Excellent thread! Fun update. I know you’ve already seen the answer (I haven’t seen the source yet) but I wonder if the fly is a reference to the real estate office in Anchorhead at the very beginning that has an invisible fly.
3 Likes
Oh, could well be – though interestingly, from a quick google at Anchorhead transcripts looks like there’s an invisible fly in the last scene, too, which might be the more direct antecedent.
Rereading that scene also reminded me of something (spoilers for the end of Anchorhead that are more plot-relevant than “there’s an invisible fly”): it ends with the main character announcing her pregnancy, with more than a little bit of a foreboding undertone. I mentioned a couple times through the thread a suspicion that Nitocris was going to give birth to Vaadignephod or something icky like that, so I’m guessing that’s what I was subconsciously pulling from even though I didn’t fully remember that plot point!
2 Likes
to be clear Chris asked for the fruit & we assigned him the pantry, we didn’t specify any particular thing be included in anyone’s room save for the puzzle chain objects/information
doing the room assignments was probably my favorite part of working on Cragne; there was a space in the Google form to make (non-guaranteed) requests, & Ryan sent me a spreadsheet of every room in the map he’d designed, & I just went to town
(we all knew Sam would write an amazing pub but also I think he referenced a hangover somewhere in his form? anyway there was never any question the pub was Sam’s)
6 Likes
Yeah, “there’s a fly buzzing around here somewhere” is an ambient message that appears in both the first section of Anchorhead (the real estate office) and the very last (the epilogue), a sort of thematic bookend that adds some ominousness to both the weirdly empty real estate office and the perfectly calm and normal end scene. Since this is the very last section of Cragne Manor, that’s what I imagine the reference is.
4 Likes
I think I was hoping to get some sort of pantry-type place because I enjoyed the disjoint juxtaposition of such a banal location containing a keystone puzzle in a larger ghost story. I guess in that way the room and its puzzle really is one big riff on the whole “soup cans” trope. And I’m glad Mike got one last sexually ambiguous special thanks procgen name there at the end.
Yeah, if I remember right there were a few people who took them up on the offer, and J and/or R took their pseudocode and vague descriptions and assembled working rooms that tried to represent what they described. IIRC Austin from my local IF meetup group was going to be another, but in the process of writing it for his room he decided he was going to use it as an excuse to learn I7 instead. Fun fact: I was having so much fun hanging out in the Slack and helping new coders with I7 bugs and quirks of the language and design issues that I didn’t realize he was one of them until he mentioned it at the next meetup.
5 Likes
Hi @DeusIrae,
thanks for doing this fabulous Let’s Play!
I tried to finish Cragne Manor some years ago, but got stuck about halfway through, so it is great to see now what I missed. And I had to chuckle a bit since I am currently in a similar situation as you back when you started the LP, with a teething baby keeping me up at night, so your posts kept me entertained through some sleepless times in the past weeks.
Now that the main part of this Let’s Play is over, I have to find other captivating stuff to read 
A bit offtopic maybe, but last night I stumbled upon some internal Infocom memos from the year 1985 where legendary Steve Meretzky proposed some game ideas to be implemented by Infocom in future IF games. One of them immediately caught my eye as it reminded me a bit of the approach later taken in Cragne Manor (although of course in much bigger scope there):
“THE VIABLE IDEA”
Genre: Mixed/Experimental?; Estimated Development Time: 6 months.
An idea I originally came up with as a way to produce a game in much less time than could normally be
expected, but which I think is an interesting idea even without that need. Basically, one person (the Editor) designs a tiny “piece” of a game — a couple of rooms, a few objects with action routines, maybe even a character. Working from this, in complete isolation, five (or so) imps would write a small mini-game (a
couple of puzzles, ten to twenty rooms) around that original core. The Editor would be responsible for integrating the five ideas together, blending the code, making sure that there wasn’t any gross repetition in the stories, and, of course, fixing bugs. I think that seeing how different people went in different directions from the same starting point would make for an interesting interactive fiction experience.
His game idea proved to be quite divisive within Infocom, with most people (incl. Brian Moriarty) being quite sceptical about it:
“Maybe too much of an “in” thing, appealing only to old, loyal customers???”
“My opinion is the same as the last time you suggested it; and I was right then, too.”
“Sounds dangerous. Lots of egos. I duck this one. Who needs the headaches?”
So unfortunately that project never saw the light of day, in favor of LGOP, Zork Zero and Stationfall, but I still found it quite interesting to read about a collaborative writing idea in IF back in the good old days already.
7 Likes
surprisingly enough we did fine in that regard on Cragne, possibly because everyone got the ability to make their room as huge & setpiecy as they wanted without competing for resources with other authors, possibly because Ryan & I are… very firm in defense of our Artistic Concepts (I am not gonna say we are hard to out-ego, because that would be rude to Ryan)
but yeah we had none of the issues you might imagine would crop up with multiple Big Names in the same project, they were all very success-focused & cooperative & delightful
10 Likes
Ha, that’s awesome – glad you enjoyed the thread, and glad to be able to pay things forward a little bit since there are a bunch of blogs and Lets Plays that got me through my son’s bouts of teething.
And thanks for sharing the Meretzky idea – I have to say, titling your brainstorm, which you know your coworkers are skeptical of, “THE VIABLE IDEA”, is an especially funny bit of attempted social engineering.
That’s good to hear! On the evidence of the finished product, I can definitely see how you and Ryan laid generous, yet clear, guidelines for folks’ contributions, but possibly an additional factor is that you both exercised a lot of humility when it comes to your rooms – like, I was kind of expecting those two room to be a little more canonical and at least hint at a definitive plot. But no, while your room gives critical tools to the player, and Ryan’s wraps up a climactic puzzle, they’re put on a very egalitarian footing with what everyone else wrote.
5 Likes
I guess such projects can go either way, but you never know until you actually try it out.
But you two did a great job of keeping all of this together and pulling through! For me Cragne Manor is my favorite “coherent mess”, so to say, and I am still impressed by the sheer size of it.
By the way, one more quote I found for “THE VIABLE IDEA”, this one by Dave Lebling (founder of Infocom and writer of “The Lurking Horror”):
“0 out of 10 for that idea. 1/5 of a game takes more than 1/5 the time to do. When are 5 imps ever free? This never works all that well in literature.”
4 Likes
Infocom was very invested in its “auteur” ethos. While this was limiting in some ways (they would never do something like the “viable idea”), it did make them unusually committed to authorial vision. I don’t think A Mind Forever Voyaging looked very promising as a commercial product, but the company never tried to discourage Steve Meretzky from making it AFAIK. In fact, Infocom promoted it vigorously as a literary work (new ground for them) that they were proud of. Who other than Infocom would have let their (arguably) top-selling active developer—or anyone, for that matter—spend unprofitable hours making a game like A Mind Forever Voyaging? That development culture was not conducive to collaborative efforts, but I don’t think we would have gotten as many great Infocom games as we have without their authorial philosophy.
So far as 1985 goes: Brian Moriarty had been patiently waiting for a chance to make Trinity (it was his dream even before hiring on at Infocom) and probably wasn’t looking for something else to get involved with. It would be released the following year, in 1986.
Communities are just better at some things than companies. In the case of Cragne Manor, it brought together a bunch of highly capable, motivated people, drawing from a larger talent pool than Infocom could have mustered at any point in their history. Infocom could never have made CM, even if they had wanted to. I think Mike has done a fantastic job documenting the humor, horror, and wild inventiveness of CM!
8 Likes
Seconding what Jenni said. Much of this was because we all began working in isolation and the initial secrecy made us all ramp up our own strategies so as to not appear to be slacking in comparison in all of our own special ways. It was “Big Comp Energy” but we were all working on the same project - the harder we worked, the higher the quality would be. We had a few side brags, like “largest individual room word count” but that was more for us to compare scope before we knew what everyone else was doing.
I am sure we all felt this was a very important project and we had no idea how good the other rooms would be, and because we received incredible coaching and positive feedback and assistance from Jenni and Ryan we all did our best work. Probably anyone could finish a game successfully with that amount of support and that’s how it was set up. Nobody got more than they could handle. We were allowed to go full out if we wanted; some people needed more help but others did not and could help others, and we were also allowed to not stress too much and make it a simple project at our individual discretions.
After a couple weeks, we were also finally able to test other people’s rooms and see what was going on elsewhere in Backwater and the Manor, and that likely motivated a good degree of polish in many rooms. The Slack channel was extremely active with tech support and chatter and jokes and assistance, so everyone’s knowledge and “egos” worked together in the best possible way.
TL;DR: We weren’t “competing” with each other per se, but everyone knew who we were working with and what we wanted to accomplish and the high-water level raised all boats.
6 Likes
Ha, thanks for providing that context on Moriarty’s comments, which maybe provides a counterpoint to Jenni’s point about a lack of competition for resources in the case of CM!
It’s funny, I tend to see the IF community as also having a fairly strong auteur ethos too in how games are produced and received (much of my commentary on individual rooms in this thread follow that approach, I think), but per Hanon’s post directly below yours, if anything that helped make the process here more collaborative. I suspect the fact that a community by definition requires non-hierarchical collaboration as well as the absence of the resource-competition dynamic ID’d above account for some of the differences.
5 Likes
To be fair, AMFV was way more promising as a commercial product than Cragne Manor ever conceived to be. :)
Everybody went into Cragne with the attitude “This is going to be a complete cthlusterf*ck and that will be hilarious”. It’s not really something Infocom could have come up with.
6 Likes
The tech is important, too. There wouldn’t be a lot of room for individual vision for five authors in a 256K story file, let alone 128K
3 Likes
That’s a huge part of its appeal. The viable idea would have been radically different philosophically and practically
3 Likes
I see what you did there
6 Likes
Dang, if Cragne Manor wasn’t already the title…
That is very true. If Cragne Manor were on floppies how many would there be and how cursed would it be to disk swap!
7 Likes
That gave me a laugh. I expect you’d boot the game, read the first room description, type S, and then the drive would chug and it would say ‘Please insert disk 2.’
I was thinking of offering something like this as an IFComp prize – I would reverse engineer the first room of your game (or more if it was doable) to the Apple II using BASIC. I decided not to because I’m trying to stay industrious with my time on Andromeda Acolytes.
-Wade
7 Likes
Ever wondered why there’s so little interaction between the rooms? The real reason is to ensure each room can be put on its own floppy, and only the inventory needs to be saved in RAM.
8 Likes
This is a good lesson from watching Cragne coalesce. There are things that go from “impossible” to “unlikely and difficult but doable” if all of the people involved making a thing actually want to be involved and want to see the thing finished, like Hanon mentions.
And also that Jenni is an incredible cat wrangler and project manager.
9 Likes