I was absolutely searching the internet trying to find the other 52 episodes before I realized that was a joke…
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Jenni and I aren’t exactly opposed to doing more Type-Ins; we just have lots of other stuff going on.
We’ll talk some more about it and see if anything emerges.
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Do you ever plan to release updated versions of your games? I was thinking you might fix the bugs that got you hit with a pillow in the Clash of the Type-Ins episode on “Reference and Representation: An Approach to First-Order Semantics”.
BTW, thanks for doing another episode! It brought me great joy.
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In general, on principle, most of the time, no.
Hey, this kind of follows from the earlier question about entering games in competitions! When I release a game outside of a competition, there’s no deadline telling me when the game has to be done. I decide when to release it, and that means I have to make a call as to whether it’s good enough to be released. On that day, by my standards at that time, the game is finished—and in every single case, I know that this “finished,” “good enough” game must contain some problems or omissions or bugs, because of course it does. There will always be more bugs. That’s reason number one.
Reason number two is: Those problems, omissions, bugs, etc. are part of the work. The omissions speak to my priorities during the writing process. The bugs represent my level of skill at the time. All the elements of the work contribute to its meaning, even if they detract from its quality, and by fixing those problems I would be chipping away at the original Thing I Made, in a way that feels disrespectful or distrustful of the guy who made that thing.
Reason number three has to do with how much value you and I and the world get out of the time and effort it takes to update games. It’s hard to say. But I’m pretty sure we all get a lot more value out of time and effort spent on making fun new games. Take Reference and Representation, and imagine the timeline where I never made that game because I was busy updating other games. How many fixed bugs would be worth it?
On this last episode of Type-Ins I found a couple of continuity errors between that game and the larger Little Match Girl universe. I am a huge nerd about this continuity, and those errors rankle me mightily, even at this very moment. It wouldn’t take long to go in and fix them—but that way lies madness. I have cooler stuff I should be doing.
I don’t feel beholden to these principles when I’m updating a game for larger reasons. When I make a Little Match Girl game for my Patreoneers, I’m able to pretend that I’m writing for an invested audience who knows the series; when I get the same game ready for public release, I have to consider a wider audience, plus I have a chance to pretty it up and fix the music and the continuity errors. Visit Skuga Lake - Masterpiece Edition has some amendments and additions, but I didn’t put it together because the original game needed to be fixed—I put it together because the original Visit Skuga Lake was already a masterpiece and I just wanted more people to play it
why are you reading this instead of playing Visit Skuga Lake
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Hello. Thanks again for doing this thread.
I wanted to ask about your hosting experience with Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing.
Have you had concurrent players on your server? What was the peak number of people simultaneously playing your game? Did you have peaks in traffic, like over the lifetime of the game as well is in daily/weekly patterns of traffic? Alternatively, did you have dead periods?
I have a kernel of an idea in my head, but it depends on what these patterns look like for a parser game released in this space and your game looks to be the nearest analogous example I could find.
Thank you,
Pinkunz
P.S. Will there be a third Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction announced sometime soon as the last event was announced in 2019?
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I’m afraid the data I have access to aren’t very detailed. It’s basically just page views per day. Play in RVAFF doesn’t actually take place on the server, so I’m never able to tell if more than one person is playing at once.
The day the game was launched saw the most traffic at 120 page views. For a few weeks after that there was a range of 20-50 views per day, and then it was 5-20 views per day for a month or two. Since then it has been more like 0-2 views per day, with occasional bumps. I would say that the overall history of the game has consisted mostly of dead periods.
Here’s the surge in traffic that you can expect when your year-old game wins a XYZZY for best implementation:
Hey, didn’t I say in some other answer that I didn’t want to look at these data? Because it would be depressing???
(Of course, I can’t be too sad, because even in 2023 the game still gets a few hits per week, and it’s very nice to know that people are still thinking about it after so long. I have plenty of other old projects that get maybe ten hits per year oh good now I can be sad about those instead)
Anyway, I would say only in the first blush of popularity would it have been likely for two people to be playing RVAFF at exactly the same time, and even then it wasn’t something I’d rely on.
The wheels of the Third Quadrennial Exposition are in motion. They’re not moving as fast as I’d like. Probably it will become necessary to adjust the original schedule.
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I apologize for bumming you out. If it means anything, the information you provided was very helpful and supports some hypotheses I had about the flow of traffic.
I look forward to the Exposition.
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If it helps, I think about this game OFTEN.
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I liked the fantasy section in A Rope of Chalk and was wondering what fantasy books you like and are influenced by.
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If you mean specifically the Cealdhame segment, it was mostly influenced by the two semesters I studied Old English.
If you mean the whole fourth section, the influences aren’t really fantasy fiction exactly. One room resembles a scene from House more than anything else, one room is supposed to be a Neruda poem/Waterhouse painting, one room is the film The Nightmare Before Christmas. In general I think the surrealism and “collage” sensibility of the fourth section ultimately derive from Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
The fantasy books that influence me the most, where “influence” is defined as realizing where I got an idea that I had thought was original, are the Chronicles of Narnia and Madeleine L’Engle’s books. In particular L’Engle’s perspective and ideas are kind of baked into my brain as baseline generic fantasy.
Fantasy fiction I really dig and aspire to includes the Dirk Gently books, what I remember of the Gormenghast books, the Sandman comics, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics, the Doctor McNinja comics, Jesse Moynihan’s Forming comic, Evan Dahm’s Rice Boy/Order of Tales/Vattu comics, the show called Adventure Time, and let’s say Venture Bros. counts as fantasy. But this all influences stuff like the Little Match Girl games more than A Rope of Chalk. I guess that one room in A Rope of Chalk is very Sandmanesque, though.
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There’s been a bunch of talk about Vorple in this recent thread and how few games have been written in it — but of course an fine recent example is the prizewinning and highly regarded The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls.
Is this your first time using Vorple? What about The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls inspired you to use it? Is it nice? Any advice or experience to share for future authors?
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First, caveats: I have had a bunch of trouble putting Vorple games on itch.io. There’s some problem with scroll bars. I don’t really know what’s going on.
ANYWAY, I first used Vorple for Even Some More Tales from Castle Balderstone. The structure there is an “anthology” of Inform games accessed via a Twine framing story. To make that work, I needed to be able to link seamlessly between Twine and parser environments. To “gate” the big finale so that it was accessible after you finish all the sub-games, I needed to track the player’s progress from multiple parser games. And with Vorple I could do those things!
I don’t think anything within the sub-games of Even Some More relies on Vorple. I designed them before I knew I would be using Vorple. Individually they’re all more or less standard parser experiences. Vorple was really just about juxtaposing them in the way I wanted.
When I made The Little Match Girl 3, I got to use Vorple more creatively and not just out of necessity. But I only used it for a few things:
- Change background colors
- Music
- Fancy text styling
And this was all in the service of adding some cinematic presentation elements to an otherwise fairly standard parser experience. It’s not like I wanted the game to open another window where you drag Tetris pieces around to organize your inventory.
When I did the public releases of the earlier Little Match Girl games, I “ported” them to Vorple so I could add these elements and give the series a consistent style, and then later games are also in Vorple so they can match. So, that is why LMG4 is a Vorple game. I haven’t done a lot of what you’d call innovation.
But there are a couple cool things I’ve done in recent games which should interest people:
- All the music in LMG4 is timed with the associated text in fairly sophisticated ways. I did calculations down to the millisecond to make sure text shows up at just the right time. I was never sure if it all worked perfectly for all players… When you have a minute, you should play all the way to the finale and let me know whether everything matches the beat perfectly or not.
- Near the end of The Little Match Girl against the Universal Sisterhood of Naughty Little Girls there is a really cute effect that I won’t spoil here.
- OH HEY I FORGOT ABOUT THE SHOOTING GALLERY IN LITTLE MATCH GIRL 4. Uh, I’ll talk about that in another post.
Vorple can do way way way way more than I’ve done with it. I’m sure there are capabilities that I could leverage that I just haven’t thought of yet, and then there’s a universe of things that I can imagine but don’t know how to do, and then there’s a third universe of things that I don’t even know that Vorple can do.
The main thing anyone needs to know about Vorple is: It lets you execute JavaScript commands. That means, if you don’t know how to make Vorple do something, you don’t have to google “vorple rickroll open CD-ROM drive”—you can google “javascript rickroll open CD-ROM drive” and start from there. And because JavaScript can affect CSS, Vorple opens the door for you to let a parser game do anything that you’d expect a website to be able to do. And then you’re off to the races.
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Dear Ryan,
I only want to use Vorple in the super unsophisticated ways that you use it in your beloved Little Match Girl games, which I promise I will get around to playing eventually. In the meantime, could you show me an example of how you use Vorple? But can it be the simplest example? For babies?
— Rudimentary in Richmond
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Dear Rudimentary,
Of course. Here’s a game where, as Kirby, you eat different monsters and gain their powers, causing the background color to change.
"Kirby's Ability Extravaganza" by Ryan Veeder
[In this Kirby fangame, the background color
will change to match the ability you've acquired.
NO COPYRIGHT INFRAGMENT INTENTED.]
[For executing JavaScript commands,
the baseline Vorple extension should be sufficient.]
Include Vorple by Juhana Leinonen.
Release along with the "Vorple" interpreter.
[As you know, the beloved Nintendo character
known as Kirby is a little pink ball of a guy
who lives on the planet Pop Star.
When he eats monsters, he gains their abilities.
He swallows a fire guy, and he gets fire powers.
He swallows a monster with a sword, and he gets to use a sword.]
Pop Star is a room. Description of Pop Star is "Eat a monster to gain its ability!"
[I'm going to define just a few of the more boring
abilities Kirby has been known to use.
Plus we will define his default state, which I will call "null."]
Ability is a kind of value. The abilities are Null, Fire, Ice, Tornado, and Sword.
The player has an ability. Ability of the player is Null.
Description of the player is "You are Kirby! The pink thing from the Nintendo games! [if ability of player is not Null]Right now your ability is [ability of player].[end if]"
[Now, pick a background color for each ability!
Pull up your favorite color picker and find the color you like.
Copy its hex RGB value and set that as the "bgcolor" property in Inform.
(I don't prefix these bgcolors with the #
that indicates a hex triplet, because that's going to be
in my JavaScript command, which we will see below.)
The default state has to be pink!]
An ability has text called the bgcolor.
bgcolor of Null is "f6a1ff".
bgcolor of Fire is "ff7c70".
bgcolor of Ice is "a4f5eb".
bgcolor of Tornado is "9fc5e3".
bgcolor of Sword is "8df290".
[We want the background color to match
Kirby's default state even at the very beginning of the game.
We could set the background color in the game page's CSS,
but we may as well do it at runtime, to demonstrate the
technique that is the whole point of this example.]
When play begins:
let our ability be ability of the player;
execute JavaScript command "document.getElementById('vorple').style.backgroundColor = '#[bgcolor of our ability]';";
[What the heck is this "getElementByID" action???
Well, the main stuff you gotta know is here: https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/met_document_getelementbyid.asp
The element we're getting by its ID here is "vorple,"
which is initiated in the browser interpreter file with
<main id="vorple">. It contains the whole game and,
by Vorple default, applies its own background-color
"on top of" the background-color of the page body.
This command will change the background-color
property of (the style property of) the vorple element
to "#[the bgcolor we want]".
But what we call "background-color" in a CSS or HTML
file is rendered in camelCase as "backgroundColor"
in a JavaScript context.]
[Anyway, we also want the background to change during gameplay.]
A monster is a kind of person. A monster has an ability.
Instead of eating a monster:
let new ability be ability of the noun;
say "You eat [the noun]. You gain the [new ability] ability!";
now ability of the player is new ability;
execute JavaScript command "document.getElementById('vorple').style.backgroundColor = '#[bgcolor of new ability]';";
Hot Head is a monster in Pop Star.
Description of Hot Head is "He's a little guy who's on fire!"
Ability of Hot Head is Fire.
Pengy is a monster in Pop Star.
Description of Pengy is "He's a little penguin!"
Ability of Pengy is Ice.
Blade Knight is a monster in Pop Star.
Description of Blade Knight is "He's a little guy with a sword!"
Ability of Blade Knight is Sword.
Twister is a monster in Pop Star.
Description of Twister is "He's a little spinny guy!"
Ability of Twister is Tornado.
[We should be done, right? NOT SO FAST, PUFFBALL.
If we UNDO eating a monster, Kirby will lose that ability,
but the background color will not change. Similarly,
when we RESTORE a game where Kirby had an ability,
the game's interior state will be restored,
but not the game-exterior state of the background color!
So we need to make sure both these out-of-world "actions"
will "update" the styling. Now, I personally don't know any
way of affecting what-happens-when-you-undo, except to
insert it into the response the game prints to report that
something was undone. So that's what I do.]
Immediately undo rule response (E) is "[bracket]Previous turn[sneaky change background] undone.[close bracket]"
Restore the game rule response (B) is "LOADING[sneaky change background]."
To say sneaky change background:
let our ability be ability of the player;
execute JavaScript command "document.getElementById('vorple').style.backgroundColor = '#[bgcolor of our ability]';";
[I am haunted by the feeling that there must be some other
out-of-world action that also requires this behavior,
but I don't know what it is.]
Couple caveats:
- Targeting the “vorple” div means you don’t affect anything exterior to that div, such as, possibly, a list of links off to the left of the gameport. This can turn out to be undesirable if, for example, you’re changing text color in addition to background color. I typically target the whole page (
document.body.style.backgroundColor = '#whatever'), but then I have to modify vorple.css to remove the line that sets a background color for vorple. The method above doesn’t require hand-tweaking any css files. - If you test this example by saving and restoring to see the background color change, you will notice that the response to your >SAVE command was “Save failed.” But it didn’t really fail! As far as I know this is just Vorple being confused. You can get around this with something like
Save the game rule response (A) is "Saved the game successfully."although that will also end up printing if saving really does fail somehow.
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Dear Ryan,
I am not a baby. Could you please show me some examples of more involved things you can accomplish with Vorple? Specifically, could you explain how you implemented the shooting gallery in The Little Match Girl 4, a game that I have played?
— Intermediate in Indianapolis
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Dear Intermediate,
Certainly. Here’s an example that will demonstrate two techniques, both of which kind of involve the game sort of “talking to itself.”
The Vorple Hyperlinks extension lets us make hyperlinks to web addresses, hyperlinks that activate JavaScript commands, and hyperlinks that essentially type a command into the prompt and hit Enter for you. This example demonstrates the third version:
"The Heavy Door" by Ryan Veeder
Include Vorple Hyperlinks by Juhana Leinonen.
[This causes the base Vorple extension to be included as well.]
Release along with the "Vorple" interpreter.
Security Checkpoint is a room.
Vault is a room.
The heavy door is a closed door.
The heavy door is inside from Security Checkpoint and outside from Vault.
Instead of opening the closed heavy door, say "The door is too heavy to open!"
The button is in Security Checkpoint. The button is fixed in place.
Initial appearance of the button is "There is a [pushable button link] here."
To say pushable button link:
place a link to command "push button" reading "button".
Instead of pushing the button:
say "You push the button, and the heavy door opens.";
now the heavy door is open.
When the player clicks the hyperlink reading “button,” the command >push button will appear in the transcript and the action will take place. Visually, it looks exactly like the player typed that command! Can you think of anything clever you could do with this???
The other way you can make Vorple “tell itself” a command is with the “queueing” function of the Vorple Command Prompt Control extension. To “queue” a command is to make the game process that command. The documentation explains how using this extension to queue a parser command "take inventory", without showing the command is basically identical to using the native Inform 7 technique of try taking inventory and so by itself this syntax is not very useful.
Within the source of the Vorple Command Prompt Control extension, we see that queue a parser command "wear stockings" without showing the command gets translated into JavaScript with the line:
execute JavaScript command "vorple.prompt.queueCommand('wear stockings',true)"
(The true indicates that we don’t want the command itself to show up in the game transcript.)
Again, by itself, this is kind of the same thing as the Inform 7 code try wearing the stockings. But, because we have escaped from the Inform 7 environment into the realm of JavaScript, we can use additional JavaScript syntax to do more interesting things. For example, what we’re going to do now is make the heavy door slowly swing shut, in real time.
If you were going to make this door close by itself on a turn-by-turn basis, you’d probably write something like:
Openness is initially 0.
Instead of pushing the button:
say "You push the button, and the heavy door opens.";
now the heavy door is open;
now openness is 4;
Every turn while openness is greater than 0:
decrement openness;
if openness is 3:
say "The door is beginning to close.";
else if openness is 2:
say "The door is halfway closed!";
else if openness is 1:
say "The door is almost closed!";
else if openness is 0:
say "The door swings shut.";
now the heavy door is closed.
To do this in real time, the principle is the same, except instead of referring to “every turn,” we’re going to invoke a secret action that we can tie to the actual passage of time.
Openness is initially 0.
Button timing is an action applying to nothing.
Understand "xxxbuttontimexxx" as button timing.
Carry out button timing:
if the heavy door is open:
decrement openness;
if openness is 3:
say "The door is beginning to close.";
else if openness is 2:
say "The door is halfway closed!";
else if openness is 1:
say "The door is almost closed!";
else if openness is 0:
say "The door swings shut.";
now the heavy door is closed.
Notice that no Vorple nonsense has occurred yet. To be clear, in Inform 7 terms, “xxxbuttontimexxx” is a regular old input the player could type at any moment, triggering the “button timing” action that exists only to advance the story of the door closing. The text “xxxbuttontimexxx” will not appear in the game, though. There is no reason to expect the player to type it. Instead, we will make the game type it to itself on a schedule we define.
All we have to do is add to the “pushing the button” rule:
Instead of pushing the button:
say "You push the button, and the heavy door opens.";
now the heavy door is open;
now openness is 4;
execute JavaScript command "setTimeout(function() {vorple.prompt.queueCommand('xxxbuttontimexxx', true);}, 2000)";
execute JavaScript command "setTimeout(function() {vorple.prompt.queueCommand('xxxbuttontimexxx', true);}, 4000)";
execute JavaScript command "setTimeout(function() {vorple.prompt.queueCommand('xxxbuttontimexxx', true);}, 6000)";
execute JavaScript command "setTimeout(function() {vorple.prompt.queueCommand('xxxbuttontimexxx', true);}, 8000)";
These new lines contain the “queue a command” JavaScript syntax that we’ve seen already, but each queued command is nested in a setTimeout command. And all that command does is tell the browser, "I need you to fire off this nested command after this many milliseconds." The number at the end is the number of milliseconds.
(Because we’re directly referencing the JavaScript methods as defined in vorple.js or wherever, we don’t actually have to include the specific Vorple Command Prompt Control extension for these purposes.)
After you push the button, the game will wait two seconds, and then “secretly type in” the command “xxxbuttontimexxx,” causing the button timing action to occur. And after two more seconds, the same thing will happen again. The way each instance of the action is resolved gets handled at the Inform 7 level.
So, how does the shooting gallery in Little Match Girl 4 work? Starting the minigame “launches a bunch of targets,” putting them into play so that the player can start trying to >SHOOT TARGETS. But at the same time the minigame starts, we “schedule” a “secret action” for a few seconds later. That secret action represents all the targets falling to the ground and the minigame being over.
And you can use these same principles to sync text with music. LIKE IN THAT GAME I MADE.
A caveat: These “secret actions” are regular plain old actions, as far as Inform 7 knows. That means that they increment the turn counter, trigger “every turn” rules, etc. But if your scheduled secret actions start interfering with your “every turn” rules, you’ll probably notice something screwy is happening pretty quick.
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Thank you for this. I’ve been working on a multimedia extension that includes hyperlinks.
A few years ago I made a graphical game that used a technique very similar to this but instead of surrounding it with xxx I prefaced it with xxvym or something.
I thought about including something like that in the extension I didn’t know if 1. People would use something like that, or 2. If there was a more efficient way. This post inspired me to add it in. Thanks!
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Funny! In ZIL if you need a placeholder synonym (because you can replace synonyms for a word in-game), you use ZZMGCK, then ZZMGCL, ZZMGCM, etc.
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I feel like we always focus on your work and what we can extract from that. May we stray into the silly for a change?
With Neapolitan Ice cream, what are your preferences?
I prefer the chocolate and strawberry over the vanilla, but due to the order of the sequence, this sadly makes a single continuous scoop composed of chocolate and strawberry, but with no vanilla, functionally impossible.
Inquiring minds wish to know. Also, if you feel so inclined, feel free to share another utterly irrelevant personal preference.
Thank you as always.
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