CYPHER: Cyberpunk Text Adventure

Playing Game Hints
41

We aren’t denying anything… one of the worst things we could do is denying there were grammar bugs in the game. In fact, We’ve spent the last money we had fixing those mistakes (we hired a native English speaker this time, the previous one, the one that got us into this whole mess, wasn’t native. Don’t worry though, we castrated him and threw his body into the river. We waited and he didn’t floated back so its okay ^_^)

We have came out with 2 patches already, and we are working on the third to support not just more text fixes but more screen resolutions, some more descriptions on the texts, performance improvements, etc.

Players have been thrilled with the fast response we had to come up with patches in such short notice. Of course, in a perfect world, the game should have been perfect; but it isn’t. Since the game is mostly text, the bugs you may be able to find are (you guessed!) grammar.

Well there was a weird sound bug too but that one got fixed too :slight_smile:

I must say, we are extremely excited by all the support we’re having by the players. Again, some people didn’t liked the game, and that’s okay. We are working hard to get things better and make everyone happy (if possible) in the short run.

This is a fun community I always used to read from time to time but it’s the first time I’m actively participating. Hope we can launch the next game over here before anywhere else! :slight_smile:

Cheers!

42

Thirty years ago Infocom had a much better parser than yours. While other companies had worse parsers they were popular only because nothing else could run on those computers.

You could embed Inform’s parser in Cypher, if only you wanted to.

43

If you are talking about ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=4qfjt6y5pkan2220 , then I will agree that different strokes for different folks, but I will argue that you can not then defend your game purely on the sense that it has a “soul” and it’s your baby, which is what you’re doing.

This is getting tiresome. The CONTENT of the game isn’t what we find hard to swallow, it’s the GRAMMAR and the PARSER.

Oh? With proper parsers and grammar? If not, don’t bother.

George - mazes and hunger timers and inventory limits and pixel-hunting and extremely cruel games were also popular, mostly because that’s all there was. Any and/or all of these are emulated nowadays, true, but they have a reason now (often to include a fresh twist).

Unless I misunderstand you and you mean that CYPHER can be to modern players what Scott Adams was 30 years ago? Possibly, but in that case I’d tell modern players - you can play much better for free!

Alex said it first and I second it, the one good thing about CYPHER is the marketing and publicity around it. And if it’s bringing new people into IF, that’s actually a good thing.

But the less savoury facts about the game remain.

EDIT -

But my crippled imagery was actually regarding the parser.

No. No no no, you still persist in saying that and it isn’t true, and it’s a reflection of the finished product. BUGS are to do with programming. BUGS are to do with game logic breaking. A BUG is when you forget to set a car as “scenery” and the player is able to pick it up, or when you realise that you’ve put a key inside the locked room it’s supposed to open.

What you have in your grammar (glad to hear about the patches, mind) aren’t bugs. It’s just plain bad grammar. Would you read a book like that? (one that was unintentionally written that way)

EDIT 2 - EEEK! My link to “Crystal and Stone” was to elsewhere entirely! Fixed.

44

“different strokes for different folks”

Ahhh man! I tried to say that in so many different ways… I couldn’t find the expression in my head. I wanted to be the one who get to say that one. ;-(

45

True, but we see the whole thing from a different angle and our perspective about bugs is a bit more wider than that. Try to write a game in Chinese, find a Chinese translator in your country and go publish the game over China. If there are problems with the translation, you can only blame yourself and keep going forward. That’s all you can do. Fix it, apologize (which we did to our buyers) and move forward into improving the game/parser. And that’s precisely what we’re doing. :wink:

The parser, well, I see there is no point on discussing that further. We already stated what we did with the parser a few posts back :slight_smile:

Cheers! I’m off have dinner! Wooot!

46

If you’re not interested in learning English, at least learn your terminology.

You hiring an incompetent translator isn’t a bug, it’s you hiring an incompetent translator.

Re parser: silly me for thinking you were open to discussion. If that’s your watertight stance, good luck to you. See how far it gets you. I hear that you can’t even move properly in your game - you have to type “go north” instead of the usual “n”. You think that’s small potatoes? Then you’ve been IGNORING not just us but pretty much every damn plance that discusses your game.

Also, you seem to love waving your 15-year-old player’s review. Here’s a few from Infocom:

Munch about what set Infocom (and Magnetic Scrolls) apart from the other companies of the time. Think about where these games are and how much they’re enjoyed today, then consider Scott Adams’ games (who, UNLIKE you, actually had a hardware reason for the parser limitations).

Or just remain stubborn. I’m pretty much done.

47

Again… we never said we were going against infocom… I know ENCHANTER, ZORK, etc. I have many great things to say about these. Amazing moments. The Lurking Horror scared the crap out of me.

And what I said was there was no point in discussing that further meaning I already said pretty much what I wanted to say about the parser already, I never said we weren’t going to change it (which we are) and that the game won’t get updates (which is having).

Hope we get more cool text adventures out there soon (besides the ones that we are getting from the IF fanbase) and I hope we get to play them all ^_^.

Cheers!

48

I have no doubt that there’s a large demographic that plays the game just because it looks good. These people really couldn’t care less whether the parser recognizes X or whether you have to type MORE to scroll down. Why should they? They’ve never played a game with a decent parser, or if they have, they weren’t aware of the conventions experienced players take for granted.

The lesson from all this is that if someone comes up with a game that has the bling combined with a standard parser, a decent story and good writing, we have a huge hit in our hands.

49

I’m going to take a potentially “controversial” stance here. I’ve been playing Cypher, and I really rather like it.

I’ve actually been in contact with Javier in regards to the game, and have even sent him some grammatical corrections as I’ve been playing through it. The parser CAN be pretty frustrating at times, but this is largely due to the fact it doesn’t follow standard IF conventions. However, as Javier explained to me when I was asking him about it, they found the standard IF parser conventions to be boring and they tried to create something new. I totally give them props for trying something different, but unfortunately trying something different doesn’t always work.

The story of the game is pretty good, imo, and the atmosphere you get while playing thanks to the music and sound effects really do create a unique and fun experience for text adventure games though, and this game has given me tons of ideas for improving the games I’m working on in terms of the use of music and sounds.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw my 2 cents in here. It’s not a perfect game, but it’s a charming one - above mentioned issues notwithstanding.

50

Right. Shortcuts and mechanisms that ease player’s interaction with the game, throwing down the barrier player/game and allowing for unmatched communication between player and story are boring.

The more I understand what they find “boring”, the less interested I am in their game(s).

To their defense, if they found some IF conventions to be boring, I would understand, and it would have been interesting indeed to try and do something new with them (like the cardinal directions). But the parser? The only thing “boring” about it is that a lot of people have gotten used to the way it works, and it’s therefore flexible and powerful, suitable for verbose or shortcut-y people, oldcomers and newcomers alike, even allowing such structures as “TURN SOMETHING ON” as well as “TURN ON SOMETHING” (which I gather is a norotious problem of CIPHER). These are generally regarded as good things.

51

That’s what sgreig wrote:

To tell you the truth, Cypher has more appeal than the Textfyre games. At least for me. Pretty much the only games with a good enough presentation after Gateway 2 were Robb Sherwin’s games. (There was also “Macrocosm”, but it was a bad game.) Also, Cypher is actually presented as a game, not as some educational bore.

However, appeal is not enough. It has to speak English correctly first :slight_smile:

52

They didn’t say “IF conventions”, which would mean stuff like having to examine everything; room = a closed, easily definable space; cardinal directions; and so on. They said “IF Parser conventions”, which reads not as “conventions of the genre” but “conventions of the parser”, i.e. x = examine; n = go north; “turn SOMETHING on” = “turn ON something”; “search” different from “examine” (and modernly, “read” different from “examine”); possibly even “person, do this”.

Obviously my quarrel isn’t with the latter examples. The parser in IF has become a swiss army knife; some people prefer to strip it down to a single blade. That’s great. But what CIPHER does is strip it to a single blade THEN proceed to blunt it down by removing the most important conventions, the ones that make it easier and more natural for the player to communicate with the game.

If they SAID “IF parser conventions” but they MEANT “IF conventions” (not surprising, given the level of English they’ve demonstrated), as you suppose, then that’s irrelevant, because it’s the parser’s conventions they went against, not IF’s.

53

Peter, is it me or you are taking this a bit too personally?

54

We just don’t want to get into more arguments. We wanted to stop by here and to say hi to everyone and try to present the game to the community, that’s all.

Sorry if we offended someone. Hope some of you can enjoy the game.

Cheers.

55

No worries cabrerabrothers, hopefully we’ll see more of you around here in the future.

56

James - possibly a bit too seriously. I do feel it’s a serious matter that someone is charging money for a text adventure, put zero thought into the parser, and then proceed to ignore all the criticisms (I’m the most vocal one here, no doubt, but google a bit - I’m certainly not the only one).

Mostly what irks me is the way they seem to be ignoring all criticisms. I didn’t start this as a hostile argument, I don’t think - I started by trying to start a dialog, explaining over and over what was wrong with the parser and why it was such a problem. I got a sales pitch, a “it’s our game and we love it the way it is” and a single favourable review in answer - and naturally I got irked, it felt like I was talking to a wall.

Still. I realise (I’d have to be stupid not to) that I’ve turned the conversation a bit sour. So, sorry about that. Cabrerabrothers did come here to talk to us, and did explain their stance, and actually refused to be insulting or abrasive in any way. I’m still pissed at the non-answers I got, but cabrerabrothers did behave smashingly.

57

We never ignored anyone and certainly never ignored criticism, that’s your own personal take on what we’re doing (and a wrong one.). We came up with a patched version THREE DAYS AFTER, then another patch after a couple of days and now we are about to release a new patch with performance improvements for netbooks, more descriptions for the items, some extra options for resolutions, etc. I will just take the high road and believe you’re a bit too passionate about the genre, which we are too.

Anyway… don’t worry that much, you’ll live longer! :wink:

58

Does that new patch fix these issues?

  • Allow “x” for "examine
  • Allow “n/s/e/w” for movement
  • Allow “turn SOMETHING on” and “turn on SOMETHING” to be synonims
  • Do away with the ridiculous “Type MORE to continue”
  • Give better error messages to input not understood

You say you never ignored anyone. Well, you never answered about these issues, either. If your new patch does address them, then yes, I’ll applaud and commend and apologise.

The reason I’ve been so gung-ho on these (and on the fact that CB insts on treating bad grammar as a bug - but that one’s too awful, if I think on that again I start ranting again) is because these are basic things. If I can’t trust a developer to fix basic things, I can’t trust them at all and I won’t buy their product. I mean, if I was beta-testing this and I told them about these things and got the answers I got, I’d have said “Screw you” and walked away - because obviously my beta-testing was worth jacks**t.

59

When I first heard of this game, a couple of days ago, the first question that popped in my mind was “What parser did they use?”
When I found out that they used their own, I was immediately disappointed, before even reading a review or the comments on this page. After having my fears confirmed here, I can’t say I am interested in trying the game.

I do however hope it is successful, and applaud the Cabrera Brothers of putting out a commercial IF game in 2012. Doesn’t change the fact that I am disappointed for the unwise decision to go with an established free parser. I advise you to reconsider this in your future games…

60

Will you consider the release of a free demo? I’m not currently interested in the game subject, so chances that I’d buy it are close to zero, but after having been toying with my own self-made parsing engines when doing IF works for retro-computing platforms I would really love to see how your commercial offering works! And perhaps this demo would make me change my mind and go and buy the real thing! … well, perhaps not, but without it we’ll never know for sure! :slight_smile:

I can sympathize with the choice of using your own parser, which is as valid an option as any other. Somehow I feel that part of the challenge and fun of making games are programming them your own way. On the other hand, I’ve got a clear notion that IF works ceased to be related to video-games decades ago, and are nowadays a way of telling stories in a different way from traditional fiction. I think that modern IF creation tools are way more efficient for that specific purpose, but writting Cypher, which claims to be inclined to the gaming side of the equation, with your own engine actually makes sense. Even if there is a lot of stuff to improve, it was worth trying, and I hope this is not the last IF offering from you, whether I’m interested or not in it!