Hello, I’m new to this community and have an IF game I’ve been working on for a while now, it began as a tech demo when I was looking for work, but ended up growing into something bigger. The thing is, it’s only ever really been seen as a portfolio piece and not something anyone played extensively, so I’m looking for impressions about the layout, what works and what doesn’t, what’s confusing, etc.
If interested you can hit me up at strange.effigies@gmail.com!
The game is called ‘And Ye Shall Find’ and is a Science Fiction / Horror story where you have to navigate a damaged ship that’s on a thousand year journey, after a mysterious calamity kills almost everybody on board. It’s free to play, and doesn’t require any sort of account or anything like that.
It’s web based and has a lot of bells and whistles like a compass, things like inventory and the old ‘diagnose’ command moved to devoted tabs, a pinned room description at the top, etc. but at its heart it was inspired by the old Infocom games I grew up with.
Full disclosure: the game is quite large, and not yet finished so can’t currently be played beginning to end, I’m just at the stage where I’m looking for some general feedback that I could apply moving forward. The other disclosure is that while I did not use AI for any of the art or text descriptions, part of the original tech demo was that the NPCs use AI generated responses, and I also provided an ‘AI assistant’ that is meant to replace the original hint system, but neither are central to especially the early game, and I am in the process of building out ‘non-AI’ static conversation trees to use as a fallback if nothing else. At that point using the AI would become something you can toggle off. I bought a small chunk of tokens for the testing that won’t auto renew, so if you’re playing and that piece becomes unresponsive let me know.
