Well, I hoped to get release 2 and the postmortem out before the results. 1 of 2 (and the bigger one) ain’t bad. Plus, I can say Hooray for the upper half! It was what I was aiming at. I just made it.
(Note: spoilers are inevitable due to the mechanic. So be warned.)
In a way I was sort of glad that my longer more complex projects were clearly impractical, and I had to shoot lower. Well, lower in terms of length. I should have made time to do more. But as-is, I’m glad I got a chance to focus on the central mechanic. And I’m glad my testers helped clean up a lot, quickly.
Oronyms were always on my mind, but a list on the internet only turned up the classics like I Scream. I wanted to find some new ones. I was worried it might be too easy, or I might have to abuse pronunciation to make real puzzles. There couldn’t be too many. It felt like an EctoComp game. But I didn’t have a title!
I’m lucky at least for my own goals that I have a radar that picks up on Stuff That Works. Well, for me. Reading the title (or the title, shifted) in a chat sort of got me going. At some point I just get in a sort of zone where I’m looking for stuff in the back of my mind (“this is what I’ll daydream about and nobody can stop me”) and when I saw that (the week of April 29, from my notes, with a “#TITLE!!!” comment appended) I laughed and knew I had a title, and I hoped everything else would fall. It seemed like a really good way to end, too, and of course I used that trick before with Very Vile Fairy File, where the final command is a twisting of the game title, though a bit trickier. But after a couple monthsI didn’t have much in the way of stuff before then, which was a problem.
After writing a spoonerism game for last year’s EctoComp with Roads of Liches, and of course with the rhyme games, I had a general framework for detecting two words to put together. It had to be modified from the rhymes to the spoonerisms, but the underlying idea was the same, and I was able to reuse a lot of code. I reused a lot more code from the spoonerisms to the oronyms.
But I was out of ideas what to flip around! Fortunately, I had made a general push to try and make friendly NPCs (see: Bright Brave Knight Knave) because though I like a good explore the hostile world alone jaunt as much as the next person, there’s only so much you can do. And somewhere along the way I remember Brian Rushton’s topic but I sort of misremembered it, or maybe it was another essay. As I remembered it, you could just have an elf, an orc, a troll, and a haunted forest and castle and so forth, and everybody would say it was just great, since it touched all the bases.
So I touched all the bases. After all, there’s no shortage of games that play on old RPG conventions (hi, Quest for the Teacup this year!) and sort of make fun of them, because said conventions need to be refreshed. This seemed particularly good for me, as I had little or no plot but at least had some immediate puzzles I could focus on. I recognize that some of them, NPC or no, were going to seem a bit stretched. You probably noticed a lot of Noun Adjective as opposed to Adjective Noun, but I figured that sort of puzzle telegraphing was okay.
So in the end I was just worried about not having enough puzzles for a full game, and I really didn’t expect too much, and because I was more distracted than usual, I didn’t want too much to have to test to get it in a reasonable shape. I was having trouble coming up with as much as I did for the rhyme games, or the spoonerism games, so I went with what I had. At some point I realized that I could focus on similarly named things, or words that were extensions of each other. And there was stuff that didn’t work out well, or I couldn’t get it to work, like soap and so. I wanted to avoid proper names, too, except for yours.
Nevertheless despite simplifying things I still ran into a time crunch, and my testers pulled me out of the fire, pointing out things that would have been seen by engineering if I’d started a month earlier. Well, started in earnest. But it also, I think, justified my decision to keep it short.
I also wanted to do something a bit easier, not to make the player feel remedial or because I wanted to say, well, people can’t appreciate my really tough stuff, but I think I would really enjoy having a whole range of things from relatively easy to relatively tough, so that people actually do have a choice of what of my stuff they want to look at, if it lasts. But I didn’t want to force any level of difficulty. I had a feeling this was mostly going to be on the easy side for me, but on the other hand, I did want a few tricks. Pronunciation might be a problem, and one thing that snared me with a tester was the pronunciation of police in the US or in england.
The individual puzzles, well, some fell out quickly, like Skull. Cull was the only word related. It’s not the first time that I used a skull, either, but it was pretty obvious what I had to do, and it was kind of fun looking for words that ended with an S sound that weren’t a direct plural. (For instance, nose/no, though that’s more a Z sound, and there’s nothing there.) I also had fun looking for ways to bound the world, so the result was some rooms that had an ocean, or water across it, or something. Brainstorming sessions went well enough.
One of the big misses for the comp was, I would really have liked a hint item, beyond just the pawn that let you advance past things. The pawn was a late addition, but I’m pretty happy with how it worked, and it made me laugh when I saw the name. I’d done similar things with the Lurking Lump for my rhyme games. Again, I was focusing on the word warp, or other ones like jump, and it fit in perfectly. The other clue item, the one that told you the length of the words, I knew I wanted, but I just couldn’t figure out what it was. Testers pointed out they’d like a hint, and I said, unfortunately, I have to bite the bullet. I can’t do anything. I didn’t plan the creative time for it. (I also didn’t want it to be too on-the-nose.)
Well, I got the name (sly size-slice eyes) with about 6 hours before the deadline. This gave me something to do during the comp not to worry about reviews too much, though I think it went the other way, was completely ignoring them because I had this new feature they added tweak. There are some reviews I haven’t even looked at. I mean, yay writing primarily for myself, but I took it to an extreme. That said, I’m pleased I wrote something post-release so quickly.
I was disappointed the NPCs were relative ciphers and didn’t do anything cool. I didn’t see how to. But as usual I started piling up ideas that wouldn’t make puzzles, and perhaps for post-comp I will add in a bunch of chats. For instance, “random follower 1 and random follower 2 sing Mile of My Love together. Hooray camaraderie!” I mocked up some pseudocode so every follower pair gets chat. Who knows? There may be enough for two go-rounds. There are lots of spare ideas that might go somewhere.
Other spare ideas? Well, I actually fought myself a lot on the side optional room (with the profanity) … it’s something I wanted to play with, not because I like to swear a lot, but because I wanted to capture the fun parts of it, the creativity, maybe even the naughtiness we felt as kids when we realized what would bug adults. And also use it for good. Perhaps this time would’ve been better spent writing up the hint item. But it was a lot of fun even if I juggled how things appeared in the first release! You see, I had a testing command to organize the insults in testing order for Zarf’s scripts, and that worked. But a shuffled one did not!
It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, give people the option of enjoying silly cuss words but make it clear what was going on. And I think it was, by that stage of the game. So I’m pleased with myself.
Finally … I thought this was going to be a one off, but apparently I had cast my net wider than I thought I did, and ideas kept falling in. So I hope to have a sequel for parser comp. It already has a few rooms. The basic core code is there. The trick is to find oronyms I haven’t used yet, ones that aren’t too related to what’s done.
I always felt like I was playing in a fun little lab with WP and it never felt like work. Too many of my recent previous efforts did, even though I enjoyed them. I guess I recognized WP had a ceiling, as it wasn’t going to be profound, but I hoped it would be clever fun. There’s a contradiction of course – I want my stuff to use the parser in new and unusual ways, but when I want to explore it more and write a sequel, well, it’s not so new and unusual. So I hope the puzzles, easy or hard, provide entertainment.
On the non-writing front I am disappointed I did not review more IFComp 2024 stuff after a good start. I still have 2023 stuff to proofread and backlog. It’s frustrating because I do want to contribute to the community that way too. But there have been other writing projects. One thing about programming text adventures is, you can always find something to fiddle with. Or, well, I can. Not so much for just fiction.