That I put out quick post-comp releases for each of my entries is a good sign EctoComp was good to me. With a late flurry of activity I rated 2/3 of the entries I could. There are still a couple entries I want to check out. I’m impressed with what it’s become, and how I see new names I hadn’t seen before submitting stuff. Long may that continue. It looks like the organizers have found a way to spread the word.
I had a few goals for EctoComp, when submitting these three games, beyond just uncluttering my mind and avoiding the bottom. I also wanted to see if I could have the sum of my top two vote getters be greater than or equal to the number of votes from the most played game. The second, in fact, happened, and it was a tie, but I cheated! I didn’t rate the top vote-getter. I claim solidarity with other entries that wanted more votes, helping the little guy out, blah blah blah. And I wanted to add something new technically to each game.
I also think this will be my last participation in Petite Mort. Not that I haven’t enjoyed it, but it was stressful to fit everything into four hours with a few small bursts, and when the deadline came, I was relieved just to take a step back and fill in details for my entries, cross pollinating the features so that they were in each game. Petite Mort has served its purpose for me as a programmer but I will be judging/rating/reviewing!
I did enjoy adding a new feature to each game, but it did get troubling to track everything, especially since Adventuron has the web only interface format. This doesn’t work great with source control, even if you can cut and paste. But Adventuron obviously does a lot of other things right, too. The graphics are a big thing, and they played a part in a mini feature I tried that I don’t know if people noticed.
About the features. GSGR had an in-game map, not meant to be too tricky, but at just five rooms it was a test run for Quirky Test’s larger in-game map. CDSA leaned into the THINK command and hint item more (it was less linear so it was harder to track) and also had a nag feature which forced you to leave and return. It also relied more heavily on combinations of puzzles and had you act on an item, and had the concept of “useless” items that would be destroyed at the right puzzle. DADC had the sky slowly turning more light as you solved more puzzles.
GSGR was also a nice way to ramp up when I got a bit stuck in IFComp. I don’t know if I ever finished writing a Petite Mort game before EctoComp, started, but in this case, I had the six ideas where I was just laughing a bit “so what happens if I make an EctoComp entry? It’d go something like this…”
The map took up a lot of my programming time, as did the oaf who clued things. I used code generation for Quirky Test’s puzzles that cut down the time needed for Petite Mort, and speech to text also worked nicely. I had another stub that formatted text to print statements. So it was neat to have stuff get reused.
GSGR wrapped up the big stuff pretty early, and I was left thinking, is this all? We’ll give you another game? It would be fun if there was. Ark came next, and I wanted to keep it relatively small and tidy, maybe with nine rooms. But I felt I had to write it, especially after Wade Clarke and Art DiBianca pointed out things while testing and while sending me a transcript from the comp.
That was something eliminated from the final release, where it said you searched for a weak link. So they both tried Wee Clink, maybe to make it small enough to escape, or less intimidating than a cell. I don’t even remember if I put that phrase in there, to make people laugh or whatever, but when they found it, I thought maybe it deserved higher billing, or maybe as a puzzle the other way around. I actually liked it better than Us Too’s puzzle, which I liked too.
I wanted to keep the map small at nine rooms, and I figured I would have four off shoots each where you have to go to room one, then find a way to unlock room to later. But the thing was, with that box, there’s no other way to do it but to make a swastika. Which, no. So I wound up with a bit of a convoluted map, and I imagine this might have pushed it down in the rankings if there wasn’t that much else to separate it from the other two. It wasn’t intuitive, and it’s still hard to test, and I wind up confusing the pond and the maze. And the whole pushing the player back so they show up later might be frustrating too. I did also slip up by putting a portal in two places, where I meant to put a door in one.
Still, I was glad I was able to put in ideas like the tattoos/number, which were like the oaf but programmed more quickly and robustly with experience.
The final phrase was one that I had heard, and it might have been due to FlacRabbit’s Matter of Heist Urgency that I had the idea for the silly pun for the final puzzle. I really wanted to throw a long word in there. But I also saw the word “robbery” and it Made Me Think.
But Arc did feel bumpy and I thought, hey, you get three entries, and I wrote it up pretty quickly at the start of if comp.
So I figured if I had another idea, I would let it happen. I realized the map didn’t need to be a square. There were other possibilities for symmetry with still just nine rooms. (I didn’t count the introduction/epilogue.) In this case it was a tree-ish structure where the end nodes on one side helped you solve the middle node on the other, with the path down the middle being the final set. I liked this symmetry but just needed puzzles. I feel that DADC’s are the least Halloweeny, but they have a bit more of a story. I figured I’d go in for general weirdness and desolation and relying on the overused “It was all a dream” ending. Only in this case you get to make it so.
The graphics were really fun to draw, but I did see limitations, such as how I wanted to add gradients and couldn’t really do that easily with MS paint. The gradients might show texture of, for instance, the animals in DADC. I worried the joke might get old to readers, but all the same, I realized I did spend time on the pictures and I enjoyed it. I just feel I can do more. I’m glad the comp rule say drawing didn’t count against time limits. With Adventuron it’s not hard to add a drawing, or an overlay.
Throughout this I thought of one more feature: each game notes if you get something half-right, but it doesn’t TRACK it. I laughed that off as too fiddly for Adventuron. This was where Inform’s handling of data structures made it superior.
And it was. But I figured a way through for GSGR. It’s not exactly pretty, but you don’t need to use structures, just several arrays. It’s weird, I spent a lot of time saying “I can’t do that, but I can do X” and eventually I realized I could.