As a secondary school teacher I learned recently that when students come out of an exam and say “I cooked” it means they did well, but if they say “I’m cooked” it means they did badly and now fear for their future.
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Cool cat, daddy-o. 
I don’t know if it’s a hot take but it can feel a bit mood-whiplash with the actual purpose of interaction “With an advanced parser, you can type in anything you want and try anything you can think of” and then as you become an experienced parser player realizing 2-3 word commands are sufficient and faster, then like “but you can chain multiple 2-3 word commands together!”
I have made some truly repetitive games, and I think the world-model and physics-sim properties of parser games make this possible and potentially enjoyable to an extent. I think there’s a line between the joy of discovering how a complex system works in a game and then it becoming repetitive once the process is established.
For example in Baker of Shireton it was most efficient to bake five loaves of bread at the same time. ROLL DOUGH, G, G, G, G. PUT ALL RISEN DOUGH IN OVEN was a frequent sequence. Looking back, if I’d been better at understanding this after the player accomplished the sequence several times it would have been like a “level up” reward if the parser went “Ding! New skill acquired! Type CREATE BATCH to roll five balls of dough at once!” Once the player figures something out they basically learn a new skill/command so it’s easier - basically modeling how experience and repetition makes a task easier and automatic.
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I played a lot of muds in the past where repetitive commands are the norm and there’s all sorts of macros, hotkeys, client commands and in-game commands that improve the UI – I think in general it comes down not so much to UI affordances but the player’s genre expectations and how they adopt different UI conventions.
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That’s one of the most important features of Hadean Lands.
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I think there’s unexplored potential in trying to design a parser interface which literally nobody likes.
Someone already did that, it’s called Action Castle. It’s a tabletop RPG, but if someone could recreate it in code form… Well, you know where this is headed.
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Wow, it’s like the world’s worst D&D game.
Honestly my favorite part of the MUD experience is the expectation that the player will tweak their client to create a palette of pre-made action sequences.
I understand that this only appeals to a specific kind of person, but it still appeals, and I suspect if you have a deeply simulated game with a lot of steps, then the kind of player who is drawn to that would also be the kind of player who would want to assemble action sequences and macros.
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I hadn’t heard of this, but I see it’s by the author of Lacuna Part 1: the Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City, which has been sitting on my RPG bookshelf for more than a decade and which looks like it would be awesome to play if only I could make the slightest sense of how to do so.
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Story games! The name of that RPG genre fits so perfectly with IF, I feel like there should be more cross-over.
I ran a Lacuna game for a while! Its mechanics are pretty simple, but I can understand struggling with stuff like how to structure a session and what kind of narrative you’re going for in that setting. I did it as sort of a “find the culprit of the week” thing with interludes for exploring the weird environment and/or dealing with bizarro bureaucracy (these interludes feeding into a metaplot that would have eventually led to discoveries involving the nature of the world/the PCs’ jobs/conspiracies involving both of those things, if scheduling issues hadn’t killed the game before we got to any big denouements). Of course, many of the secrets behind those things have to be made up by the GM, but I thought the book gave me enough to work with as a jumping-off point, and all in all it seemed to work well.
(But then, I also like mechanics-light narrative-forward RPGs that give a GM a lot of room to invent stuff and don’t map the setting out in meticulous detail, and I’m sure there are people who would just find the general lack of hard rules and details endlessly frustrating, which is valid.)
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Heh. Ever heard of the infamous F.A.T.A.L.?
Nope, and I’m sorry I just looked it up.
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For anyone who hasn’t previously encountered FATAL and thinks that it might be fun to snicker at an unplayable, chronically overcomplicated mess of a 2000s-era simulation-heavy RPG, please be warned first that it is misogynist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist and highly puerile.
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Yeah, next time I’ll add a content warning.
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Could you put that under a spoiler tag with a content warning please? Thank you!!
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Hey mods, if you decide content I’ve posted is unacceptable, I would much rather it be deleted than have it altered. Changing what I say to something else might confuse readers as to me and my positions, rather than making it clear that editorial authority has been exercised on the part of the moderators.
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Apologies if the edit altered your authorial intent. We generally consider putting [details] blocks around things to be better than deleting them outright; nothing you said is unacceptable for this forum.
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I think part of IF’s lack of popularity now is because of how difficult to learn from an outsider perspective.
As enthusiasts on a fan forum – where most of us have been playing for decades – it feels pretty natural and intuitive. But it can be hard to figure out where to start, just in terms of what platform you want to use, knowing the limitations of your programs and how complicated certain things can be. Learning how to make games results in reading tons of documentation that might not even be applicable, and only a few platforms have all of said documentation collected in one place.
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I’m probably going to make a thread about this later, but non-Merciful IF greatly suffers from almost every “Game Over” situation being permanent. There’s no concept of the game resetting you to a last safe scenario after failure like in other games. The closest that most IF comes to this concept is Polite games that allow you to undo moves, so you are basically never one move away from being out of the game-ending situation. However, I feel like the ante could be upped a bit - giving the player deadly or time-sensitive situations that they are guaranteed to be able to solve, and resetting them back to the start of the sequence if they fail it. While reading the walkthrough for Finding Martin, there was a sequence where I dearly wished I could have puzzled it out coordinating the movement of the fuzzy cube as your first self in such a way as to let your future self exit from it, but in a Cruel game such as that I simply will never have the time or patience required to realize I’m stuck, reload, do the tweaks, play over 200 moves to check my work, it didn’t work, reload, tweak it again… The last game that I played back in August that was anything over Polite was such a bewildering experience, requiring around 40 backup saves for a game that was less than 1000 moves, that I’m frankly still “whetted” from the experience of playing a Cruel game.
And yes, as someone who grew up on them, I’m quite cognizant that graphical adventure games have almost never cracked the “it is either impossible to lose any progress or you have to make backups every 10 minutes” nut either. I sure wish they could!
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