Bradisson Rayburn’s Revenge! is my third Inform game, but my first finished one. I sped through the development, working on it for hours a day for 5 consecutive days. And by that point, I was completely ready to just publish the game and be done with it. But I wound up replaying it a few days ago, and honestly, I’m still proud of this one.
This game includes a lot of Inform mechanics I had never used in my earlier games: random generation, variables, scenes, condition checks, allowing free-form answers, etc. It wasn’t too hard to figure these out, and while my final code is somewhat hack-y, it’s still functional and I ironed out the bugs to the best of my knowledge. And while I usually load up a game with as many useful-seeming extensions as I can find, here I restricted it to just two basic ones (screen effects and menus).
The first thing I did to start the game was to plan out a few different challenges and their solutions, then make the studios so that you could find the items you needed in there. There were going to be five challenges instead of three.
- The first one would be a trivia game where you get questions that are nearly impossible to answer, but the answers are provided in reading material you have. I ended up combining this one with the letter challenge because I felt like they were too similar.
- The second is the expired food challenge that wound up being the final one in the finished game.
- The third would have been the button masher, playing out as it did in the final game.
- The fourth was the letter game that came second in the final, but you’d have to head back to the studio and look up facts about the movie stars to guess who it was. In the final, I also expanded the scope on what the celebrities were known for, to make the letters and backstories more varied.
- The fifth was a totally luck-based “pick a door and win a prize game”, where you have a 50% chance to win. This was mainly a placeholder challenge if I couldn’t think of anything better. I was also considering having you just give up and walk out no matter if you win or lose, like you do in the final challenge.
Another big thing about the game is that I wanted it to have a bit of randomization, and puzzles that you could solve in multiple ways. In the letter game, you can either read the letters and match up the requests or notes with the people in the magazine, or you can investigate the smudge and look at the scrubbed-out name and work out who it was addressed to based on the length and the character you are given. Exactly who the correct answer is is randomized, and there are different letters for all four of them. Also, when giving your answer, you can either use first name, last name, or full name, and I accounted for some spelling differences, just to make it more responsive.
The expired challenge also has some randomization to it. If you eat the meal straight-up, you will always die. If you put the sprinkles on it and then eat it, you have a 50% chance of surviving. The guaranteed solution is to put it in the pot and throw it away. Also, Bradisson and the other contestant’s dialogue will change depending on how you win, but you’ll be called out for cheating either way.
The first challenge uses a lot of randomization, but mainly to determine your score and the other contestants’ scores. Contestant 1 will get between 4 and 9, contestant 2 will get between 5 and 10, and contestant 3 will get between 2 and 12. When you press the button, you will get between 3 and 6, but zapping it gives you between 15 and 20. I still wanted it to feel like a competition and not let the player win by just always pressing the button, but also give them a chance to catch up even if it takes them a few turns to figure it out. Since there’s only one solution here, I put in a special response if they press the button too many times in a row suggesting that there’s another way to do it, and there’s a poster hinting at in the Medical Studio. Maybe it’s a little too obvious, but it is the first challenge, and I think it’s still fun to play through.
The main inspiration was looking up some strange, unpopular game shows that I could model challenges after: all of them are based on something, but I distinctly remember the last one being a mix of Hurl! and an episode of The Patrick Star Show of all things. Bradisson is named after Gene Rayburn, host of Match Game. One of the people mentioned in the magazines is Broadway star Miranda Lily, who’s from Opening Night, an older IF work I really liked. I’m kind of surprised how few IF games there are about game shows: the only other one I can name is Are You Too Chicken to Make a Deal?
I didn’t have too much time to develop the game’s story, with it basically just being written as I did each challenge. I even had a few people note that the title was misleading, and I admit it was one of the first things I came up with for the game: the actual story that came up was more of an attempt to make the title connect to something.
This isn’t one of my favorite creative works I’ve made, but I still think it’s a very good one. I’m happy with how it turned out and, if I find a good enough theme for it, I’d be open to doing another Inform game in the future.