The Woodcutter’s Quest (ParserComp)
Oh wait, I also played this ParserComp Inform text adventure really early on! It’s based on the sample text adventure outlined in a “How to design adventure games” ebook by Shawn McClure, that was offered as a prize for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam this year; I did heavily consider picking it at the time and I was especially interested in playing this entry, just to try out an implementation of the sample game from the book.
While looking up Adventuron games during the TALJ, I also came across another game produced by someone that was also following along with McClure’s lesson: (itchio link: John's Adventure by zeropolisretrocoding). Some small guess-the-verb and under-implented parts in that, but I tried it after playing through Woodcutter’s Quest and was able to finish it, and it seems like an interesting point of comparison! That game thanks a Garry at the start, I just noticed, so very possibly the same Garry that (co-)made this.
There’s a few small modifications and tweaks made to the original design by Warrigal in their implementation (would love to know the changes and design decisions, and the reasoning afterwards). Whatever the case, what we end up with is a solid, short-to-medium length text adventure, a light fantasy sort of setting where you set out to save your village after they all get kidnapped. I enjoyed this, as many text adventure players would, I think.
I imagine the sample text adventure had to be kept relatively simple enough to explain within a book to someone possibly newer to parser game design, so I wasn’t necessarily expecting something too ambitious. I’d watched a youtube video review of the book before, and it seems like the book gives you things like example room descriptions and item locations and describes puzzles and such, and it’s focused on just giving you the design and doesn’t touch on the coding or implementation part. I don’t know if the book encourages people to implement their example or just make their own, but yeah, you probably don’t want to subject many first-time authors to trying to implement something overly complicated. Stuff like elaborate rope tying, or liquid/container puzzles might not be the things to start them on! (I did notice that one difference in John’s Adventure was you find a pre-filled jug, of water!) Still, I kind of went into this wanting to see if the sample game would be foundationally strong enough to make me want to buy the ebook (is that unfair?), and I subjectively felt like there were a couple design quibbles in this, stuff I might not fuss that much about normally, y’know, within the realm of free, hobbyist text adventures, but this is from a professional who’s giving advice they’re charging for, after all (at least partially)?
The biggest quibble is just that there are three puzzles involving animals blocking my way; I’m fine with one, might’ve been okay with two, but three did feel a bit much, particularly since they’re basically encountered in a row on the same path, and have basically the same sort of solution. The animals aren’t technically out of place for the setting, but they’re all just non-magical creatures plonked along the only way forward, so they did feel a bit arbitrary.
Meanwhile, probably the most complicated puzzle involves an attic, and it also IMO ends up being the most interesting puzzle here, though John’s Adventure had a simpler implementation, so that might’ve also been an a modification. The goblin and the rope puzzles also seemed slightly different as well between John’s Adventure and this, as I recall.
The other thing is that I felt like I was sometimes tackling puzzles without knowing how they helped me on my quest; like, why am I messing around with a beehive? The answer being, it’s obviously a puzzle of course! It didn’t feel like I was particularly focused on doing stuff that seemed discernibly related to “saving the villagers” through most of my playthrough. That is something that’s perhaps pretty commonplace; we solve puzzles and we pick up things because that’s just what we do in these sorts of games, and even lots of “classic” commercial point and click adventure games probably do this; I remember in Day of the Tentacle you could solve a puzzle which puts a vacuum cleaner somewhere really early on, and it only comes into play at the very end. But ideally, the player should for the most part know why they’re trying to solve something and how it advances their goals before they actually solve it, right? Maybe not every single puzzle, but a good chunk of them. Like I’d be trying to get into the attic knowing something specific I want is up there (maybe I read a note elsewhere)? Some of this is partly on me trying to solve puzzles as I encounter them; I’m curious if beginners or other players might keep exploring the whole map first, if I’m an outlier. But it’s also how the map is laid out. Something I’ve seen given as design advice on this board before is that for the most part, the player should encounter a locked door before they find the key for it. In my playthrough, it felt like I basically solved many of the more major puzzles in the first half and ended up with some items I didn’t have a use for yet (“keys”, basically), and then I continued along and that’s finally when I started finding a bunch of the “doors”. It thus felt slightly unbalanced, even though the individual puzzles are fine to quite good!
Small aside: Is the beehive puzzle (edit: smoke calming bees) an example of something that relies on cultural knowledge? Is it common knowledge? The reason I knew part of the solution there is because I’d played a point-and-click adventure game that also used that bit of trivia.
One thing I really liked here is that the ending text gets changed slightly depending on some small things you do; I don’t think this was a scored game, but it’s neat having optional things in here, especially as part of a fantasy quest sort of game. They felt a bit like optional sidequests, almost! Overall, the implementation here is really solid, and there’s a clear goal, I always understood the way forward, descriptions are clear, puzzles gave good feedback, and so it was still enjoyable to play through, which is all stuff that matters most of all.
I just remembered there was a golden frog; did anyone find out what that does?