The Jam where you only give one choice to the player!
The Single Choice Jam is a short unranked jam where you have only one restriction:
you can give players only one choice or action in the whole game!
The rest… is up to you!
Constraints and Rules:
There should only be One Choice in the entire entry - only one page in the game may have multiple options to choose from.
Other links between passages are allowed, as long as there is only one link on each page (with the exception of the page that has the One Choice).
Non-story passages like Title Pages and Side Menu (settings, codex, etc…) are not restricted by this rule.
Parser-like games are allowed only one room with more than one action (like Aisle). Any other room can only have one action.
Movement (NSEW), inspections (X/LOOK AT), etc… all count as one action; HELP and WALKTHROUGH do not.
The Jam is open to any program/medium, as long as the piece can be considered Interactive Fiction (i.e. the game is interactive, and its focus is on the text).
The Jam is open to any language.
The Jam is open to NSFW content, as long as you indicate it in your submission.
Spam or hateful content will not be accepted.
Join the jam by clicking here:
We also have a discord server to discuss with other participants or share your progress: Neo-Interactives
To be clear, I’m assuming i can i have a bunch of rooms with exits and things in them that can be looked at, examined etc (but not got). And this all counts as one action (because i can’t actually do anything).
Then I can have one special room where you can do things. There can be many things to do, but the player can only choose to do one of them?
if there are people in the rooms does a conversation count as a choice/doing something or is it learning something (like examine)?
You can have as many rooms as you want in the entry, but only one can allow the player to do more than one action (which the player can only choose one of those). Any other room you have, the player is given only one possible action.
Aside from WALKTHROUGH/HELP, all other verb (or verb+noun combo) count as an action. So Look/Examine/etc… is an action. So are directional ones (NSEW).
Yup. You can Talk to the person, but that’s your action for the room.
OK, but that would mean you can’t look at something or say something without ending the game, and it would mean you couldn’t get to the room with multiple actions?
The Multi Action Room doesn’t have to lead to an ending, just the player can’t have more choice in actions after that. The other rooms can’t have more than one possible action to do. So like:
Room 1: -> can only go north
Room 2: -> can only talk to someone (pushing the player to a different room)
Room 3: -> player has the choice to interact with an object, or talk to someone, or move somewhere else...
You can have as many rooms as you want in the entry
Except for one, all rooms can only have one set action the player can do.
In that one other room, you give the player more than one possible action to choose from before the game ends (à-la-Aisle) or the player is moved to another single-action room.
NSWE+, Look/Examine, Take… all these verbs count as one action.
If the player is in a One-Action Room, and the preset action is not a directional one (NSWE), the prompted text after the action can tell the player they moved to another room after the action ended (like they talked to someone and at the end of the conversation, that someone threw them out of the room).
Does that make more sense?
It’s easier to explain for choice-based entries…
I think what confused me was from a design standpoint.
Most parserheads I know of wouldn’t actually implement the room in this case. It exists simply by reference in the text.
Like, the outside of the grocery store in Aisle doesn’t actually exist. No one implemented that as a room.
Technically, you wouldn’t even need to implement exits from your main room, as the game ends as soon as you “pass through” that exit, but this only occurs in descriptive text and doesn’t require a world model to exist after that point.
Like, even a room with dozens of rooms heading off in every direction like a spoke, would only have one room under the hood, so to speak, even if dozens are described.
I’m imagining a parser game that’s like a museum tour or something, where pressing ENTER takes you to the next room, or you can type a command…but once you’ve done that one time, you can only press ENTER from then on. So you have a lot of possible rooms and a lot of possible objects and such, but you can only ever take one action, and after that you’re back on rails.
Okay, @Draconis immediately finds an exception to the point I made above. Although, I would counter that this could still be designed, behind the scenes, as a single room that is simply prompting new “decription” text at you until you choose an action other than ENTER.
>x chalice or >get chalice or >x table would all have valid responses and would function. The catch is you would only get to choose one for each play session.
To discover what different actions may do, you’d have to restart the game and choose something different.
It may not be your cup of tea, which is fine, but there are a number of one-move parser games written in the same way, some tongue-in-cheek, others less so.
I really enjoyed the game Gallery Gal from a few years back. You’re a superhero who’s only power is that exactly once in your life you can turn into an art museum, permanently and irrevocably:
Every option in the game is “continue” or “become an art gallery”.
It sounds like you might be able to make something like this for the comp if the game was timed to automatically display passages one at a time, with the player being able to hit the “art gallery” button whenever they wanted.
The jam concept is cool. I am still a little confused and I woke up needing to make ASCII art.
If we view the sequence of game actions as a graph, are you requiring it:
where how long the A path is before the choice point is allowed to vary between plays, but there is at most one place during a given play.
(2) to be as in (1), but the length of A must be the same for all game plays.
(3) to be as in (2) but you also allow the branches to link back to some point in the A path so you have loops but there is only one choice point in the game and its choices stay the same.
I personally absolutely hate timed text and can think of maybe 2 or 3 games where it is even a slightly positive feature. But I only suggest here to shoehorn something into the comp that otherwise wouldn’t work.
As I interpret it, option 1 seems to be what we’re talking about here. The length of “on-the-rails” content both before and after the choice seems up to the author, as long as the game ends after the choice and before another opportunity for player input is offered.
