Let’s hear what our Premier Challenger, C. E. J. PACIAN, has to say…
Q: You listed Galatea as an inspiration for Snowblind Aces, your first published work. Which parts of Galatea most inspired you, which did you use as a model, and from which did you intentionally deviate?
CEJP: To me, Galatea is a masterpiece beyond constraints of genre or format. The way that it puts you in the role of a character who doubts the sentience of Galatea, which naturally makes her indisposed to tolerate being treated like a game NPC… That’s something that works at multiple levels and which the game explores consummately.
With that in mind, I’m reluctant to say that Galatea inspired my silly fantasy romance much beyond “it’s a famous one-on-one conversation game”.
Being a bit braver, I guess you could say it inspired the way I wanted to handle making a romance game. Specifically how I dealt with the “vending machine” problem of characters who fall in love with the player character when the player performs the right sequence of actions. In real life, you can’t make someone fall for you, and a lot of people are messed up in unfortunate ways over that fact. So I approached Snowblind Aces with the premise that the NPC is already in love with the PC, and the player only gets to decide things like: does he reciprocate? If he reciprocates, does he commit? If he doesn’t reciprocate, does he reject her cleanly or string her along?
You could see this as a poor copy of the way Galatea conveys its central character’s uncompromising interiority.
Q: Is it fair to say that Gun Mute was your breakout hit? What were you aiming for when you crafted it? Were you surprised when it was nominated for no fewer than ten XYZZY Awards? [editor’s note: That means that it was nominated for every XYZZY award in 2008.]
CEJP: All I wanted to do with Gun Mute was try and evoke the feeling I got as a kid reading a magazine article about Wild Guns, a SNES game I wouldn’t get a chance to play for many years. Just this cartoonish marriage of cowboys and robots and strange environments.
Although I’m proud of the “Best Puzzles” XYZZY it won, I’ve always suspected the large number of nominations had more to do with votes from people outside the normal IF community, so I feel a bit uneasy about it at best…
Q: Your best-known game is probably Superluminal Vagrant Twin, which currently holds 4th place in the IFDB Top 100 list. What was the inspiration for that work, and what do you recall of the design process? How did you come up with the title?
CEJP: I’m a big fan of all sorts of space operas, from The Expanse [a series by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, under the pen name James S. A. Corey] to Alistair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series, so I always wanted to make a game where the player was flying a spaceship around. It was a concept I kept coming back to for years, but I could never develop in it a way that I liked. Perhaps the player was flying around the ruins of a huge space battle, or between quarantined space stations during a plague, or “up” and “down” the gravity well between different planets and moons…
My attempt just before the one that stuck was inspired by Tsutomu Nihei’s Knights of Sidonia: the player was a shuttle pilot on a generation ship whose post-human inhabitants had just invented faster-than-light travel. Your task would be to jump to different worlds by name and figure out what had happened to the rest of humanity, but I didn’t really have a good sense of where the story would go from there.
And then this idea came out of nowhere: what if I kept the jumping mechanic, but the player was just some loser trying to pay off a huge debt. There’d be a simple buy/sell mechanic, passengers, and a large number of very simply described worlds. The rest of the game felt inevitable from that starting point.
“Superluminal Vagrant Twin” was just a description of the player character that returned zero Google search results at the time. 
Q: Your first eight published games were all written in TADS 3, then you switched to Inform 7 as your primary language. What motivated your choice of TADS when starting out, and what motivated the switch to Inform 7?
CEJP: I love TADS 3 as a language, especially its brevity. Most of what you write when making a game in TADS 3 is text that the game will output. But the support for what you could do with the game files was lacking. You can play them online with Parchment these days, but for a long time that wasn’t an option!
At some point I read an article by some indie game developers who talked about what a lovely language C# is to work in, and how pleasant it was to make games in whatever the proprietary Xbox library was at the time… And how that left them up the proverbial creek without a paddle when Microsoft refused to list their game on the Xbox store.
The moral they wanted to convey was that an appealing development environment is worth nothing if people can’t play your game. At that point I decided that I wanted to release to the Z-machine, if possible, or Glulx.
Q: Despite the fact that you wrote what are currently your two highest-ranked games using it, you’ve stated that you found Inform 7 “almost physically painful to code in”. What are the pain points that stand out most, and how does Dialog compare?
CEJP: There’s a famous criticism of PHP where the author asserts that a good programming language should be predictable, consistent, concise, reliable and debuggable. For the sake of argument, let’s give Inform 7 those last two. But the first three? The syntax being the English language makes it being concise impossible. And to be predictable and consistent would require much, much more care to be taken with the phrasing of the language and its library – if it’s even possible when, again, the syntax is the English language.
For me, working in Inform 7 is a constant ordeal of knowing that I can do something with the language, remembering the syntax for other, similar things, and having no idea how to apply that knowledge to what I want to do because there is no logical pathway between them and an infinite set of English phrases that could describe what I want to do.
Now, Dialog is weird. I was actually taught Prolog at university, but I don’t think it really stuck, and I don’t think I necessarily grasp Dialog much better than Inform 7. But, hey, look at some Dialog code: it’s extremely concise. Even more so than TADS 3. And, within its weird but small set of rules, it’s also consistent and predictable. It does all those things, and it outputs very efficiently to the Z-machine, the most accessible format we have for parser games. That’s me sold on it.
Q: You’ve twice released games written in Twine. How did you like it? Do you expect to use Twine again?
CEJP: So Twine manages to have both an intuitive development environment and an accessible release format. I actually use it a lot more than it seems, since it’s also a great tool for planning. I definitely want to make more Twine games, even if most of my ideas so far end up being a better fit for the parser.
Q: Of all your published games, which one(s) are you most proud of having created? Which one(s) do you wish would get more attention?
CEJP: I can look at any one of my games and feel pride over what I achieved with it, followed by a laundry list of things I wish I’d done better. But Weird City Interloper is approachable and distinctive and imaginative, so it’s probably the one I’m happiest with.
Attention is a double-edged sword: I want to share the weird little things I make, but I also want to hide in a cave and never be perceived. I feel like I’ve lost the handle for how to share my games with people on the modern internet, but I also feel like the modern internet is less of a place where I want my things to be shared widely anyway… But basically anything I made since Superluminal Vagrant Twin.
Q: What do you see as the main advantage of limited parser games compared to “normal” parser games? What are the most important considerations when designing in that style?
CEJP: Advantages: easier to make and easier to play. I think the main consideration isn’t that different from any other parser game in that you should always have a straightforward answer for “what does the player do?” Even if you aren’t limiting the verbs, I think you would still want the player to feel that they are learning how to consistently interact with your game and overcome its challenges.
Q: Weird City Interloper is a particularly interesting experiment of yours in that all interaction takes the form of conversation. This approach works surprisingly well; the player gets a sense of space and motion despite the lack of spatially-oriented verbs. What prompted you to try this format, and what did you learn from the attempt?
CEJP: A question I am always asking myself with each parser game is “But why is it a parser game?” Am I just playing it safe and sticking to what I know when it would actually be better off in Twine or Ren’Py or custom JavaScript? Sometimes my answer is something like the implied worlds in Superluminal Vagrant Twin, or the appeal of converting a different genre to parser like Gun Mute or Forsaken Denizen. Another thing I come back to is this sense that typing into the parser is like talking to the game, and so having it talk back to you in-character feels natural.
At the same time, this is kind of the only gimmick that Weird City Interloper has, and I do wish there was a bit more of a sense of either exploration or branching storytelling. My current work-in-progress is very inspired by Interloper’s interaction mechanics, but approaching it from a bit of a different angle… We’ll see how that goes, I guess.
Q: You said that “Øyvind Thorsby’s Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies taught me that you can have action in a parser game”. Which are your favorite action scenes in interactive fiction, and what makes them stand out?
CEJP: Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies and the games of the IF Arcade have plenty of great moments in them. I’ll single out J. Robinson Wheeler’s Centipede from the IF Arcade, just because it sells its action by being very wordy, which is the opposite of how I’d do it. More recently, Robert Patten’s Beat Witch is full of action scenes out of a slightly twisted Hollywood blockbuster. And SV Linwood’s Cut the Sky, my favourite parser game of the last few years, is more or less a series of stylish sword fights.
Q: What do you see as the highest skills in the craft of IF?
CEJP: There’s no real answer to that, since I think any number of different skills can be applied in the right way to make a good IF game. Just speaking for myself, though, brevity is the skill I value the most in the games I play. If you want me to read a lot of text in between commands or links, it had better be really well written.
