OK, this is back-seat driving at it’s finest: this isn’t even really for you the author, so feel free to completely ignore it. But I thought this was a fun idea that landed on the prongs of three fiddly design problems, and I enjoyed the meta-puzzle of “how might I make this work better?” probably more than the game itself. And I keep wanting to talk about it.
long
So, three problems:
- How do you make an interface for a “parser-like” map-and-inventory game that balances being both not too clicky and having a non-overwhelming amount of stuff visible at any one time?
- How much do you simulate, and how do you describe it so that players can understand what’s going on?
- How do you make a comedy about juggling too many plates frustratingly funny instead of just plain frustrating?
I think the biggest thing here is that there are extra clicks in a lot of places.
Clicking on a location should just go to it: we don’t need to see “The hill on the west side of the clearing in the dark and oppressive forest” a million times – I know it’s a hill, thanks, I just want to go there.
Another big thing that’s not only an extra click but also hugely confusing (it took me three playthroughs to figure out why this was throwing me so much): the game (or maybe the engine) gives you a separate page describing you going from one place to another, and it has almost all the links, so you think it’s a location description, but it’s not.
Pretty much all parser engines will give you a brief description of your action and then immediately follow it with the full location description. So this led to a LOT of “wait, where the heck did that object go? I know it was here?” And then searching for the name of the current location so I could click it to see where I actually was. It doesn’t help that it’s in a sentence so it’s not always quite in the same place (though I did eventually realize that the current location is always in the top right and you can click it there. But it’s still an extra completely unnecessary click every. single. time. you. move).
You never feel quite in a location: you’re in this liminal space of “JAKE exits the FOREST and steps into the HILL.” The actual location is a popup that could go away at any time.
Fixing this would save so much time: instead of HILL → brief hill description → GO → “jake goes to the hill” → HILL → full hill description, it’d just be HILL → “jake goes to the hill: full hill description.” One step instead of FIVE, but without changing any of the simulation’s action economy, I think? It feels like it’s still the same amount of actions for Jake.
Another thing is that describing spaces is hard: it’s a common exercise in the ambiguity of language to hand one person a simple picture or diagram and have them describe it to someone else who attempts to duplicate it without either being able to see the other’s drawing. And a lot of parser conventions are an attempt to hit one set of possible sweet spots. So sticking to a rectangular grid of similarly-sized spaces with only north/south/east/west connections is easy mode.
So here, where the spaces don’t have particular sizes, or different people may have different mental sizes for them… for me a “clearing in a forest” is usually a small space, certainly smaller than a field, probably smaller than a hill, definitely smaller than a shore, so a clearing that contains a field, a hill, a path, and a shore isn’t something that immediately occurs to me.
And this layout, with a ring of four spaces giving access to four different sides of a central one, especially with the thing in the middle being a truck and not something unambiguously huge like a house or skyscraper… it’s certainly not unheard of, but again it’s not something that I immediately think of (especially since another location completely contains an abandoned car). And especially since they’re all labeled TRUCK: there’s nothing to suggest that these are completely separate aspects of the truck unless you click through to the detailed description. Well, you do immediately see the headlights on the front of the truck: that was nice.
I’d drop the compass directions entirely and re-prioritize how the descriptions are organized to focus on their relationship to the truck, and I’d label the aspects of the truck as FRONT, DRIVER’S SIDE, PASSENGER’S SIDE, BACK instead of all just TRUCK.
So instead of
The hill on the west side of the clearing in the dark and oppressive FOREST. The clearing extends ahead towards the PATH and back towards the SHORE and there is a TRUCK parked here.
maybe
A hill on the DRIVER’S SIDE of the truck. A PATH extends in front of the truck while the SHORE lies behind it. A dark and oppressive FOREST extends in all other directions.
(this would also have the benefit of allowing people who aren’t in the US to see it as matching their vehicles, rather than forcing them into our orientation…)
There are a bunch of other little things, like the Trash Pile being completely random: you can easily get junk three or four times in a row and conclude that it’s useless and never find out that there’s a useful item hidden in there. The messages when you confront the oppressive PRESENCE are all very similar and kind of bury the important part (did it go away?) in one or two words in the middle of the last sentence (it “begins to feel less ominous” versus “continues to feel ominous,” I think?)
But…yeah. I think making location links go directly to the location, with the action description as a line at the top instead of being its own “place,” and focusing the location descriptions on the separate sides of the truck would make this one of the most pleasant choice-based interfaces of its kind instead of one of the more tedious ones. I had fun with what I saw of the game, and the variety of things possible with the simulation seemed amusing, and I would have liked to see more of the achievements, but past a certain point I just couldn’t be bothered with all the clicking…
