So, how many people here prefer to play IF with somebody else/in a group? I’ll play ChoiceScript/CYOA-style games alone, but with shorter stuff or parser stuff, I strongly prefer playing with somebody else. For the shorter stuff, it’s just the same reason you’d want to watch a movie with somebody - it’s always more fun to discuss with somebody else afterwards.
For parser stuff, it’s because I secretly resent the parser every time it doesn’t read my mind and having somebody else wrestle with it is a godsend.
Anyways the reason I’m asking is I’m wondering if there’s any appetite for, like, a IFComp party where people can play some IFComp games together, or maybe like, a book club? Or something like that.
I almost always play IF “with” my BFF. That is, we both play it at the same time, although not together, as we live in different time zones. Then we compare notes several times a day to brainstorm.
It’s amazing how different our skill sets at puzzle-solving are. I love playing IF this way. Not sure how great it would be for me Club Floyd style-- with everybody chiming in at once.
And I think this is exactly what Club Floyd is (scroll down to find it):
Oh, playing the games in parallel sounds fun, that’s something I’d never considered @AmandaB
Are there Let’s Plays of IF? I know about the old Something Awful Let’s Plays, which I was a big fan of when I was in college (does that make me old or young?) but I’m not actually sure where people go to find them nowadays. I feel like Twitch has kind of eaten the market - or are Let’s Plays and Twitch different markets?
As for Club Floyd, yeah, you can probably find me in the transcripts there. It’s fun! Unfortunately (or fortunately?) those are almost always parser games, so there’s less variety than I’d hope.
I’ve pretty much only played in a group at SF Bay Area IF Meetups. It’s fun; I wish I could do it more often.
Parser games are what I gravitate toward but, yeah, there have been times playing parser IF when I thought I’d thought of the right solution and tried every way I could think of to express it and got nothing but error/failure messages and concluded it wasn’t the right solution after all… when it really was the right solution and I just hadn’t found the right words. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that be a blocker at the Meetup – there’s always been someone able to get close enough to the game’s wavelength to get it.
It’s rare, but there are. Lynnea Glasser did some IFComp let’s play stream videos. There are also some audio podcasts. One is “Clash of the Type-ins” by Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna where they have a guest author read their own game as they play it. They haven’t done them recently, but there is an archive.
The more I chew on @mathbrush 's remarks on my WIP, the more I realize I still have a problem. I think I have a solution to that problem, but we’ll see. Otherwise I’m having fun creating more puzzles for the WIP’s core mechanic. Also realized I don’t have a working title other than “nsew+ba,” which is not intuitive and also too close to NSFW, (which it is definitely not controversial in that regard).
Anyway, really liked the premise of this topic and thought it was a good time to resurrect it if I may.
Chris Conley wrote SWEDUN a while ago. A title like this may or may not help with inspiration. If the directions are in or out, you have NOWISE.
For forward or backward, nothing turns up. But I ran a short python script for any two letters.
all 2-letter combos, with 6-letter words generated
ad dewans, snawed, wesand
ah washen, whenas
ak knawes, wakens
ao weason
ar answer, awners, resawn
av navews
ay sawney
az wanzes
bo besnow, bownes
ci winces
di dwines, indews, widens
do endows, snowed
du sundew
gi sewing, swinge, winges
hi newish, whines
io nowise, winoes
ir rewins
it twines, wisent
iu unwise
iv vinews
iy sinewy, winsey
iz winzes, wizens
ko knowes
lo lownes
mu unmews
or owners, resown, rowens, worsen
ou swoune
ov wovens
rt strewn
the python code
from collections import defaultdict
dic = defaultdict(list)
def process(my_word):
for x in 'news':
if my_word.count(x) != 1:
return False
short_word = my_word.replace('n', '').replace('s', '').replace('e', '').replace('w', '')
short_word = ''.join(sorted(short_word))
if short_word[0] == short_word[1]:
return False
global dic
if short_word not in dic:
dic[short_word] = []
dic[short_word].append(my_word)
return True
with open("c:/writing/dict/words-6.txt") as file:
for (line_count, line) in enumerate (file, 1):
l = line.lower().strip()
process(l)
for sw in sorted(dic):
print(sw, ', '.join(dic[sw]))
SANWEB - A top secret U.S. military website
WAS BEN - My name is now John
BEN SAW - And Ben conquered
NEW ABS - And about time, my muscles were getting slack
SEW BAN - Sorry no more sewing allowed
All fine suggestions, although I am partial to “When did I leave that hat?” Got a hearty chuckle from that one. I also like the past tense of “Was Ben” although, I might feel obligated to name a character Benjamin or Obi Wan as a result.
Well, from what you’ve described before, I think a neat title could be “Autorotating Time” or “Time Stall”, mostly because of how similar it is to an aircraft slowly losing the ability to continue flying.
