I never usually enter IFComp.
The reason for this, most years, is that I start the year really excited about Making All The Games. I make a TALP Jam game and a ParserComp game and sometimes a SeedComp or Spring Thing or PunyJam or IntroComp game (or all of them). I always plan to make an IFComp game, but every year I burn out making the earlier games, miss out on IFComp and just about manage to throw a Petite Mort game into EctoComp before falling into my winter slump for a month or two. Then the cycle repeats again.
This year looked likely to be similar, except that I didnāt even finish all the games for the earlier comps that I had planned out. I have stepped up the time spent on my other major hobby (running) and am still getting used to the large amount of mental (as well as physical) energy that this takes up. Every evening, it felt like, I planned to write and found I couldnāt. That part of me was drained.
I hoped the summer would be different, as I was between blocks of marathon training and hence not running quite as many miles per week. I had a mid-sized game project I was excited about, and I was managing to get a bit of work done on it every weekā¦ but not enough. I was still tired, and I was procrastinating, and I was starting to feel that yet again I would not make the IFComp deadline.
Then one Saturday morning after my weekly parkrun (community 5k run), I found myself in the exit of my local supermarket, trying and failing to turn right, just as I do every Saturday morning. The timing of the obstacles in the traffic seemed so unlikely as to be impossible and was almost comical. I sat there for what felt like ten minutes, my husband making increasingly exasperated observations about my bad luck.
When, after a perceived eternity, I finally managed to pull away, I reflected on how trapped I often felt - not just in driving but in life. Life - like parser games - purports to give you the freedom of choice. But in some situations there is no choice, and youāre the madman doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Because you have to turn right eventually, in order to get onto the next thing - and thereās no clever puzzle involved, nothing you can do to make it happen. All you can do is keep trying and hoping that the moment will be right.
I decided, in that moment, to make a game where you have no choice except the choice to keep trying.
Turn Right is entirely based on a real-life location and experience. I have to make that frustrating manoeuvre with depressing regularity.
I wrote the game out in script form due to its relatively linear nature and then coded it in Adventuron. Writing took considerably longer than coding. The entire first draft process took about a week. I implemented as many sensible commands as I could think of, as I wanted to create the illusion of a normal parser game with normal freedoms.
As usual, my husband was my first beta tester. He was quicker than I expected to realise that the solution to the game is literally TURN RIGHT (x30). When he got to the ending, he looked at me for a minute.
āPeople wonāt get it,ā he said. āThis is a āyouā thing.ā
I thought he was probably right. I was more nervous than I had ever been to solicit beta testers on here. I assumed everyone would think it was a troll game. But, as ever, I am grateful for the kind feedback and transcripts I received from my testers here. They all provided helpful ideas for additional alternative commands and events, and the comments from them encouraged me to go for it and submit to my first ever IFComp.
During the judging and reviewing period, I was surprised and sometimes a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of reviews that were coming out. They were largely positive and included further useful feedback that I may incorporate into a post-comp version one day.
What was far more gratifying, though, was that people identified with the events of the game. Drivers from all over the world, non-drivers who donāt drive because they want to avoid this kind of stress, even drivers who drive a lot more assertively than I do - they had all been in this situation, they all recognised it, they all knew what it was like.
I have always felt a massive amount of imposter syndrome as a driver. Itās not a skill that comes naturally to me at all. As a teenager, I had to take my test six times before I passed. Iām not very observant, Iām not very good at multitasking - itās something I find hard. Rather like running, I keep doing it because Iām stubborn and I want to prove I can get better at it and because doing the hard thing does genuinely improve my life. I have always felt that itās one of those things that everyone else can ājust doā and Iām terrible at it for some reason.
The response to Turn Right has changed that. I have realised that everyone has the same experiences and that weāre all in the same situation out there on the road. I have become more confident and relaxed in my driving as a result.
I will admit that the gameās eventual low placing in the results, following the largely positive reviews, did give me a tiny bit of pause. But in all honesty, the placing of the game doesnāt matter. It enabled me to break my IFComp duck and publish my first (and most likely only) game of 2024. More importantly, the experience has led to a genuine improvement in a stressful part of my life.
Thank you to everyone involved in the competition this year.
