In most science fiction, you colonise space; in Endymion, space colonises you.
Well, I certainly hope neither Draconis or Pacian forgot an obvious element in their plans…
RE: TADS 3—for default Things (i.e. portable objects), you’d have to either use a specialDesc (the equivalent of an appearance predicate; initSpecialDesc is the equivalent of an ‘is pristine’) or set isListed to nil to prevent listing. Fixtures (i.e. non-portable objects) aren’t listed by default.
Or TADS 3 MultiLocs.
You aren’t going to do a Z-machine release of the game, then? Better break out the C64 emulators…
I am finding that part of the joy of this experiment is the additional insight into the development process. As such, since beta-testing can be a critical part of development, I personally think it would be valuable to also be able to see any beta testing that the chefs manage to finagle in their very brief development window.
I consider this fast-walk IF. If you’ve ever written a game in 4 hours for Ectocomp, anything else is luxurious. Even I could do something acceptable in 4-5 days if I didn’t do anything else for that time. And I’d sure as hell leave a day for testing, except that testing is not allowed. You will not see me being a contestant, because of this but also because I’m an Inform person and Ryan Veeder is the Inform ChIF and I don’t need to make life that easy for Ryan.
It’s so, so bad. The room is crammed with cardboard boxes that are moving a little with little skittering noises coming from them and I know that there are BIG spiders in them but that I have to pack them anyway. From a Freudian standpoint it’s downright boring-- I hate moving.
That’s exactly why I said that, tbh. Given that most timed IF stuff runs on timescales where you can’t have any outside testing anyway, a slightly longer competition having a “no testers” rule doesn’t seem particularly cruel?
Clearly you should explore this by writing a puzzle game where you have to pack the boxes so as to fit the most stuff with the minimum additional spiders.
Surely it ought to be taramasalata? That’s at least fish based.
Thanks for the artwork @Melisande . I’d also had an inspirational pang to maybe do something like this, but being a judge I decided it was easier for me not to
“Only just above average when it comes to looks”—surprised there’s no on the spot smiting here…
So you aren’t doing a z-machine version? I guess offline play really will require a C64 emulator…
Is it really? I could buy there being mathematical notions conveyed more easily in notation than words, which would make such notation more expressive than language for its domain.
I’d say that counts as a language, so surely that means that—assuming you think it’s less expressive than other languages—some languages can be more expressive than others.
Beautiful. The microbe-hedgehog alien looks adorable.
Breaking my rules and dipping in one more time to say: there’ll definitely be an offline version, but not in Z-machine format. I can make one if needed, but I worry that the play experience will be much less pleasant without links.
I’ll respond to any more direct mentions after the show!
In the spirit of spreading knowledge about specific platforms and craft in general, competing chefs are invited and encouraged to make their source code available, but it is not a requirement.
The two dishes will be packaged (along with the shared materials provided by Pacian and Draconis) and uploaded to the IF Archive once the episode is over.
Is not all critical judgement so? If art has obtained some non-arbitrary foundations, nobody’s told me…
Well you know what they say about putting all your eggs in one basket.
Capsule Review: Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider (Spoilers Inside)
Playtime: ~1h
Most of that playtime was the result of getting stumped by a puzzle that I missed the initial clue for. No hints used.
The way in which puzzle solutions followed merely from directing NPC attention was clever, and the way in which more heavily narrative scenes were integrated with mechanic was skilful.
The story was no mere throwaway framework for puzzles however. I found the adventurer’s search for treasure vs spider’s search for love dynamic—when it gets revealed—fascinating, and the red string pun was amusing. Also, what a way to create a hankering for a sequel with that hook at the end there—I’m anticipating future instalments of the mysterious spider extraordinaire now.
Capsule Review: Endymion (Spoilers Inside)
Playtime: 1h 30~
Unlike ATSS, I did have to resort to hints here—vocabulary puzzles don’t seem to gel with me, apparently. Or perhaps it would have worked if I’d been willing to tough it out—I’ll never know, unfortunately. I feel like a bit of an idiot for not realising the hoop would open the pouch, but otherwise didn’t feel I’d missed anything obvious.
The puzzles prior to when I resorted to hints—wandering through the six rooms wondering what my options were, wrongly expecting that the coil could be used to remove the darkness from the hold and the central area to open up the game—weren’t particularly difficult to solve but didn’t give me a particularly accurate description of the language per the hints (mine were davazo as wheel, zedre as bridge, lazha as push, al as turn…).
The story we get is thin enough, but what we do get is tantalising—the ship name Endymion is inherited, the protagonist has clearly been scrambling to make ends meet for some time—and honestly feels like quite enough for the game. I suppose some scenes of the rescue proper would be nice, but leaving it as a mystery is a valid artistic choice.
So judges are sharing their 1-10 ratings in each category, plus their overall winner. But the rest of the audience can vote too, and we don’t have to follow what the judges are doing? How does our voting system work?
A voting poll will be opened on the episode thread at noon UTC on Sunday November 16. Audience members will choose one or the other dish as their favorite.
Voting will be open until noon UTC Tuesday November 18, at which point the winner will be determined. If the audience vote is a tie, then the judges’ verdict (which will be posted at the start of voting) will act as tiebreaker.
Welp. For my taste, Pacian wins this one hands-down.
There just wasn’t enough story around Draconis’s language puzzle for me, and it felt slightly rushed and overscoped. I’ve played enough little conlang puzzle games over the years that I’m more interested in how they’re executed and less impressed by their mere existence. This one (unsurprisingly) avoided the my-first-conlang mistakes. But you’re still constrained to wanting to keep the sentence structure simple enough that people have some hope of understanding it. And you probably want to keep your verbs simple and concrete for the same reason. But then it’s hard to avoid the problem of your sentences feeling a little Dick Jane & Spot, especially in a game made in 5 days. If you don’t take some steps to separate it from your story it can limit the nuance you can express? “Boy Kicks Ball! News at 11!”
So Endymion felt like I spent most of my time trying to guess the (somewhat basic) verb, and then my reward was a door opening or… another verb to guess. I got bored and didn’t finish it. Also the gradual hints didn’t end up telling you how to actually do the thing, and the whole-vocabulary was divided by part-of-speech which felt like it spoiled some things unnecessarily, so once I resorted to that I didn’t feel much like going on.
Pacian, on the other hand, leans into the absurdity of the small-vocabulary-limited-sentence-structure (OK, no sentence structure in this case), with an arrogant smug unreliable narrator/protagonist. It feels like it’s inviting you to laugh at the “well, if the game actually described this thing it wouldn’t be a puzzle, would it?” aspect of the situation. I liked that the player character was a mix of annoyingly “it’s so obvious what this is I don’t need to say it or think about it” and also hopelessly wrong about what the thing is or how humans use it. So we have something to laugh at and not just be annoyed by. And when we put something together we get rewarded either with a fun scene advancing the story, or a new set of objects. And in either case we get to speculate and feel clever for guessing what’s going to happen (or which words for thingy/doodad are going to come up next), or amused by how it went in an unpredictably different direction.
Bravo. I think the only thing I got hung up on for too long was being convinced that the brass box was the next step when it wasn’t.
I might as well weigh in on the opposite side of the scales, then!
I feel like I was spoiled by playing Endymion first because all the way through Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider I was wishing that I could type THINGY MEANS KEY and then have the game keep track of that for me. @Pacian 's writing and world-building did absolutely sterling work in keeping me invested enough to push through the game (which is probably no surprise to anybody who’s familiar with their work) but the core gameplay loop wasn’t one that I found rewarding. While the protagonist’s perspective on the world was often hilarious, I couldn’t get over their refusal to give a basic physical description of any of the objects, meaning that too often I was just trying random things on each other until the stranger picked up on something. If I’d taken paper notes on which noises from the device corresponded to which items in the room, I could maybe have cut down the time I spent doing this, but like I said, I’d already played Endymion which shoulders that burden for you. The protagonist/narrator of Endymion, by contrast, feels like they’re genuinely trying to do their best to make sense of what they’ve come across given the limited information available. I think it was pitched too hard, probably as a result of the lack of testers, but I enjoyed the experience of putting in tentative translations and then updating them as new information came to light (“if I change my translation of o from in-this-direction to just in, do these sentences make more or less sense?”), and the game provided the support to make that interesting rather than burdensome.
