I made “Figueres in my Basement” today using Michael R. Bacon’s Interactive Poetry extension for Inform 7.
Note: Figueres is a town in Catalonia, not a misspelling of figures.
You can try it in your browser using Parchment: http://parchment.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/parchment.html?story=http%3A//mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/figueres.zblorb
or download the blorb-wrapped z-code file via the IFDB page: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=oszryjtl33cwgivl.
Interesting. I like the tone. Some cool imagery at work, although it doesn’t seem to diverge as much as I expected when I replayed.
One thing I’d mention, although I suspect this is an issue with the poetry extension, is how typing a non-significant word from the text, (‘the’, for example) triggers the response “(That word is not part of the poem at all.)” Perhaps that could be worded a bit better.
Yes, that’s an issue with the extension (I reported it to the extension author soon after it was released, actually). I remember looking at the source and thinking that it would be difficult for a user of the extension to fix without hacking the extension itself.
–Erik
I think I fall into the “interested in theory but not sure what to make of this one” category. But I may have the wrong interaction approach – I keep typing in words because I want to know more about them and the backstory they suggest, which doesn’t have quite the results I expect.
Hm.
The backstory they suggest is my personal life. Maybe I should have kept this thing to myself. I could explain what every line means to me, but that would mean telling my life story.
Well, if you want to know the bits of the backstory that aren’t so personal:
[rant]Figueres, Catalonia, was the hometown of Salvador Dalí, whose surreal paintings of distorted everyday objects came to mind when I saw a twisted old nail in my father’s basement (part of “one of three homes” I inhabit) and whose fantastic mustache I envy. Lately I was grinding some metal (something I’d never done before) in that basement, which provides about half of the inspiration for the second stanza.[/rant]
That helps somewhat – thanks.