What a great game! In that environment the three-dimensional movement was easy to understand, and I found it fun to be able to anticipate what objects would do and get in front of them. I’m glad I asked if anyone had done it!
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What I find very interesting about this is that IF rooms tend to function more like scenes in scripts and movies, and less like locations in 3D games. Accordingly, most people probably have equivalent expectations of them, both writers and players. And, to stray even further from the actual topic of this thread, how wicked would a 3D remake of Zork actually be? 
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We might find out since the FTC lost to Microsoft in court.
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Somebody made a 3D version of Adventure and it didn’t get very good reviews.
People think of 3D 1st person games as being the most “realistic”, but aside from mimicking what we see and hear with our eyes and ears, are they? When I play one I often feel as though I’ve become a very clumsy creature, more like a Dalek than a human being.
It’s often struck me that parser games are about the only type of video game that allow the player to use their fingers. We can let our players strike a match, flick it away or break it in two if we choose to. We can let them tie ropes in knots and untie them again, or use them for skipping. That, to me, is realistic.
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This will maybe come as a bit of a surprise to people who are more familiar with my roleplay writing in TTRPGs (hi, Gonch Girlies!), but in my IF works, I prefer to actually keep a limited cast, and so try not to add too many characters. Maybe three, but more typically two, with one primary protagonist and a secondary character of their intense fixation or interest that’s referenced, but not seen live.
While in a roleplay scene, it might be easy and breezy to puppet around a cast of two or three characters at once per post, especially if I’m weaving interactions between the both of them, I find it a lot more difficult to do so in the rather limited constraint of most of my IF games. Smacking out a couple thousand words in roleplay replies (probably coasting up at ~400k words worth of collaborative prose between me and Jinx alone) is much easier than when I’m painstakingly agonizing whether a crafted sentence sounds good enough when it’s held to a higher calibre of writing.
Roleplaying is fun, a little goofy, with some pretty gems of phrases here and there- but my more polished writing in completed short drabbles, fanfiction, or games, tends to be subject to more fretful polishing. It does make it a relaxing side hobby that still lets me practice writing, though, and I also learn some new words from my partners or pick up on patterns in my own characterization, plus the bonus of worldbuilding being made far more enjoyable when bouncing ideas between friends.
I think a big part of the struggle is how roleplay goes deeply into a scene, but is quite shallow, in terms of the spread of the narrative. You can chainlink scenes chronologically, but I’m most motivated by writing what seems funnest and pursuing that whimsical, haphazard timeline more so, and most of my IF is quite linear in terms of its sense of time and pacing, while being a bit more expansive in terms of contextualizing fragments.
I also just tend towards writing much shorter IF works, often completing stages of the work in a matter of days, with most development not stretching past a week or two, the longest being roughly a month or so for Sweetpea.
ETA: I just flipped through my catalogue, and for the vast majority of games, coding takes a day, drawing the cover art takes a day, and writing takes one or two days. Depending on the complexity of the art, it can be as quick as around 20 minutes, to 4 or so hours. Coding takes the greater part of an evening and some of an afternoon revision, largely because I’m still learning how to do it. The writing is generally a first draft with a cursory look over for typos when I’m refreshed the next day, as I typically do very little to edit my writing. So about 3-4 days on average is about right, swapping rapidly between coding and writing as I get bored with one or the other. This is while writing around a life, also- either providing childcare during the summer, or in the middle of exam season and prep for Sweetpea.
I get bored or frustrated pretty easily, and so breaking things up into distinct phases helps, (cover art, making the interface pretty, writing by hand, typing up a draft, editing, coding links and any other behaviour like buttons or popups…), so hopefully the project I’ve been poking at during Camp NaNoWriMo is longer, (so far at ~330 words a page, with 10 pages that need to be transcribed), but generally, I just don’t have the space to deeply flesh out characters in a handful of a thousand words (much of which is eaten up by variation, or extra fragment-y memories.)
It is a little annoying, since my strength when it comes to writing is description (in that very particular, fussy Gothic-ky way that can be polarizing) and characterization (which I think is helped by both writing my genres of choice, and years and years and years of roleplaying and developing and writing my main cast of characters), and neither are used to as great effect as I would like in my IF work. I actually consider it generally some of my weaker writing because of that. Limited time frames and smaller scoped projects are nice for getting things done, but can make things feel a bit thin, personally- which would be exacerbated if I added in more characters than I feel my narratives could sustain in the limited space.
The Gonch Girlies have been cooking up a little collaborative project on the side that does pertain to more of those fast paced jammy events, and I have a longer form collaborative IF game with Jinx that is closer to how I write when I roleplay, but I’m also hoping to finally sit down and release a longer form game to hopefully show off more of what I feel like I’m good at with writing. It’s theoretically intended for IFComp, but there’s always SpringThing… Or just releasing it for the Tumblr IF crowd to be honest, since it does line up with their style a bit better (suitable to being serialized, LGBT fantasy, homoerotic.) But we’ll see.
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I don’t include undo or redo. My games (Twine) aren’t really built for that. either they’re meant to be single experiences, or you’re meant to replay them in full.
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I usually avoid NPCs you can talk to (at least in parser games). A few years ago I wrote a game with a bunch of NPCs and a “talk about x” command and it was a never-ending quest to add all the possible inputs people might reasonably think of. Not worth it! I kinda prefer exploring more than talking to people anyway.
Side note: This thread is making me want to write a game with empty rooms, mazes, menus, undo prevention, lots of dialogue, and a ton of useless objects to carry around…just to see.
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I avoid putting things into my games that I wouldn’t want to play myself. I like to try to put some light in and around the situations I write about, even if they are about situations that are a serious problem for my character. That doesn’t mean they all have to be happy or funny, but a situation that is nothing but misery, with nothing to alleviate it for long stretches, is difficult for me to write (even though I can sometimes play them quite happily).
Strict linearity is something I avoid writing as well, even though I’m perfectly happy to play such a game if it’s in the right context (such as an IF that has contextual cues associated with linearity). If I’m railroading for too long, I feel like I should be writing a book, short story or poem instead.
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Dead ends - not just ones where you have to turn around and go back where you came from, but literal dead ends - where eg a rock falls on your head and you die and that’s the end of the game.
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Violence. Currently trying to develop some classes which have interesting skills which don’t use violence, such as enhanced observation or enchanting items (eg being able to read a bookshelf from anywhere). Trying to figure out how to still keep things compelling and interesting through stakes such as social relationships or tasks such as healing.
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Dead ends
My least favorite part of old CYOA books and a major factor in why I physically bookmarked transition points. I take this personal experience as a design lesson - if you create scenarios like this, people will gamify and save scum to avoid unfun gameplay.
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I avoid making the player do evil things. I also take out a few built-in synonyms, like “torture” as a synonym for “attack.”
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Thanks for pointing that out, BG. Will make a point to edit that as well going forward.
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In games, where players are given a lot of autonomy within a story, I’ll try my best to avoid forcing any opinions or emotional responses onto the player’s character. It can be quite jarring to be told that my character feels a certain way about something or someone when I, personally, might hold a neutral (or even opposite) opinion/reaction at that moment. Especially if I haven’t been shown any evidence to feel a certain way or made any choices that confirm my character’s feelings.
This doesn’t happen very often, but I’ve played some games and, in an instant, I feel like I’m observing an unfamiliar character and then I’m back to being the main character of the story again.
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I usually try to avoid assigning emotional responses to the player character for this reason, but omg that was impossible for I Am Prey, where the player character has a fundamentally different brain structure from humans, which directly informs how they navigate the world.
I had to choose between the worldbuilding falling apart (taking the story down with it), or forcing the player to have some amount of disconnect from the player character, and I chose the latter.
I really want to try better to avoid this in future games.
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It’s annoying when that happens, but sometimes it’s needed to explain something: “The popular person who isn’t that clever wins every time? Come on! Surely this is rigged.”
I get that the difference is that the above one is said like a fact (surely this is rigged) and not like you thinking it (surely, you think, this is rigged).
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@SomeOne2
Don’t get me wrong. A logical observation is one thing, telling the player that they are deeply saddened by an event is another.
I totally agree with you though.
I just had a short string of games give me a weird, “I’m not feeling what the author is telling me to feel” vibe and it stuck out to me as something I don’t wish upon other players.
If it’s important to get the player emotionally on the author’s side… show, don’t tell. You want me to hate the villain, show me a reason to, but don’t tell me that I just hate the evil-doer. Have them kick a puppy or something. 
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I can see arguments for both sides of assigning emotions to the player character.
If the player character is supposed to be a direct avatar of the player then it seems like it might not be ideal.
But if the player character is supposed to be a separate entity much like what you’d find in a table-top roleplaying game then it seems kind of logical to do so.
For example, would you be more disgusted as the player sitting at the keyboard reading “Villian X kicks a puppy.” or would the player character be more disgusted watching it happen? In this case there’s a clear disconnect between the emotional state of the player and the player character.
Perhaps this is a bit esoteric but it is one way to justify assigning emotions (in my mind).
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That is a great distinction to make. Thanks for that. I think I’ve started a few games where I thought I was a direct avatar, but then the author took control and the character was no longer me.
I never really considered strictly role-playing as a character being it’s own type of story format, per say, but I can see the utility with that in presenting a story over that of a focused adventure game.
Sometimes the line between playing a role and playing as yourself isn’t properly defined or presented consistently enough in some stories/games. Perhaps that is a better thing to acknowledge instead of my original complaint of author-imposed character opinions and reactions.
This gets me thinking… all parser games I’ve played are written from the second-person perspective. You do this and that. I wonder how a story would change if it was from the first-person. I do this and that. Or third-person, for that matter. I wonder how it would change the level of player engagement… or the acceptance of having emotions and reactions played out more explicitly with less player control.
I’d imagine I would understand that I’m playing a role more clearly if the game described my character in the third-person (or first-person) initially and then switched to the second-person just as I’m about the control the character… or something like that.
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Emily Short has a great collection of collections here:
Narrator – Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling (emshort.blog)
All kinds of narrator voices, including first-and third -person.
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