Good Bones thoughts [IntroComp]

Competitions IntroComp
1

I spent about half an hour with this: I didn’t really find anything to do and it’s not clear to me if it’s an intro that just gives a sense of the place or if there are mechanical things that I completely missed.

Fairly patchy, which is fine for an intro: some fun little touches: x cards gets “Slimy and faded. Picking through the pile it appears someone has removed all the Aces.” but then a bunch of under-implemented places (mostly the usual beginner-ish making-flavorful-descriptions-by-adding-more-nouns-which-you-then-don’t-describe and most of them could be easily fixed by redirecting them to an existing object to make it clear that they won’t give you more details).

I have no idea what I’m doing here: the intro is mysterious – a little too mysterious.

You’d assumed, based on the location and sparse details whispered to you over the phone, that you were stealing some employee files or a secret lasagna recipe (with sauce almost certainly made with gunpowder). But the restaurant, and even its basement, are now five storeys above you, and the stairs descend further still.

And… “but you’re now five storeys down” isn’t an answer to “what am I supposed to do here, if not stealing employee files or a secret lasagna recipe?”

And the space is an odd mix of house and office and… there’s a theater, and a lab, and a ridiculously opulent office (with “soft, cerulean carpet running like twin rivers from the higher platform holding the desk, down two parallel pairs of steps, to the lower area near the entrance.”). So I’m not sure if the space is intentionally surreal or… what?

But it was interesting to wander around and look at, I just have a nagging feeling that “what if I missed the whole point of this demo?”

Anyone else play this? Quick, you have probably almost 24 hours before IFComp opens! :stuck_out_tongue:

Transcript: good-bones.txt (46.8 KB)

6 Likes
2

I played it and had a similar reaction. The introduction and the response to X ME suggested all sorts of potential mystery and excitement. But the … house? secret base? facility? is pretty big (big enough that I had to start mapping) and in the absence of any further guidance about what I was meant to be doing, I ran out of motivation before covering the whole area - sounds like you got further than me.

3 Likes
3

I had much the same experience. I think I went everywhere I could. I didn’t find any keys for the locked doors, nor could I get the shimmering thing from the fountain, nor did I accomplish anything with the rotating chest. I ended up dying in the garbage chute from eating the red herring haha. Oh, and I wouldn’t have thought to enter the garbage chute at all if I hadn’t seen it in Josh’s transcript, which I checked before quitting to see if I’d missed anything.

Transcript:
GoodBones_script.txt (53.8 KB)

2 Likes
4

Oh, you got the herring? I didn’t figure that out. Nice!

Ah, I see, gotta hit the machine, of course.

2 Likes
5

I didn’t actually expect it to work based on my experience in other games, so it was a nice surprise when it did!

1 Like
6

I’ll also add that, from the perspective of wanting to give helpful feedback to the authors, it would be nice to know how far players should be able to get at this point. Is the basic exploration all there, or could we be solving some puzzles? Having a statement to this effect (e.g., “Right now it’s mostly just rooms and a few items; you’ll encounter some puzzles but they’re not currently solvable”) packaged with the game would be immensely helpful. (I’m not familiar with past iterations of IntroComp, so no idea if this has been done before or not.)

3 Likes
7

I agree about knowing the status of the project! I think I could have been more helpful if I knew where to focus. I also don’t know enough about IntroComp to know if that’s ever been a thing.

I have a transcript with a couple of notes that I’m happy to share with the authors. Even though my comments aren’t harsh, I’d prefer to pass them on directly. If you wrote this game, reply or DM and I’ll send them to you!

FWIW, I enjoyed the tone and quality of the text and would be interested in seeing more of the project.

4 Likes
8

Thank you all!

I’m one of the creators and I’m not sure how much we’re allowed to post before the competition officially ends but thank you for your feedback so far! I’ll prepare a little more of a rundown/post-mortem of the comp version of this game later this week when we’re past the official voting deadline.

7 Likes
9

Looks like there’s still time to provide feedback (and ‘vote’), but only just!
Not sure when exactly voting closes; I guess in no more than a few hours, at midnight in some USian time zone.

1 Like
10

I didn’t get further than anyone else here before resorting to a text dump with glulx-strings. There’s a lot more text! Which looks obviously spoilerific. I don’t know if it’s all reachable yet, of course.

After that, I did manage to make a few changes to the world. This helps: >SEARCH everything. For instance, you can find a key for the chest, which contains objects to surmount at least one other impediment. So maybe there’s more to be done.

3 Likes
11

OK, so…

  • There’s an aluminum key taped to the underside of the desk in the swanky office.

  • That opens the aluminum lock on the chest on the upstairs landing, giving you a couple suggestions forms to read and the grippy gloves.

  • The grippy gloves let you get the slippery coin out of the fountain downstairs

  • So now there are THREE coin-like objects that can go in the vending machine: the “Last Player marker” from the game room, the sticky coin from searching the couch in the lounge, and the slippery coin from the fountain. The crank seems to turn a quarter of the way for each of the first two, and almost all the rest of the way for the third: is there a fourth somewhere? Like the red herring in the machine is a red herring, but if you get the crank to turn all the way, it’s useful?

  • Also, amusingly, you can kill yourself by hitting the machine until it falls over on you.

  • What is the gibberish at the bottom of the Suggestion: Gloves sheet?

  • You can find an exit sign by searching around in the garbage, but you’re still stuck there AFAICT

  • The chest seems to have a hidden compartment in the bottom

  • You can turn chest and it’ll rotate 90 degrees clockwise (it starts facing north).

  • You can open the flashlight and take the batteries out, but then I get a Punyinform error trying to put them back in.

  • I’m not sure what the point of the flashlight is: you can turn it on and off but I just left it off the whole time and never had a problem with light. Do its batteries run down? Hitting z a lot suggests no. Is there something you can’t see without it?

  • If you examine the vent in the flickering hallway, then listen to it, it sounds like it’s whispering “descend”.

  • In the Untidy Bedroom’s desk drawer, you search and find a red note that you “put in your pocket” and it completely disappears.

  • In the Untidy Bedroom’s cabinet is an immaculate pipe (for smoking).

I feel like there are a few other objects I’m forgetting to mention. Plastic flowers. The two suggestions forms. The guidebook and the memo.

idk. I still got nothing. @xyzoe you want to say anything here?

1 Like
12

I offered to playtest in the future so I think I’ll hold off in case they ask. But! I definitely did not try searching, so I must have missed a lot.

1 Like
13

Hi Josh,

We didn’t want to comment on any of the discussion regarding the game until the comp was complete (which it now is).

Some of the objects are part of yet-to-be-implemented puzzles, such as the flashlight, which is part of yet another level of rooms. There are a few things which haven’t been mentioned yet so I’m assuming they haven’t been found, such as the barracks, one of which seems to be inhabited by a girl who just loves her posters, a couple of projectors which show an instructional film, and more. (Also worth noting: you were very close to getting out of the garbage room!).

A few random responses to folks:

We very much embraced the surreal. This game is being written by two very strange entities who love very strange media, and that’s reflected in the game. Our goal for the finished product is to make something that balances our love of the weird with a story that pulls you in and doesn’t let go.

Right now I’ll admit it: the narrative is not quite there yet, although, rest assured, we do have a lot more story than was implemented. We tended to focus more on world building and puzzles (not enough puzzles, and probably too spread out). One of the reasons we opted to do IntroComp as opposed to IFComp was that we really, really wanted that player feedback (and anyone who wants to send us transcripts, notes or any other feedback: we’d love to hear all of it).

I don’t feel that you missed the point at all. The point (for now) is to explore the world. It’s a piece of interactive fiction written by two new IF authors working as a team flying by the seat of their pants. We’re both grateful to everyone who took a chance on an incomplete work with a high risk for disappointment.

Excellent points, Tabitha! So yeah, because of the scope of the project there are a lot of things that are incomplete—puzzles, the story, etc. If I had given judges any guidelines it would be essentially what you said: here’s an incomplete game with a handful of working puzzles and, hopefully, some juicy world building to sink your teeth into. Any and all feedback is welcome (you can DM either of us on here).

Thank you! It took us a while to get our sea legs in Inform 6/PunyInform but hopefully we’ll get a complete version of this out as soon as possible (and if you or anyone else who has enjoyed this game so far wants to be a part of our testing team, let us know!)

This is an awesome tool and also how dare you :stuck_out_tongue: I think most of the text in there is reachable but @FeSerenity could maybe verify since they were the ones to do the final upload and I know a few things got taken out for the comp release.

5 Likes
14

Also, I heard there was a ClubFloyd playthrough. Does anyone have a transcript of that which we could check out?

15

Hmm, I’m gonna tag @pinkunz on the ClubFloyd transcript question: pretty sure he was involved with coordinating playtest transcripts at one point…

16

I think it’s worth being wary of the assumption that most players, when placed in an unfamiliar space, will automatically begin exploring the space and looking for puzzles to solve or other goals. Particularly if you have a large area accessible straight away, there’s a risk that not everyone will be keen to either start mapping the area (which is work that may or may not pay off) or wander randomly (which is deferring the problem of actually figuring out the space until later). Even giving the player a meaningless goal (in the context of the overall story, e.g. “they told you that the first step was to find the chicken”) produces an incentive (the player can enter each new area thinking “hmm, could there be a chicken here? Or there?”).

1 Like
17

Yeah, we’ve been talking about cordoning off areas until puzzles are solved so that the map expands over time. Great feedback!