Testing parameters

General
1

For testing your own system, are there any other standards beside Cloak of Darkness?

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Cloak of Darkness is really just an example, not a test.

The usual workout for parser systems is porting Adventure.

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This is the IFDB search for games with source available so one is somewhat spoiled for choice in finding a game to adapt to kick a new engine’s tires. But you’d probably want to be able to share the result, so you might also want to look for one licensed in a way that would allow you to do it (though I suspect many authors would say “sure, go ahead” if asked for permission).

Emily Short’s Bronze has such a license; here’s Bronze in XVAN.

(And Adventure, as Andrew suggested, has been released under a 2-clause BSD license.)

Emily Short suggests IF games for adaptation here. It was in response to a question about adapting for VR, but it touches on looking for things already licensed for adaptation.

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(And Adventure, as Andrew suggested, has been released under a 2-clause BSD license.)

That looks complicated to try to build. There’s a Python sub-project that generates C files, or something. I wouldn’t be able to build that.

Are there any ports of Adventure into Python, Ruby, Node, Lua, etc?

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Games with source on the IFArchive with Adventure conveniently near the top alphabetically. There’s FORTRAN, C, and Forth, there. Plus

and doubtlessly others.

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Also:

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My guess is “source” is the best we have, no spec for each location is available or a spec like COD? Not wanting a walkthrough either.

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I ported Adventure to Rust, although it’s the earliest version I could find and not the game most would know.

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Yes, source is the best we have.

It occurs to me that Craverly Heights is perhaps an even better candidate. This page with an annotated side by side comparison of its Inform 7 and Dialog source makes the intended behavior fairly easy to follow.

Discussions like this one crop up on a recurring basis…

But it keeps not happening. I suspect it’s because the domain is just too big. The spec calls for the moon to be visible in the outdoor locations. But does it dictate that the game should report an error if you try to give moon to aunt may? Does it specify what the error message should be?

In general, parser game devs rely heavily on existing standard libraries and its default world model, and errors, and messages. And no two of them have exactly the same world model. A specification should be, well, specific enough that one could document a test suite that determines whether something fails to implement the spec or (possibly) succeeds at implementing the spec. But there are so many different kinds of failure in parser IF that it would be extraordinarily tedious to create the spec, or document the test suite, or attempt to satisfy such a spec. I suspect that these are the rocks that aspirations to create such a thing crash upon.

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I’m looking for choice based type games, not parser.

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Maybe consider The Intercept, an MIT-licensed choice-based game that’s sort of the de facto official demo Ink game? Although again, it’s just an example rather than an exhaustive test. I’ve also seen people port the crime scene example from the Ink documentation to new systems.

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The reason why we all started with parser is because Cloak of Darkness is an example intended for parser games. People have in the past adapted it to choice-based formats, but it wasn’t its original use case.

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