PracticeClub Jam (SpeedIF)

Testers were divided into people who didn’t figure out the slide interface at all (on iOS), and people who got through the story by randomly trying possibilities rather than reading the text.

As usual, I’m impressed with how extensively you can expand Undum. I guess it takes really good knowledge of Javascript.

I really wished there were more than 3 text displays for each stat. When there’s only effectively, what, 4-5? only having 3 written out gets annoying, as it means you can’t tell whether “collapsed” or “insufficient” means “you will die next turn” or “you’re nearly stabilized”. Adverbs could work here.

I kept wishing there were a few more ways to interact with this, though.

Admittedly [spoiler]I only unlocked three new events: water conservation, biofuels, and the purple spiral whose name I can’t remember.

Although I just finished the game (succeeded lifeboat in any case) and never reached the purple spot this time, anyway.

But I never figured out what exactly led to the unlocking of new world positions: was it purely tech events? The societal leanings, of consumerism and xenophobia, seem like they could have had more effect; I never really noticed any.

And, to make sure I understand cryostasis: it makes the sleeping body ignore event results, and on awakening both bodies jump to the event at which the awakened body was put in stasis, right? But the newly awakened body takes on all stats of the other at that point, so the only real effect is A) rewind time along the event clock and B) the constantly awake body may have a slightly different population value now. (Also if it had been frozen too long, society may fragment, but again I never saw any effect from that.) Was that copying of stats intentional? I feel it could be a much more interesting (in the Dwarf Fortress sense) simulation if both bodies could progress independently.[/spoiler]

Also, I think I found a bug: [spoiler]I successfully landed the lifeboat despite the planet being cryofrozen, while the text had suggested it couldn’t have even been launched in that state.

My last log: [rant]CETERIS PARIBUS

War. Heavy casualties. Agriculture stalls. Environment damaged. Economy benefits. Treaty signed. Peace. Wartime robotics lie unused.
Population booms. Consumerism takes hold. Economy burdened. Resources stretched. Population interested in expanding habitable regions.
Outbreak and pandemic. Economy stalls. Population loss. More resources per capita. Population interested in reprogramming human immune systems.
Surplus robotics used for agriculture. Environmental damage. Water consumption spikes. Population interested in renewable energy.
Consumerism on downswing. Scientists develop mass cryostasis. New understanding of microbiology may lead to better biofuels. Surplus robotics aid scientific advances, bolster economy at cost of agriculture and environment.
Moon enters cryostasis. Focus on environment. Green policies slow economy. Environmental benefit could have been greater with more robotics. Consumerist attitude drives conflict over resources, undermines water stewardship initiatives.
War. Heavy casualties. Agriculture stalls. Environment damaged. Economy benefits. Treaty signed. Peace. Wartime robotics lie unused.
Moon wakes from cryostasis. Society shifts.
Surplus robotics used to improve environment. Green policies slow economy. Similar efforts begun to restore water supplies.
Water conservation program in place. Agricultural downturn due to irrigation limits.
War. Heavy casualties. Agriculture stalls. Environment damaged. Economy benefits. Treaty signed. Peace. Wartime robotics lie unused.
Population booms. Consumerism takes hold. Economy burdened. Resources stretched. Population interested in expanding habitable regions.
Outbreak and pandemic. Economy stalls. Population loss. More resources per capita. Population interested in reprogramming human immune systems.
Surplus robotics used for agriculture. Environmental damage. Water consumption spikes. Population interested in renewable energy.
Planet enters cryostasis. Consumerism on downswing. Scientists develop advanced biofuels. New understanding of microchemistry may lead to nanorobotics. Surplus robotics aid scientific advances, bolster economy at cost of agriculture and environment.
Focus on environment. Green policies slow economy. Environmental benefit could have been greater with more robotics. Consumerist attitude drives conflict over resources, undermines water stewardship initiatives.
Planet wakes from cryostasis. Society shifts.
Energy consumption favors the biofuel market.
Moon enters cryostasis. Scientists develop nanorobotics. New understanding of chemical-processing codes may lead to mass desalination. Scientific advances bolster economy at cost of agriculture and environment. Economic benefit could have been greater with more robotics.
Focus on environment. Green policies slow economy. Environmental benefit could have been greater with more robotics. Similar efforts begun to restore water supplies.
Water conservation program in place. Agricultural downturn due to irrigation limits.
Moon wakes from cryostasis. Society shifts.
Planet enters cryostasis. Scientists develop mass desalination. New understanding of environmental transformatives may lead to terraforming and geoengineering. Scientific advances bolster economy at cost of agriculture and environment. Economic benefit could have been greater with more robotics.
Focus on environment. Green policies slow economy. Environmental benefit could have been greater with more robotics. Similar efforts begun to restore water supplies.
Mass desalination turns oceans into freshwater sources. Oceans suffer from unbridled consumption.
Planet wakes from cryostasis. Society shifts.
Moon enters cryostasis. Scientists develop geoengineering. New understanding of biospheres and energy distribution may lead to interstellar travel. Scientific advances bolster economy at cost of agriculture and environment. Economic benefit could have been greater with more robotics.
Focus on environment. Green policies slow economy. Environmental benefit could have been greater with more robotics. Similar efforts begun to restore water supplies.
Moon wakes from cryostasis. Society shifts.
Planet enters cryostasis. Scientists develop interstellar-capable generation ship. Launch of generation ship delayed while planet in cryostasis. Scientific advances bolster economy at cost of agriculture and environment. Economic benefit could have been greater with more robotics.
Forced rationing and new environmentalism stabilize society aboard lifeboat.
Lifeboat arrives at habitable planet. New chapter in history.[/rant][/spoiler]

Phew, finally got internet access. A new version, addressing everything except more modes of interaction, uploaded in the original post. You found more bugs, perhaps, than you realized. (This is what I get for putting out a game without beta testing.)

Stats were not copied, but averaged, which was not very clear. I’ve changed them to run separately and retuned the puzzles, and they’re consequently more interesting.

Thanks, Chris, as always, for the great feedback!

As an adjunct to the first (I think) TheoryClub discussion, here’s a quote from Jimmy Maher’s discussion of Nine Princes in Amber (which I’d never heard of [EDIT: this initially said “reviewed,” which made no sense]):

So hm. Sounds directly relevant! It did seem to me that if it were an explicit choice game the player might be deprived of this:

I actually wondered about the same thing. In a hypertext of the sort that Maher says this game would have benefitted from being…

…and that’s probably the most convoluted sentence I’ve ever written…

…all the choices would be explicitly listed for the player to choose. It wouldn’t be exploratory, and apparently the game gains a lot when played in an exploratory, original-story-diverging way.

Which is always one of the difficulties of puzzle-designing in CYOA (and, I suppose, the main reason why CYOA is simply a beast of a different nature, never really focusing on puzzles much): all the possible choices that can advance the story are there for the player to click on.

One way of doing it, I suppose, would be to have most or all the major options - the ones like “walk in shadows” or “attack Amber” - always available. Always.

Hmmm, maybe “walk in shadows” could be toggleable - a simple “sneak” effect (I dunno, I never played the game or read the books) which would affect the next passages. And “attack” could be a button that gave several submenus - people, cities, what have you - that could reasonably be attacked at this time.

So I guess it WOULD be possible: by overwhelming the player with options, but doing so carefully enough that the player would soon recognise WHEN those options were actually relevant.

Hmmm, I’m reminded of the spell system in the iOS Sourcery! games. It’s pretty much the same thing, gameplay-wise - a non-explicit but definite choice.

Now I’m all excited about this game. [emote]:)[/emote]

The combination of PLACATE / FLATTER / BLUFF / etc with thirteen major characters – or even a handful of characters per scene – seems like a good source of explorability even in a menu-based system. Dropping the parser means you’re never going to surprisingly try “PLACATE THE BANK TELLER”, nor “ATTACK PITTSBURGH”. But these are pretty well outside the scope of the Amber story to begin with.

A hypothetical “Choice of Amber” game (that’s what we’re talking about, right?)(*) would be explorable. That’s the fundamental of that kind of game – an explorable tree of consequences. And you would certainly have the choice of sticking to the book’s plot or not. What might be missing is the sense of struggling to follow the book’s plot.

(* The missing footnote to the above: The ambitious version would be Amber in Versu. Versu was designed for exactly this sort of flatter/flirt/bluff/insult social-interaction playground. I ain’t tackling it, though.)

What I meant was not so much explorability as the thrill of discovering that the game is explorable rather than a linear stroll through the book’s plot. But that might not be so important. Actually it’s still probably there if lots of the alternate choices get you killed, as they seem to do.

For what it’s worth the manual is here. There are a lot of verbs – presumably in the multiple-choice version most of them would be grayed out most of the time.

Yes, exactly, the player doesn’t have to struggle to guess the command nor does the game have to accomodate every single thing. On the other hand, though, if a Bank Teller is in the “room” and we’ve made him upset… well, then “placate” could suddenly be applicable. And so would a sleuth of other interactions.

Versu might make it even more dynamic and alive, but possibly a bit too much? The way it currently exists, 9PiA might work best as a (gargantuan) scripted piece (for a given value of scripted; i.e., as scripted as, say, Sorcery!, where the “script” allows for you to have X companions, or not, in various scenes). I was personally thinking more of Undum. Or, even, Crawford’s Storytron.

I mean, it depends on what the scope was. If the heart of the game is the social interaction (and I get the feeling, from Maher, it is), then I suppose Versu would be the best tool, though it looks a bit too powerful for what 9PiA does (I could be utterly wrong). But the examples that Maher gives (attack city, walk in shadows) speak to me of something besides social interaction.

Well, then again, not having an iPad I haven’t been able to check Versu in action, so I might well be talking baloney.

I imagine so. However, I would also imagine it would be best if they were available if they make sense even remotely. That way the player would always have a wide array of choices, all of them meaningful to a certain degree.

A nightmare to code, and of course we can’t do it because of copyright, but it’s a cool “castle in the air”, as we Lusitans say. [emote]:)[/emote]

True, I’d guess that would only come across in a parser interface. But I wonder if it’s worth it, keeping that “discovery moment”… because the player follows it linearly mostly because (as I understand from Maher) the parser is so obtuse that trying to deviate is merely frustrating. The player must understand the parser thoroughly in order to deviate, and that “understanding” could be compared simply to always having a list of actions in buttons, greyed-out or otherwise. So by skipping straight to it, we avoid the frustration.

Anyway, if the player is familiar with the book, I’d imagine they’ll either play it like the book - and discover the surprising not-so-good finale, leading them to replay - or they’ll take every chance to try new things… and they’d try new things with the parser version as well, except that in the parser version they’d throw their hands up in disgust and say “Ah well, I suppose I can only play it like the book”, unless they hit upon the right commands.

So again, we might be losing that “discovery”, but I’d argue we’d be reducing player frustration.

Same again. I would, as a player, gladly do without that struggle.

I like the cathegories! You could do the same thing with buttons: “Hostile”, “Neutral”, “Friendly”, etc, and each have their own sub-menu. Or have them collapsable/extendable, and allow the player to, say, always keep the “Neutral” menu open for easy access.

EDIT - Reading the manual, I would say that, in all probability, ANY text adventure that has a huge list of commands that has to be consulted all the time is probably not suited for a parser interface (ain’t hindsight grand). That also goes for the Perry Mason game. Conversely, if a game understand a huge amount of input BUT is able to clue the player in, or is responsive enough that the player is never left floundering for lack of an appropriate command (which present day parser-based IF is always trying to achieve) then it’s definitely a parser-based game.

The thing is, these are plot elements from the book. “Walk in shadows” is a stock scene; it’s one of the two ways you travel at all, in this setting. And then book 1 ends with a big set-piece assault on Amber. I can’t remember if the series works around to repeat performances, but it’s a given that half the characters are planning it at any given time and the other half are planning the defense. (And half of both groups are deciding who to backstab in the middle of the attack.)

Sounds complex. In fact, sounds downright Lord Of Midnight-ish.

Thanks for clearing that up, too.

So, with the next Theory Club discussion centered around testing, what’s the Practice Club Jam gonna look like? Or will we cross that bridge when we come to it?

Beats me. Maybe we’ll have an idea after the chat.

Speaking of which, I didn’t catch that the June 14th transcript is up:

emshort.wordpress.com/if-discuss … onfiction/

Read, consider ideas, post experiments here by July 1st.