Any interesting experiences with incomplete IF game series? Reasons why they got canceled, plans for further installments, or just what you wish they’d have done?
Max Blaster hints at a sequel twice and I would want to play one. I messaged Emily Short about it a few years back, but she said she didn’t remember if there were ever actually plans to make another one. She also stopped the When in Rome series early because of a lack of player interest.
18 Rooms to Home was an experiment where it was a one-room parser game, and each update added another room that was earlier in the day. It started with Room 18 and stopped on Room 15, ten years ago. I didn’t play it (I usually don’t play unfinished things), but the concept is fascinating to me.
Counterfeit Monkey has a sequel hook, but if I remember right, the postmortem said that the author remembered the fate of every IF sequel ever and decided to just put all her ideas into the main game instead.
Scroll Thief was supposed to be the first of four parts, but the first one only got released because of the Introcomp deadline, and the four planned parts all collapsed under their own weight and got too big to actually finish.
This game seems interesting, but I can see why it didn’t get finished. Combinatorial explosion is real, especially if you needed to write an exponentially higher number of paths with each update – imagine writing Room 1 and needing to have it tie into everything else you’ve added!
I do play unfinished games in the hopes that there’s at least some gold there, and maybe the creator will be inspired to finish it or at least share what their plans were – I played Colour Beyond Time on an unfinished port, and the author decided to fix the bugs and port over the rest of the game once I left my review.
I also remembered Death By Monkey, the proposed killer app of the IAGE engine. It was even supposed to have multiplayer, you could host a Java server and connect with other people to play it with them. It wound up getting canned early with only a few rooms and no proper ending, leaving IAGE dead in the water for over two decades now.
Max Blaster and Doris de Lightning against the Parrot Creatures of Venus is styled as a comic book episode, so I thought any hints at a sequel were just part of the aesthetic. Of course, this genre does leave the possibility for a sequel wide open.
The best handling of serialisation, IMVHO, is the proven one: a self-contained pilot; if the setting/general plot isn’t liked, there’s no damage.
OTOH, the abysmal lack of feedback (together with non-constructive criticism) I’m receiving has led to substantial scaling down of my major WIP, the most recent scaling down currently in consideration rather questionable from my perspective, and this led to consider sequels/new episode as possible place for the scrapped parts, but I feel that is a sort of palliative for my morale… but can be also a real solution for the narrative when projects became too big ?
Anyway, we have for sure a successful and ongoing IF series, Ryan Veeder’s Little match girl series, so, personally I think serialisation can work in an IF context.