I had chapter 1 of my WIP as good as ready in august 2020. Then my motherboard shortcircuited.
Your example may well stir me into action again.
1 Like
I’m just here for the coffee. 
7 Likes
I don’t know if that appeals to you, but maybe you could deliberately aim for a specific genre, like hard-boiled noir, pulpy SF, cozy mystery, Robinsonade, alternate history, Regency romance, … . Then the genre will provide a sort of scaffolding or framework of typical plot points, settings, and scenes, which might help in writing the story. You can always throw in a twist or two, of course, so as not to make it too formulaic.
2 Likes
Is that playable online somewhere?
I’m working on a game with a fairly ambitious world to explore (my first game), and also enjoying, but feeling not a little overwhelmed at the amount of work required to go back and “flesh” it all out! I have all of my locations linked, with all of the game puzzles working, but I have to go back to every one (dozens and dozens…okay, there might be well over a hundred) of my locations and create all the nonessential world objects, nonessential verb responses, NPC responses, atmosphere messages, unfinished location descriptions, and all the while fighting the urge to “add more and more detail” to what can do what, so that I can actually finish this game before my nonexistent grandchildren grow up. Loving it, but wow! A text game is a major commitment…
Kind of funny because a graphical game seems clearly more sophisticated than a text game, but even with novice level programming skills I could make a simple little platformer game in a couple evenings, while this work is going on two years, with a lot left to do…
Okay, there’s my coffee rant! Not actually a complaint… I love the process; just more like a reflection, and regret that there’s not more available time in a lifetime for all the things that would be fun to do if you had the time to do them…
7 Likes
That’s it - thanks.
Oh, I hear you! I have more ideas than I’ll ever have time to do, and it drives me mad. Nearly all of my games have sequels in the works and I have more ideas besides, but when each game takes four or five years to complete, I’ll be a very old man before most them see the light of day…
4 Likes
I recognize the feeling. When I started writing “The Tree” (working title) I had a lot of fun with the start location, implementing climbing and jumping the trees, looking under the moss, examining the protagonist, implementing sky and sun,… Eight months of fun later, I realized I had one semi-finished chapter of the planned five.
I’m more of a “one finished location after another”-writer. Of course I have to go back to fix some things afterwards and to make sure puzzles in multiple locations are properly linked, but completing a location in full (all objects, descriptions, actions, alternative descriptions,…) makes for a nice variation between programming neat actions and tricks on one side, and losing myself in imaginative descriptions on the other. I would probably not have the courage to go back through the entire programmed game to write descriptions afterwards.
4 Likes
I don’t have a ton of game making experience, but out of all of my attempts, the only one that went fairly smoothly was when I wrote out a fake playthrough transcript in notepad and then quickly implemented everything needed to make that transcript become a reality. The times that I tried to do one room at a time and just wing it, I always lost focus on the goal and eventually lost interest as well. Going back through to implement all of the extraneous stuff to flesh out the world was definitely a slog, but that fact that the game was already playable through to the end kept me going. It’s a lot more difficult to give up on it when it’s already come that far.
4 Likes
That reminds me of the discussion about writing vs mechanics here:
…anyway, after months of dithering around wondering why I’m bothering at all, I’ve finally grasped the nettle and am knuckling down to finishing a game: mechanics first, all the writing in a block afterwards. It’s the only way that I can feel I am actually making progress towards a definite end point.
4 Likes
I don’t have a fake or minimal playthrough to work from. I do have a strict story/scenario written with pen and paper, both in prose and in diagrams.
It might be a good idea to write a minimal playthrough to back those up though.
2 Likes
I tend to follow the path of least resistance, doing whatever I most feel like doing that day. Sometimes I’ll do nothing but coding for days and at other times I just feel like writing. Sometimes projects fail and I’ll cannibalise the parts for something else. Good puzzles will sometimes sit around for years waiting for the right project.
4 Likes
So the last ten minutes were this:
- I mention flowers in the room description. Better turn them into a scenery item.
- Okay, but surely players will try to take those flowers. (Does “pick” automatically work as a synonym?) Better deal with that.
- Wouldn’t it be fun if they could pick them? Wait, let’s implement a “wreath of flowers” item, that would fit the mood very well.
- Okay, so what if the player then tries to give the wreath to…
… and so I vanished into a rabbit hole.
8 Likes
Do you have a plan that you’re writing to, or are you just feeling your way along? The flowers sound delightful, by the way.
2 Likes
When I start writing a game, I usually have a strong overarching idea. I can describe the essence of the game to you in ten sentences. I have perhaps a few clear ideas of locations or events. But most of it is still a blank, and I’ll gradually fill it in as I go along. For me writing is exploring, finding out what it is that my essential idea really amounts to.
This particular game is a little bit different in ways I can’t explain without saying more about the game then I want to do at the moment (it’s supposed to be a competition game)… but the description above still holds! Currently, I’m implementing a relatively small outdoors area; most of the game will take place indoors. (Like in Zork, for instance, if we want a classic reference.) There were a few things I wanted to put in, but otherwise I was thinking of it as “fun to explore”, “with maybe some optional puzzles”, and it’s been slowly taking shape as I went on.
4 Likes
This is exactly what I’ve been learning from playing so many old games lately: you don’t need the rabbit hole. Modern players are way too spoiled. Remember: “It’s a game, not a simulation.” (Someone wrote this in a comment elsewhere on the forum. If I find it, I’ll credit that person.)
An idea for an essay has been bubbling in my mind the last few days: “What I’ve learned from oldschool IF.”
I want to go into topics such as:
- excessive implementation (or the expectation of such) in modern games.
- elegantly refusing player’s commands. (T-Zero, which I’m playing now, does an excellent job at this.)
- SAVE and RESTORE as legitimate game moves. (The Bill of Rights as more a suggestion than a rule, not to be taken too seriously.)
As I said, still brewing in the back of my brain. I’m making notes though, so I may actually write it sometime in the not too distant future.
5 Likes
Not going to lie: half the reason I decided to make my game a psuedo parser game instead of a real one is to avoid this exactly. A more streamlined experience where I can control what can and can’t be interacted with keeps both me and the players focused. I know that’ll turn off some players, but honestly the alternative is that I’ll never finish the game.
2 Likes
I don’t necessarily disagree with that, Rovarsson. Indeed, I have another parser game on the backburner in which you can only interact with the nouns that are printed in bold and then you can only examine and use them. That ultra-sparse style of interaction would fit the breakneck speed of that particular game! But the game I’m working on right now, and certainly this outside section, well, it’s all about taking your time exploring and enjoying the environment. So that calls for a different type of implementation – when it actually fits that purpose. Picking flowers sounds like precisely the type of behaviour I want to reinforce, so I ought to reward it!
4 Likes
I feel like there’s no one best way here. For instance, I think Ryan Veeder’s most distinguishing characteristic is that his games are exhaustively implemented where it least matters. And that delights people; the idea that you can just ignore the main thrust of the game and do whatever you want, and the game rewards it.
I do like the other style as well, but I think it’s good to point out that both are good, in their own way. The ‘less implentation’ way is definitely easier, though! I enjoy it a lot, and I’m working on an Adventuron port of an older ‘minimalist’ game I wrote 4 years ago called Swigian. I think Adventuron and the whole old-school, less-implementation style is neat.
8 Likes