Our cameras turn backstage, where @lpsmith has cornered @FLACRABBIT by the snack table, peppering them with questions to which @FLACRABBIT is gamely answering…
Q: You said that initially, IF seemed most compelling as a medium in which to write, not necessarily play. What about the form made you think, “I want to do that”?
FR: It’s the thrill of creating something that takes on life of its own, as if your game code merely opened a window into a world that existed all along. That’s why the scenes I’m most proud of are ones based on freeform systems with complicated states. It’s magical to see emergent behaviors, strategies, and interactions appearing out of nowhere, even though I wrote all the rules.
Q: You cite Emily Short as the author who has most influenced you to date, because she “really tries to fulfill the promise of the command prompt - allowing players to take a variety of actions and have the situation react and evolve logically, instead of constraining their actions to a narrow set of game-advancing commands.” What approach to writing and design do you take that has assisted you the most when you attempt to fulfil that same promise?
FR: No author can implement infinite commands, only a set of them, and the desire to make a huge set of actions available to the player is countered by the necessity of making each one have a real and perceivable impact on the game’s state. So, to me, the “promise of the command prompt” is more about some or all of the commands not being disclosed to the player, rather than the total number of actions implemented. Overcoming an obstacle becomes a two-stage process: the player must think not only of the ways in which the world state must be changed, but also of some actions that can change it.
When I’m designing gameplay like that, I break the problem down by asking myself specific questions and then writing down the answers. For the scene as a whole: “what actions can the player/PC take,” “what state does the game need to track,” and “how does each action affect each part of the state.” For each action: “how important is it for the player to know about this action,” “how will the player guess that this action exists (because of genre conventions, real-life knowledge, and/or in-game hinting),” and “how will the results of this action be made clear to the player.”
As a side note, it’s interesting to me that most recent, successful parser games have moved away from that type of gameplay (i.e. with undisclosed commands). Games that still try to do so wholeheartedly, like Alex Crossley’s Imperial Throne from last IFComp, tend to provoke irritation and puzzlement. Still, I don’t think that parser authors should give up on it altogether!
Q: The “rule-based mechanical system covered by layers of hand-written descriptions” in Savoir-Faire also intrigued you. Have you started at or drifted towards a similar design in any of your own works?
FR: Yes, I have used that structure for every combat scene I have written. It helps keep the code organized (by cleanly splitting it into world logic and description sections), and it also helps me quickly iterate on the mechanics: I put in standardized placeholder responses at first, and only write detailed/adaptive ones once I’m confident that the skeleton of the scene is fun to play by itself.
Q: This will be your first published game that was not written with Inform 7. How would you compare and contrast Adventuron to Inform 7, based on your experience so far?
FR: Adventuron is much more primitive. Its parser is fundamentally based on pattern matching. Everything seems to be a string, except for integers and booleans. There are subroutines, but not real functions with arguments and return values. On the plus side, it has much stronger guarantees about multimedia support, and you can do some fun tricks with styling and colors.
As with any low-level language, the sky is the limit for what you can build in Adventuron, but you’ll have to lay down every brick above the first floor yourself. No wonder many Adventuron authors choose to focus on making the best one-story building they can.
Q: You’ve also worked in “traditional” video game development. What role(s) have you taken on there, and what kind of crossover to IF have you found?
FR: The skill I’ve developed in the areas of programming, art, and music are directly transferrable to IF. As for how video game design influences my thinking about IF design, I’ll give an example.
One famous lecture that really influenced me is “The Art of Screenshake” by Jan Willem Nijman. His action game-specific examples aren’t really relevant to IF; however, IF authors can make use of the principles behind them, particularly providing redundant feedback to the player via multiple channels, and what Nijman calls “permanence” - making the player’s actions have some permanent impact on the game world whenever possible, even if it’s just cosmetic. For instance:
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When the player >SEARCHes a pile of clothes, the game could start describing them as “clothes scattered about on the floor” instead of a pile.
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Often, NPCs that move around the map simply “arrive from the [direction]” and then “go [the opposite of that direction]” one turn later. To give more feedback, the game could describe sounds the NPC is making, even when it’s not in the same room. That way, the player could determine roughly where the NPC is, what it’s doing or interacting with, and which way it’s going.
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Many modern games, to avoid unwinnable states, make sure puzzle situations alwaysreturn to a baseline “start” state. A typical example is an NPC returning to a single location after unsuccessfully searching for you. Without changing the mechanics, one could add permanence by making the NPC increasingly frustrated and grumpy every time it looks for you, with some unique comments.
I’ve seen many other gamedev talks, papers, and blog posts that have advice that can be applied to IF with some creativity.
Q: Both of your published works make significant use of music, and including Ataraxia, there are now three works with soundtracks designed by you. What do you find compelling about combining music and gameplay?
FR: I find that it’s very difficult to convey a mood or emotion via plain text without explicitly stating it outright, e.g. “You feel hopeless.” (Better authors can do so, of course, but I’m not one of them.) Music is a natural solution; it vividly sets the tone, while allowing the author to concentrate on expressing more immediate aspects of the situation within the text.
Q: Let’s say, hypothetically, that I’m one of those people who usually listens to the first 15 seconds of music in an IF game, then turns it off. Sell me on leaving it on for the whole game.
FR: I love this question so much that instead of just “selling” you on leaving it on, I will prove, with logic, that you MUST leave it on.
Premise 1. Games may provide content to their players via multiple channels, such as gameplay, story, line-by-line writing, artwork, and music.
Premise 2. The value that a player derives from playing a game is caused by experiencing its content. I don’t think this is controversial.
By Premise 1 and Premise 2, we have:
Lemma 1. The value that a player derives from playing a game may come from any or all of the channels by which it delivers its content.
Corollary of Lemma 1. A player who does not experience one or more of the aforementioned channels may not obtain the value imparted by the content of those channels.
Premise 3. A player seeking entertainment should attempt to derive all the value possible from a game. Similarly, a reviewer should consider all the value that may be derived from playing the game when judging how valuable it is, in the interest of fairness. (Of course, reviewers actually unable to experience the content delivered via a channel [i.e. by being deaf] are exempted.)
By Premise 3 and the corollary of Lemma 1 we derive our conclusion:
Conclusion. Leave the music on!
Q. E. D.
(However, if the music is really unpleasant, formal logic takes a back seat to preserving your sanity and/or eardrums.)
Q: What’s your process for composing a soundtrack?
FR: If I’m scoring an existing work, I take a very analytical approach during the planning phase. In general, I start with one or two tracks that I feel form the emotional or thematic core of the game. For instance, with Ataraxia, I wrote the track for arriving at the island first.
Once I have the core of the soundtrack, I pick out motifs (the classical music term for a short, identifiable melodic phrase) from it and decide what each one represents. I like putting motifs from one track into others; it gives the soundtrack a sense of cohesion, and also simplifies my job by letting me steal from myself instead of having to invent totally new melodies and harmonies for every track.
When I’m composing for one of my own projects, my process is a little more haphazard, as I write some music in the same order that I write parts of the game. That means that I often end up revising or replacing earlier tracks as the whole of the soundtrack comes into focus.
Q: Both of your published games have featured extensive combat scenes, which, like soundtracks, are relatively rare in IF. What makes a combat scene worthwhile in your book?
FR: “Worthwhile” is an interesting word choice here. I would give a different answer depending on whether you mean “worthwhile to play” or “worthwhile to write.”
I think humans derive a deep instinctive thrill from overcoming difficulties by being smart. In IF, where authors don’t have the easy out of posing repeated reflex challenges, winning a combat scene has to depend on being smart instead of brute force. (I’m ignoring some edge cases, like a JRPG-style game where fights could be made trivial by grinding.) For that reason, I think players who are looking for entertainment, and who are willing to think about strategy and tactics, will find it to be worth their time.
I’d also say that developing an action scene is worthwhile for an author (as in, it’s an effective use of your development time) because it viscerally engages the player in your world, and it lets you showcase NPCs’ personalities and your game’s setting in a very naturalistic way.
Q: In my mind, combat scenes and music both share a difficulty in making them work for IF: pacing. Do you try to pull the player to your own pacing, try to meet them at their own pacing, or do something else? How effective do you think you’ve been?
FR: In a systems-driven action scene, the pacing will be decided mostly by the mechanics you implement, not by the player, nor by the author. I personally would fix only serious and recurring problems with it, and even then only in ways that are justifiable within the game world. If there’s always an annoyingly long “mop-up” phase at the end of a fight, for instance, you could make the remaining enemies surrender or flee once a certain number of them are neutralized.
I think this laissez-faire approach is relatively effective, based solely on the IFComp transcripts I’ve received; very few people quit in the middle of a battle (although some quit before one).
Q: What are the particular challenges that you see in implementing action scenes effectively, and how have you overcome them?
FR: Designing a mechanical system that supports some interesting tactics isn’t easy, but it’s well-trodden ground in game design. By far the bigger challenge in IF is creating a natural and engaging flow of text to describe the results of actions and the ongoing situation.
The obvious problem is that if a message is repeated word-for-word, or paragraph breaks start revealing the underlying code blocks, the illusion of reading a book or interacting with a seamless world is broken. Even once that’s fixed, the author is faced with the even greater problem of economically conveying everything relevant to the player without causing information overload or decision paralysis.
It would be hubris to say that I’ve overcome these challenges. As for how I’ve attempted to overcome them, I recommend you check out my postmortems for A Matter of Heist Urgency and (especially) A Smörgåsbord of Pain. In the latter I go into some detail about the custom systems handling text output. I think these ideas are relevant for both parser and choice games.
Q: What’s Commissioner Mumblebumble really saying in the opening scene of A Matter of Heist Urgency?
FR: If I could understand him, I would have given the translations in-game! It was only out of necessity that I left it in the original Mumblese.
Q: What do you see as the highest skills in the craft of IF?
FR: To me, the very highest skill in the craft of IF is the ability to create a world, not just a game.
In pursuit of this elusive and subjective goal, an author has to master several subordinate skills. I personally value the ability to create a compelling aesthetic and mood (which involves knowing how to realize archetypes and cliches, so that you can recombine and alter them with intention) and the ability to design turn-by-turn or click-by-click gameplay that’s inherently engaging.
