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.