Limited parser game where fire, ice, and lightning are the only three verbs to interact with the environment?
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Back in the Storynexus days, one of Failbetter’s philosophies they encouraged people to consider was that failure should be as interesting or even more interesting than success. A corollary was that players love to see actual results from their actions and choices.
An example is a player choosing to keep committing crimes despite being warned not to. Getting thrown in jail is not a game-over and they have to claw their way back into the good graces of the authorities; otherwise they now are pursued by extra enemies in the guise of bounty hunters, towns may refuse to let them in or transact with them, so they have to go underground to sell their loot which they’d never have access to if they remain law-abiding.
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I’m thinking now that for the game I’m currently working on, it might make sense to go with a choice-based approach overall, but with an occasionally-appearing parser, just for situations where I want the player to feel like they’re being forced to “break the rules” when the official options they’re presented with are flawed? So for example, by a window there could be a choice for “look out window” but also a text entry box that accepts “SMASH WINDOW”?
Is this a thing that’s been tried?
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The “Hybrid Choices” extension for Inform 7 allows the author to switch between parser and numbered choices that can fully interact and be affected by the world-model. I used it in Fair to simplify conversations and complicated interactions that would be fraught with guess-the-verb otherwise.
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My impression is that these hybrid systems usually go the other way to what I’m thinking of (i.e. introducing choice elements into a primarily parser-based game, rather than the other way around)?
You can do a game entirely in choice with Hybrid Choices if you want, with occasional dips into the world-model when necessary.
I will say ideally it’s better to use Hybrid Choices as mostly-parser with forays into choice (Steph Cherrywell used it in several games just for dialogue trees) but there are very few systems that have any sort of robust world-model parser underlying a choice system. (Except maybe Gruescript? That’s a unique choice/two-word parser hybrid system that might also be something you’d want to look into.)
You could definitely go with a choice system like Twine that occasionally allows text-input for obscure choices, but in that case it’s less of a parser and more like “enter a keyword for a bonus off-the-board command.” You almost need to make sure the player knows exactly what to type (and whether capitalized, camel case…etc…) This isn’t parsing, but keyword-list matching.
I did that in robotsexpartymurder where conversation with androids included all the standard preset conversation gambit choices, and then a text-entry line which allowed “admin” commands to affect how they behave. The player had to learn what these commands were, and were tutorialized like “Make sure you say it loudly and clearly: ABRACADABRA instead of Abracadabra or abracadabra or AbraCadabra…” so my matching list only would match and accept commands in all-caps.
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This is more-or-less what I was thinking of, except using a more forgiving regex rather than accepting only a single keyword (and I would still try to anticipate and head off other likely inputs, like you would do in Inform with a string of "instead of…"s). I think it makes sense to still call that “parsing” even without an inform-like world model?
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Yeah, the main reason there are more “parser systems that let you switch into choice mode” than “choice systems that let you switch into parser mode” is that a full parser requires a fairly elaborate and standardized world model, and Twine/Ink/ChoiceScript/etc authors are used to designing their own world models to represent exactly what’s important in a given work (and no more).
What I did for Gosling is building it as a full parser game, and then putting the choices on top of that, so the parser world model is still primary. I think if you wanted to do the opposite, the regex matching you’ve suggested would probably be the best bet.
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>X VASE
Now that you come to examine the elegant vase containing the key, you can’t quite put your finger on why, but it too looks somehow like a nail.
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Yeah! And they all work as alternate solutions to all puzzles, but with huge differences in the descriptions of the results.
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