It’s nice to hear all these different viewpoints and experiences! Being a relatively inexperienced author (who also had major time management issues during my project), I know my chances of having executed it particularly well are very slim. I am fully prepared to accept any criticism that may come from my mistakes, haha.
I do agree it can be great to take chances on unusual or “controversial” features that have the potential to add new and interesting elements to a work. That’s the kind of game I love to play, and I hope to be able to provide an interesting experience for others too!
At the very least I’m confident that most players will understand why I made this design choice, considering the game’s main theme. But it’s certainly plausible that it would have taken a more seasoned or talented writer (or even just a more experienced me!) to properly bring my vision to life. Time will tell!
As a first-time entrant, I’m honestly stoked for any and all parts of the IFComp process, and will treasure everything I get out of it
That sounds like all you can ask for and all the reader can ask for.
It struck me after this argument that a LOT of parser authors say “I know mazes are bad, but I think this one will work, because (reason x)” or they find a clever way to subvert it or give you an item that passes through a long maze. So I suspect there are Twine conventions of “stuff you shouldn’t do just because it’s there” and people can and should have the confidence to say “well, what if it’s in this context?” Or, in some cases, guess-the-verb.
So I basically agree with what @jjmcc said but thought I’d provide some context from the parser side of things!
Also, I’d argue that if someone doesn’t break any rules, they’re not really having fun or pushing themselves, even if they’re minor rules! Which is still okay. You can write something good and solid. But breaking the rule the right way often can give a work a positive jolt.
There’s a way to do timed text. The general rule is “if I can read to the end of what’s there and have to drum my fingers waiting for the next thing to appear that’s bad.” Even if I can click through to avert the timer, that still can be fiddly and annoying over the length of a moderate-sized game.
If you’re using timed text to somehow build suspense or anticipation through a long section of cutscene prose, that’s not a good idea and usually has the opposite effect of being distracting and manipulative. Nothing ruins suspense like the author standing over you with a stopwatch…
Delayed text is like salt - a teeny bit can be effective, such as a single brief “oh heck!” delay before a bomb explodes or a slight delay as a computer is searching for information and printing it out. Any delay of more than a second should be rare.
If you’re doing a stylistic “text reveal” transition style where text regularly fades in, or appears in sections, or different paragraphs glide in from alternate sides solely for “whiz bang neato” reasons, these transitions should be fast and not interrupt reading speed. Any cool transition that takes a while is cool the first time and should either not happen on every single screen or speed up on subsequent reveals so it’s minimal once you’ve seen the full thing. These can work well to mark occasional plot transitions or time passing like “The next day…” but will get old if presented too often.
Another long shot reason for an occasional delay might be to reveal a new thought - You present the player with the normal menu of choices and then suddenly - a flash of inspiration after three seconds: “Wait, I have the time travel device!” and there’s another new choice that appears to call specific attention to it. (Obviously this delay should not repeat each time this menu appears once the player has seen it the first time.)
Printing text l-e-t-t-e-r b-y l-e-t-t-e-r (like in Visual Novels or JRPGs) frequently is exhausting. Don’t do this the whole game. Save it for a rare salt-moment (like in Taco Fiction) or have your on-screen computer readout do this visibly but very fast as a style. Even if you can click through to skip the text scroll, this is very annoying through the course of a moderate-sized game.
One thing is that slow text doesn’t bother me nearly as much since I realized I can just download it and edit the twine file to remove it. Then I can give it a better review without being grumpy about something that’s not super important.
Hmmm…this coming from a person who spent months altering someone else’s game to make it more fun…
You’re right it can change author intent, but ‘is the artist in charge of how art is consumed or is the viewer in charge’ has been a debate for a long time. Porpentine’s game With Those We Love Alive asks the reader to draw symbols on their skin with marker, but I didn’t do that at that time either.
I also rewrote part of the Hugo interpreter source code to make a profanity filter so I could play Cryptozookeeper without an enormous slew of course words (although his cursing is so inventive that quite a lot got through and I learned several new phrases).
I’m really allergic to timed text. I read very quickly, albeit with a huge font if possible, and hate to be forced to read slowly. However my policy now is that if a game does this too much I will stop playing and move on to something else. So I won’t down vote it as I might otherwise. But that’s just me. Some people love it. Good luck to all the authors! And even if I don’t play your game many others will.
Theoretically, I like the idea of the viewer interacting with a piece of artwork by altering it to suit their own taste. Art should be interactive, right?
But I swear, every time I’ve gone to metropolitan art museum to put my theory into practice, I end up in handcuffs.
The thing about VNs is that they very nearly always let you click through, usually let you customize text speed, and fairly often let you disable timed text entirely. Like, your average VN creator has had the thought that people have different reading speeds and might like some control over this area of their experience. (It may be built into some common VN creation tools? I’m not sure, I’ve never made one, I just play a lot of them.) With IF, it’s fairly rare to have any sort of settings at all. Which is understandable for a category of games largely made by individual hobbyists, because including settings is more time and effort, but there’s also a certain amount of “but this is my artistic vision!” that goes into it, I think. Which is fair, but I do think that if your artistic vision physically interferes with the reading experience, you should gracefully accept that it will frustrate some people.
Insult to injury - if there’s a sound that plays with every letter. dbdbdbdbdbdbdbughdbdbboopduh
This can be stylish with some very artistic sound design, but usually for Visual Novels or JRPG where you want a sort of vocal mumble as the portrait lip-syncs.
I saw a significant number of Pentiment reviews that said they wished the fastest speed had been faster, so I specifically didn’t play it because I tracked down some videos with people playing on the fastest speed and it was slow enough that I knew that it would make me drop the game before I finished it, even though the effects were cool enough to be awesome for the first 20 minutes…
I have used a timer/timed text in my interactive poem (Reflecting my face in the mirror), two interactive adaptations (Litany in which certain things are crossed out, and Compassionate Simulation), and one game (In a minute there is time). The poems are short, the adaptation is dynamic fiction. The game I got the rarest compliment of “it works for this one” from people, including Mathbrush, because it’s meant to be excruciating to see the 60s timer tick down while someone’s yammering at you for 40s (and you can also back out of those timed conversations)
I am fully prepared to accept any criticism that may come from my mistakes, haha.
