Give me a moment, I just woke up. > < Set up everything yesterday, have to pull the switch today.
look
You are in a small, dimly-lit laboratory. There is a closed hatch in the ceiling above you. Electric arcs crackle and fizz and test tubes bubble all around you. The scent of sulphur lingers here. There is a lever by the door.
x lever
It’s a rusty lever. Who knows what it operates.
pull lever
With a CLUNK the hatch in the ceiling opens and a platform descends on rattling chains. Behold, the games…
Probably not; reviews are reviews, and the perspective of co-entrant authors is likely to be valuable.
Unless the dominant tone of your thoughtdump is ‘these all sucked! why didn’t mine win?’ Or, for that matter ‘these all sucked, which is obviously why I won.’
I like seeing what authors have to say about games. I’m interested in what their predictions were beforehand, though it’s probably diplomatic not to make lower-half predictions.
Also, if you’re wondering, people like to read postmortems, too. Those are good things to start during the judging period, and drafting them has helped me keep focused on what I want to fix & not worry too much about reviews in general.
Oh I was definitely going to write a postmortem at some point. I couldn’t stop myself, actually, from writing an afterword which is in the story itself.
Well, I definitely like to see post-comp releases. I think I’m not the only one. Even if I don’t have time to replay, it’s good to see people following up. You also may find that people have suggestions you didn’t consider, or maybe you even rejected because you didn’t look in detail enough. I know in IFComp it’s been humbling for me, but it’s also helped me add things I think have really helped.
Also, despite the no public talking rule, feel free to trade transcripts with authors. Doing so has been big for me in IFComp (and I’m not the only one,) and it reduces the me vs. them feel.
I fully expect that people will find bugs and issues that I wasn’t able to get to in time; in fact I have one specific bit in mind where I think I got all of the sensible verb alternatives in there, but which might turn out to be underclued or that I missed some permutation.
I plan to release the (cleaned up) source code with release 2 after the comp is done, too.
Originally I didn’t include a walkthrough for my game because it’s pretty short, but now of course that the competition has started, I’ve immediately had second thoughts. So I linked a walkthrough to the game’s listing on IFDB in case anyone needs it.
I plan on writing a post-mortem for my entry at some point. I assume it’s normal to await the end of the competition to publish your experiences on making it and how the experience evolved. I actually removed and added some major locations after the game was mainly done.
First one up at drdanstreetmentioner.blogspot.co … parsercomp … authors, I’m trying to take transcripts, so if you want one, let me know.
I’d love a transcript! I asked all my testers for them to try and avoid “guess-the-verb” syndrome, but I plan on doing a post-comp release as well, and it would help immensely.
Also, I uploaded a map of my game to its IFDB page in case it helps anyone. Turns out a lot of the IF Mapping tools people have made over the years are pretty cool! (Though there’s a certain charm to pencil and paper)
Welcome to the forum–transcript sent.
For anyone wanting to judge, I find it’s helpful to do a bit of arithmetic. There are 14 games and 28 days (ok, 24 now.) A game every other day will definitely allow you to enter. A game every 3 days will, too. Every 4 days, you will have to squeeze something else in. Maybe even keep track of when you can review.
Also, I know I want to make sure I review all the games, and to that end, I’m using BlockSite to eliminate a major distraction (stuff I don’t really want to do but get sucked into.) It’s helped a lot this year in general.
Carolyn, do you have an objection to people stating how long each game is? I know that it can be helpful to me to know if a game is long so I have the proper time set aside. This may help people judge more. But on the other hand, people may gravitate to the shorter games and neglect the longer ones.
The only by-the-rules conversation block is that authors are forbidden to discuss other people’s games. Discussing your own game is okay.
My game isn’t too long. It’s got just over twenty locations and is basically a treasure hunt. There are some puzzles but I don’t think it would take too long to play.
This is good to know–I was thinking of writing up a spreadsheet of game length (yeah, subjective,) genre, programming language etc so that people could work on the game that most fit their mood. I think there are a lot of nudges that could be used to get judges to participate more, and I’d like to try some, without breaking the rules of ParserComp. If I do anything like this I’ll try to stick to the facts.
Down, the Serpent and the Sun shouldn’t take more than twenty or thirty minutes. I’d say forty, max, if you play through twice.
I’d also be very appreciative if anyone wants to send a transcript my way! People have already found spots that need extra ironing, and I’m definitely going to clean those up for another release after the comp.
I’d love feedback on playtime for mine (Oppositely Opal). I’ve had testers say three hours for initial playthrough but that includes bug hunting.
Also, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who is writing reviews. It makes the judging period more exciting for those of us who entered!
Mine (Terminator, not terminator chaser) takes around a hundred turns on the default difficulty setting, give or take some tutorial and out-of-world commands. How long you spend on each of those turns is up to you… also it’s designed to be replayable.