I normally put my postmortem on my blog, but I wanted to post my thoughts here first.
I apologize for the length, but I had a lot of thoughts! Fair warning, there are a lot of spoilers below. I’ll try to hide the most egregious ones.
Ok, here we go!
GENESIS
Unlike my other entries, Hildy’s path from initial idea to final product was pretty convoluted. A few years ago I had the idea for a game with a female enchantress that took place in the Zork/Enchanter universe. I coded some of the prologue and was working out the the mid-game section when I realized I had a problem: the game was uninspired. It was a treasure hunt in a dungeon without any real heart. I wasn’t enjoying writing it as I had my other entries and that lack of enthusiasm was clearly showing up in the story and gameplay which were pretty bland.
I knew I needed a fresh start, so I abandoned my original idea and decided to work on a science fiction story instead. I set this one in our own world as my previous entries had been, but I kept the idea of a young woman as the player character. I worked on this game for a long time, completing the prologue and a great deal of the mid-game section. Unlike my earlier attempt, I was enjoying the writing and coding a great deal. I had what I felt was a really good idea and I was having a great time bringing it to life. But then two things happened, one of which was under my control and one of which was beyond it.
First, some of my ideas started to get away from me. In particular there were some science fiction doodads in the game that were necessary to make everything work, but I had overreached a bit and they required more and more coding to keep the game from flying apart on me. I realized I was going to have to scale them back or rework them in a different way and I wasn’t sure how to do either.
Second, a divisive political discussion erupted in the United States that coincidentally made it look as if my game were a commentary on that particular topic. (The issue doesn’t matter as it has since left the public consciousness, but it wasn’t the pandemic.) I was frustrated by this because I do not write games with a political agenda. Trinity and A Mind Forever Voyaging are examples of fantastic games deliberately written with a political agenda in mind. I don’t mind playing games like that, but I am not interested in writing them. At least not now. I want to write escapist fun. And in the atmosphere in our country at the time, my game was going to be seen as a commentary on a political debate that I had no interest in actually commenting on.
As I was stuck on a coding problem and on a story problem, I decided to step back and take a break. After a while, I found myself thinking more and more about my original idea of a game in the Enchanter universe, but now I was starting to come up with some ideas that I was really excited about. I had an idea for an interesting player character and setting that I didn’t have before. I even took some ideas from my science fiction game that I liked and was able to work them into this new project. I got to work on fleshing out the game and pretty soon I was completely engrossed in the development of what eventually became Hildy. It had taken a few years, but I was finally working on a game that I knew would work.
The PC
The first decision I made when starting my third entry was to make the player character a specific person with a specific personality. In Diddlebucker!, I had deliberately chosen to make the PC a true AFGNCAAP (Ageless, Faceless, Gender Neutral, Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person). You were free to imagine yourself as anybody you wanted. You even got to name yourself, so if you wanted to be Harrison Ford or Taylor Swift you could do so.
In For the Moon Never Beams, I created a PC that was a bit more specific: you were a high school student taking your girlfriend to prom. I gave a few hints as to your personality that were revealed through your conversations with your date, but they were still pretty vague.
In Hildy, I wanted to see just how specific I could make the player character, going as far from the AFGNCAAP concept as possible and I had a few ideas that were central to who this character was going to be:
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I wanted my PC to be a young woman this time.
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I wanted her to be smart.
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I wanted the player to like her and to root for her.
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I wanted to avoid the Mary Sue archetype.
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I did not want the player to be able to exploit her.
I’m going to discuss items 1 through 4 first and then we’ll get to item number 5.
Most of Hildy’s personality comes out in the prologue through her interactions with her godfather Frobar and her roommate Mabellabeth. We see that she is smart, talented and creative. She has invented several magical items that conveniently bypass some of the more tedious aspects of earlier IF games. She also has come up with a unique solution to her most recent test requiring her to subdue a cave troll (by teleporting herself into its belly, exploding it from the inside-out). So, we also see that she’s not afraid to get herself dirty.
But she isn’t perfect either. She’s lonely because she doesn’t make friends easily. The master enchanters are mostly dismissive of her and her abilities. Her roommate despises her, seeing her as some kind of freak and even her godfather is exasperated with her oddness. She is a bit emotional and perhaps a bit too eager to throw in the towel. She also suffers from chiroptophobia (which I admit was a late addition to her character).
One thing I was very careful to do was to make no specific in-game indication regarding Hildy’s physical appearance. It’s true that her silhouette is on the game cover, but I tried to make the background of that image suggest that what we are seeing is figurative, rather than literal and I also tried to make the image as vague as possible regarding her ethnicity. Her skin tone is completely unknown for example, and even the exact texture and style of her hair is not quite possible to determine with certainty from that image. This was by design.
The only in-game indication of her appearance comes when she examines her roommate. There is a hint there that, at least in Hildy’s eyes, Mabellabeth is the more physically attractive of the two. I also made sure not to describe what Mabellabeth’s physical attributes actually are, just that Hildy might feel that she pales in comparison. But even there we are dealing with Hildy’s perception, which may or may not reflect reality.
I wanted Hildy to have a specific personality and age, but beyond the fact that she is at least athletic enough to be proficient at swinging on a whip, her other specific physical attributes are up to the player to decide.
Ok, so let’s discuss item 5: I did not want the player to be able to exploit her.
Having Hildy take a bath was always a part of the game. By starting Hildy off covered in troll guts and needing to clean herself up, the player is forced to take care of one of her basic needs.
Bathing and showering is one of the most mundane, yet personal tasks that we do for ourselves on a regular basis. My hope was that when Hildy is bathing, she is more real. We can identify with her more. She may have magical powers, but she’s still a human being that enjoys the pleasure of a warm bath. She gets dirty and smelly like anybody else and enjoys the sensation of getting clean.
But in addition to being a mundane experience, a bath is also a personal and vulnerable experience. Hildy might be an enchantress, but she’s just as vulnerable in a bathtub as the rest of us are. All of this was designed to help the player to bond with a specific character who might be very different from their own personality. We can, I hope, identify with her more.
However, allowing the player this kind of personal interaction with the PC did not mean I was going to allow the player to exploit Hildy. Yes she gets undressed for her bath, but she is not going to walk around the game world naked. Nor will she purposefully undress anywhere outside of the bath or her dorm room. And in the one puzzle where she becomes accidentally naked outside of those two areas, the player must solve her modesty problem before continuing with the puzzle. This forces the player to respect Hildy’s personality and, I hope, makes her more likeable and endearing to the player.
The Puzzles
All of my IFComp entries have been puzzle-fests because that’s what I like to play, so that’s the kind of game I like to create. I hope I have gotten better at creating puzzles that are fair and entertaining for the player. Naturally, some players are going to find some puzzles underclued and unfair while others find them engaging and perfectly clued. It’s a tough balance to strike.
I try to create puzzles that I would enjoy solving, use my beta testers to help me clue them better and then implement a robust in-game hint system to give incremental help to those who need it. That has been my modus operandi since Diddlebucker! and I think it mostly works.
One main goal I had for the puzzles in Hildy was for some items/spells to have multiple uses. This was something I didn’t do as much in my previous games. I also wanted some puzzles to have multiple solutions. The latter was more difficult, but while I didn’t accomplish these goals for every puzzle and every item, I did accomplish it for the following:
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The plumdo spell can be used to solve the bat puzzle, the second-level gap puzzle and is used in the final boss fight at the end.
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The rella spell is used to restore both the doll-sized nightshirt (if necessary) and the linen scroll.
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The whip is used to solve the bridge-gap puzzle and in the fight with the ghoul.
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The dysmu potion is used to solve the Little Flatheads puzzle and to survive long enough in the theater to dispense with the ghouls.
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The aometh spell is used in both the theater and in the final boss fight at the end.
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The makeup compact is used to solve the unusual machine puzzle and in the final boss fight at the end.
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The embrow spell is used to solve both the Waldenscrolls puzzle and the Little Flatheads puzzle.
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The shisa potion can be used to read the manuscript and the mirror.
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The noogle spell is used to get dressed after Hildy’s bath and after she wakes up in the epilogue.
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The bat puzzle can be solved by casting plumdo west or by running west, the latter suggested by the narrator as an in-game hint.
11. The upper level gap puzzle can be solved by casting plumdo north/south or by casting plumdo on the pile.
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Turning yourself into Zava Dreden can be accomplished by using his image in the fresco or in the portrait at the mall entrance.
The Villain
I don’t know where the name Zava Dreden came from. It just sort of came to me, but I absolutely know where I got the idea for his appearance.
Vampires are a tricky villain in modern culture. They are so overexposed in our culture that they have become little more than a cliché. They certainly do not inspire terror in most people anymore. Still, I liked the idea of incorporating a vampire into a fantasy story. But I did not want him to be a cartoon. I wanted him to be menacing. So I went back to one of the earliest movie depictions of a vampire: Count Orlock from the 1922 silent film Nosferatu. This is the image of a vampire that I had in my head for Dreden and one that served the story much better than a Lugosi vampire or (perish the thought!) an Edward Cullen vampire would have done.
So the descriptions of Dreden’s images in the mall, his appearance at the end game and even his voice were all geared towards generating the image of a sickening perverse predator in the mind of the player.
I had one player object to my use of a mirror as a weapon against Dreden. In my story, vampires hate mirrors not because they have no reflection, but because the mirror reminds them of what they’ve become and the depraved depths to which they have sunk to gain immortality. This was artistic license on my part, but one player viewed it as a mistake. My defense is that this is a vampire from another world and things work differently in my story. Besides, if I was going to use garlic and a holy symbol as weapons against him, I had to incorporate a mirror which was already needed for another puzzle in some way. But it didn’t make sense for the vampire to be wounded by not seeing himself, so I went the opposite route.
The Epilogue
Honestly, this was a bit tricky for me. My previous two IFComp entries had no almost moral whatsoever. They were pretty much straight adventures. I mean, I guess the moral in For the Moon Never Beams is “abandoning your girlfriend when she’s in trouble is not nice” but that’s pretty shallow!
But I found myself stuck with a moral to Hildy. At the start of the story she is dealing with the fact that she feels like an outcast and is considering dropping out of the apprenticeship. I had to address that somehow in the epilogue and it required a morally acceptable (to me anyway) response.
For example, I adamantly refused to compose a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer ending where everyone decided they loved Hildy because she proved herself useful. I mean, I love that movie and watch it pretty much every year as a nostalgic guilty pleasure, but I can admit that the morality behind the ending is a bit icky.
And I also refused to let anyone change their mind about Hildy. Mabellabeth is a rotten person and her opinion of Hildy flows from that. Hildy’s actions won’t change Mabellabeth or her opinion.
So, I had to thread a needle here where Hildy would more clearly see her own value (quite high) while also more clearly seeing the value she should place on what most other people think of her (quite low). I also made sure that the beginning text of the game did not explicitly state what Belboz thought of Hildy. Frobar is concerned about that, but we don’t actually know what Belboz thinks. And Frobar’s (actually quite high) opinion of Hildy hasn’t changed either, though perhaps his approach to her has changed a bit.
And I wanted to get all of that across in just a few lines, while also giving Hildy the happy ending she deserves in the form of a new friend without implying that what Hildy needed was a new romantic partner. She makes a friend at the end of the game that was always there, they just hadn’t crossed paths yet. And it’s a friendship she’d have missed out on had she left the Guild. Whether or not he becomes a romantic interest as well is totally up to the player.
Final Thoughts
I delighted in writing Hildy and I am thrilled that so many players had a good time playing it. The game received a number of very flattering reviews, but what I cherished the most were those that indicated that they had fun playing. Creating a fun experience for the player has always been my goal and I am delighted that Hildy did that for people.
And I am blown away by the fact that my game appeared in the top ten! Watching that get revealed with my wife and children while standing in line at an amusement park is something I’m never going to forget!
I want to thank all of the IFComp organizers one more time and all of my beta testers, players and reviewers. And of course, a final thank you goes to all of the wonderful, selfless posters at intfiction.org who answered my many questions over the years.
Thanks for a great comp!