Clod's Quest Demo (Undum port)

Playing Beta Testing Requests and Discussion
1

Undum port of Clod’s Quest by Duncan Bowsman.

textadventures.co.uk/user/view/q … gbjg/freak

There is some text referring to features not yet implemented (hints, possibly limited saves) or solely refers to the original.

Clicking on a link in the main page attempts to use that object directly.
You can also select an object in the inventory pane, then click on link in the main page to use the first on the second.

(Inform 6 and Inform 7 ports are also available.)

2

This was a real treat to see, thank you! A faithful port of the demo for the admittedly long-winded title Clod’s Quest: The Dungeons of Zivulda. I played through to the end (including the tutorial), and only found one error… when I open the “Options” menu with the bit about mustard, I can’t seem to get back to the title screen.

Undum provides a clean interface which feels well-suited to the type of play the adventure intends to offer. My only complaint about its presentation is that the screen is scrolling rather than providing a persistent display like in the original (where the player sees a room description, the result of an action, then the screen clears and provides the room description again). The scrolling wasn’t really a problem unless I selected or de-selected an inventory item while reading a room description… upon selection, the screen would scroll to the bottom, meaning I’d have to scroll back up again to interact with the room.

Perhaps I should investigate Undum more fully…

3

Sadly as I hate to bite my tongue, I have to say this was amazing. I was expecting to find a subpar Legend of Zelda in stupid static CYOA medium, but what I found instead was an incredibly smooth web-based text-only Scumm game. No parser, but there’s a simulation there indeed, puzzles, items, stats etc. Felt incredibly like certain IF like Walker & Silhouette or Blue Lacuna. I’d even go as further as saying it’s more flexible: while in these games you just type the highlighted word, here you choose a tool (a verb) from the menu and clicking on the highlighted word, producing different results. Much clever, that surely is not CYOA of old, more like parserless IF…

Undum, that’s a name to be reckoned with for sure.

hmm, perhaps I should revise the message I just posted about the future of XYZZY Awards…

4

Very interesting. Would you consider making available an offline version? From what I understand, it’s as simple as providing all the files in a ZIP.

5

Slight update:

  • Title fixed
  • Bug in options menu fixed
  • Some long blocks of text (Introduction, Tutorial end) broken up into cutscenes. Inventory is inactive during cutscenes.
    (Does the effect work? Should I break up other blocks?)

Duncan:

  • The scrolling on item select/deselect annoyed me a bit as well. I looked into fixing it, but I’m not sure exactly how.

namekuseijin:

  • Thank you.

Peter:

  • I will provide a downloadable version, once it’s finalized. (Some of the tutorial text needs to be updated for the undum version; I’d like to add the hints and possibly limit saves; possibly break up the other long blocks of text into cut scenes; the character text “You are starting on an exciting journey.” is just copied from the Undum tutorial, and should vary through the game.)
6

A couple of spelling errors I noticed: in the text dump at the end of the tutorial, Claus seems oddly “vivacios” instead of “vivacious.” In the description of the Dungeon Entrance, “that in” should be “that is.” I imagine I must have read right over these the first time, being so used to reading it.

After finding the clothespin, perhaps the reader could get an italicized message about unclicking the mop to pick it up?

I’m not totally sure of the formal affordances of Undum, but is it possible to put the room description in a separate window from player input? Or perhaps the room description could re-display after every action, showing user input at the top and scrolling down to the room description? I think ideally there would be no scrolling at all, though, but the screen would clear periodically.

Breaking up the text blocks is really nice, though I liked the introduction displaying as a single block because it all managed to fit on my screen at once. The best instance of adding in a pause or break was after opening the door to end the tutorial sequence. More like that, I think.

7

Changes:

  1. When the game is in mobile mode, it will display the information from the status window below the room description.

  2. Game won’t scroll to the bottom after selecting / deselect an inventory item.