What's your IF White Whale?

Yes please.

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I had to actually check the rules to see if you could just submit them as 10 separate games to IFCOMP, each roughly 2 hours in length. Short answer, sadly no. ( 5. Authors may enter at most three games per competition year.)

Looking forward to seeing how this looks!

Edited to add: Although, submitting 3 separate interconnected games that, while complete experiences in their own right, work together to be greater than the sum of their parts, seems like an interesting idea.

Now thinking of potentially fun sets of three…

In no particular order:

  • Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future
  • The same Star Trek away mission from the POV of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy
  • Ferris Bueller’s Day Off from Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane’s POV (secret ending unlocks a short fast food job interview for former principal Rooney)
  • The adventures of the Moe brothers, Eeney, Meany, and Miney
  • Three games written from a deaf, mute, and blind POV (Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil)
  • The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly done as three separate games with different winning conditions and POV.
  • Making three games around Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Maheshwara, the destroyer, would be tempting, but probably best left for someone who shares that cultural heritage.
  • The Three Kingdoms of China is tempting as well, but probably is also ethically out-of-bounds for someone as ethnically European as I am.
  • Cartoon trios like Huey, Dewey, and Louie or Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.
  • Classics, like the Three Musketeers, the Three Amigos, the Three Stooges, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion, etc. (Add asterisks for the Musketeers and the Stooges of course.)
  • And obviously all of the fairytale opportunities (Three Little Pigs, the Three Blind Mice, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Hensel and Gretel and the Witch, etc, etc.)

I’m sure there are a ton more, but that’s the whirlwind my brain just sprinted with reading the IFCOMP rule just now.

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While we’re talking different POVs in threes: Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins.

I’ve always been interested in the very different experiences these three men must have had of their joint mission.

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That would always be a nice idea, for example a sort of Cloud Atlas story, where you see the story from multiple people with one final section - or maybe something different.

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Let me know when you have something playable. I want to help on this “dino” born.

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I don’t have a genuine white whale now. I mean, in the 1990s, I wanted to make a horror Eamon with Eurohorror movie ideas. And I eventually made it in 2010; that was Leadlight. I had a sketchy outline of what would become Andromeda Acolytes in 2014, and I’m making it now.

After I remade Leadlight as Leadlight Gamma (2015), I was working out what to do next. I had an idea for a an abstract horror-drama about an actress. The name of the game was/is fantastic, so I’m not going to tell it here in case I can use it later. But this game wasn’t looking very parsery.

While I recorded ideas for the unnamed game in Scrivener, I looked into various non-parser engines I could use to make it. Unsatisfied, or just confused, I started writing a CYOA extension for Inform with an idea I could do it there. The extension got out of control. I abandoned it, and the game, too (because I seemed to remain insufficiently excited about the game.) But I resurrected the extension for my own purposes and now I’m using it in Andromeda Acolytes.

-Wade

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As a point of reference, you might want to try to dig up a copy of “Midsummer Tempest,” a novel by Poul Anderson. It’s literally a Shakespeare novel, and not just because of the title. At a certain point, as you’re reading along, you notice that while the conversations among the well-born characters are formatted as prose, the characters are all speaking in good iambic pentameter. The low-born characters, however, speak in prose.

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My “five-act Shakespearian tragedy, in ten or so modules” is meant to be about ten hours of play time from five of the ten-to-twelve bits on offer, depending on the player’s choices. But I’m off chasing a different whale at the moment.

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In my “to do” list for some far someday is a game tentatively labelled “Program 66”, in which you try to make the first Apollo moon landing happen, and you have to switch perspectives a lot to get the right decisions made. (There’s lots of backtracking into design meetings and tests, to make the final mission come out right.) And then in the end you have to try to get a marooned Soviet cosmonaut home, too, which involves switching into a whole bunch of Soviet personalities too.

But that’s at least two whales from now. :slight_smile:

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I’m still a noob so I may actually make some of these projects one day, or they may fall by the wayside, but here goes:

  1. A text adventure (in the Hinterlands campaign setting) about an amnesiac cultist trying to escape the humongous temple their sect occupies, all the while learning the disturbing truth about their own culture. I’ll save the details because I may make it someday, but it involves roaming NPCs and stealth mechanics.

  2. A text adventure adaptation of the entirety of the novel Dracula, with lots of letters, journals, and changing POV characters.

  3. A long form JRPG (in the Hinterlands campaign setting) called Hinterlands: Refuge about a refugee from a planet that has been destroyed by a Galactus-like entity. The game focuses on three harrowing days as the protagonist struggles to adapt to life in a big city on a foreign planet while political turmoil unfolds around them. Everything culminates in what I’d loosely describe as Astro Boy vs Godzilla. And I won’t spoil anything else.

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Some folks did something like this in IFComp 2020. That they’re related wasn’t foregrounded, but if you search that page for “teresten” you’ll find it in the descriptions of three games…

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As a wrestling fan, I really like this idea. I would pay actual money for this game.

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I have a concept for space travel game where Pascal’s Wager is used as the core of a spaceship engine. Players need to alternatively “bliss” and “torment” the brain of Pascal himself, which they have in suspended animation, to triangulate the locations that they need to go to.

In theory the choices that are made in subpassages would add or subtract to Pascal’s brain state/the ship coordinates, but I need a way to make it not tedious and repetitive. Ideally there would be gambling minigames that adjust the values. And I need a plot too.

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Your concept just blew my mind.

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Haha, thank you. I might need to look for collaborators so if anyone has further ideas please get in touch.

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Oh, I had missed this great thread. I’m only going to say the title and leave it there: 14 planets.

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This sentence made me laugh:

It’s bleedin’ hilarious how you offhandedly mention they happen to have Pascal’s brain in suspended animation.

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It’s bleedin’ hilarious how you offhandedly mention they happen to have Pascal’s brain in suspended animation.

In what I have of the plot so far, the player character actually doesn’t have Pascal’s brain. It’s Pascal’s brain that has them – they’re a teenager or child and it’s their legal guardian. Somehow I need to tie this in with Pascal’s presumable father issues with a dad that didn’t want him to learn math…and also preferably without touching religious aspects of fatherhood as much as possible.

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will be interesting implementing it in Pascal (the programming language…) :smiley: aside that bliss.pas and torment.pas are two nifty sourcefile name :smiley:

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Haha, I will have to work that in! I’ve heard of the language but I’m not much of a programmer beyond Twine and Inform. I’ll have to use it in a joke though.

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