Game Producer! by Jason Bergman (Inform)
The first game in the Comp I played through to completion, though only with a little aid from the attached walkthrough (sorry, but USE OBJECT ON OBJECT was never a command I’d have thought to try). The guide that came with the game informed me there were three different difficulty settings, as well as different choices available if I chose to be male or female at the start. A nice choice but as I’d seen (I think) pretty much everything on my first place through, one play was all I did.
As the title might suggest, you play the part of a game producer. I got to work on a first person shooter called “Regicide”, though apparently there are different games available (the game changes at random each time you play), and it was my job to ensure that it got finished, tested properly for bugs and got a decent review from the press. As I finished with a score of 93.3% and was told my game would sell an estimated 2,000,000 copies, I think I did pretty well. Of course, I cheated by looking at the walkthrough but, as I said before, the only part I really needed help with was the guess-the-verb USE OBJECT ON OBJECT. Other than that, it was plain sailing.
Most of the scenery is implemented nicely, with the unfortunate exception of the Demo Room where the game is tested out. I amused myself by trying to examine various pieces of scenery but none of them seemed to be there as the game wouldn’t acknowledge a single one of them. Was this deliberate? I can’t help but wonder if a location called Demo Room which doesn’t contain any examinable items is some kind of in joke.
For the most part, this is a nice and straightforward game. A good number of the puzzles are easy to figure out and just require a little thought. I wasn’t too sure about one of them – involving pouring something into a fellow worker’s coffee – because it seemed a tad unlikely that he wouldn’t have noticed me doing it seeing as he was sitting right there at the time, but no one ever said the game was realistic.
All in all, a fairly decent game. It took about an hour and a quarter from start to finish and even though it was a timed game and needed to be completed in a certain number of moves, I didn’t find this bothered me one bit. In fact, the only aspect of “Game Producer!” that I disliked was the introduction which didn’t seem to make any sense at the time and only later on, when I’d read the game guide, did I realise what was going on.
6 out of 10