Unless I missed it in the big long list, my suggestion is PULL OUT.
If “in” and “out” count as verbs, I suggest an IF cover of Rammstein’s song “Rein raus.”
RESUME THREAD
Some more: SUBVERT ORDER, REBEL YELL, IMITATE SMILE, CONFESS SIN, TOTAL GRIND, CASTLE RUIN, DELIBERATE LIE, (E)X HUSBAND, SECOND BASE, SPREAD FEAR. If IF commands count, there could also be VERBOSE TRANSCRIPT (admittedly a bit lacking in the gameplay department).
eat vomit
Here’s how you’d make this work as a game:
Every in-game action moves the player through a location that has already been marked as visited and automatically quits the program. Thus, the player has no time to read the description of the room and even if they could, it’s so terse they’d just get the room heading. The puzzle of the game is figuring out that you need to use the out-of-game actions to make the room descriptions verbose and set the transcript so that when you act in this zero-move game, you’ll be able to read the transcript created after the program has quit out to finally be able to read the room description. 10 points to whoever implements this.
How about an AIF game called Jack Roger? Methinks a game like that would slide into the queer IF category as well. Neil
Some questions –
Where do the games go? Just wherever, with a mention in this thread afterwards? Or do you want them sent to you so they can be collected together?
Anybody working on one?
If accepting the challenge, should we stake out (announce) the title we’re using? Seems unlikely any two people would go for the same one, but it’s not impossible.
Well, as I said, this is not really a proper minicomp, more a silly proposal to shoot the shit about. So yeah, it’s pretty much a matter of posting here if you come up with something. If a whole bunch of games got made it’d be worth making an ifwiki page and an IFDB list, but so far there’s only been one, and I don’t really expect a great many more - the thread’s been dead for a week or so. So if you’re looking for the full minicomp experience this is probably not it.
I’m halfway through the Ectocomp games and I want to finish them all first, but I’ve picked four possibilities from the original list:
HIT RECORD
SMOKE STACK
TROLL FACE
DIE FOOL
I think any of these could work.
I really would like to do either XL or LZ sometime. (LZ would depend on “look at” as an abbreviation for “examine.”) But it would be a vehicle for some experimental stuff, so I wouldn’t expect it anytime soon.
Good that I read through the posts again. So Purist means making sure that the game always makes you aware of what’s in inventory (if inventory matters) and doesn’t hide anything that’s important to the solution behind any other action (ex: you have to “kick bucket” but the only way to find out there’s a bucket shouldn’t require you to examine the junk pile).
Anybody here remember Goose, Egg, Badger enough to know if it took the Impure approach? It seems like it probably did; if not for navigating the area, then at least for more fact-gathering than those three verbs would have provided.
I think it did – Walkthrough Two at least includes directions (and “x,” which is surprising because “watch” often works as well).
The thing about “goose egg badger” was not that it was limited to those three verbs; rather… hmm, the game always treats this as a big spoiler, so I should tag accordingly.
Every noun in the game also works as a verb, and if you use only noun-able verbs, you get more points.
It was only after that particular IFComp ended that I even knew there was a trick (by way of reviews and discussion, I guess). But I somehow thought the game was winnable with just those three words as verbs (assuming you knew everything there was to do already). Sounds like I remembered wrong.
From the too-obvious-to-have-been-mentioned-yet dept:
BRAKE TURN
If I added some more synonyms, my BUS STOP game could be completed with BRAKE TURN.
Here it is, Laroquod. It’s earlier in this thread. Cheers.
Has someone suggested WALKABOUT?
I may still do “SMOKE STACK” because I think it has good potential, but I opted to go with the low-hanging fruit first. Yes, TROLL FACE.
You’ll need Hugo (or Hugor or Gargoyle) to play. I’ve included two versions. I think both adhere to the purist rule of being fair and winnable with just those two verbs, but the “Strict” version makes it so that you can only use those two verbs (plus a few out-of-game commands like Quit and Restart).
The bad news is that you all get to be my beta-testers. This is pretty much a public beta version. As ever, I think it’s complete, but there could be issues. I’m also prone to spelling mistakes, so if you notice any, please let me know that too. Rather than derail the discussion, you’re welcome to privately message me (PM). After any issues are rooted out and fixed, I’ll rebuild, do a more formal announcement, and add it to the IFDB.
Without further explanation, here is:
[size=150]trollface.zip[/size]