Live and Get Pie: A Reveal, And Summary of Its Appeal

Competitions IFComp
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IFComp — Alas! — is done; I know I had some fun.
As for Live and Get Pie… The author? It is I!
Don’t worry: I am not (as you perhaps have thought)
now setting out to write this whole post in what might…

…

…

be AABB iambic hexameter, who would have the time and energy to get through a whole post like that? :wink:

Anyway.

As the game description notes, I wrote the initial version of this game in less than a day. (I’m not sure it would quite qualify for the “under 4 hours” cut-off of a Petite Mort game in EctoComp, but it might have been close!)

It’s also worth reiterating that I am really not very good at writing games in Inform. If you download and extract the code, you can see this admission in a comment at the top of the file:

[I wrote this very quick. It might just make you sick.]
[I know the code’s a mess. Inform is not my bes(t).]

In fact, this is only the second thing I’ve ever tried to write in Inform. The first was just as buggy and odd AND I wrote it in a very short period of time as a Petite Mort entry for EctoComp 2022. If this pattern holds true, my next Inform game will be written in 2030 and will also be short, buggy, and weird.

After this experience, I definitely understand the value of reviewing transcripts before a game goes live. I pushed out an update pretty quickly because there were some really basic things players consistently tried which I hadn’t thought of. So many people tried flying that it allowed me to make the game slightly less frustrating and nonresponsive, and even (I hope) push people towards the solution a bit.

And an extra “thank you” to @aschultz, who was kind enough to explain how to make the game kill people even when they had made a typo or tried to enter an invalid verb while plummeting towards the ground. Thanks, Andrew!

The game ranked 55th, which frankly is higher than I expected. I was pleasantly surprised to see a few people actually enjoying it in reviews, instead of going “URrrrgh, aAarrrgh, nooOoOoOOoooo.”

I am pleased by the distribution of votes. I got at least 1 vote for every single number, all the way from 1 to 10. A 1-10 split!

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Yes, that means someone rated Live and Get Pie a 10.

I’m not sure what’s more shocking: that, or the fact that someone also gave it a 9, and a whole three people gave it an 8. You’re too kind, you beautiful, deranged maniacs, you!

I plan to jump into the review threads for folks who took a crack at writing about it, but may not get to that for a few more days. :slight_smile:

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A peel? Is this a pie, or an orange? :upside_down_face:

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One of the anonymous comments on the game was "I played this game while eating an orange, " interestingly enough…

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Something I forgot to say in the post-mortem but am remembering now that I am responding to comments:

Even though Live and Get Pie placed pretty far down in the rankings, thinking it up and writing it, creating its bizarre cover art, and then reading the transcripts and watching people actually react to it here on the forums was THE ABSOLUTE BEST TIME and it brought me a lot of joy. Like, walking-around-the-house-giggling-to-myself-until-my-wife-asked-if-I-was-really-okay kind of joy.

Watching people in the transcripts try to engage with the game as if it were normal on the first play, then dying and restarting, was way more entertaining than it probably should be! I could kind of see the “Wait, wtf???” appear, speech-bubble-like, above your imagined heads.

So, uh, thank you and/or sorry about that. :smiley:

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It was fun to be able to help on this, since I kind of pulled myself out of the loop.

I like the other changes you made, too. It strikes me that while you say “Inform is not my best,” sometimes that’s a good thing, because it shows you don’t need years of mastery to try a cool trick. Inform’s IDE has a lot of cool examples, but it doesn’t have anything like this, where we can poke at a game and see a few parser-manipulations come together into a game.

So I’m glad you were willing to share the source – it will teach people a lot, and in a more fun way than reading the documentation! (The docs aren’t no fun. I think they’re well done. Your code brings alive concepts. Thus, high-five!)

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