Sounds great! I’ll work on the current tester feedback when I return to my computer on Saturday and send you something!
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I sent in a new version!
I have a school trip I have to chaperone each fall, so I had to take a break from coding all week. Instead, I downloaded my github draft gblorb onto Frotz on my phone and played through this dimension and some others on the plane. I took a ton of notes, and now that I’m back I spent six or seven hours going through them all. The level is much improved now; I think adding clocks to all the time travel puzzles will help immensely.
A big problem that I found was that I had tons of ‘rifts’ or portals/wormholes with a color called ‘rift-style’. So I’d say stuff like ‘The description of the fifth-rift is "This is a [rift-style] rift…’. But in both descriptions and initial appearances this would end up showing the wrong rift-style, especially if there were other rifts in the room. So I had to switch it to ‘The description of the fifth-rift is "This is a [rift-style of the fifth-rift] rift…’.
I still find it funny that this was intended to be a one-room level with limited actions but has turned out to be one of the most complex levels in terms of rules, items, code length and even locations (since the tasks in the ‘one room’ open up rifts to other rooms). I think I underestimated just how difficult coding sequences of events can be. Three of the largest areas code-wise are repeatable puzzles involving a time loop.
After this I can go through a couple more tester reports I got during the trip and then settle down for the long winter of IFComp, while still chugging away at the final area (which is very sketchy).
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Could be the title of @aschultz 's next game!
-Wade
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I would play that game!
Testers found even more wild bugs in my current version. My Game Center’s around rifts of different types, which are portals or wormholes. They’re supposed to be bigger than the player and made of nothing (just a hole in spacetime). But the tester just put them all in their pocket and walked away 
I had forgotten to make some of them fixed in place. I fixed it in the newest version (44 I think) but it was pretty funny.
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If you’re not trying TAKE ALL in every room, you’re falling down on your job as a tester (and missing out on comedy gold!)
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Testers are the heartbeat of the world!
In further amusing news, I’ve been adapting the example Emma from Writing with Inform and made a party that accidentally invited literally every person in the game as well as the ones from the example, which then caused some runtime errors and also triggered some interactions. So I ended up with a party that included a dead man, Emma Woodhouse, two caimans that immediately get into a fight and get a third caiman running over to cheer them on, a vampire, king arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere, and an immeasurable quantity of robots:
Summary
Divya makes excuses and drifts off to join a group by the window.
The brig guards makes excuses and drifts off to join a group at the corner.
Antonio Yang makes excuses and drifts off to join a group at the corner.
The silverback makes excuses and drifts off to join a group at the corner.
The frog makes excuses and drifts off to join a group at the corner.
The stubby caiman wanders over.
The wolf with a blue collar makes excuses and drifts off to join a group at the corner.
The wolf with a green collar wanders over.
your
*** Run-time problem P55: The scene Time-paradox hasn't started, so you can't ask when it did.
future self makes excuses and drifts off to join a group by the window.
Lance wanders over.
Frankenstein makes excuses and drifts off to join a group by the window.
The Pharaoh wanders over.
Dracula makes excuses and drifts off to join a group next to the doorway.
The sound of whispering sand wanders over.
The wolfman makes excuses and drifts off to join a group by the window.
Charon wanders over.
The monkey robot makes excuses and drifts off to join a group at the corner.
The glamorous woman wanders over.
The bearded man makes excuses and drifts off to join a group at the corner.
The dead man wanders over.
Arthur makes excuses and drifts off to join a group next to the doorway.
Dafydd wanders over.
The boss makes excuses and drifts off to join a group next to the doorway.
The Dafydd wanders over.
The bikers makes excuses and drifts off to join a group by the window.
The distant gangs wanders over.
Dad makes excuses and drifts off to join a group by the window.
Gwen wanders over.
The nervous young man makes excuses and drifts off to join a group by the window.
The flashy woman wanders over.
The beast makes excuses and drifts off to join a group next to the doorway.
The little spiders wanders over.
Dan makes excuses and drifts off to join a group at the corner.
The bot wanders over.
The speedy bot makes excuses and drifts off to join a group next to the doorway.
The big bot wanders over.
The robber bot makes excuses and drifts off to join a group at the corner.
The dusty bot wanders over.
The lanky bot makes excuses and drifts off to join a group at the corner.
The lonesome bot wanders over.
The Athos bot makes excuses and drifts off to join a group at the corner.
The earth bot wanders over.
The air bot makes excuses and drifts off to join a group at the corner.
The fire bot wanders over.
Guinevere bot makes excuses and drifts off to join a group by the window.
Arawn Webster wanders over.
Mr Weston wanders over.
Mr Woodhouse makes excuses and drifts off to join a group by the window.
Mr Knightley wanders over.
Frank Churchill makes excuses and drifts off to join a group next to the doorway.
Emma Woodhouse wanders over.
You can hear the long caiman and the scarred caiman snarling and snapping at each other!
You see the stubby caiman running away to see what's happening, breaking the lure.
Edit: actually, this is only about 1/3 of all people, I think the example code only triggers for about 1/3 of all people each turn.
11 Likes
from doors to wormholes, THE CLASSIC IF debugging issue…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
4 Likes
Did the portals still work both ways when the PC dropped them in another room? Because that is major puzzle gold right there!
(I think I remember a topic about “takeable holes” as portable passages on the Forum some time ago, but I can’t seem to find it. Perhaps someone took it and misplaced it?)
5 Likes
The portals did work actually… lol
I realize that this is really the wrong time to be posting on this thread but, alas, my drive to complete the game has been unabated.
I’ve revised my opening slightly. I was replaying one of the most popular games of all time (9:05) and one of my favorite openings of all time (The Art of Misdirection) and was trying to figure out what makes a good opening, a memorable opening, and/or an opening that makes people want to keep playing.
I noticed both those openings had the player isolated from others and had several objects with clear ways to manipulate them. Both directly suggested actions you could do, but we’re otherwise fairly open ended.
I looked at a lot of the most played games and realized that quite a few begin with you being in trouble or doing something dangerous and/or bad. Breaking and entering is a popular theme (like Zork and Anchorhead).
I wanted originally to have the game start with a party full of people but I’ve shifted now. I’m thinking now of starting the game with the player going through junk in a storage closet when they get a call asking reminding them that they had a presentation that night on the history of their starship. So you panic and have to grab some random junk and take it to the presentation. There will be a locked closet with keys and a flashlight and dark areas so they player gets used to those mechanics. Then when we head to the party (like I had initially planned).
I figure at the party you can ad lib your presentation by showing the object and choosing from various potential topics to say about it. That will allow for some humor, let me do some work building through the player’s speech about the history of the ship, and introduce the conversation mechanic.
The opening is the last area to work on; I’ve already sketched out the layout of the pre-ending, the three endings, and now the opening. I’ve gotten rid of all the temporary rooms in the game. The only tasks left are to put in a skeleton of the puzzle structure in those new areas, then flesh them out, and then it’s all over!
Anyway, if you’re reading this on IFComp eve, I hope you get good rest before the comp begins!
9 Likes
I agree this makes a good opening. I mentioned in another thread that part of the appeal of the parser is the illusion that you can do anything, and NPCs tend to shatter that illusion (because there are so many possible ways to interact with a person and it’s hard to model even a fraction of them).
So use your opening to play up the illusion by showing off what the system’s best at, whether that’s classic “manipulate the medium-sized dry goods” or something else! Get the player invested in the illusion from the beginning and then their investment will smooth over any issues later. (Like how I’m told in static fiction you need to hook readers first before they’re willing to suspend their disbelief for you.)
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Work has been progressing on my game; I have a cycle of ‘code one room or NPC, then play and review one IFComp game, then beat a level or a boss of a video game for fun’.
My dad’s in town, and I watched him beta test my most recent finished dimension (level 9, with a bunch of portals in time and space). It’s wild to see people play your games in person because you waver between ‘man I really hope I coded that’ and ‘wow I need to make directions clearer’. It was really helpful though, so I hope to try it again in the future!
Competition games are really helpful too, like @OverThinking’s game Gestures Towards Divinity, which does a lot of stuff I like. IFcomp is great for sharing different techniques and seeing strengths and weaknesses of various approaches.
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Finally reached 300K words of code!
Work is still fairly slow on this final area. I spend about equal time coding and playing IFComp games, which is why I’m reviewing slower than usual this year.
I’m currently trying to figure out how long players are willing to spend in puzzleless scenarios involving conversation and museums. I currently have an 9-room museum I’ve allotted 20 turns for players to spend time in (they’re basically locked in for 20 minutes and then can leave when they want) and I have a large party with multiple locations and 9 NPCs that walk around that I’d also like to last 20 turns. There’s one conversation topic you can use with everyone and about 3 others so far, and I might add some background stuff like eating food, etc.
But if people tolerate it, I might increase the budgeted time to 30 turns. The next area is a solo conversation and that was budgeted for 20 turns, but that’s kind of hard to do, so if the party is fine I might shave some of the solo conversation and add it to the party.
If not, my plan is in the conversation (the last one you have with anyone in the game) to include a ~10 turn sequence where someone describes their childhood impressions of your story and actions in a CYOA format where you’re essentially a superhero (so like an exaggerated version of your deeds in the game with menu options for things like defeating monsters or running with wolves).
I’m only 1/3 or less of the way done with the final area, and haven’t even started on the three endings. But that’s good, since it means I won’t be asking for large groups of testers for the ending until near the end of IFComp!
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This ending stuff is ending up a bit bigger in code than I expected.
I’ve coded up the first 70 turns of the ending and sent it to a (very helpful!) tester for early feedback before going in too deep. It worked out pretty well, but they suggested numerous additions. At this point those 70 turns are taking up about 21K code, making it already larger than some of my complete (200 turn) dimensions.
That 70 turns contains all the big reveals and the emotional climax of the game. All that’s left is the denouement as expressed through the endings. Based on the poll I made earlier in a different thread, these endings should be fairly mild puzzles.
But one of them is in third person, which I think should work well after seeing something similar in Little Match Girl 4 today. I started working on looking at every command in the Command tab of the index and trying them in third person. A lot are weird from either being written in ‘you’ for the main part of the game or written as “I didn’t do that” for the murder mystery flashbacks. So that’ll be a pretty hefty chunk of time, sorting that out.
6 Likes
Late to the party, Brian, but if you’re still looking for places to burn down, I can give you written permission to arson Sagrada Familia into oblivion. I can legally do that, I’m Catalan. And it’s a fugly building anyway.
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As a builder I’m super impressed by pics of Sagrada…
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Concerning the SF, I’m of Orwell’s opinion (Homage to Catalonia).
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Shouldn’t you at least wait until they finish building it before making such a decision?
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Sunk cost. Do you a 2x1 offer, demolish the Valle de los Caídos too.
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Sorry if you feel it’s a blight to your city! I wasn’t really commenting on its taste so much as the unique craftsmanship, which I have an especially high appreciation for, after working with cheapo, tasteless modern materials and designs all the time…
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Working on endgame area(s) now. Spoilers below for theme and setting of endgame. Otherwise, this is a normal post.
Spoilers
I knew I wanted the endgame to be set in the engine room for a while, and for it to be a physically dangerous space. Basically, like Wrath of Khan.
But I needed to figure out what kind of engine is feasible for this ship. There are two time periods in the game, and this is the earlier one, so it is meant to be closer to current technology.
I knew nuclear would be dangerous, but would nuclear engines move a ship? Researching, I realized most ships need to physically eject material to move forward. So I considered a small particle accelerator shooting out fast particles, so the fuel could last long enough to get to a star, but apparently that is inefficient since so much of the energy ends up in the shot out particle (according to one person, but IDK if that’s true given relative reference frames).
So I finally researched solar sails and laser engines. I think a sail would require too much redesign of parts of the game, so I’m going with a laser-based nuclear rocket, which is something people have theorized about a lot.
The endgame scenario is going to be based, after further research, on the meltdown at 3 Mile Island, to provide a realistic dangerous scenario with a variety of physical obstacles.
Edit: Also, would it be weird for a character to quote Porpentine (in-game)? After all, her games are in museums and this is set in the future with a well-read protagonist. There’s part of Howling Dogs that is directly pertinent to one ending.
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