“The Promise” is an Interactive Folk Tale in Three Acts.
The project has been in the works for just over a year, and I have had several Alpha testers working on it from the beginning. But it now is ready for full-on Beta testers.
The idea is to submit it for the Spring Thing, but due to a memory fault error on my part, I thought I had submitted my intent to enter, but did not. But there is hope. I may get in after all. Either way I am intending on releasing this game soon.
You play a young boy of nine who wakes up in his village on the day before your tenth birthday. You are asked to help out while most of the adults and able older children are on a hunting expedition. Your mother wants you to become a productive member of the village so she asks you to help the villagers out by offering your services to them during a day that starts out like most other days in your village - cold, perpetual winter.
But as the day progresses you realize that this is no ordinary day, and you soon learn the value of a promise.
It is a longer game, fitting for the Spring Thing, but not the IF Comp (which has a two-hour playtime limit).
Please contact me at promise at huxter dot org, or sean at huxter dot org.
I am making feelies for the game - two “parchment” maps and a “parchment” letter sealed in wax. (Should you open it? Play the game.)
For this I carved a glass bead as a wax seal. I also carved an amulet from a beach rock (the in-game amulet) and I am considering plans to release replicas of that too, if I can find the right bakeable clay. (Sadly I can’t release actual carved amulets because it would take me more than a full day to carve a single one.)
All testers get a credit in the game, so please let me know the name/pseudonym you would like used in the credit.
Thanks!
What? Who am I, you rightfully ask?
I’m Sean Huxter. I was a huge INFOCOM fan back in the day. In fact when I got my Commodore 64 in late 1982, I purchased it bundled with “SUSPENDED”, by Infocom. I own almost every INFOCOM game available for the Commodore 128 (which I upgraded to specifically so I could play the later INFOCOM games such as “A Mind Forever Voyaging” and “Trinity” which were too large for the C64. I currently work as a Technical Artist for a computer game company, but am always working on personal computer gaming projects, including in 2009, a Bejeweled-like game in Assembler for the Commodore 64 playable under the GEOS operating system. Other than that I’m a huge toy collector and a 7-year contributor to the SyFy Channel’s “Science Fiction Weekly” website (now merged with SyFy Wire.)
My only other IF game, written in the modern era, (I did write one in BASIC in 1985) is “Piracy 2.0”, An Adventure in Space, based very much on the INFOCOM model and that original BASIC game, took fifth place in the 2008 IF Comp. Please check it out if you wish, but it is polar opposites from this current game/story.
Thanks!
Sean.