Dan’s famous Mountaineering spiel.
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Hi Amanda.
Thanks for your review.
I’m sorry to hear that you had problems with the fob keys, and that you didn’t finish the game. I tried to add as many commands as I could think of, and you would have found that >use green fob on green reader would have worked too. I can understand your comment against long commands. But I felt it necessary/appropriate to specify since there are two readers in that location.
As for your comment regarding look / search, I have tried to limit the use of search to situations where this would be a natural thing to do, ie. search corpse etc.
The credits are on the first screen just above the intro picture. I realize that there are “only” three testers. But when no one else volunteered, I had to go with what I got. On the bright side I can assure you that they tested the daylight out of the game before they were satisfied.
I’m a little puzzled about your comment regarding the >x space. If you followed the walk-through the command >X space would have worked.
Did you use the hint function in the game?
Best regards
Finn
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I moved the information for modern machines for Mystery Isles to the top of the page and changed the offending $2.00 donation (or click to download free) message to say $0.00
You could always play it online as well with nothing to download. I moved that info to the top of the page as well.
I’m learning how people would like information presented and it seems I failed to provide information in the correct order.
I hope that helps.
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You’re not the only one Jason, don’t worry 
@AmandaB wrote a lovely review for me and I’m thankful, it was also an interesting insight into the players mind!
So, the short version of the story is that this little game has been in mind for about 4 years, in fact I actually partially coded it some 3-4 years ago when I was a little more energetic. It fell onto the To Do list, then off the To Do list altogether, and it wasn’t until I had a bit of a resurgence a few weeks ago that I decided to try again from scratch. And, it’s ok! I gave myself practically no time, I think I started it in earnest about 5 days before the cut off (and these are 5 days where I’m at work - albeit from home - and doing family stuff etc) That probably shows in the final comp version, there was originally more to do with the fountain (the colours should rotate and each colour represents an emotion that you can bottle for when you need it), and the forest area I don’t think I fleshed out at all sadly. All of these I plan to go back to (famous last words) in a post-comp release. Side note: I’d love for these to be on IFDB.
Next, the “players mind”. So, my testers were my kids. They tried all sorts of things! Some of them clearly weren’t going to make it into the game, but a lot did, and a lot of it I think comes from them being completely literate with Google and ChatGPT etc they were trying very natural language commands, so I tried to account for that in ZIL as far as the 40+ year old language would allow, and it did itself proud - I mean, Z-Machine versus modern LLMs, yikes. What that meant was that I accounted for “Fill the bottle with water from the fountain” and “fill the bottle from the fountain” and so forth. Which is great, but, I actually neglected to account for “IF speak” which the players more generally would use (like Amanda), hence “Put Water”, “Put Water in Bottle”, “Take Water” etc probably just threw the parser for a loop, because it hadn’t been prepped for those.
Interesting! So my takeaway is that I’m going to try and account for both IF syntax and more natural language syntax in the future.
Adam
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RE the walkthrough, I followed it exactly (at least I think I did), so not sure what went wrong there.
I hope I was explicit that I’m just not really a fan of the old-school parser anymore. There are a whole lot of folks who love those, and they’ll do great with your game. I don’t care for SEARCH and MOVE because they lead to having to lawnmower through those terms with every item in every room. But that’s a time-honored verb and my opinion on it shouldn’t matter much to you if that’s what you like. And at this cranky old stage in my life where the arthritis is setting into my hands, I like implicit actions if you carry the right key, etc. Which does not mean that you have to provide them!
I didn’t use the hints. If it’s clear to me that SEARCHING every single thing is the way to find the important stuff, I’d rather use a walkthrough to determine which thing I should search.
There was a lot to love about your game, but the old school parser and I just don’t get along anymore.
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It does. I’ve had a lot of difficulty getting games in this comp to play easily and I was exasperated, but of course there’s a learning curve and I’ve flubbed it myself often enough. Apologies for my tone.
And I’ve completed your game, so next up is Mystery Isles by @WauloK
This is an old-school escape-the-island game with a series of traditional puzzles. It’s usually pretty straightforward although there were a couple of things I needed a hint for (hitting the rock on the boulder to sharpen it and kicking the tree were not intuitive to me). There are some purposeful annoyances, like a lighter running out of fuel all the time, although it’s fairly easily rectified.
There were some hitches in the gameplay. The bench kept ending up in the cave for some reason. I got points twice for something (I think in the cave?) so I ended up with 110 out of 100 points. The hint system is pretty good if the torch is lit, but if it isn’t it just tells you to light the torch no matter where you are. When trying to get a banana, the location describes the bananas but says there aren’t any there. This is because they’re up the tree, but the implementation could be a lot smoother. There are some weird things you can’t do, like tie the line to the bamboo to make a fishing pole (I really spent a lot of time trying to make a whole fishing pole when all I needed were the line, hook, and worm). You can’t climb the banana tree even though you can climb another tree. North is listed as a location in the jungle, but you can’t go there.
But no new parser game is without problems, and I enjoyed myself despite these hitches and completed the game without too much trouble. The descriptions are terse and lightly humorous, the map is easily navigable, and it’s satisfying to escape. I’d like to see the implementation on this beefed up in a post-comp release, but for now it’s a nice little puzzly romp on a deserted island.
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Thanks for the feedback. As you noted, there’s a lot wrong - but also some things I got right. With Jayne, Love is the answer. It may be worth trying that. As for warnings, you are right, I should have included them and trigger alerts - my apologies. I appreciate the time you have taken to play/read and look forward to refining my work as I continue. With thanks.
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