Dear all,
over the past months I developed an IF, which is now close to completion. Currently I’m looking for people who are interested to test the beta game and give some feedback. Please take note that I think I have a beta version around end of January to mid of February.
First of all: My game is written in German language. Sorry about this, but the simple reason for this is that German is my mother language and anything that I could write in English hasn’t nearly the same quality. In my fever dreams there will be an english version of my game one day.
About the game:
„Phoney Island – nur die Lüge zählt“ (Only lies matter) is a satirical game about some kind of orange phoney guy who uses all kind of fraud to become king of an island. Similarities zu living persons are strictly coincidental. Your job as a player is to arrest this guy and bring him to justice.
„Phoney Island“ is technically a rather classical IF with a simple text parser, that knows around 2000 words. Dialogs are completely driven by multiple choice. Additionally, I build in functionality that allows to play the whole game by multiple choice.
The game comes with three completely different levels of reality (one weirder than the other), a lot of characters, locations and items. It has a rather classical puzzle design, which shows a lot of influence from classical IF, but also from Point & Click games.
About the techniques behind:
„Phoney Island“ is a project that I started to reactivate my programming skills. So I didn’t use an IF system like Inform. I did the whole thing manually – more or less elegant. The game is coded in C# and in the original version for Windows Presentation Foundation. The screen layout can be changed from classical text only view to views with separate inventory area, location items area, etc… For curiosity reasons I also will try to port it to NET MAUI and bring it to Android and iOS somewhere in the future.
The game should run on any PC that’s capable of running Windows 10.
About the status of the project:
One idea behind „Phoney Island“ was to make an IF that’s so unfrustrating that even today some people like to play it. To support that idea I’m currently in the phase of adding convenience stuff to the game: Synonyms, more multiple choice, alternative actions, whatever. The game itself is fully playable, but I’m definetely not satisfied with the comfort. As I wrote above, I guess that a satisfying beta version will be available end of January, mid of February.
About me:
My name is Stefan Hoffmann and I published my first game in 1989 together with my brother and a friend. Since then I worked in different positions in the games industry, as a project manager, game designer and programmer. My first adventure game was „Pirate’s Adventure“, which I played in the early 80s. Since then, I played a lot of IF and Point & Click Adventures.
„Phoney Island“ was my first attempt after many, many years where I designed and coded a game completely on my own, and regain all the fun that I had with this stuff in the past. And what could I say? It worked!
