Josh Grams's Spring Thing 2023 thoughts

Competitions Spring Thing
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Ah, given that, you did well. It all worked; it was mostly inconsistent levels of how much you had to do manually: you automatically pick up the key (I think?) vs. having to do every step by hand in the shop, even some that most games elide.

I wouldn’t go so far as offensive, I don’t think? It just… given that there were places where the room descriptions or events weren’t responsive to the game state (like the meadow, where the cat scratches at the gap under the door even if it’s open), it stood out that there were seven jokes of the form

“He’s ugly, he’s so ugly that…”

…he went to a haunted house and came out with an application form.

…when his mother went into labour, his father went into shock.

…when he was born the nurse slapped herself.

…when he goes in a shopping store they switch off the cameras.

…he makes blind kids cry.

…he gives Freddy Krugger nightmares.

…he has a job modelling for death threats.

Personally I’d be leery of teaching that sort of humor to a kid unless I was sure they were mature enough to understand how easily it slips over the line into being mean-spirited, and when it’s ok to do it (tell them to the person’s face; when you’re sure you have the relationship/trust and they enjoy that kind of funning; when there’s no one around who might take your behavior as a model, etc.). You can teach that fairly young, of course. I don’t know your kids.

And there are plenty of kids’ shows that are built around this kind of humor, so not everyone feels that way. It mostly stood out by being nearly the only place with variations, when some other places felt like they could have used them for more mechanical reasons.

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Thanks Josh - the only other ‘variation’ in the game really is the ‘describers’ of certain scenery objects (the meadow, the village, the path etc.) : If you replay the game you may notice that they may subtly change with each new play through. That wasn’t intended to ‘enhance’ the story - My son was writing a game in his I.T. class at school (in python!) and just wondered if the mechanics to change ‘adjective’ descriptions, and then refer to the described object only by that adjective and not by any of the others previously seen for that object, was possible. I therefore ‘tried’ to implement it in this game, but not sure that fully worked either (especially the ‘sun’ as pointed out by another reviewer :slight_smile: )

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Red Door, Yellow Door

I’m not sure what to think of this. I liked the writing. I’m not sure if there’s supposed to be more to it than wandering through a dream sequence and then either sensibly cutting it short or doing all the things that you’ve been warned not to do. The game seems to tell you that there’s supposed to be one more ending, and I think I know how it’s supposed to work but I’ve had no luck figuring out the commands.

where I'm stuck

I’m guessing the meat is supposed to go in the bag and then you use it to lure the fly. But I can’t touch it, I can’t get it with the bag, I can’t put the bag under the meat or on it, can’t wear the bag.

Other things… there are two doors that I can’t get into: the swinging doors in the restaurant and the sturdy door just to the west. The hollow skeleton of a building also doesn’t seem to have anything to do there.

You can lock the front door of the house but there doesn’t seem to be a purpose to it.

The help suggests that we should need to go under something but I haven’t found anything to go under. Well, I’ve found plenty of things to try to go under but they’re all too gross. Or dangerous, in the case of the crashed cars.

The radios appear to give previews of the bad ending. I haven’t found any use for the bicycle (although I’m amused that you can apparently ride it through a revolving door with no problem). You can go in the two cars involved in the accident but there doesn’t seem to be anything to do there.

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There’s something in the kitchen cabinets that you need for the thing you’re trying to do.

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Aaah! I thought I’d looked at everything in all the rooms. How did I completely miss one in the house? Thanks.

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Red Door, Yellow Door

(now that I’ve finished it)

It’s a little hard to tell the difference between “dream-logic” and “slightly unfinished.” The fridge seems interesting but then there’s no description of the inside. Ditto the cars involved in the accident. I rode the bicycle everywhere because that seemed fun but the game didn’t acknowledge it in any way. You can lock the front door of the house but then it doesn’t do anything (like keeping the not-friends out or whatever). There are two doors in town that you tantalizingly can’t go through.

Those things were both interesting for what they added to the dream-like only-half-existent reality, and a let-down when the game didn’t acknowledge them with any results (or just distracting red herrings). I definitely liked the door that was bulging under the weight of the water, but otherwise I’m torn as to which effect was stronger for me.

I thought the characters were well-drawn.

Dunno. I had fun with it but I’m not sure I know what to make of it. Unresolved feelings about your father’s death: maybe the game is left slightly ambiguous/unresolved as a parallel to that? I guess it’s sort of supposed to be horror? I never understand horror; it rarely does anything for me either way, so…yeah. It seemed fairly well-done, as far as I could tell…

Secret of the Black Walrus

I went back and finished this. It’s pretty short. It’s a decent choice-based mystery. The mix of “we won’t let you move forward until we’ve shown you the necessary clues” and “if you didn’t write them down we’ll just let you be stuck” feels kind of unusual. But I think it works for a mystery: it gives you some work to do by hand without being technically unfair.

There were a bunch of dead-end choices that felt like they were unnecessary padding, and not interesting enough to add much of anything to the atmosphere. Right at the beginning you can choose to wait as many times as you want (at least I tried a dozen or so) while the Inspector bangs on your door fruitlessly. Why’d you give me the choice? There are plenty of places where you just have “click the arrow to continue.” Ditto at Astley Circus, you can try the door, but it’s just locked. I’d have just left that out.

Typing in locations for the cab driver to go (and…what was the other thing you type? oh, research topics) was a nice touch that fit well with the “you need to write down the clues yourself” design.

The engine worked pretty well. Some minor niggles. I found the page transitions painfully long, to the point where I edited the code and styles to make them near instant. As I said before, the reactive layout was a little annoying on desktop: I launched it in a full-size window, thought, huh, that’s a nice layout: 80-character-ish line wrapping is a little longer than I prefer but perfectly reasonable, and the font is big enough that it doesn’t look ridiculous with short lines. That layout will fit perfectly in a half-screen column and I can have a note file on the other half of the screen, and I’ll zoom the text slightly to make the lines a little shorter… And then I put it in a half-screen-column window and the text got significantly shorter and the line length went up to about 115 characters, and the buttons went full-width which wasn’t as pretty as the ones that fit the text. And I fired up a screenreader at one point, and it starts reading at the first choice on every page. So you have to tell it to start reading from the top of the page every single time, which is irritating, but probably easily fixable.

I still think the writing lets this down: it varies wildly in tone and regard for grammar and so on. The first few passages are a good indication of this, I think: the first is fairly serious, maybe lightly tongue-in-cheek, sort of Victorian detective noir? And then the inspector comes in and it jumps straight to “As a tall, pale, gaunt Englishman, he possessed superior skill at looking dour” and Madame Soo saying out loud to him “You’re at a loss, as I have never entered the club myself, for I am no gentleman.” And it goes on bouncing back and forth like this, from fairly serious and straight, to “is every tall pale gaunt Englishman good at looking dour?” and “that would work as a descriptive beat, but who would talk like that; did you try reading this line out loud?” and “It’s clear what you mean and how you got there, but that’s… not how that word works” lines like “Each was flourished with a signature black India-ink scrawl of a walrus.”

Obviously it’s supposed to be campy, but for me it fell in a bland middle-ground; neither consistently “bad” enough to feel like amusing parody nor exuberant enough to feel like an endearingly over-enthusiastic imitation of Dickens or Disraeli, Wilde or Carroll or the Brontës.

But it’s a fun little detective story.

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Interesting. I need to learn more about css to determine how to get the layout right between desktop and mobile. There is no “one size fits all” approach that’s for sure.

And thank you for the kind review!

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Thank you so much for the lovely review of my game, I’m glad you enjoyed!!

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I Am Prey

(I had direct-messaged Joey with what I had to say, but since I looked at the review spreadsheet and this one only has two public reviews?!)

I had expected it to be very videogamey, but the writing isn’t half bad either and (depending how you play) there are a fair number of little story nuggets tucked away here and there.

But it is mostly about the game mechanics. And it’s clearly supposed to be tense. But it only takes an undo (or a few of them) to get you back out of the places where you get yourself killed so it’s not that bad. I did save several times but I never needed them.

I played very conservatively so I never tried half the mechanics in the game (I never tried any of the “tricks” listed in the guide, except slamming the door once by accident). But honestly once you learn all the extra map connections and that you can just undo out of anything and try a different route, I suspect the chase bits are probably the most fun part of the game (I have to go back and play again and try this to be sure, but I’m guessing that’s the case).

So. I suspect the manual is overly intimidating: think of it as a limited-parser hide-and-seek board game in a maze with lots of secret exits to find. Your commands are:

  • N/S/E/W (and a few ordinal directions)
  • LISTEN and then PEEK <dir> (to see if it’s safe).
  • CLOSE DOOR quietly behind you so the automatic door closers don’t give your position away.
  • JUMP TO <thing> or CLIMB <thing> (the guide lists lots of other synonyms, but these suffice for everything. I think you can even abbreviate them to JM and CL but I never tried that). And there’s one place in the game where you have to RUN, so if you think JUMP should work but it doesn’t…
  • SEARCH <thing> (you can say open/look in, but this is faster. And it also tells you if you can climb or jump on it).

And then you get to go explore. Check all the containers for parts of the spacesuit you need to escape: shelves, lockers, cabinets, chests, fridges… I think that’s all the kinds? There are a few things to look under as well. You can hear doors closing a few turns behind the Predator, so you can play cautiously and try to stay mostly on the other side of the map from him (this is what I did). Or you can hunt for the “secret” exits so you can just leave another way if he’s blocking the normal door: there are only a couple rooms where you’re really trapped. And at least one of those has a locker, chest, or fridge that you can hide in until he goes away (I’m pretty sure you can hide in chests and fridges: I only tried a locker the once. And if you do hide and then he comes into the room you get to hear him monologue, and I gather he has a bunch of those: hey, story!).

And…that’s pretty much the game. In the “extras” folder in the download there’s a graphical map which doesn’t show a few of the secret rooms or any of the secret connections (or the cubicles in the Admin section) but gives you the whole main layout. You’ll want to download this and have it open while you play. Or if you prefer to make your own maps you’ll (probably) want to play as the cat (safe mode). Or hey, just live dangerously: there’s always undo.

Yeah. I feel like there are still occasional rough spots, but it’s a pretty good thriller digital board game, if you’re into that kind of thing.

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What else have I played that I enjoyed? A lot of these were perfectly good but not my thing and I knew perfectly well that they weren’t and I played them anyway so I have no one to blame but myself.

The Familiar

This is a cute little story in Adventuron. I’m not usually a big fan of pixel art, and yeah, the font was kind of annoying, but the header art actually fit the game pretty well. A short adventure about being a crow and trying to save your witch from the hex that’s killing her. Limited-parser: I think you can move and PECK and CAW and that’s about it? Oh, I guess you can GET and DROP too. The puzzles aren’t hard: I was never too stuck, but it was fun finding the solutions. I think at least one of the obstacles had multiple solutions (?) which is cool: I found one and then realized there was probably a less drastic way.

The dialogue design was a nice touch: choose from a menu of differently-flavored caws. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t branch much but the adverbs always made me chuckle appreciatively: they were chosen such that it often wasn’t quite clear what thing you were going to “say” but they all sounded like interesting ways to respond.

The only things that struck me as a little off are that when you first land at the witch’s cottage, there are three exits but you’re forced to go into the cottage. So that felt like an extra room and an “oh no, I have to make a choice and the story is clearly telling me which one to make, but is this one of those games where it’s not really urgent and it might be more fun to go explore first?” And then I found out on my second playthrough that it’s not actually a choice. So I might have just gone straight from the sky into the cottage at the beginning. And then it was a little odd that you started off flying over the treetops but then for the rest of the game you’re under the trees on the walking paths through the woods (though I guess you’re still flying). A minor thing, and changing it would mess up a bunch of the story beats, but it struck me as a little odd.

The Kuolema was fun too, though it’s basically an escape-room-esque gamebook, and Google Forms requires two clicks for every action which feels a little clunky, so I still think this would have been better in a tool that allows a little state tracking and regular links to do things.

Marie Waits was…huh. Also like an escape room, somewhat literally? A timed escape. And very parser-ish: you have to explicitly do every part of every action. Partly because it’s PunyInform, I think? But it also felt very in keeping with the theme of escaping with a tight time limit: “oh, you want to do this thing? You’ll have to do this other thing first. Oh, and then the other other thing first.”

> pull rope
You try to loosen the rope by pulling your arms upwards at the back
of the chair, but it’s difficult to pull it in that direction. Perhaps if 
you were able to tip the chair onto its side, you’d have a bit more 
leverage.

> tip chair
Tipping the chair over would be a good idea, but first you’ll need to 
pull it away from the wall a little.

> pull chair
You press your feet against the ground and manage to nudge the 
back of the chair slightly away from the wall of the pit.

(although I only played once and I think I escaped by like 11:15 so I had nearly a quarter of the time left: guess it wasn’t that tight. Though it was a little annoying that “look” took a turn: I feel like in timed games it often doesn’t? I had to switch my habits to scroll back instead of just hitting l again.)

Horror just doesn’t do anything for me, so Etiolated Light wasn’t my thing. But I was intrigued by the juxtaposition in the title: spindly plants, ghostly white from lack of light, set next to “light”? And it was short and well-done: probably one of the best games in the comp if that’s your thing. I think the structure got fairly maze-like at the end and it felt like it could have used more work to make sure the text all made sense in all the paths through: in my playthrough a baby appeared that had never been mentioned before, and there were a couple other things that felt like references to other paths that I hadn’t seen, maybe?

Similarly, I’m not a poetry person: I like concise evocative text but not just words for words’ sake. So Protocol being basically a loong piece of poetry wasn’t my thing either. But there was a lot of really nice imagery: I kept seeing lines that I could have saved for later. There were a few jarring bits where the grammar was off in a way that was probably intentional but just felt like a mismatch for the smoothness of the rest of the prose. But mostly it was really solid, just too much for my taste.

The very first sentence was a little confusing to parse: my mind latched onto “constants” from the heading and then it took until the very end of the sentence to realize it was talking about conservation laws: personally I would have re-worded that as “A conservation law defines a particular measurable property of an isolated physical system that does not change as the system evolves over time.” But that’s nitpicking: I think this paragraph is intentionally alternating sentences between active and passive voice? It’s just that it was the first sentence so it stuck out that I had to look at it twice to parse it.

And then it just felt like it didn’t go anywhere quite enough for me? It starts off by making a big deal about how you’ve been stuck in a body that doesn’t belong to you (or maybe that’s just some form of dysphoria and not some form of cloning/personality injection/whatever) and then never quite does anything with it either way (that I saw?).

It repeats the pattern of long, long, lush paragraphs and then short, repeated, stuttering half phrases, which was really effective the first couple times but not so much after a dozen times.

I suspect from the feel of it that there’s a fair bit of branching at the end (and maybe a significant branching of perspective all the way through based on whether you choose to leave or to fix it at the beginning?) but then it was left (I thought) open to interpretation at the end rather than reaching a definite conclusion so I’m left wondering… what’s the intended point of the branching? What am I supposed to get out of this specific ambiguous ending versus one of the others?

Or, y’know, I could be completely wrong about the structure of this: I’m totally guessing. But that’s what it felt like to me. I suspect it works great as a long piece of speculative poetry for those who are into that: the writing seemed very well-done overall and there really were a lot of great individual lines in here.

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First of all, thank you for taking the time to play and review these games. Thoughtful honest reviews are welcome as far as I’m concerned. With that said, it’s left me wondering something.

I’ve noticed certain types of games, for example poetic games with florid prose among others, seem to not be your bag, which, for the record, is totally fine. Romance games aren’t exactly my speed personally. What isn’t immediately clear to me is what exactly would knock Josh Grams’s socks off upon playing. For example, if someone were to enter a game into a future Comp with the solitary goal of delighting one Mr. Josh Grams, what exactly would this game look like and what would it prioritize? Honestly curious. It’d be like a personal achievement badge, like impressing Simon Cowell or Gordon Ramsay on the first try.

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YAYYYYY!!!

Thank you again for playing!! :grin: I’m really glad you liked it!

This is a spot-on description of the game! :smile: Most of the stuff I plan to release will lean really heavily into a sort of boardgame-esque, game-y experience! Perfect description!

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Ooh, that’s tough. I mostly go barefoot. :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously though, I’m way more interested in “how does this thing work, and how could it work better?” than in oohing and ahhing. I don’t remember ever doing any sort of fandom whatsoever: my brain just doesn’t work that way. And it goes both ways: I remember having a conversation with my Mom after a piano recital as maybe a 10-year-old where I was like, what do I even say to other kids’ parents and grandparents when they come up and gush about how well I did? I can never thing of anything to say that isn’t either an outright lie or very rude. They’re not even giving any useful positive feedback – saying “I really liked this part” – it’s just empty “oh, I loved that so much!” and I’m sitting here thinking “well, I guess I know what your opinion is worth, then.” And I think it came up because that year one of the other kids was kind of derogatory about my playing and I was like “See! That’s what I’m talking about! I mean, ok, a bunch of what they said was wrong, but some of it… they were the only one who had anything helpful to say!”

But ok, what delights me? I often like short things that have something to say, and they say it and then stop. And it feels a little hard to really gush about the really short ones sometimes. Hmm. Maybe it’s not short, but that all the words and choices are there for a reason.

OK, yeah, maybe that’s getting at it a little. I’m a programmer; I can do fancy complicated things all day long, no problem. What gets me is writing craft of a certain kind. Using, say, basic hyperlinks to do something that enhances your story, your themes, in a way that you couldn’t in static prose (of course I can’t think of any examples at the moment, but there have been a couple that made me go “oh. yes”). Why is it important that your story is interactive?

And I like evocative prose, but concise evocative prose? I need to believe that you’ve thought about whether each word contributes to what you’re trying to evoke or if it’s just too much as I quoted Annals of the Parrigues earlier in this thread, about “a goatherd named Leofrick the Seditious hears the voice of a flaming mare who was
defecating while standing in shaft of moonlight on a hilltop.” I think…I need some of the prose to fade into the background to let the special moments stand out?

Not necessarily, though. Chandler Groover’s Eat Me mostly works for me. And the deliberately “ungrammatical” awkward text of Claire Furkle’s SPY INTRIGUE actually works for me too, but there’s something about it that makes it clear… these aren’t the mistakes people make when they’re not comfortable with traditional English grammar. I have absolutely no doubt that it’s 100% deliberate. But mostly I like story: if you’re going to do something like these two where the text pushes itself in front of the story you’d better be toweringly certain that a) it’s central to the story you want to tell and b) you’re a good enough writer to pull it off.

And I don’t know how many people can do that. I can sort of appreciate, say, Cat Valente’s The Difference Between Love and Time but emotionally I’m still kinda “you could have told this story in fewer words: why are you making me read this many words for this?” Even though there are some really good bits in there:

Ocean Shores is hollowed out like a gourd someone meant to make into a drum for a beautiful party. But they wandered off and maybe even forgot what drums are to begin with so now it’s just an empty scraped-out dead vegetable lying on a cold beach nobody would ever hold a party on.

And then a seagull shits in it.

I’m getting distracted. Well, maybe that bit is a good example, actually. I like specific details that are like…the things that occur to you but maybe not to other people, rather than digging through a thesaurus or quotation/idiom dictionary for things. Ursula Vernon does this really well, let’s see: A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, where Mona is identifying the customers by name and also by their bakery order, and they kinda feel unique and specific to the story but also haven’t we all had this experience with some older neighbor or relative?

“Sidney Weatherfort wouldn’t run away to sea,” piped up the tiny Widow Holloway (one blackberry muffin, two ginger cookies, and thank you so much, dear Mona, you’re getting to look more like your poor dear mother every day, you know…)

And that goes for the whole story too: tell me a story about something you’re really into, whether you’ve experienced it personally or spent tons of time digging into it for fun. I feel like it’s often obvious when someone is talking about something that they don’t know about and haven’t done enough research on, and vice versa. Take… Jean George’s kid’s book Goose and Duck: it’s goofy and over the top and definitely not an accurate representation, but you can tell that it’s abstracted and stylized by someone who has a good idea how it does work and loves and cares about it. Versus, say, the bird scene in January, which starts “From the well-water-blue circle of sky descended a bird.” And well water isn’t blue. Deep open expanses of water like an ocean and maybe a big lake are blue or green, but if you’re looking down into a deep narrow hole in the ground, it’s black or brownish, regardless of whether it has water in it. And most people won’t know or care, but there’s always going to be that one person… I live in rural Maine, plenty of people have dug wells here; this is a part of my life; you’ve just thrown me right out of your story and making me wonder what else you’re drastically misrepresenting.

And so many IF pieces these days (well, any day, really) are kind of the same old fantasy or sci-fi stakes and settings. It feels like… how exciting can we make this? Tell me a story you wouldn’t find on r/WritingPrompts. Tell me a story about ordinary people getting by (maybe in magical circumstances, sure). Or just with smaller stakes, maybe? Not everything has to be “you’re going to die” or “you have to save the universe.” I think I do prefer external problems rather than internal emotional ones: we never have a shortage of The Absence of Miriam Lane or The Grown-Up Detective Agency where people are lost, or trying to find their way, and that’s great, but I feel like we have fewer characters who are comfortable in who they are but then something happens or hey, the world is just an ugly place a lot of the time, and they have to go deal with it. Give me the forty-something black single-mom social worker who has a portal appear in her laundry room and thinks “nope, I know better than that” but then has to grab the toilet plunger and dive in after her “sweet, loveable, dumbass son” (By the Works of Her Hands, LaShawn M. Wanak, Never Too Old to Save the World Anthology).

Gah, that’s hopelessly long. “Let me explain! No, is too much: let me sum up.”

  • Yeah, use evocative words, but keep it concise, keep it specific. Make me believe that every word is necessary, is pulling its weight and helps to tell your story.
  • Tell me something that’s not a usual sci-fi or fantasy trope, don’t make me think “this sounds like something you’d find on r/WritingPrompts.” Something you are really into, whether it’s a hobby or just a pet research area.
  • Make me believe in your characters as real people. Specific details, specific things they want?
  • Don’t get distracted by shiny tech: why is this form of interactivity necessary to tell your story, how does it support and enhance the story you’re trying to tell?
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I think at least one of the obstacles had multiple solutions (?) which is cool: I found one and then realized there was probably a less drastic way.

Several of them did! Glad you found one of them. I really appreciate your thoughts. If you happen to play it again for any reason, just type “SETTINGS” to change the font :slight_smile:

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Oh man, I remember seeing SETTINGS and totally didn’t think to try it. Thanks!

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This is definitely on my list for post-comp! I haven’t worked out how to exclude meta actions from a timer in Puny/I6 yet, but I’m sure there’s a way. Thanks for playing :slight_smile:

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See, I saw the same thing, but my reaction was “YOU GO BOIIEE, SET UP CAMP IN THAT THESAURUS BABEE!”

Not to make it about @JoshGrams and me, but (ignore before the but) I am delighted by how often I see the game artifacts you describe, but place opposite value in. We are all different! We are all individuals!

image

(Ok, that image is pretty much the opposite of my point, but I just love it and am powerless before pavlovian responses to phrases I recognize.)

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I shall perhaps write another mystery game, in which the victim is shorn from this mortal coil by being bludgeoned on the skull with an unwieldy thesaurus.

The hero will obviously be named Ira Nee.

(In all seriousness, I appreciate Josh’s review and concede he is correct: I just have too much fun with fantasy 1885 London indulgences.)

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Well, I disagree with both of you. You do not have ENOUGH. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Hah, yeah, its great. @rovarsson too: so many times I think, ehhh, this is annoying… but he’s going to LOVE IT!!!

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