Cloak of Darkness has become something of a rite of passage for parser based IF systems.
I had a quick stab at implementing it in Rez (still a few bugs to iron out), but for choice based games it doesn’t make half as much, the “discover the verb” based puzzling is not their forte.
Has anyone imagined an equivalently scoped game that could be CoD for the choice generation?
I don’t believe there is an equivalent choice-narrative universal demo game, however choice narratives have used Cloak of Darkness to demonstrate features.
Cloak of Darkness is designed to show
Most choice-narrative systems don’t provide these by default.
Ah well, yes, I guess not. Rez having at least 3 of those puts it in a kind of half-way house.
And while you could implement those things in most choice-based engines, they would be a test of the implementation, not the engine.
For menu driven implementations with a choice prompt, I would think that when you are “in the bar when it is dark” that any choice but to go north back to the foyer would trigger the losing condition. Meaning you have one choice and putting in an invalid choice triggers the losing condition. It would be up to the system to let you handle an invalid choice in your choices while the room was dark. There would be one choice while it was dark: Which would probably just be “go north to the foyer”.
I think cod is not ideal for Parser system either. It’s too easy to special case everything and thus doesn’t really evaluate the engine. Also the darkness itself is counter intuitive because the cloakroom is not dark.
Last year we used the “Mini-Cluedo” challenge to demonstrate parser-like features in choice-based systems (proposal, spec, implementations in Dialog, Strand, Gruescript, Harlowe, SugarCube, Dendry), but that’s specifically about systematicity (being able to assemble a set of choices based on the state of the world) rather than the one-off options that choice-based systems are best at.
12 posts were merged into an existing topic: Problem with Cloak of Darkness specification
As noted sometime in past, I’m toying around refactoring Isekai (a rather elaborate piece of narrative-centered exploration-based parser IF) into CYOA, and indeed I noted that where CYOA is strong is in the narrative; If I figure how to convey the sense of wonder in a choice-based narrative, the core issue of Isekai is removed.
Personally, I think that modern parser IF (from 2000s onwards) has somewhat helped the shift from puzzlefesting (lacking better words..) to narrative-centered IF, easing the acceptance of CYOA, which are, IMVHO and frankly, inadequate for puzzles. And at the very core of CoD is a puzzle.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio
My goal here was to get away from CoD and maybe this is it.
I was very puzzled for a moment about what the massive first-person-shooter franchise Call of Duty had to do with this thread… 
This is an interesting question! I think that a choice equiv would need to consider not just what the system can show off, but what choice authors are looking for when they make their games. Some things that choice authors tend to care about that occur to me:
Also there’s so many authors who want to make RPGs in like Twine, not in this forum maybe but many other communities…
Yeah, I like the Mini-Cluedo demo for showing how you can programmatically generate a set of options, but I chose that specifically because it’s not the most common thing you see in choice-based games. I don’t think it’s even possible in ChoiceScript (though I’m not very proficient in ChoiceScript so I could be wrong there).
We could also do with a more classic choice-based demo. Custom-written choices, a tiny branch-and-bottleneck structure, set some variables and then check them later (both for which choices are available and for the outcome of those choices).
If I may comment on this, I think parser related features aren’t a good CoD equivalent for choice based IF. I think better are typical choice-IF elements, like two or more “scenes” (if that’s the correct word) several clickable choices and maybe two or more different endings. Authors already good at composing choice-IF should construct some reference.
I feel like “choice-based” describes an interface more than a genre, and as such you’d probably want more than one canonical demo game, depending on whether you’re more interested in branching narrative, QBN/storylet-type stuff, or something parser-esque (with rooms, puzzles, and world model). I’ve written all three of these types of game in Ink, but there are big differences in terms of which Ink features I lean on in each case.
I made a specification, feel free to tell me if it sucks!
Our heroic adventurer finds themself on a difficult road.
The game begins in a forest. You stand before a crossroads that splits to the left and right. There is a man standing next to the path on the right, wearing a large, black, velvet cloak.
You are wearing a scarf, and can pick what color the scarf is.
These elements can be examined at the crossroads.
You can start a conversation with the man at the crossroads. All conversation options with the man can be explored, and you can leave the conversation at any time.
These choices can be taken at any time and lead to the endings. You can’t return to the crossroads once taking them.
All endings should reference the scarf and its color in some way.
If you take the left path or take the right path (it doesn’t matter):
If you steal the cloak and run:
road-of-darkness.twee (8.7 KB)
Edit: Added the ability to customize the scarf color into the specification!
Edit: Lucian pointed out a typo
I like it! The only two things I might add:
But this is a nice succinct little demo already, and I’m not sure how either of these things could be cleanly added to it, so they might be better saved for a different demo game. (And the “conversation with man” → “standing at crossroads” thing might qualify for the first one, depending how it’s implemented.)
I believe it does fulfill the first bullet point! Here it is. The password is “choice”
(An aside that doesn’t advance the goal of this thread at all: the Spanish community appears to have an equivalent of Cloak of Darkness for parser works called Proyecto Vampiro: a short work not originally intended as an example, Vampiro: Memorias de reXXe, which ended up ported to a bunch of systems by a bunch of people. I guess it’s a bit like what happened to Craverly Heights. Well I thought it was interesting.)
That was fun and the first real CYOA I think I have played. I’m guilty of taking the cloak and running on my first try.