Barbetween - A Seltani Age

Howdy y’all,

I’m pleased to announce my latest IF work, “Barbetween”. It is created with and hosted on Seltani, Andrew Plotkin’s multi-player (and multi-author) online text environment set within the Myst universe.

My homepage for Barbetween is here: jmac.org/barbetween . Follow the link from there into the game; you’ll have an opportunity to make a free Seltani account if you don’t already have one, on arrival.

If you read maga’s announcement blog post all the way to the end, then you’ll already have learned that the game was an intended ShuffleComp entry, but ended up in conflict with the competition’s rules, particularly as regards its impracticality for offline play. So, I offer it you it as its own release, under my real name. I hope you enjoy it!

Naturally, I welcome all critique and feedback, either here or via email (jmac@jmac.org).

I gotta write up a blog post about the clashes between archivability and new IF models.

(Wrote half of it, actually. Gotta finish it.)

Very neat! I’m glad to see someone doing interesting things with Seltani. I still haven’t found anything that “felt” like the right project to me, but I want to.

I’m sorry to hear you were disqualified (though I can see why). I hope there’s enough attention raised that you receive many playthroughs and helpful feedback anyway.

My thoughts:

[spoiler]I think I wish I’d played it with “oh yeah, this is probably multiplayer” more aforethought, because it would have affected my experience. I thought I’d be able to choose each tap separately and have a different experience, rather than just having one and changing events for later players. I liked seeing that it would change for later players. (And I’m glad I rethought what I typed at the last second, because the first one contained an obscenity.)

The experience of having separate sung lines appear on the screen was not very immersive to me - especially at choral points, where my reaction was “Okay, it’s gonna be X amount of time before something interesting happens again, and I lost focus.” Perhaps do this as stanzas instead?[/spoiler]

Thanks for the comments… I’m glad you liked it!

Regarding the latter part of your critique:

[spoiler]I consider modifying the break between the two verses so that the guitarist only starts into the second verse on a player-tripped trigger. Examining the bartender as she relabels the tap, perhaps.

In retrospect I’m not sure why I didn’t do this in first place, since both the guitarist’s appearance and its beginning to sing are tied to trigger actions, rather than timers.[/spoiler]