What's your IF White Whale?

Authoring General Design Discussions
121

On spoilers, I know for sure that on forums involving a celebrated JRPG (Final fantasy VII, 'nuff said…) is a rule referring to a certain major (and very influential in the genre) scene as THE SPOILER (literally, all caps) and indeed spoiling that scene actually led to ban.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

1 Like
122

Yup! And the like Ghibli-style animation. There’s an analysis somewhere that… IIRC they took the labels off the containers in the fridge and stuff (?) but they’re all exactly the shapes and colors of Chobani’s products.

Also, the tech is all wrong from start to finish
  • Barns with tons of glass like that are a weird useless half-way point between barn and greenhouse: no good for growing plants but an absolute nightmare to heat/cool.
  • Solar panels facing all different directions, including some facing directly away from the sun?! Also I’m a little skeptical about them being partially transparent: wouldn’t you want to capture all the light? But I don’t know the physics so maybe it’s totally fine.
  • A wooden paddle water-wheel thing under a tiny stream of moving water like that makes no sense for power generation: the energy you can get out is related to the height the water falls and the amount of water, so most systems use a turbine on a pipe running a few hundred feet up a hill (high “head” low flow) or a large amount of water falling a small difference, and in either case you want a carefully designed turbine or wheel shape to capture as much energy as possible. And if you look at old-fashioned water wheels you’ll see that they’re always under the stream, not out in front of it (dunno if that makes a difference, but didn’t they look for reference imagery?).
  • Windmills on airships to get them high up to catch more wind is an interesting idea: I’m skeptical but I’d love to see the numbers on that. But…uhhh… why’d you put them all in places where there’s no wind? Because they’re not turning.
  • Flying tractors!? Flying buses? If you’re trying to be energy efficient, you absolutely don’t fly. Period. You certainly don’t do it for heavy things. And also…if you’re flying, you have no friction to hold you on a slope: why doesn’t the tractor just zoom down the hill into the ditch? When I was 18, we built a little one-man hovercraft as a project and you needed a very flat surface to drive it: we mostly took it on the river.
  • If you’re trying to water your plants efficiently, you put it directly into the soil where it goes to the plants’ roots and as little as possible is wasted by evaporation into the air. It takes a metric f***ton of energy to turn water into water vapor: you’re certainly not going to waste probably orders of magnitude (?) more energy turning it into a raincloud, and anyway have you ever seen a cloud up close? They’re just fog: you can’t make a raincloud that small.
  • The fruit-picking robot is an absolute nightmare: those snaky arms with all the millions of little joints, each of which is how many parts that are going to wear and break down and need to be replaced at some point? Like…I bet you’re looking at a cool million dollars for that thing, and it’s so ridiculously slow. You’d need at least three of them to match a single skilled human worker.

etc. etc. etc.

Oof. Yeah. And like…probably there is a reason. Were the pods stored badly so they’re no longer viable? Is there a bacteria or fungus on the pods that’s eating them when they start sprouting? But can you afford to test all the possible things to find out? Is there a lab that even offers those services to the general public?

I figure I’ll probably have to soften things a lot for the game but I definitely want to keep a little of the unexplained failures, yeah. But I know in “deduce the hidden rule” games like Zendo (and puzzle games in general) it’s terrifyingly easy to make unsolvably hard problems, so it may be that the tricky part is actually getting easy enough patterns that people can actually find them.

4 Likes
123

Oh man, tell me about it.Why did one of my rows of garlic crop wonderfully and the other get destroyed by rust? Who knows! But now I only have enough garlic for me, and none left to sell.

I’ve had an idea rattling around for a few years, too, but from a much more permaculture simulationist point of view. I am toying with an energy-descent world idea with a compressed timeline (so “sow corn” might take a whole day).

I’m not sure it’d be much of a game, though. More a series of mysterious disappointments followed by slow starvation.

2 Likes
124

The letter-based eco-system sounds very nerdy, but in a positive way, similar to Conway’s Game of Life. I only understand half of it but I would love to see it given birth to the world.

3 Likes
125

Sounds like a dream!

So kind of like travel writing! I’ve had similar ideas before, of exploring a real-world place through interactive fiction. Of Venice, Lviv, etc. etc. Though I’m not sure how it’d pan out, given the scale of things you could explore in areas as large as cities. How do you capture the essence of cities without being too finicky, or too boring?

6 Likes
126

My white whale is Xanadu: The Movie: The Graphic Text Adventure.

Graphics would be “of the time,” so Apple ][ style, better than Mystery House but not as good as the Questprobe series. Parser would be verb-noun. You’d play as Kira, and in early adventure style would only roughly have anything to do with the “plot” of the movie, with more sane puzzle design though. Chip-tune snippets from a handful of songs from the soundtrack accentuate key plot points. Mostly I want to make it so I have an excuse to design the box art and fake “advertising” as collateral works.

4 Likes
127

A wikilike that also simulates EDITING a Wikipedia page, based on fabulated sources which the player has to evaluate!

6 Likes
128

Rewriting Zork Zero

2 Likes
129

I honestly can’t see what you disliked about Zork Zero. Sure, opinions are always different, but hated?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m just interested, because I’ve nearly finished the game right now.

2 Likes
130

I don’t want to be the “just read Gold Machine” guy, but one of the reasons I write it (besides enjoying it) is that it isn’t always possible to say everything I want to say in forum posts. Sometimes, that’s because I talk a lot. Other times, it’s just that art is complicated, you know?

The shortest way that I can say it is this: to me, rhetorically and tonally, Zork Zero is a prequel to the 1984 gray box repackagings of the Zork trilogy. I prefer the original releases. I’ve written a lot about my reasons over the past two years.

Others have said a lot about Z0 mechanically, about its familiar puzzles (towers of Hanoi!) and hassles (the nose gag, again and again), though I guess you have seen it all, so close to the end.

Other people do like it, which is OK!

DId I say “hated?” Ah, well, that’s hyperbole. I don’t feel the same way about Z0 that I feel about global warming, for instance.

8 Likes
131

This one was so difficult for me! At first my teen self was thrilled to knock off puzzles I’d seen in some other variant or context and say “yay, this is easier than I thought!” But that thrill wore off with too many of them. And for people without that initial thrill … well …

Then a lot of other things were a matter of reading the Flathead calendar. Which was a neat bit of copy protection, but it didn’t give a sense of accomplishment. It felt like I was getting an A on a homework assignment. Which is better than getting a B or C, but not as adventuresome as I hoped.

It’s also possible a lot of people who played it on the original Apple floppies just got tired of the extra loading time, especially coupled with getting the game in unwinnable states (e.g. most treasures can be thrown in the cauldron but not all!)

Tying Z0 back to the original topic, sort of, any sort of interesting abstract problem that could be expressed as part of an adventure game could be a white whale to me. And, for instance, the Nim puzzle was interesting to me–the whole concept of mathematical induction to solve it is really neat. And it’s kind of fun for me to solve a Peggleboz style every so often, because it’s not worth remembering, but it is satisfying to re-derive.

But being able to put these into a narrative or storyline would be very neat indeed. And that’d make a nice white whale. Maybe more like a dolphin, since it isn’t something I focused on. But if I were able to snag it, then yeah, wow.

7 Likes
132

Haha, I just saw this thread again. Seems like my White Whale became a reality! Hope you guys get your White Whales into code one day too.

(Plus, I am really racking my brain for a joke to do with white whales and craters on Magrathea…)

12 Likes
133

Yeah I thought about this thread when I saw Milliways.

I see my comment from 4 months ago and I think a lot of us still chasing that white whale have caught a shark or two. Which ain’t bad. I guess I caught a minor shark with my EctoComp Grand Guignol entry. (I’m still reeling it in/fixing bugs. But that’s kind of fun.)

I have to admit I don’t know what I’d do if I caught the whale. I hope I wouldn’t give up completely, and I’d stick around to write constructive reviews.

7 Likes