Wow, how to follow all that?
I really have been so busy this last 6 months that I didn’t really pay that much attention to what was going on in the Adventuron community. I kind of assumed when I stopped hosting the Adventuron jams (more of a hiatus really) that it would disappear and be consigned to the scrap heap.
I’m really happy to see how people are working around the (considerable) limitations to produce games that other people enjoy to play.
Weirdly enough, I was happier with earlier versions of Adventuron, not because they were better, but because I was aiming lower and I thought it did what it was meant to do with limited bloat.
These days Adventuron is dangerously close to be a competant general purpose IF (and TA) engine, but it’s not there. I’m aiming higher now, and not succeeding as much as I would have hoped. Clever authors can and do work around the weak points, as documented in this post, but it pains me to see the pain that the system is generating. Verb noun games are a pleasure to write in Adventuron. Inform-esque parser games are a real pain to write. And it’s not something I feel good about at all - even when the results are good - especially when the results are good.
A couple of things I’m proud of about Adventuron though are:
- The choice commands. I really lucked into a great design here. It wasn’t anything conscious. Just a lot of experimentation and a lot of bad designs unseen by anyone else (you’ll find undocumented experimental commands littered across Adventuron all over the place). Anyway, these experiments graduated, and I do think that Adventuron allows for a lot of innovation in parser + choice gameplay. It’s very ergonomic (imho).
- The iteration commands. This was a recent addition - added this year. It’s just nice to be able to iterate across categories of things, and to run filters across the iterator. It feels very modern to use. At least for me.
- String templates - They are really powerful, and even I am surprised at how some users use them in unexpected ways. It creates a lot of opportunity for dynamic storytelling (if your game is IF) in a game.
Adventuron is still very much a work in progress, a work in progress whose development has slowed down a lot recently. My passion for the project remains high and I’m motivated to reduce author pain, and to deliver a stable version of Adventuron that I myself am satisfied with.
It’s not there yet.
Well done to @bjbest60 and all the other wonderful supporters of Adventuron. I really had a feeling it was over, so it’s such a nice feeling to read the nice comments and see that people see the good in amongst the bad.