Good day, everyone.
IntroComp entries have been released, and voting is now open through August 15th at midnight Eastern.
The IntroComp page has been updated at http://allthingsjacq.com/introcomp to reflect this.
Thank you in advance for voting and providing useful feedback to authors!
Are the download links working? I just had a PM from someone who tried downloading my game and just got screens of code instead. I tried and got the same thing myself.
What happened to the play online links? Only one showing now is Werewolves Rising.
There was a msg sent to the authors saying that, for the time being, the links are down due to tech probs. I’m sure they are working on smoothing out the wrinkles.
(edit to add- David, I tried your game and it’s working fine for me! Good luck!) [emote]:)[/emote]
However, the whole zip is, apparently, available at the IFArchive, UNPROCESSED section. [emote]:)[/emote]
As an author, am I allowed to respond now to any of the points raised about my game or do I need to wait till the comp is over?
If not, thanks for the review.
(I don’t think the below comment is a spoiler for Werewolves Rising, whose review it quotes, but better safe than sorry. It at best tangentially related to the game and deals with racism and horrible violence.)
[spoiler]
This is, I think, not exactly accurate as it pertains to the actual history of lynching in the United States. Lynchings were extra-judicial but often planned in advance, though not as far as a week, and were often something of a social occasion. Ken Gonzales-Day in “Lynching in the West” says:
This was particularly true in the Jim Crow South:
And the very notion of a vigilance committee belies the hot-blooded spontaneous nature of the idea of lynching, although a week may be a long lead time.
The word may or may not be apt for a vaguely medieval setting, depending on how much the author minds idiomatic anachronisms.[/spoiler]
Fishing… well see, one of the testers tried to take the fishing poles, which were after all scenery. But a fishing pole should logically be portable. And then one thing kind of led to another.
You’re welcome to discuss via PM, though.
[spoiler]
Yeah, I did tone this line down a bit when I thought about spectacle lynchings. Evidently not enough - ‘immediate’ isn’t the word, to be sure. I do think that ‘in cold blood’, which is to say premeditated, doesn’t exclude ‘heated’: there’s a kind of heat which fuels people to organise duels, pass knee-jerk laws, and start land wars in Asia, all activities requiring plenty of premeditation even when conducted in angry haste. But yeah, if the victim knows about it a week in advance, it’s an awfully strange lynching.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]
Hm, you’re probably right about the victim, unless he’s already locked up (as in the Omaha Court House lynching, which developed over a couple days – the victim there couldn’t flee because he was locked up, and in this case law enforcement was actually trying to prevent it). I had envisioned the discussion as taking place among the “townspeople” team, which seems more like it would correspond to the actions of a vigilance committee who knows who’s going to get lynched when.[/spoiler]
Hi, folks.
The main reason I’m posting is this: I have made the most minor of minor changes to Werewolves Rising. There was some confusion over the fact that the author’s name was Jimmy Ronald on the voting form and website, but Roger Ronald in the text of the game. The author’s full name is Roger James Ronald, so he goes by both, and didn’t realize he’d registered under a different name than what was in his game. It’s now listed as Jimmy Ronald in the game, on the website, and in the voting form.
Now that I’m here and I’ve read the other posts, I have a couple of other things to say:
As said in a bunch of places, I don’t really frequent this forum, so thanks to those of you who’ve already answered some questions, such as the fact that authors cannot publicly discuss their games (but can privately).
The play online links were pulled permanently, because I decided to include them on a whim when all the games turned out to either be ChoiceScript, Z-Code, or Glulx. But the authors didn’t know I was going to do this, and the authors were not asked to release their games for the web. I just slapped the Inform games into the Parchment or Quixe site and called it good, only to later notice that hint menus in one game weren’t displaying correctly, text highlighting wasn’t working in another, etc. Next year I may consider asking (but not requiring) authors to release for web, but this is something I’ll really have to weigh, because I want the playing field to be as level as possible for content, regardless of platform, and not all platforms are yet suitable for web. Possibly it’s something I’ll work out after the Intent to Enter deadline has passed, but before the entries themselves are actually due (basically, once I know which platforms people are planning to use for their entries).
Thanks again to everyone who is downloading, playing, voting, and reviewing.
Are any reviews up anywhere? I haven’t seen any except maga’s in this thread. Just wondering. [emote]:P[/emote]
I’ve been Googling ‘introcomp 2013 reviews’ and the like for several days but I haven’t found any yet. Then again, Google doesn’t find Maga’s reviews either so there could well be oodles of them out there.
Yeah, I’ve been watching Planet IF to no avail. Oh well.
If you guys find any, you’ll link them here, please?
NEVAR!!!111!!1! [emote];)[/emote]
Are we allowed to post reviews here before the voting is over? I mean Maga did, but he is special. [emote]:)[/emote]
There are no restrictions on posting reviews. The only discussion restrictions are on authors. (But it’s polite to use spoiler tags, etc.)
Do I want to play more of:
Akkoteaque - YES - This felt like the beginning of a game the size of an Infocom epic. It seems there’s lots more planned. My main critiques: I understand the concept of having useful keywords highlighted in blue, but with the game this thoroughly implemented I would much rather have decided for myself what I wanted to check out. When everything is blue, I feel I must lawnmower through what the author has decided to point out to me. The keyword highlighting is good, but I’d like a way to turn it off. It should be off be default and activated if the player feels they need some help.
Also the game dumps you out on the dock where you have like fifty things to do - you’re expected to get on the boat to start the story but I have my possessions to examine and three characters to talk to and a feisty pelican with a puzzle and all of the highlighted keywords in the location and constant rain messages AND backstory to check out AND a fishing pole you can mess with or not…I was a bit overloaded. I’d suggest perhaps giving the PC one scene to herself prior to the banner drop so I can discover who she is and her attitudes (say she has to pack her suitcase for the trip) before dumping me into a ridiculously detailed location where everyone is standing around waiting for me. The pelican got impatient and solved his puzzle for me before I even knew there was one.
Best Laid Plans - MAYBE - This felt like a proof of concept for the author’s mechanic that a game would be built around. Moving scenery could be a really neat idea, but if I can’t pick up objects normally, than this is basically replacing my inventory. And I can only carry one thing. I don’t know how much of a game could be sustained if all I can do is move windows and doors around one at a time. The puzzle becomes “where do I drop this so I can pick up something else?” Neat concept though.
The Example of the Chicken Sexer - NO - This feels like a complete one-joke speed-if game. I’m not sure it needs to be fostered by the IntroComp to be completed. Unless that whole section was a prologue to a bigger game, but there didn’t seem to be any more hooks to hang more game on though. What was there was good, but seemed to be the complete experience. Unless he’s going to have to deal with the consequences in the afterlife of all the male chickens he sent to their doom.
First - NO - Implementation problems. Specific objects pointed out but had no description. I couldn’t get out of the seatbelt. The game didn’t like RELEASE SEATBELT, UNFASTEN SEATBELT, UNHOOK SEATBELT, OPEN SEATBELT - the last one just told me I was crazy. Why am I crazy for wanting to escape my inverted wreck of a car? Unless it’s going to explain why I don’t want to get out. The hook of starting in a wrecked car made me want to figure out what happened, but not if the game is just going to reply “You can’t do that” to everything I try.
The Vanishing Conjurer - YES? - This had a good amount of world set up. I wasn’t railroaded, but I wasn’t directed either. I felt like I was wandering through an area in Disneyworld where animatronics were bolted in place to say their three programmed lines to me and wait for the keyword to let me move on like a walk-through funhouse. The magic angle could be interesting, but … I don’t know. The writing lacks something…it feels like the PC should be invested in this case more specifically somehow. It feels very staid and formulaic vanilla IF with little tension or momentum; Here’s your exposition scene, here’s your quick search of a house, here’s the mansion with people who sit in place until you say one of their keywords. I can’t believe I couldn’t ask a houseful of magicians about MAGIC and get their philosophies at least. That said, this was at least a fairly good proof of concept that the author knows what they are doing, even if the game isn’t firing on all cylinders yet.
Werewolves Rising - NO - CYOA with sparse description, no atmosphere, and choices every three lines that barely feel like they have any effect on the world. CYOA needs to lean toward better writing since the interaction is streamlined. If the plot is going to tumble forward like this in choppity-choppity fashion, you need writing the calibre of FALLEN LONDON to make it worthwhile. I clicked through this game in about 8 minutes, during which I sold clothes at a market, was attacked by a werewolf, considered that I was a werewolf, witnessed my mother hanged in front of me, then acquired a potential love interest. I was told how I felt at every turn and not given any space to put myself into the shoes of the character by inference. None of it had any real story-weight.
What happened in 1984 - NO - A potentially interesting concept, but this was just a couple of rooms with nothing to really do.