Congratulations, I can see 45 “join” till now. Its barely a great people support for your iniiciative.
Having a rich and complex game with just the word USE is easily possible. Look at all of Arthur DiBianca’s games like Grandma Bethlinda’s Variety Box, Inside the facility, etc.
These are all “good old fashioned” text adventures that are much better in puzzles and humor than just about all the puzzle games I’ve seen in recent competitions, and they use just a single verb or even just movement with no verbs.
However, those games take a great amount of skill and imagination to write. Chandler Groover wrote a game called Eat Me using jus the verb EAT, and the code for that was much more complex than most his other games and recognized hundreds of verbs (just to all redirect them correctly to EAT).
(Edit: ninja’d by @ChristopherMerriner)
4 Likes
Let’s agree to disagree. That’s exactly the kind of puzzles I hate to do because it disrupts the flow of the story. However, that doesn’t mean that I cannot give you hard puzzle.
Let’s take your newspaper puzzle example.
USE NEWSPAPER
You slide the newspaper under the door, an old trick to retrieve the key on the other side of the door. In pulling the newspaper back, it got shredded, but you have the key!
Later on in the game, you meet someone who was frustrated because you failed to meet him to give him the necessary object because you failed to READ NEWSPAPER, which you need to do 3 times before the little classified ad he posted catches your eye.
If I’m nice, I may keep a counter to be persistent across repeated play, or maybe even OCCUR 30 if done with ScottKit. Or, I can make you read the newspaper 3 times in a row, or worse, 3 times in 10 moves but not in a row. I don’t believe that you will like it if I give you that kind of puzzle. Yet, it’s legit puzzle, albeit more PnC rather than Parser.
This is more of Game/Puzzle Design discussion rather than ParserComp, though, so I hesitate to talk it over here. Maybe put out a new topic for the difference between Parser and PnC puzzles?
It’s not the program, it’s the data. I maybe using ScottKit, or Adventuron, and do it quick. Or I maybe using Inform and TADS, and spend months doing it.
Implementing ScottKit won’t take that long, and I believe that it can be done by porting it to Inform6. So, no problem.
Thank you! Yes, I’m very pleased and thankful. 
Adam
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Many thanks for running this competition Adam. A world without decent parser based IF, i.e. where everything is Twine based or consists of puzzleless one room games where you can have 87 different conversations with a tin of creosote is my idea of hell.
8 Likes