Seriously, this game sucks.

Playing Game Hints
1

A small transcript from an illuminated player.
I don’t really know how to cope with this. :slight_smile:

[Actually, I don’t know if anyone can see this… In case:]

[rant]ABOUT
Condominium
Andromeda Awakening is an IF by Marco Innocenti, written for the IFComp 2011. It is the first full work of Interactive Fiction by the author.
The game was betatested and proofread by Joel Webster, and proofread by Lutein Hawthorne and G. A. Tippery. If you find any bugs or misspellings, please don’t shoot on them because they did the BEST job ever, considering it was done on a very tight schedule.

Release 2 was done via the help and suggestions of such impressive gentlemen as Victor Gijsbers, Peter Pears from goodolddays.net. Praises to them.

If you have suggestions, corrections or flames, feel free to contact me at minnocenti@kidstudio.it. Of course, it would not be lethal to write me some (eventual) pleasantries, also.

A superbrief HINT command is included, but no complete walkthrough, in game. That can be found in a separate .txt file.

Look around
Condominium
You can’t see any such thing.

Wonder what to do
Condominium
That’s not a verb I recognise.

look
Condominium
Condominium
The foggy light coming from the grates on the top half of the stairwell looks like a cascade of dusty milk. You are standing just mere feet from your house entrance, above the first step outside.

around
Condominium
That’s not a verb I recognise.

what to do?
Condominium
That’s not a verb I recognise.

eat some bagels
Condominium
You can’t see any such thing.

walk into the house
Condominium
You can’t see any such thing.

enter house
Condominium
You can’t see any such thing.

open door
Condominium
The door will open automatically as you step into the next room.

step into house
Condominium
That’s not a verb I recognise.

walk back
Condominium
You can’t see any such thing.

what do i see
Condominium
That’s not a verb I recognise.

see
Condominium
That’s not a verb I recognise.

look
Condominium
Condominium
The foggy light coming from the grates on the top half of the stairwell looks like a cascade of dusty milk. You are standing just mere feet from your house entrance, above the first step outside.

You really think it’s time to rush for the Campus. You sight the exit, down from here.

look
Condominium
Condominium
The foggy light coming from the grates on the top half of the stairwell looks like a cascade of dusty milk. You are standing just mere feet from your house entrance, above the first step outside.

rush for the campus
Condominium
That’s not a verb I recognise.

enter exit
Condominium
You can’t see any such thing.

exit
the Exit

the Exit
The faint lights get fainter here. A sturdy door opens on the Avenues, to the north. A flight of stairs moves up to your front door.

walk up stairs
the Exit
I only understood you as far as wanting to walk up.

walk up
Condominium

Condominium
The foggy light coming from the grates on the top half of the stairwell looks like a cascade of dusty milk. You are standing just mere feet from your house entrance, above the first step outside.

walk out
the Exit

the Exit
The faint lights get fainter here. A sturdy door opens on the Avenues, to the north. A flight of stairs moves up to your front door.

continue
the Exit
That’s not a verb I recognise.

walk up stairs
the Exit
I only understood you as far as wanting to walk up.

walkk stairs
the Exit
That’s not a verb I recognise.

walk stairs
Condominium

Condominium
The foggy light coming from the grates on the top half of the stairwell looks like a cascade of dusty milk. You are standing just mere feet from your house entrance, above the first step outside.

take stairs
the Exit

the Exit
The faint lights get fainter here. A sturdy door opens on the Avenues, to the north. A flight of stairs moves up to your front door.

enter avenues
the Exit
You can’t see any such thing.

go north
Avenues
You leave the satisfying safeness of your house with but a sigh. The massive vibertron door opens with no sound, and with no sound closes after you.

Avenues
The vivid pink of the Monarch sky paints an eternal sunset and washes the street and the buildings in a somewhat romantic nuance. The door to your condominium lies south of here, reflecting the three suns like a gigantic kaleidoscope. The Avenue runs out of sight in every direction, finding outlets in a handful of other busy streets. The one you need runs east, towards the train station.

All these people, you think, watching the passers-by as they crowd the streets in their random duties. If only they knew, they’d squatter around like mad rats, biting at each other and feasting on the corpses.

The major sun – Korhos – seems to point its malevolent, cold finger at you.

seriously, this game sucks
Avenues
You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can’t see whom.[/rant]

2

You don’t. There’s no need to.

3

This is clearly a transcript from someone who isn’t used to playing IF. There’s little you can do - you can go the extra mile and add some sort of generic response that might be triggered by some of his most obscure commands, but that way madness lies. You can include the IF Reference Card with your game. You can use some of the most newbie-helpful extensions out there to cover SOME of the many responses commands IFers don’t even dream about.

But mostly? Mostly you shouldn’t worry.

4

Maybe I should add a joypad extension? :smiley:

5

This reminds me of a voice control software for Windows XP (Dragon-something). Some people were trying to tell the computer stuff like “look up lolcats in Google” and “play Paranoid by Black Sabbath.” Nothing they said was understood, because they didn’t know the concept of it. They thought the program was useless.

If someone can’t be arsed to RTFM, even if told so right from the beginning (“new players should type ABOUT or HELP”) then nothing can help them.

6

If nothing else, I think it might be worth putting a note in the ABOUT or pre-opening text or banner or somewhere that the game assumes basic knowledge of IF conventions, and direct newbies to some aid/reference sheets/etc.

7

The game needs more structure first move in. Something trivial a newbie can screw around with to get the idea of the parsed command-response game structure, and an oldbie can move past.

Might also create an autohelp timer. If the player hasn’t entered a meaningful command in 7 moves, it speaks up with some direction.

Conrad.

8

Hahah man, that’s pretty funny actually.

Walk stairs! Walk damn you!

9

A transcript like this is really valuable. Usually if someone doesn’t make any progress they quit very early, but this person did stick with it very long.

There are some things that could be easily improved. Obviously “eat some bagels” is not something the story should respond to if there are no bagels in the entire game, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that “enter house” should work.

The transcript demonstrates quite well the conventional wisdom that the parser should understand the same words you use to instruct the player to do something. As an extreme example, if the story says “You should grab the bagel”, then the parser really should understand “grab” as a synonym for “take” and not assume that the player is aware of the standard IF verbs. In this case if you say that the doors open automatically as you step into the next room, it’s not unreasonable to assume that “step into” should be a synonym for “enter”.

Also, it seems obvious that in this case when the player says “this game sucks”, they mean “this parser sucks”, so I wouldn’t take it too personally.

What would happen if you included that Aaron Reed’s newbie helping extension (I don’t remember the exact name right now) and tried the same commands? Would it give more reasonable responses?

10

“Wonder what to do”

this is typical of ADD people who can’t read. It’s clearly stated in the prologue that you’ve packaged stuff and is leaving the house.

Don’t bother. ADD people are trigger-happy crackhead FPS players, not IF players or even readers at all.

edit
Now that I’m playing the game, I’m more bothere by this

[spoiler]“we know nothing about Monarch before the first settlements from the outer galaxies came into Andromeda more than one thousand years ago. Technology back then was not sufficient to dig as far as we have recently.”

come on! The guys can travel across galaxies but can’t dig a hole far enough in the ground?![/spoiler]

than by the occasional lack of polish on scenery.

11

I suspect that there are plenty of people with ADD that play IF and read. It’s a disorder, not an all-purpose insult.

12

Indeed! And write, for that matter – both IF and Ph.D. dissertations and what have you.

13

To make it clear. I’m NOT bothered by this particular “player”, I was just joking. Posted ‘cause it deserved to:)
I bother more at all those who kept tryin’ to get inside the building even if the game tries to push you OUT: Emily Short said something quite insightful on the matter as an answer to my post on her first review of AA.
Fortunately, the problem is addressed in the Final Cut version. (Really, play the Final Cut version. Really.)

You are right. I make amends on things like this one (or try to do it) in the Afterwords you get after finishing the Final Cut Version. (Did I mention to play the Final Cut version? If I didn’t, well: Play the Final Cut version. Really.)

Anyway: Although I understand the need to gain more attention and give a better experience to IF newbies… still, to me IFComp is IFComp. And I enter games for IF fans, in the IFComp. Andromeda 2 will be even worse, I suspect :slight_smile:

14

Also: I’m bothered by the fact that the

ticket puzzleis impossible. I’m not sure I had it addressed properly even in the Final Cut Version.
Which, of course, you should play.

15

impossible? It’s quite straightforward. I’ve only taken a peek at the folder after going through it.

16

I don’t know what you mean. But you should have a look at the 720 transcripts online in which people failed to find the solution. I think the

wax soap puzzleis much easier.

Well, at least you don’t have to memorize blorple TWICE to do it.

17

I meant that I only took at peek at the documents in the folder the PC was carrying after getting to the train. Going through the ticket obliterator was easy enough: you can’t go ahead because you your ticket is invalid, so you just backtrack. I took at look at the scenery and there was the guy looking at the maps in the station, a clear hint that I should go talk to him. A harder puzzle would be if he was hidden in between scenery description, but he was in a paragraph all by his own.

I really should try finishing Spellbreaker one day. I’ve only really finished Nelson’s wonderful nod at it, the early Inform demo Balances. Kinda hard, but fair and logic puzzles.

18

You examined the scenery, which is something many found unobvious and unfair. But thanks for the support. :slight_smile:

I found your transcript online. You are NOT playing the Final Cut Version. This is BAD.

19

Look at one of the old Infocom games. The documentation included a sample transcript that illustrated the kind of instructions used in playing the game.

20

Now that I’ve made up a coherent timetable for events in the galaxy… I think there WAS a reason for such a thing:

The layers where indeed dug in the beginning, as one can witness when entering the last rooms of the game. The Event then wiped clean technology and all, that’s why the PC thinks they were not able. But they were. And did.

Things for people to investigate in the upcoming competition, if they want!