Monday, 16:30 is another game with fluid actionable scope, so that you wind up moving around the inside of an office when you’re acting on different things in the room. The game prints command clarification breaks as you move around the office so the internals are a bit more transparent than Shade’s.
One of the issues with having time move independently of your actions (as opposed to having it lurch forward whenever you solve a puzzle) is that if your actions move time appreciably enough to affect the puzzles, you’re doing a “be here at this time or be screwed” kind of game (like I understand Deadline to be) which just drives players (me, at least) crazy. Either you have to devote a lot of effort to describing how time passes and make the player care about it even though it’s irrelevant to the gameplay, or you have to make it so a lot of interesting stuff is happening even if you’re not where the author expects you to be. Challenging. (Or I’m sort of trying to envisage something, set in Stately Gardens as it happens, where the NPCs just do all sorts of crazy stuff and you’re really not expected to be in control of what happens, at best you can start a lot of chain reactions. But I’ve barely started prototyping some of the NPC stuff.
Paul, I really want to see your project. Even the first version that you scrapped after testing.
And the issues with comfort with the existing set of verbs is definitely a matter of community formation, IMO. I tried Cold Iron on an IF newbie (up to the midpoint, when we couldn’t figure out how to press space to continue on an iPad browser) and though she got through a bunch of it with less prompting than I expected (through commands like “read the book” and maybe “walk through the door”), she was absolutely flummoxed when she had to enter a compass direction.
I tried to chase down every single parenthetical command clarification in the i7 parser and erase it. Unfortunately, a couple are extremely hard to root out!
This drives me crazy too. However, this is exactly what I’ve done! In my defence, it doesn’t play like Deadline. It plays a lot more like Pac-Man, and ‘be here at this time or be screwed’ does not drive me crazy in Pac-Man. It’s the whole point of the game, so I’ve tried to replicate the conditions that make that work as much as possible in the physical part of the story. I don’t want to play this up as if I’ve succeeded at textualising Pac-Man or something, because that’s impossible. I just took achieving that kind of play loop as my design goal, so yeah… timing is everything. (But it’s not actually in real-time.)
Yes I have a lot of work ahead of me filling in corners in the geography where I want things to happen despite the fact that nothing is supposed to happen there, just so that bit won’t always be the boring bit.
That sounds pretty cool! It’d require a slower clock to allow the long chains of consequences to play out, unless you gave the NPCs longrange comms.
Mixed emotions about this. See, basically all of the text that is currently in my game is just placeholder text. I had the idea for the system and I ginned it up, and in order to test it I drew up ‘fake’ events and objects, just so I could tool around in it and get a feel for what it felt like to move around. I was really obsessed with achieving a certain kind of ‘flow’ and not focused on the text at all, but the process of playing my own game got me so excited that I was dying to playtest and check if I’m not insane. So I just sort of filled all the holes in my placeholder narrative as quickly as possible, thinking I had basically made it into something passable so that people could get a feel for what it was like to solve things in this different kinda space.
It wasn’t passable. At all. This was a totally premature playtest.
So anyway, I got depressed for a while, then realised that I had to finalise the planned sequences of accompanying visual elements before I fixed any game narrative at all, regardless, so I set to work on that. So those visual elements all turned out to be massively reshuffled to line up more closely with the gameplay fundamentals that I had just come up with, which I think are sound, and now I am back at the game with a new attitude and knowing exactly the way all of the game storylines need to go in order to dovetail with the visuals and produce juxtapositions that hopefully I can sink my teeth into in the dialogue; and a few adjustments I need to make to the gameplay, too. So I would much rather you play the version with the actual text first, rather than what I’ve currently got, but I think since I am back on the actual case, as it were, it might not be too much longer before I can at least release a select alpha, although I can’t make any promises. Maybe I will include the original test version for comparison. [EDIT: The alpha would be missing all of the graphics, and thus be absent a whole layer of interpretation, and I have mixed feelings about that, too, but I do want the text layer to work on its own.]
If it ends up taking me way too long, then maybe I will just pass around what I’ve got so people can get a look at it. If I don’t have my upgrades basically done by, say, mid-June, maybe that’s what I’ll do. HIt me up for it then, if you remember.
It’s those things that you just assume because they have become bred into your bone that come back to bite you with newbies. Many of my playtesters have been newbies so that’s become really clear! No matter how much I thought I tipped the first use of each command, it was never enough. Eventually I just listed all the commands at the moment they are needed, up on the status line, in plain view. And you know what? Even that wasn’t enough. Because newbies don’t look at the status line!
I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to replace the status-line based tutorials with, but I’m not happy with them.
Maybe I can find a way to blink the status text for a turn, somehow flash it in real time for a second whenever there is new help text, to attract the eye … after all it’s all the way at the top of the window whereas all the action is happening at the bottom. Just a single blink might do it, but since I don’t have any real-time system set up, it may be a little complex to achieve. But I will try, before I resort to littering the transcript itself with help text – that’s what I was trying to avoid.
I might need to go Glulx for that, and though I am compiling to Glulx now, my plan is to do a lot of optimising at the end, all at once, to shoehorn this thing into a .z8 so it will run as well as possible in a browser.