Judge Wade’s Scores for Iron CHIF Draconis’s Endymion
Writing 7
Playability 6
Design 9
Inventiveness 10
Challenge Ingredient 10
(42/50)
I spent a bit over two-and-a-half hours completing Draconis’s Endymion. I made it through to part seven of its eight invisiclued help categories without using those invisiclues – though I did go to the HINT command a couple of times on the way, which correctly told me to just persist in the room I was in – but my ability to assess the game became fragile around that eighth category because I was really stuck, then still stuck after the invisiclues, then still stuck after that.
The game’s use of its “strange device” and the core mechanic of building/divining/estimating the meanings of a range of alien words is a deep one. I think the judges definitely expected depth based on Draconis’s early posts and had faith that Draconis would achieve it. I was not disappointed with the result, and of course the final product is more remarkable than the speculation. This is a puzzle game with a long form approach in the tradition of some quite hard games, one in which a complex solution model has to be constructed in the player’s head.
The programming of the guesses dictionary is excellent. It’s easy to store meanings, easy to check them, and easy to review where certain alien words have been spotted. The vocab ultimately becomes numerous enough that maybe some quality of life niceties would be good additions (different ways to order the vocab page?) but Draconis already supplied more QOL features than most of us thought woud be achievable in the time available.
What was exciting for me during play was the cycle of reviewing the vocab, reviewing guesses, trying to refine them, wondering if I was coming up with better guesses or worse ones, and, occasionally, suddenly seeing a sentence appear that looked more like English than last time I looked at it. That’s a whole meaning-constructing system the game manages to build in the player’s imagination.
For use of the Challenge Ingredient, I’m giving a 10, and in consideration of all the game’s language features, not to mention Draconis’s creation of at least part of a whole alien language, at speed, I think Inventiveness must also score a 10. The setting could potentially be viewed as a little barren or typical, but this is hard sci-fi and the game’s revelations show these aliens’ concerns are or were principally the same as ours. There are still lots of geographical or tech features peculiar to the aliens – the shiny things, the darknessess – to give enough of an original aesthetic without distracting from the play mechanics. The emphasis is in the right place.
The writing didn’t drop to being unclear at any point but some expressions edged fuzzy or redundant. An example was the phrase repeatedly given in response to making progress in the game: “Nothing immediately/obvious happens,” followed by exciting contrary-sounding information about what just happened. A base of clarity is important to establish in a game with as many details as this one, and it was achieved, but it was tougher for Draconis to poke in unexpected moments of awe or surprise around it. The protagonist did upon a few occasions express their surprise at what they’d found and what was happening, but the prose didn’t really convey the excitement of it, the awe. In context, there was a definite writing challenge here. The clarity of the constant tech messages versus an inner life for the protagonist (or not). Perhaps I’d say what happened is that the inner life was raised, but that’s why it’s then missed. It might have needed subtle tending to throughout the game rather than the occasional long paragraph to remind us of it. This kind of thing can take ages to solve satisfactorily, or to execute across a whole game if the solution is subtle. I feel this is a major concern in my WIP and so it’s something I’m very conscious of it at the moment. I’ve given a 7 for Writing.
I found Playabiity really tough to score. A game which had been very playable, as well as very challenging, suddenly became close to impossible for me. I felt there were a lot of bows to be drawn long in rapid succession in the approach to the last solutions, and I ended up losing my way. Now, Draconis did design and supply the invisiclues, and they were of significant length and they dealt with a lot of material. I consider them to be part of the game, in line with the recently re-expressed view by @Kamineko :
But the invisiclues were unable to address any of the problems I encountered when I first turned to them. So I think, as I often speculated could turn out to be the case during the battle, that it was hard for Draconis to anticipate the sites or nature of difficulty for this particular game without any outside testing. And I know that I personally didn’t think about, in advance of this pilot, how I’d deal with a really difficult game, because I probably doubted anyone would be able to make a legitimate example of one in the time.
As it stands, I think Endymion will cause unreasonable-leaning play trouble for the majority of players beyond the compass of its designed challenge, which is already high. Saying that, audience commentary has also indicated that its challenge factor overlaps sufficiently with the particular challenges posed by extra-IF constructed languages (“conlang”) that to be skilled in those may greatly reduce that challenge, in the same way that maths puzzles in IF can sometimes be non-puzzles for the mathy. Am I saying I think a lot of people are skilled in conlang? Absolutely not!
Were there to be a revised version of Endymion, I could envisage the difficulty elements and/or hints being finetuned and the game really soaring in the genre of sturdy puzzle games. Also, some of the difficulty might have been mitigated by players just having more time than the contest offers. (Being a judge, I had one day to score Endymion. Tasters have a bit longer.) I’m sure Endymion is exactly the kind of game where if you hit a wall, a break from the game could prime you to have the solution drop into your head next time, or relax your perspective sufficiently that you’d come up with an idea you’ve been overlooking.
I can’t dimiss either end of my play experience, the solid playability and challenge at the head, versus my troubles at the tail, so I give a 6 for Playability, noting also that most advanced tech features demanded by the complexity of this game are already in place. There were some disambiguation issues which became annoying because of the length of the game; the blue and black levers, the coloured orbs versus other coloured doors and consoles. My understanding is that the reminder that “shiny things” remained in a certain room wasn’t really a bug – it indicated there was vocab in that room I hadn’t recorded guesses for. But often I deliberately didn’t record a guess for something, so it took me a long time to realise I hadn’t missed something else in such rooms. I did play entirely by typing, and also appreciated QOL features which I assume are part of Dialog, such as the ability to go to things and places just by typing their name.
For Design, a 9. I don’t feel it’s fair for me to take any more away for the unanticipatable difficulty factor at the design level. There are numerous puzzles here, and they build up their interactions in quite an abstract way within a system. The multiplication of meaning is high. It is, again, incredible that Draconis was able to assemble all this within the time. Spiritually, I view Endymion as a long game, just a short to mid-length one. The time and other restrictions of the battle have turned out to pose unanticipated (again) challenges for Draconis to make a game of this type.
There’s no doubt the game has showcased Dialog. Draconis drew on compact and advanced programming features of the language, helpfully expanded upon for us by @improvmonster , to be able to execute this game in five days. Draconis added a hyperlink control layer, apparently easily. And Dialog packed or supported features most players don’t even know about, and that this game didn’t have time to teach them (that I saw), like entering one word to “teleport” to rooms and things. There was even an ASCII automap which I didn’t use.
-Wade