Is that because there’s something you don’t like about Quest, or is it just that you like writing your own stuff?
If you could write a Quest game in Inform (or an open-source Inform clone), would you use that?
Quest seems like it should be a good option, but for some reason I just can’t warm up to it.
I almost wish for phones there was an interpreter which had commonly used verbs in a pull out drawer on the left, and inventory in a pull out on the right, which were large tap-buttons, and your command is built in the lower half of the screen with completion suggestions like a texting interface (or the early Lucas SCUMM adventures), and you could also hold your finger over the large and easy-to-read words in the text to add them to your command, and additional words that you need like conjunctions or WITH and ON pull down from the top of the screen, appearing as needed. That would eliminate “you can’t see any such thing” because any unimplemented or out of scope word would be non-selectable. It would eliminate lawnmowering because you could swipe to find useable words in the description, but you still have to find a verb or inventory objects that will work with it.
Nope, not at all – I literally had no idea Quest had a GUI. I’ve been downloading and playing comp games for years, and never noticed a GUI in any Quest game, so I was just ignorant of this.
Regards to the interface: it’s nice, and is actually doing a lot of what I want to do – especially the compass interface. However, I’ve been working on my game for over a year now in Inform, and am very familiar with it, so it’s a practical consideration not to switch platforms. Also, I do want to radically change things about that interface for my WIP.
Also, I really like Inform 7. There’s something familiar and classy about it. I’m an old-school IF’er – my first game was Zork back in 1986 for the PC JR, so it just feels right. I’m going to check out Quest more, though. It looks like a great system that is trying to make huge strides toward reaching a bigger market with apps, and mobile – that’s cool. I might get my hands dirty with it later, to see what it can do, and how much it compares to I7.
A couple of years ago I put together an experiment that takes a well-known parser game and shows how it could be implemented with a hyperlink interface (A Colder Light, which matt mentioned above, was inspired by the experiment). Because it uses the code of an existing parser game (Inform 7) essentially unchanged, it is a great example for the types of questions being raised here–you can compare apples to apples by playing a few minutes of each version.
Link to the blog post describing the experiment:
glimmr.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/ … put-in-if/
The post links to both the experiment (a CSS + Quixe joint) and the parser game.
Personally, I think there are just too many options available at any moment in a parser game for it to be ideal to just map it to links, as this example does.
Thanks for the heads up on Glimmr! This is exactly what I was looking for. I’m definitely going to use this in some way for an upcoming game. (It even has animation capabilities…) [emote]:shock:[/emote]
(Edit)
And thanks for the CREATION of Glimmr too, I suppose. [emote]:D[/emote]
I don’t think anybody thinks you could/should take existing parser games and play them purely with links. The key candidates are:
- Point-and-click text adventures. Like the Sierra/LucasArts adventures, but the whole game is text. I put Colder Light in this category.
Point-and-click graphical adventures were certainly way more popular than graphical adventure games that used a parser; I predict that point-and-click text adventures (not just CYOA, but puzzle/travel stories) will be more popular than parser adventure games.
- Shortcuts for common actions in traditional parser games. Even in existing parser games, let me click on a location to go there, and click on a noun to get a list of non-spoilery verbs (at least “examine” and “take”). But also let me click on a noun and type my own verb, or just type commands in the box.
Quest supports all of this, of course. (But I do feel that its UI could be substantially improved by usability testing/feedback, and also substantially beautified.)
Hah! It’s funny how things keep going in circles. I rode that wave from text to graphics. I went from Zork & Hitchhiker’s Guide to Kings Quest. I would say King’s Quest looks older [emote]:D[/emote]
Quest looks great. I can’t believe I never ran into it while playing IF. However, I play mostly offline.
An interface and being able to trim down the available options is a good idea, too. Having a parser behind it sounds like IF to me. I like how Quest transitions between clicking and text. I’m going to check out some of the Quest games hosted on the site and see how the interface feels. I think the best attribute and selling point of it is the conversion into an App. If you want to reach the biggest audience, that’s the way to go.
At the moment, I’m looking to tell a specific story – and man, Inform is NOT getting in my way at all. I am not used to systems being this easy.
I’m not worried. Even if every single artist working on parser-based games were to die and/or quit before the end of the day today, the medium would not die. It is a formal necessity, like streams of text. Like moving video. Like both 2D and 3D graphics. If all the 2D graphics makers died, it would be pretty arrogant of that community to suggest that this would destroy the entire culture of making 2D graphics as if it would be only 3D from then on. (Note: I am not accusing anyone here of holding this specific kind of opinion; I’m just countering the starkest expression of what seems to be a general fear.) It would be tragic no doubt and greatly impact the current culture, but humanity is not so ego-based as people suspect (or fear). We are simply a collection of intellectual reactants that spread out and stick to the available formal surfaces. Language-based interactivity will always be one of those available formal surfaces – in audio, even if keyboards are improbably abolished – and therefore, there will always be a fresh supply of intellectual reactants who will be attracted to that formal surface and wish to make art upon it. Thanks to the efforts of many people here there will be a history and tradition for these fresh reactants to investigate.
This is not to say that the IFcomp will remain interesting if parser games stop being submitted to it… it probably won’t be nearly as interesting in that case.
I think some things will always lend themselves to parser engines. For example, the Threaded Conversations extension. And if that somehow ceases to be true, then that just means it’s innovation time!
This is exactly what I was doing in Akkoteaque, but I have not been able to balance listing commands necessary to complete the game with not spoiling the solutions to the puzzles. This probably means that my puzzles aren’t well suited to this sort of interface. There was also a terrible bug with hyperlinks on ifrotz that stopped it in it’s tracks…
So then, would anyone be interested in a hyperlink interface extension for Inform7 that takes care of all the basic actions?
Yeah! [emote]:D[/emote]
I think making things simpler, and creating various ways to play a game will get some more games out, and to a larger audience.
Wouldn’t a hybrid parser / hyperlink system work? I mean… thinking about how I perceive things day by day (and I assume many people are like this) a lot of details get lost in the speed of life. So, the hyperlinks would be the glaringly obvious things the player character sees while pursuing the current goal, but the parser would be closer to subconscious things that could be glossed over if not examined properly. In this way you force the player to not just focus on hyperlinks, which would cover all of the easy actions and exits, but to actually use reasoning (and the parser) to solve puzzles. I don’t know – does this make sense, or am I way off base, here? I’m a relative newbie to modern IF, and I’m still trying to figure out what people are doing and have already done.
Puts me in mind of the hybrid interface of the Legend games that had a little sidebar containing all currently-useful verbs.
The StormFront interface initiative for GemStone IV (play.net/gs4/info/npg/interact.asp) The point was to make gameplay easier, especially for new players.
What they discovered (as far as I know): people willing to play a MUD preferred to type.
On the other hand, the GS4 player base was shrinking at the time, whereas it feels to me like the crowd of people playing hyperlink fiction (Twine and cousins) is growing. So maybe this would be more helpful here.
The main benefit would be on devices like phones or tablets where typing out commands is a PITA.
Possibly, rather than focusing on separate commands, we could focus on shortcuts? iFrotz allows double-tapping on words to add them to the command line, and has good auto-complete. Isn’t that simpler? On the small iPhone/iPod Touch, it works pretty darn well.
I think for a phone interface, my main concerns are I want the text to be readable…it should scale easily to the user’s preference. It would be ideal if the whole page were text, and a keyboard slid up automatically upon touching the bottom half of the screen. It should then get the hell out of the way. I haven’t tried anything on my phone since I started using Swype - I wonder if that will make things easier.
That doesn’t sound like what I was talking about. I’m saying to only offer basic verbs, perhaps literally just “examine” and “get.” For anything else, force the player to type it.
I dunno, I really cut my teeth on the Sierra/LucasArts adventures, where the verb set was very limited. In some games, the verb set was nothing more than Go, Examine, and Use, plus click on an inventory item to use that item on something else. It doesn’t require a lot of verbs to make some acceptable puzzles.
It was the war to end all wars, but Pepsi would not give up. They continued to challenge Coke!
- Wade
I wonder if it would be interesting or enlightening (or just stupid) if someone were to interpret a classic parser game in CYOA. I could see it easily becoming a joke game, reducing the agency down to multiple choice.
[code]You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
*Open mailbox
*Enter house
*Go around house[/code]
This kind of reveals one of my issues with CYOA which I’ve been gradually warming up to. The prose needs to be a notch higher than the kind you would find in a parser game. It can’t be too dry, since I can’t expand the description by examining, (outside of if the author hyperlinks interesting features) and if it’s too purple and too long I get bored before I have to click again. One would assume you want to avoid the kind of mundane “go left/go right” choices in favor of more in depth matters
*Lady Cecily answers the letter from LaFond
*Lady Cecily continues her illicit affair with the stablehand
*Lady Cecily decides to dress as a boy and participate in the polo match herself…at some point though, it can feel like you’re “voting” on how the story goes rather than participating.
I actually found that the longer-form work was more pleasant to read on a phone like a novel since I can just adjust the text and read for a bit instead of pinpoint-selecting hyperlinks. If choices only occur occasionally, and I’m not having to touch all the text to get more of it, it feels like a novel, and the prose needs to jump up to actually keep me engrossed like a novel should.