Patrick's 2023 Reviews

[patrick_mooney]

Hello, McStranger!

I do remember the setup for those 80s games (and, coincidentally, was just writing about that on the forum last week). I also have a lot of nostalgia for them and think that trying to re-evoke that in a contemporary setting is a really tricky needle to thread. For what it’s worth, I meant what I said in the review:I think there’s the beginnings of a good game there, and I think that building and polishing it will be a worthwhile task. I hope I get to play a polished and completed version some day.

I hope you don’t mind if I respond to some of the specific things you say here.

@HandsomeMcStranger

From the end result, I wonder if everyone thinks it’s because I wasn’t smart enough to make it right, or if they see the potential from what was completed and understand I would have made it a lot better if I had more time.

Of course, I can’t speak for everyone, but my own experience was very much that part of my frustration was seeing the potential and banging my head against the wall of not being able to figure out how to accomplish a task, or realizing it hadn’t yet been implemented. I suspect other people saw the game mostly as an early draft, rather than the production of someone who is incompetent or foolish. I think that the game you’ve sketched out is pretty ambitious and will take a lot of work to complete and polish, but I suspect that the end product will be worthwhile.

@HandsomeMcStranger

There is actually a way to load and save games. The command for it was LOADGAME / SAVEGAME GAMENAME. RESTARTGAME restarts it and EXITGAME to quit.

There is also an in game fog of war map that no one seemed to discover. type MAP

There was an alchemy section to the game where the user can craft items with elements transmuted from fallen enemies, which did work technically, though the use of the crafted items wasn’t implemented because of time limitations.

There were some clues written on objects, but the main character is sight impaired and cannot read small writing unless he equips something to aid him.

There are shops where you can buy and sell items and if you buy a shovel, you can dig every location to get a random treasure.

There are a few puzzles that rely on you knowing the time to within 30 minutes. There is a real time world clock that ticks every turn. You can estimated the time from the location description, but if you find the ghost watch, you will no longer have to guess.

A lot the procedural text was actually just debugging text that I had planned to replace with more relevant messages… Again, time.

For me personally, a lot of my frustration with the game would likely have been ameliorated by a README or other basic-overview kind of document — even a page or two laying out some of this information and other information about basic game mechanics would have helped. No, not everyone will notice it’s there and read it … but some will. I would have: I went through the folder opening everything that looked like a text file long enough to see if it were a manual. (On a related note, I would have liked to see the distribution folder organized in such a way as to hide the game-implementation files from the user by putting them into a subfolder, and maybe having the manual-type document(s) put into a Documentation or docs/ folder.) And if you’re trying to evoke the nostalgic forms of early IF, documentation is one nice supporting feature that helps to polish that particular illusion.

For LOADGAME, SAVEGAME, RESTARTGAME, and EXITGAME, I hope you don’t mind if I suggest adopting the now-standard commands SAVE, RESTORE, RESTART, and QUIT, either as the primary commands or as synonyms for your longer forms.

Anyway: I mean it when I say I hope there’s a finished version, because the first public draft sure is promising. PM me when you release it, please?