By the Refurbished (and Slightly Radioactive) Coffee Machine

Of course, you can spend as much time on the project as you wish! But even then you might want to consider some kinds of efficiency. If you spend years ultra-polishing a game that could also have been spent writing a second game… might be worth it, but might not be. That’s clearly up for the individual author to find out for themselves.

However, there’s also a more serious consideration here which has nothing to do with efficiency. This is that every interaction the player has with the game will be shaped by expectations and will in turn shape those expectations. If the verb “put on” has not been implemented for the first half of the game, and then a puzzle requires you to use the phrase “put on”, then that’s pretty terrible, because the player has been led to believe that they need never type this phrase.

The reverse side of this is that when a lot of detail is implemented, this will also shape expectations. Players may expect that the rest of the game will have just as much detail; if this diminishes as the game goes on, the effect can be jarring. In a puzzle game, players may also expect that they need to explore all the detail in order to find the puzzle solutions. So adding a lot of detail purely for fun can actually be the same as adding lots of red herrings, which might impact player fun.

No hard and fast rules here, just something to keep in mind.

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An upside down calculator can spell stuff. Maybe you should write while upside down? :grinning:

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This touches on the “Art and Fear” discussion of quantity vs. quality of work.

Coding for its own sake is lovely, and those authors don’t ever need to release anything.

But is the author working on the hobby project because they enjoy the act of coding, or because they enjoy the response they get from a larger community?

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I am very guilty of going overboard with easter eggs nobody will see, but they make me happy.

Depends if the goal is author-fun or releasing something. And I am a big proponent of recommending authors make an effort to complete and release several smaller projects to get the entire process clear in their head before tackling the “dream project”.

Seeing a project through to the end levels up skills in scoping reasonably and being self-aware of what you are capable of accomplishing, and increases the chance of a larger project seeing the light of day. My very very first enormous dream project I planned before anything else is as of yet unrealized because it was too big for me to handle. I might have it in me now, but who knows if I’ll return to it.

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a strong argument for 58008 being the easter egg number.

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Be sure to read the following thread attentively before implementing this:

Content warnings on IFDB - General - The Interactive Fiction Community Forum (intfiction.org)

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I don’t think calculator jokes we learned in 4th grade should qualify for a content advisory.

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But, but, but…

We all know it starts with 5318008, but where will it lead the children in the end?!

Oh, that’s an easy one: 7734

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Yep, I’ve published a novella and a text adventure; guess which one is about twice as long as the other in word count. :sweat_smile:

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I noticed you referenced George MacDonald… I love his stuff! I only read one Charles Williams, and it was a little hard for me to follow (Place of the Lion)…

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I love Phantastes and Lilith most, his most surreal works (I referenced Lilith in another of my games which turned out large). The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie are also very fun; I love the goblin animals - once again, one of the most surreal elements.

Place of the Lion is my favourite! Close competitors for second favourite are The Greater Trumps and War in Heaven; there are a few I haven’t read yet though; they are all actually online for free here (if you scroll down to WILLIAMS).

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I love all those GM titles you mentioned, Phantastes and Lilith also my favorites. I’ve probably read all of his fantasy that I’ve ever heard of or found online… also read a lot of his poetry including Within and Without, and maybe a dozen of his novels.
Maybe I’ll have to give Williams another try, as the only experience I had with him was reading out loud to my then-not-yet wife, and I could tell that his writing was a little too philosophical for her.
Good luck with your pursuits!

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Yes, Williams is very philosophical, which I like because it makes his fantasy more real and more surreal; I can see that it would be hard to read out loud because of the structure of the sentences if nothing else. A great activity idea though!
Thank you, and good luck with your pursuits as well!

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I love Charles Williams. My favorite of his novels is Descent Into Hell, which contains some beautiful descriptions of the recitation/performance of poetry, and ends with an abstract but memorably horrifying depiction of hell. His poems on the King Arthur cycle are also wonderful, but in many places even harder to understand.

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> turn coffee machine off and on again

Anybody else feel like Wikipedia is both a blessing and a (productivity) curse?

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A few months ago I decided that my work in progress not only needed a rope, but that the protagonist was going to have to make it herself.

Cue wikipedia “rope mill” and hours and hours of industrial archaelogy followed. And that’s not even counting time spent on external sources.

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I usually get this when researching things via YouTube. Which is even worse because it takes them 15 minutes to say something that I could have read in 90 seconds. Why is everything video these days?! *shakes cane at cloud*

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As research for my latest game, in addition to countless Wikipedia pages, I’ve read eight novels and three non-fiction reference books. Writing IF is getting to be an expensive hobby as well as a time-consuming one, but I’m enjoying myself!

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I fell into a retro-Wiki-hole towards the end of writing Cannery Vale discovering I had basically lifted elements from Orpheus and Eurydice without realizing.

Masturbatory postmortem commentary ensues:

I was totally concentrating on the Inferno/Dante’s Circles of Hell template (with a generous dash of Silent Hill) and those were completely intentional, but many other details managed to fall in place without me intending; references like Medusa and Poseidon and “don’t look at a spirit or they’ll disappear” were random bits I threw in based on my meager knowledge (Medusa turns people to stone! Yeah, that!) without realizing how they fit together and stealthily enriched the setting (Oh crap, they totally had acres of squicky drama between them…) Or it may just be that mythology in general is kind of basic template and tinker-toy like that?

Likely this was a case of cryptomnesia on my part, but it was entertaining to research and discover how much my subconscious metaphor/puzzle brain was at work behind the scenes. The actual denouement surprised me as well when it clicked together.

In this case I’m glad I didn’t research a lot before or it may not have worked out.

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