If anyone could help me out with a beta-test of my entry for the 2013 IFComp, that would be awesome. And I could beta-test something for you in return?
The details: I would say that it’s a mid-length game by IFComp standards, a generally “light” romp that falls more into the “text adventure” side than the “interactive fiction” side of things.
On the Zarf Cruelty scale, I would say that it’s Nasty - but everything potentially nasty can be undone back to a safe state, so it shouldn’t be that bad, really.
Completeness: At the moment, the game is playable from start to finish, but is missing some “niceities” like a hint system, walkthrough, some ABOUT menu items, probably some verb and noun synonyms that I should implement.
The scope of the beta: Grammar, spelling, puzzle difficulty/hinting, synonym suggestions. You can tell me the whole game idea is terrible and should change, but it’s a bit late for that.
Well, “undone” as in using the “undo” command. Zarf precedes the ubiquity of the undo command, so… if you’re intent on not using “undo”, then I stick with my earlier rating. If you use undo… I don’t know, maybe we need a new cruelty scale.
Well, as I understand it, the issue with the cruelty scale is whether you know you need to undo right away. If you have a lot of one-move deaths, but the game remains winnable as soon as you undo the killing move, then it’s Polite because the player will always undo as soon as they kill themselves. (At least given that modern interpreters usually support Undo.)
If you had something where you had a lot of abrupt death traps and you couldn’t Undo out of them, then that’d be Nasty, because the player would need to keep a lot of save files. (This happened with Counterfeit Monkey when Undo didn’t work on my version and interpreter – since there were a lot of abrupt deaths I had to save all the time in case I hit one of them, but if Undo had been available I wouldn’t have needed those saves since I could have just undone the moves that killed me and kept playing.)
If you’ve got something where you have to undo more than once, then it’s probably Nasty, because interpreters are a bit less likely to support multiple undos. (Or at least that used to be the case. Maybe it isn’t any more, now that for a few years Parchment has supported multiple undos.)
The rating scale postdates it. (Although when I first posted it, I was used to only having one turn of undo available. Thus the distinguishing of immediately-visible mistakes.)