Well, @johnnywz00 's Readthrough mode is the antidote to this one. It could at least allow parents or what I’ll prejudicially describe as “incompetent friends” to see what you’ve done.
-Wade
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I only knew the “little match girl” as a pathetic image, no narrative attached, before I saw this video in December 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzrFVUBpNkY&ab_channel=むにむに別館 I swear there were English subtitles on it at the time, and they described the story in such bizarre terms that I felt compelled to check out the original and find out how much had been lost in pop-up Lego translation.
When I saw exactly how bizarre the story really was, I felt compelled to write the first Little Match Girl game (and rush to finish it so I could send it to my Patreon people on New Year’s Eve). My whole idea was that in the original story, the little girl dies, that’s the point, but in this version she’s not going to die, and what happens to her instead is the main joke of the game.
“The Little Match Girl 2” is an inherently funny title for the same reason; she rightly ought not to be available for a sequel. And it seemed like it would be nice to give my Patreon people another exclusive game when New Year’s Eve rolled around again. It was intuitive to suppose that this second game would take place exactly one year later.
This reminded me of something either Jackson Publick or Doc Hammer said about The Venture Bros. (a series that has become a big influence on the Little Match Girl saga): We only see tiny half-hour snippets of these characters’ lives. We don’t witness even a tenth of all their adventures. If the little match girl realized this incredible time-travel power on December 31st, 1845, then by the same day in 1846, she would have seen and done A LOT OF INTERESTING STUFF. And I had been thinking about her through all of 2020, so she had developed quasi-realistically in my mind as well.
By the time I finished the second game, I had really become enamored of the character; her situation and her worldview reminded me of characters I admired from long-running epic stories that I wanted to emulate. And I had established a tradition of making Patreon exclusive games for New Year’s Eve. So I was basically obligated to make the Little Match Girl into a long-running epic story.
Nowadays I’m so jazzed about the series that I’m motivated to work on it even outside of a New Year’s Eve Tradition schedule, so that isn’t really part of the equation. What I’m most excited about is the opportunity to build these games into a story on the scale of Venture Bros. or Sandman or Adventure Time, something that will reward the invested player with some percentage of the joy I derive from putting it all together.
Thank you for your question. It’s so important to supplement depressing general advice with something that appeals to my ego.
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Alright, mini-question: What significance does the screenname Afterward have?
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No special significance. It’s just rad! Who else has a screen name that’s an adverb? Nobody.
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With IF Comp coming up, do you have any advice on reading and processing reviews of your work?
Thanks for your incredible work (and for creating games for me to point at as prior art, so that my own project doesn’t sound so insane… Or at least has good company)
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#1: Know Your Goals
If you’re planning to pay attention to feedback, you need to start out with an understanding of what your work is trying to accomplish. Then, when reviews come in, you can evaluate that feedback according to whether the reviewer is evaluating the thing on the level or levels you give a care about.
As far as I’m concerned,
- The extent to which an audience enjoys a work of art measures the success of the work as entertainment.
- The extent to which an audience understands the message of a work of art measures the success of the work as communication.
- The extent to which an audience is convinced to believe the message of a work of art measures the success of the work as propaganda.
- The extent to which a work of art expresses whatever-the-artist-wanted-to-express measures the success of the work as art.
I really think this mission to do a thing with your ideas is the sole obligation of the artist-qua-artist, and you will notice that success in this mission doesn’t require any audience’s sign-off or even the existence of an audience. In that sense, all reviews are stupid and pointless. And if you approach them with this mindset, they can be a lot easier to deal with emotionally. Not everybody will understand what you’re doing (especially if you’re doing something interesting), and that’s fine; you can write off the people who don’t get it and get useful feedback from the people who do.
#2. Ryan Whines
In the American public school system as I experienced it, there was a lot of direction given on the correct way to evaluate fellow students’ work, and I get the impression that some people learned that giving feedback is about finding X nice things to say, Y critical things to say, making sure you say W but not Z, and putting it all in the right order to get an A on your Feedback Evaluation. I think this checklist-type approach tends to obfuscate or disregard the reviewer’s authentic reactions and opinions, and so I tend not to trust reviews that look like they were written from a received rubric. There’s also a limit to how seriously I can take reviews composed in a competition environment where people feel obligated to write feedback for dozens of games over a period of six weeks.
Even with all these coping mechanisms in my toolbox, I can get very anxious about reviews. I think it would be ideal, if you experience this type of anxiety, to have a trusted friend read a review first so that they can tell you whether you should read it. This method requires that you have access to a friend who understands you very intimately, though. Someone who’s a good enough friend to know and deal with exactly how emotionally vulnerable you are at any given moment, but not such a good friend that they tell you “Ryan, you don’t need me to vet your reviews for you, you’re an adult.” A tough needle to thread.
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Hi Ryan, I’ve been listening to Clash of the Type Ins recently and enjoy it a lot. Are there any plans to make any more episodes? I noticed that the 10th anniversary for the first episode comes up next year. If you’re on the fence, what would persuade you to do more?
If anyone reading this hasn’t listened to any episodes, I do recommend them. I tend to try to play the games before I listen but actually the spoilers aren’t often a big deal as Ryan and Jenni don’t always solve that many of the puzzles and do like a chat in the meantime!
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More? Surely by the time it got to episode #100 in 2021 there weren’t any games left to play?
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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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