Creating interactive fiction is a slow, deliberate process, with plenty of time for reflection, testing, and polishing. Unless you’re working against a tight deadline, of course, but then it’s your own fault . Yeah? Well, not if you have the guts to enter IronChIF! Making an entire interactive fiction game in just a few days, starting from zero, and in a competitive setting with judgement at the end… what a feat of daring! What a heroic thing to do! There is a sense in which the final product is only the icing on the cake, while the creative process and the show around it are the cake itself. The challenger and the chef are both winners, and so are all us who got to participate.
I would love to stop there, but as a judge, I unfortunately can’t. I am honour-bound to judge the meals themselves; the meals, and, as I understand it, nothing but the meals. Before doing that, however, I want to say something about the process of making those meals. Specifically, I want to say that I loved, loved the way Lucian decided to be open about everything. Here he is in his own words:
My head is falling off as I nod in agreement. I love this thinking, I love this stance. It’s a somewhat unfortunate fact about the IF community that the major competitions don’t allow you to do this. You can’t be radically open about your creative process without disqualifying yourself from IFComp and SpringThing. Seeing a work take shape, in such a small period of time to boot, and with access to every part of the creative process – even brainstorm sessions and browser tabs – was fascinating and made my life as a judge so much fun. While chef Ryan gave us only a few carefully prepared hints, challenger Lucian gave us everything. If ‘process’ had been a category in the Rubric, it would have been 10 points for the challenger! I want to see more of this!
(Although surely not everyone will want to work this way. I suspect our chef wouldn’t like to. Ryan gets much of his enjoyment from springing a carefully crafted surprise on the diners; I mentally see him cutting open the giant pie and then birds fly out! Not much fun if you first take your guests to the bird shop and tell them how you’ll put them into the pie.)
On, then, to the games themselves. Despite the shared ingredient, which was even used in more or less the same way – opening or unrolling a scroll generates an effect, closing it turns the effect off again – the games could hardly have been more different. Where the challenger gives us a modestly sized, story-heavy game centred on characters and decisions, the chef gives us an astoundingly large puzzle game, with layers upon layers of puzzles, revealing more and more complexity as one goes on. This makes comparing the games on merits almost impossible. To continue the dining metaphor, think of it this way. One evening, you are given a well-prepared fish curry, and the cook sits down with you at the table and explains meaning that the recipe has in their family, and how they always made it for their dying mother. The next evening, you are given a 30-course formal coronation meal with mystery ingredients that you have to guess, and you end up taking the final 18 courses home in a cart full of doggy bags because you couldn’t get through them all.
If somebody looks at my numerical scores, it may seem as if I greatly preferred the chef’s game to the challenger’s. But that’s mostly an artefact of the rubric I had to fill in. If we had done XYZZY Awards categories here, Ryan would have won best puzzles, best individual puzzle, and best writing (about which more in a moment), while Lucian would have gone home with best PC, best NPC, and best Story. That looks much more balanced, doesn’t it? In the end, the chef got higher scores from me because he managed to produce a meal that was more polished – it’s a meal where I can’t really think of any improvements that would still leave it the same meal. That is of course where we see the chef’s unparalleled amount of experience asserting itself. (Unparalleled? It could be. I’m not sure anyone else has been making as many play-worthy Inform 7 games!) When added to the seemingly superhuman energy he has, he was nigh impossible to beat.
Now, I should make some critical remarks about the games. They are based on a full play-through of course correction and on two hours of playing Van der Nagel , with some additional insights gleaned from discussion between the judges. This means that I have seen only part of the chef’s game; I’ve seen people claim that they spent as much as 10 hours on it, although a lot of that time was no doubt spent in unsuccessful puzzle solving. Below are spoilers.
In course correction , we are playing a bird woman who is about to carry out a daring heist. I got stuck on the first puzzle. Why? I suspect because the solution (a) turned out not to require any of the scrolls, and (b) did require exploration of possibilities in a scenario that I thought I needed to avoid, namely, alerting the guards to my presence. These were just my own preconceptions working against me, and other players seem to have had no trouble. Once I got over this initial hiccup, the rest of the game was easy – I could play it through without encountering any bumps at all.
What is most impressive about course correction is the deep worldbuilding. It’s not just that we are given a lot of details; Lucian has been quite smart about setting the whole thing up, especially when it comes to time. Time! Someone should write a Rosebush essay about that. But here, observe how the backstory of course correction plays out on three different time scales. There is the immediate history of our heist, which plays out over a few days. This is our second attempt at the heist, and as we play the game we learn much about the first attempt. Lucian is being really smart here. Take the net among the trees. It is there because we raided from below, and thus the setting is tied to the PC and her short-term history, and a random item becomes meaningful to us. Then, there is the medium-scale history that we see in the relationships between the PCs and the NPCs. This is also important, because it explain the aims of the characters and why they treat each other as they do. Finally, there is a long-scale history of this society and the place of the scrolls in it, which is essential for the overall meaning of our actions and the decisions that we make.
That’s a lot of stuff going on in what is, after all, quite a short game. At times I felt that the game needed more room to breathe – more things to do, perhaps, so that the information could be spaced out a bit better, in smaller doses. But that’s a minor quibble. The depth of Lucian’s worldbuilding is simply impressive.
I also liked the fact that our characters turn out to have complex motivations. I would have liked to know them a bit better. Lucian says in the final interview that he will add nothing to the game, but I want him to break that promise. This game screams for more ! Give me a scene where I play the queen. She has to order her guards to either capture or kill this brazen falcon thief; perhaps she says capture while her advisers say kill; why does she do that; why is she protecting the criminal? The queen gazes on the child while her memories resurface. The alarms start outside. The decision must be made now. Such a scene would give us the time to come to know the queen and her relation to Constance, making the final scene all the more powerful. At least that was a thought that struck me; there are of course millions of ways to give a bit more screen time to these characters, who clearly deserve it . This while complaint only makes sense because Lucian did such a good job with these characters. I want more of them!
My only more serious complaint about course correction is that it needs more polish. Sometimes it’s small things: the code that describes things opening doesn’t generate correct messages for plural-named things like ‘heavy doors’, so you get ‘the heavy doors goes open.’ If there are many things opening in the location, the output becomes quite chaotic – one would have liked, perhaps, a list-based summary rather than a separate line for every item. A more substantial problem is that the game doesn’t correctly react to the change of PC that happens halfway through. As the buzzard, you still get messages like ‘the mist you summoned dissipates,’ which confused me no end. Did this character also summon mist? Does it have something to do with the scroll I’m carrying? I spent some time trying to summon mist, but that just generated a parser confusion where it thought I was trying to summon the scroll. In the end, I think it is just a case of an every turn rule that doesn’t check who the player character is. And the same thing happens with certain room descriptions, which clearly assume that the PC is still Constance.
Lucian, I learned from the final interview, was to a large extent learning Inform 7 while making course correction . I think it’s amazing that he nevertheless managed to make a game of this size and quality; but I also think the relative lack of experience shows in precisely these situations. Dealing with plural-named objects, ensuring that different PCs see objects differently, ensuring that the mist gets parser priority over the scroll when summoning – that’s the kind of polish that our chef, with dozens of Inform 7 games under his belt, will apply without thinking. (“Does the player mean summoning the mist: it is very likely.” You add that the moment you make the mist.) This experience is a massive advantage for the chef, and basically is the entire reason why I ended up choosing his game as the winner!
All in all, I think course correction is a very good game; I hope Lucian will give us a post-comp version with some added polish; and I hope beyond hope, indeed I insist that I am allowed to hope, that he will ignore what he said in the interview and give us a few more scenes! Though I also understand his reasons for not wanting to do so, and certainly can respect them.
Which brings us to The Van der Nagel Papyrus. And it brings us to the following question: is Ryan Veeder human, or is he a game-making machine? How can anyone win against a chef that can make a game this large, this complex, and this polished, in a few days? Of course, it comes with certain sacrifices. Who is the PC of the game? Never mind, just a faceless adventure person. What’s the plot? Eh, forget about it, solve some puzzles. NPCs? I guess there’s a raccoon, but I don’t know if you can actually do anything with it. But what is there, is great. The writing is crisp, utilitarian, but perfect for its purpose. It knows exactly what it wants to do, and it does it. There’s a lot to explore in the game, and every room is unique enough that you don’t have trouble remembering it. The scroll is fantastic, suddenly doubling the amount of locations and items, while also introducing a very fine central puzzle mechanic. And when I realised that the alternate names of the rooms not only formed a message, but also formed a message in another way, my mind was blown. Especially when that second message told me that the game was far larger and far more complex than I had hitherto suspected.
I really enjoyed my first two hours, and then I had to stop playing. In a short extra bout the next day, I got the second papyrus, but only with help of other judges. I am very unsure that I would have ever found it without them – it required a way of thinking that I’m not used to, and perhaps do not enjoy very much. In particular, it requires one to be willing to seek patterns everywhere and try out all kinds of things, hoping for success. I suppose that’s not my preferred type of puzzle. I like chess puzzles, which can be difficult and elegant, but have very explicit rules. I like IF puzzles where you need to creatively use the mechanics you have been taught (Savoir Faire, Forsaken Denizen) or where the logic of the puzzles follows the logic of the story (The Bat, The Den). I don’t really like puzzles where the creator doesn’t tell you the rules… and I gather that as you progress, The Van der Nagel Papyrus becomes more and more like that. But it doesn’t really matter here. First of all, I did not get to the point where this became the case. And second – well, who cares about my subjective tastes? If I let taste influence my judgement, what’s the point of judging?!