for those who haven’t played the game, it’s a post-post-mortem because the game protagonist is mostly dead.
“frankenfingers” was, originally, supposed to be an ectocomp entry. my games are typically long “classic” parser games with lots of puzzles and a large map (think infocom instead of twine) so they fit better in other arenas. but, at the last second, i decided to switch to ifcomp because the game is almost entirely in verse and i was curious what kind of reaction that would get. i didn’t know if it would work or not but thought at least it would be interesting.
why verse? i usually try to do something different or unique in each of my games. while poetry is not uncommon in choice games and visual novels, it’s exceedingly rare in a straight parser game. in hindsight, there’s probably a reason for that.
i’m not a poet and have never written anything longer than maybe a limerick in a birthday card. so this was definitely a challenge. some of the verse is hackneyed but there are a few passages that i think are pretty good and am proud of.
some challenges i didn’t anticipate:
describing geography in verse is a PAIN. there are shockingly few perfect rhymes for “north”, “south”, east", and “west” (and the ordinal directions are even worse because of the same reason and because they have no real accent). plus, i quickly used up the rhymes for the bread-and-butter objects that pop up over and over again in a parser game (“wall”, “table”, “door”, “path”).
making changes is a PAIN. usually, moving an exit from the “north” to the “south” is trivial. but in this case, making a small change in a room or NPC usually means a full do-over of the verse description. after a few early attempts, i ended up writing a full working version of the game without ANY room descriptions at all (it was basically an early scott adams game). then, once the game was finally “locked down”, i went back and added in the verse descriptions.
all parser games have “filler” locations. that is, rooms that hold the map together like hallways, corridors, paths, etc. there’s not much to say about these locations in prose much less in verse. these were the hardest locations to “versify” because sometimes a hall is just a hall.
the most difficult technical aspect of the game was:
dealing with the fact that the player is a disembodied hand. with a “normal” protagonist, the entire space is available. that is, if the player walks into an office and there’s a book on a shelf, PUT BOOK ON DESK makes perfect sense since everything in the room is “reachable”. but when the protagonist is a hand, it doesn’t really make sense to take the book without first getting up on the bookshelf (i realize i’m picking at the threads of verisimilitude here while at the same time dealing with a sentient disembodied hand). early on in development, the player had to GET ON SHELF first, then GET OFF SHELF and GET ON DESK in order to transfer the book. this, obviously, would get extremely tiresome.
so when i wasn’t cranking out questionable verse, i was putting together a very complicated recursive system of implicit movements that would “bounce” the player around the room as needed. to see this in action, go to the kitchen. there’s an apple on a table there as well as a stove and an oven. the command PUT APPLE ON STOVE will trigger:
(first getting on the table)
Taken.
(first getting off the table)
(first geting on the stove)
Dropped.
i’m not a great coder and this took FOREVER. i’m amazed it works as well as it does.
what would i tell someone thinking of writing a parser game in verse?
don’t! run, RUN! do a twine game instead!
no, no…
but, a consistent complaint from players was that it was difficult to “scan” the room descriptions in order to find the room exits. in hindsight, this makes total sense and i should have thought of this and broken these out. it sure would have made the verse easier to write not having to deal with as much rhyming geography.
and, while maybe someone else with actual poetic gifts could pull it off, i think doing this in verse can really only be done in a fairly fantastical or abstract setting. i don’t think “planetfall” would work in verse, for instance.
so there you go, my odd little contribution to the IF landscape. it was fun but i don’t see myself trying something like it again anytime soon.