Ask Ryan

Thank you for the response and given that my post was fishing for that response, we can call them implied questions if you prefer. I should have included an, “Am I remotely correct in any of this?” or something of the sort towards the end. I’ll be sure to pick my words more carefully going forward.

I suppose I should speak up a little since it’s well known that I am one of those rapscallions that create overly-verbose walkthroughs that spoil everything. This post will be a bit rambly; apologies in advance.

I do sometimes use unsavory black magic to learn a few things dishonestly instead of by honest normal play. I do try to play by the rules at the start, but sometimes there’s no walkthrough for me to use when I get stuck in a game that’s ten years old, and the author isn’t around anywhere and I don’t like being stuck.

Even so, black magic may tell me only that certain objects and places exist and tell me nothing how to reach them, that I’ve missed content and should play more. But yes, maybe I should reach out to authors more directly when I get stuck in a game. I did have to ask zarf for a hint on Hadean Lands when I first played it, so it is a tool I can use.

For the record, all my playing of Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing was honest playing and I never even attempted to decompile that game. I’m not sure I’d know how, although I know it is possible. I have not crafted an exhaustive walkthrough for RVAFF mostly because I’d have to replay the entire thing from scratch, possibly more than once, to do it justice. Meanwhile, you’re all missing out on my darling map of it.

It has been very helpful to have club wooby around to know which content I should not blab about. Also, sometimes I don’t spill secrets because I have NOT learned them in the first place. I’m not superhuman, y’know. I half expect that there’s some sort metapuzzle in Ryan’s games and the only reason I haven’t found it yet is because I haven’t played all of them yet to see how they all fit together. But that’s just speculation.

It is not unheard of for authors of standard IF to issue a version 2 of their games, making my walkthroughs of version 1 no longer quite valid. A game doesn’t have to be an online one to frustrate my efforts. Authors can still change their games.

Games can also seem to disappear from the web, making my freshly made walkthrough somewhat moot. If there’s some general concern that I have it too easy, trust me, it’s not always the case.

So far, only one author has ever asked me not to write a walkthrough for their game, and that once was because the game was part of a contest, and they didn’t want a walkthrough to be available then. But that was a temporary injunction, and I believe they’d be quite happy to see a walkthrough at this late date.

Writing walkthroughs takes time, especially the sorts of walkthroughs I make. Just sayin’. Some walkthroughs-in-progress are over ten years old themselves, waiting for me to finish writing them.

Also, if someday I do publish an exhaustive walkthrough for Orchid Species of the Erastian, which is entirely possible, I would be thrilled to have it invalidated by new content.

11 Likes

I always enjoy reading David’s walkthroughs for my games and I don’t think they spoil everything. (Maybe he thinks they spoil everything! Hee hee hee!) I think they do a good job giving a complete account of the critical path and letting the mysterious stuff remain mysterious.

For the record, I have nothing to hold against David except maybe his bringing up Orchid Species of the Erastian just now, which I was kind of hoping everyone would quietly forget about.

9 Likes

Oh wait, there was one sneaky thing I did regarding Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing. I was curious how the browser side graphics matched up with the game regarding the weather. I didn’t understand how the game told the browser which graphic to use, but a teensy weensy peek behind a curtain revealed how that trick was managed. Very clever.

5 Likes

Ryan,

Last night I was rereading a popular IF author’s Patreon posts and saw a call for annotations requests that hadn’t gotten much response when it was first posted. I put in a request and went to bed, only to see that you’d confirmed my nomination on Twitter by the time I’d woken up! Thank you!

This was a lovely surprise, but more than that, the speedy reaction reminded me almost of a public forum or Q&A situation, which reminded me of this thread, which then reminded me that I forgot to ever ask you about your use of planners!! I bet if I used planners, I wouldn’t forget about stuff like this, but they don’t make intuitive sense to me yet. I know some people use them in particular ways—I think there was a C.G.P. Grey video on the subject once—but I was curious if you had a specific approach to using a planner you could share. And if not, that’s fine too.

I never asked this because I wanted to pair it with a question about one of your games, and I didn’t have one of those ready then. I do now: the turn-based combat system in “Winter Storm Draco” is impressive, reminding me of things like Soul Calibur, Bushido Blade, and similar fighting games. Were there particular inspirations you drew from? Things to reconsider if you try revisiting an approach like this?

Thanks again, and please do not feel any urgency to reply immediately. I just wanted to get it down before I forgot again.

1 Like

ON THE SUBJECT OF PLANNERS

I remember they issued us day planners in middle school and high school, and I hated them. What business did the System have telling me how to organize my life? Why should I write down my assignments and keep track of when they’re due? So I can be a cog in your machine? Are we not men?

So I was really down on the idea of planners for many years. But at some point I got busy enough, or worried enough about certain deadlines, that I was compelled to start recording my plans in a planner-like format. I think this change in my thinking had partly to do with finding a notebook that I thought was really cool. It was important for me to use a planner my way, without some dumb institution forcing it on me. ARE WE NOT MEN?

My thought process probably went something like this: “There are sixty rooms in this game. The game needs to be finished by December 31st. So, I need to complete 1.3333 rooms per day.” This is such a dumb way to set goals, but I do it all the time. Then I’d write in my cool notebook:

WED NOV 16
I - _ room 1A
    _ room 1B
H - _ get haircut
T - _ write round 1

where “I” stands for “interactive fiction” and “H” stands for “hair” and “T” stands for “trivia.” I have a rotating cast of task-categories with different abbreviations. I’d put a big line underneath this, to delineate what part of this notebook page was reserved for November 16. And then I would check things off as I accomplished them. It was basically just a daily checklist, and I rarely “planned” more than a day or two in advance.

The cool thing about setting tiny goals and writing them down like this is, if you happen to also finish rooms 1C and 1D and 2A on the same day, you get to scribble those in the November 16 space and have a physical record of how impressively productive you were that day.

As I got more confident with this I started writing out my little checklists further and further in advance. But never too far in advance. I try not to stress myself out.

The format of a planner page changed a lot over the years, but at some point I settled on this setup that I consider very cool:

In the top left quadrant I write my longer-term goals for that week. (That’s not the correct week number by most standards…) Sometimes these goals need to be adjusted in the middle of the week, but there’s plenty of room for corrections like that.

Let me try and reduce all that to some actual advice:

  • Do your planning on YOUR OWN TERMS. Are we not men? This probably means using a notebook that wasn’t laid out as a day planner by the manufacturer, but in that case, maybe you now have a use for a very cool notebook that you bought years ago and never wrote in because you were afraid of ruining it.

    • If you have more than one notebook like this, it’s okay to be paralyzed by indecision for a while as you consider which notebook deserves to be your day planner. Use a paper napkin as a temporary planner, and write down a checklist dated three days from now that just says “_ CHOOSE A NOTEBOOK.” (Choose the cheaper one.)
  • Don’t feel like a whole page in your planner should correspond to a single day of your life. If you are like most people, then a single day of your life is almost never interesting or complicated enough to take up a whole page. Maybe try and fit as many days as you can on one page until you find out a layout that works for you.

    • That might sound like a really useless piece of advice, but I think this consideration has some nontrivial psychological effects.
  • People talk a lot about “setting realistic goals,” but whenever I can I try to set very, very modest goals. Tiny stupid goals for idiots, or babies. This is probably one of those Habits of Highly Effective People that Language Arts teacher tried to drill into us. She’s the one who gave us those planners! Oh, how I despise her.

ON THE SUBJECT OF THAT COMBAT SYSTEM

The combat system you mention is referred to internally as “Ryan Veeder’s Perfect Combat.” It was used again in The Roscovian Palladium. I had planned to use the ATTACK system for the scene in question, but I found out ATTACK wasn’t being maintained except in accessory to Kerkerkruip. (This was in 2013 or 2014 or something.) I was too lazy to prune ATTACK down to the specific mechanics I needed, so I rolled my own (kind of overcomplicated) system.

The core idea of Perfect Combat is that the enemy uses an attack, you pick a reaction, and then I check a table to see how well your reaction works against that attack. This ends up having some limitations:

  • The puzzle of figuring out what reaction to pick doesn’t seem to lend itself to being used in multiple battles throughout a longer combat-intensive game. I guess I can see how it’s possible to build it out into a bigger idea but it would require some cleverness.
  • The system would have a lot of trouble incorporating normal RPG combat mechanics like variable equipment or leveling up. You kind of have to write a completely new table of results for every possible variation on a combat scenario. In The Roscovian Palladium, the combat scenario has two variations for two equippable weapons, and that was plenty of work.
  • Since you’re always reacting, the player character is functionally always on the defensive, which has storytelling implications. The scenes where I’ve used Perfect Combat are both underdog situations. It doesn’t lend itself to power fantasies, or even stories where the PC is supposed to grow more confident over time.

All that being said, I think the system works well for the places where I used it. Although I may have talked myself out of ever using it again just now…

I can’t think of any specific inspirations it grew out of. I haven’t played Soul Calibur or Bushido Blade. Maybe the parrying idea came from Wii Fit or something? The tug-of-war conceit really seems like it came from somewhere, too… but it’s been such a long time, I don’t remember. I do remember designing around the idea of fencing-type battle, as opposed to most styles of RPG combat where you take a turn and then I take a turn and our swords never clang against each other.

Not that there’s anything wrong with conventional RPG combat! I just wanted this particular part of this particular game to have a certain feel to it. The feel of a one-on-one duel with weapons clanging against each other. After I’d implemented this system, I think I designed The Roscovian Palladium with the existing system in mind, but I implemented combat completely differently in Mud Warriors, and completely differently again (and much more robustly) in The Little Match Girl 3. Oh, and there was that Castle Balderstone story with the vampires! That one wasn’t very robust. But it was fun.

I guess I just have fun designing combat systems. I like to think I’ve designed systems that pair well with their games, though. In retrospect, “Perfect Combat” may not be a perfect name, because it is only perfect for certain types of scenes.

In most of the games where I’ve used combat, I was more or less serving a desire to make something similar to a graphical RPG or an action movie. As I worked on The Little Match Girl 3, I started to see how IF has the potential to depict combat in its own unique way. I think there’s a lot of space to be explored, both mechanically and storytellingly.

So I’ll probably write more games with fights, but I’ll probably be trying out new mechanics as I go along. If anyone wants to use or adapt any of the combat systems I’ve put together before, they should feel free to ask me about it.

Thank you for your questions.

8 Likes

Another great post for a bookmark. Thank you!

Maybe you could compile this into a book?

1 Like

Thanks, I’m working on a game that will eventually have fight mechanics and I really could use these ideas.

1 Like

Sorry that this isn’t a question for Ryan. Also, sorry I’m going to move something someone put in spoilers out of spoilerdom. But it’s not very spoilery, and was too hard to keep it in those blurry things, especially with a link –

This talk of Bushido Blade sent me back to a long (unfavourable) review of this PS1 game I wrote back in 2003. I was pleasantly surprised to find I still like the review. If you want to learn about Bushido Blade, have at it: Bushido Blade Review for PlayStation: - GameFAQs

-Wade

3 Likes

(Thanks for linking the review, Wade! You’ve raised some excellent points. I will attest, however, that if one can experience the franchise starting with the second game, thus avoiding the vagaries of the bushido code, and if one can stick to the multiplayer mode, cutting out the story and providing more experienced players with whom to discuss the execution of swordfighting techniques, one can bypass many of the pitfalls you identified. If your life is cut short and you find you’ve respawned prior to your previous engagement with the series, try applying this technique.)

2 Likes

If you think any of this material is worth preserving or making easier to find, I think IFWiki would be a great place for it. There could be a category! There could be a central page with like a table of contents and links to all the questions and answers!

But I couldn’t add any of this to IFWiki myself, of course. That would be very gauche.

Thank you for your question.

3 Likes

IMHO, not allowing participants/members to add pages is a weakness of the IFWiki.

1 Like

Oh my gosh I had no idea. That is some nonsense.

Well, anyone should feel free to start up the AskRyanWiki. I couldn’t do that myself, of course. The notion is unthinkably presumptuous.

1 Like

Collaboration is kind of the purpose of many wikis… Think Wikpedia.

Sorry if I offended. I value your opinion.

I’m not offended at all, except by IFWiki’s policies. But I wasn’t seriously suggesting that anyone put together a dedicated wiki for collecting the material in this thread.

Putting this kind of stuff on IFWiki seems completely reasonable to me, though. Who do we talk to about adding page creation permissions?

3 Likes

I am actually on the IFWiki committee. I will post this idea on the committee pages. I am sure it will be received favorably.

Thank you, Jeff

2 Likes

Hey, that’s great!

Thank you for answering my question.

4 Likes

Anybody can create an account on IFWiki and add pages. That has been the case for nearly 18 years. Perhaps the weakness is that anybody would think otherwise :slight_smile:

3 Likes

I should add that I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea, as the nature of a wiki is that any page can be edited over time, by anyone, as if “the wiki” is the author rather than any one person.

I’ve enjoyed reading this topic and wonder whether the best place to store its wisdom is simply this topic on this forum.

Now I realise that fos1, by “allowing participants/members to add pages”, was meaning non-editable pages with a byline, like in a blog, and he’s right that this isn’t possible.

1 Like

Sorry for replying three times in a row, and risking outstaying my welcome here! Part of my mind is at an online work conference, so I didn’t gather my thoughts properly before replying the first two times. I’m not sure whether I have gathered them yet. But there could definitely be a table of contents page, linking back to your posts in this topic. Maybe that would be a happy medium.

2 Likes