tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73656910000213711622024-03-05T22:16:26.093+11:00Wade's Important AstrolabWadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.comBlogger136125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-87655392354583345192024-02-22T13:51:00.000+11:002024-02-22T13:51:05.459+11:00Spring Thing 2024 - Wade Clarke Roblox game prize information<p>I'm listing here the details and conditions of a prize I'll be offering for Spring Thing 2024: a custom Roblox game based on your Spring Thing entry.</p><p>If you choose this prize, here's what happens:</p><p>I'll try your Spring Thing game. If I decide it's possible for your game, I (maybe with help from my nephew) will build a simple Roblox game based on your entry, or at least the first room or a prominent thing from it. We have a lot of Roblox building experience between us.</p><p>Qualifiers for this prize: I say "game" loosely! It will probably be an environmental toy you can walk around in. But you never know, it might have an objective to reach, or health, or a time limit, or a baddie chasing you, or a physics joke. It might be a reproduction of a location. We'll try to make something of charm based on your game, spending a week max to do so.</p><p>If you don't know Roblox, it's free to join, and the game will be pretty G-rated and explorable by anyone on Roblox at any time (which, there being millions of Roblox games, will mostly be you and people you let know about it. Plus the odd random visitor.) You'l be able to share a link to the game wherever/however you like. People only need to have a Roblox account to visit it.</p><p>* If you pick the prize, and I try your game and decide I can't produce something satisfying based on it within a week, don't be offended. Roblox suits some things and some subject matter a lot more than others. I'd let you know my decision quickly so you can pick another prize instead.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-90308914350773908772023-10-28T23:02:00.001+11:002023-10-28T23:02:37.993+11:00Music for IFComp 2023 entry Barcarolle In Yellow<p>Since I've been prioritising my creative energy for making <a href="https://andromedaacolytes.heiresssoftware.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Andromeda Acolytes</a>, something I've been missing is producing music.</p><p>After playing Victor Ojuel's giallo IF <b>Barcarolle In Yellow</b> (<a href="https://importantastrolab.blogspot.com/2023/10/ifcomp-2023-review-barcarolle-in-yellow.html" target="_blank">my review here</a>) I was inspired to produce for it an opening credits track. I'm reproducing the style of music made for these films in the mid-seventies in Europe, so the production is reverby, toppy but not airy, not bassy, a bit cacophonous and a little strangled.</p><p><a href="https://intfiction.org/t/barcarolle-in-yellow-opening-credits-music/65349" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The track mp3 is downloadable from this intfic.org post</a> (no joining required if you aren't a forum member)</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-84464167082675182352023-10-04T00:41:00.003+11:002023-10-09T19:38:29.748+11:00IFComp 2023 review: Barcarolle in Yellow by Victor Ojuel<p>I've currently time to play only a few IFComp entries each year. I try to start with a horror game that speaks to me. This year, the game that's plainly shouting at me is <a href="https://ifcomp.org/ballot#entry-2894" target="_blank">Barcarolle in Yellow</a> by Victor Ojuel.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimuPNJvcDniZTYv2AHzL-yIDWCchqkR3-GBhJQ6lNDYr4A-R3P_vV04L2YcdDqkNPn83dPL4oGHpldEst0FcOATLXzsz6VvSCHVZq5Jyka-U2O6qMvDkTC5NyQxTrjItruhH8U_Rru8ztNfkkx8YBDutfSjXPlZUJf_nXfKRLtQrAuMwvLh6EgVAhnM7I/s3508/barcarolle_cover.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Barcarolle in Yellow cover art" border="0" data-original-height="3508" data-original-width="2456" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimuPNJvcDniZTYv2AHzL-yIDWCchqkR3-GBhJQ6lNDYr4A-R3P_vV04L2YcdDqkNPn83dPL4oGHpldEst0FcOATLXzsz6VvSCHVZq5Jyka-U2O6qMvDkTC5NyQxTrjItruhH8U_Rru8ztNfkkx8YBDutfSjXPlZUJf_nXfKRLtQrAuMwvLh6EgVAhnM7I/w280-h400/barcarolle_cover.png" title="Barcarolle in Yellow cover art" width="280" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Cover art by Ara Carrasco</div><p>This parser adventure is an IF take on the cinematic subgenre known as <i>giallo</i>, in which I have some expertise. So even if this turns out to be my only review, I hope it's one that can help other players to appreciate the qualities of this game in the context of its source material. I'm sure Barcarolle will entertain anyone who enjoys a hectic, lurid murder-mystery thriller with violence and some sex/nudity, for that's what it is, but I can still imagine a lot of "What was that about?" questions regarding some of its content in the minds of players who've never encountered a giallo or giallo-like before.</p><p>* If you don't want to read a review of the game before playing it, but would like to know a little about the giallo genre before you do, you can safely read the <b>About giallo in general</b> section.</p><p>* Anyone can also read the <b>Spoiler-free play advice section</b> before playing. In fact, I recommend you do read that before playing!</p><p>* Otherwise: The review following those sections is not a spoilery review in terms of what the game would consider to be its surprises. It describes the initial scenes of the game, the nature of the game and story overall and the kinds of tasks the PC will be involved in during the game. It lists some specific ways the PC can die and describes the nudity that's in the game. It says nothing about the content of the ending but something about the nature of the ending.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>About giallo in general</b></p><p><i>Giallo</i> is Italian for yellow. In Italian publishing, there's a history of classic mystery novels being released in cheap editions with distinctive yellow covers and sensational cover art. Their success led to newer pulp mysteries being published in the same style. When these stories began to take cinematic form, directors quickly turned to producing original murder-mysteries inspired by them, but with a modern outlook. These films were more psychologically-focused, erotic and horrific than the books that originally inspired them (though sometimes not more so than the covers that inspired them) and often featured innovative audiovisual styling, gore, nudity, and a high body count. This kind of film became known as the <i>giallo</i> and was at its international peak of popularity in the 1970s.</p><p>The majority of giallo came from Italy, followed by Spain. Some were coproductions that shared Italian and Spanish actors and production crew. The film's casts were often studded with internationals. In <b>Barcarolle in Yellow </b>the heroine PC, Eva Chantry, is English (according to her passport) and is off to shoot a giallo in Venice when the game begins.</p><p>The name and cover art for Ojuel's game are on the mark in their pastiche quality. Compare the Barcarolle cover shown earlier in this post to this real poster for <b>The Girl Who Knew Too Much</b> (1963)</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg93Q5Xe79uDkWi75Bn65jDPVZw2NH9JaqosDYbsFNg0UG_gF0m4bn18H1HhXrnl_kXmzeyRvbRPkUBzuicymmNbLkI8lX2oCiClYRdcGQV_HyAYiy4gOFc3LVRzDW-8_UwerQvp1nPvkHds0orGKp8Bf4KNYPaGAhZkE21J3FgPSV_JnuTI2nD2YDWzas/s431/thegirlwhoknewtoomuch.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) poster" border="0" data-original-height="431" data-original-width="231" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg93Q5Xe79uDkWi75Bn65jDPVZw2NH9JaqosDYbsFNg0UG_gF0m4bn18H1HhXrnl_kXmzeyRvbRPkUBzuicymmNbLkI8lX2oCiClYRdcGQV_HyAYiy4gOFc3LVRzDW-8_UwerQvp1nPvkHds0orGKp8Bf4KNYPaGAhZkE21J3FgPSV_JnuTI2nD2YDWzas/w215-h400/thegirlwhoknewtoomuch.jpg" title="The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) poster" width="215" /></a></div><p>The international success of one particular giallo, Dario Argento's <b>The Bird With The Crystal Plumage</b> (1970) set off a copycat trend in the naming of these films. Numbers, animals and colours featured heavily. As did salaciousness. Consider these titles:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971)</li><li>Cat'O'Nine Tails (1971)</li><li>The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972)</li><li>Strip Nude for your Killer (1975)</li><li>Watch Me When I Kill (1977)</li><li>Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970)</li><li>The Bloodstained Butterfly (1971)</li></ul><p></p><p>It turns out that a <i>barcarolle</i> is a kind of Venetian gondolier's song. And for a giallo IF initially presenting to a giallo-unfamiliar audience, the colour yellow is an obvious choice.</p><p>Giallo, as they were unto themselves in the 1970s, aren't really made any more. Some thrillers have giallo-like elements, but never enough to fully qualify them or give them the giallo feel. What we do see produced today is the occasional hyper-loyal giallo pastiche, like the 1970s-set <b>Abrakadabra</b> (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2TQ3tZzRqk" target="_blank">NSFW trailer</a>) or 1980s-set <b>Crystal Eyes</b> (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukAP3LTpiqg" target="_blank">NSFW trailer</a>). Abrakadabra and its trailer are so amazingly accurate, I genuinely thought the film was a giallo from the 1970s when I first saw the trailer; the film was released in 2018.</p><p>Finally, one of the giallo masters from the day, Dario Argento, is still alive, and brought out a brand new giallo in 2022, Dark Glasses (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJIi_gg9sKs" target="_blank">NSFW trailer</a>). For all its flaws, I still think it's his best film for a long time.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Spoiler-free play advice</b></p><p>The game uses few verbs, and mercifully, all talking is achieved just with a TALK (PERSON) command. All commands needed to play are listed in the HELP. The key advice I can give is to WAIT whenever in doubt, as many scenes progress on their own, TALK TO (PERSON) whenever still in doubt, save frequently (though UNDO is also your friend) and finally, pay attention to your wardrobe. It's both fun in an IF sense to change your clothes, but it also turns out to be policed in a practical sense by this game. Wear whatever your commonsense tells you is appropriate for whatever task you're about to undertake.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>About Barcarolle in Yellow</b></p><p>In this giallo adventure set in 1975, the player takes the role of Eva Chandry, an actor whom the credits describe as starring "as herself". The credits are interwoven with the game's opening turns set in a police station, where an interview with Eva is beginning. Eva often finds that life is like a performance, or that life reminds her of her art more often than the other way around. Thus the game is presented to the player within the frame of it being a film, and is also about a film actor appearing in a giallo film to be shot in Venice.</p><p>Giallo films often blur the lines between reality, dreams, imagination, and false memories of the seen and heard, but they rarely enter the postmodern. Barcarolle in Yellow throws in a foregrounded fourth wall element that adds to the pleasurably discomforting pressure the game is always applying through its prose. Is the game reality the true reality? Or does that lie in some layer above or below what Eva experiences? What she does experience is all the mayhem of filmmaking, typically chaotic giallo plotting, and being the target of a mask-wearing killler in Venice, the same way her character is stalked in the script.</p><p>Killers in giallo films are often motivated by Freudian traumas from their past. As often, the traumas are revealed to the audience in piecemeal flashbacks cued by the developing investigations of the murders. While I'm used to giallos going back, I laughed when Barcarelle went way back (to 1862) and to another country (USA) in what appeared to be its first flashback. In its typical rug-pulling style, this was revealed to be a scene from a Western Eva was acting in.</p><p>Overall, Barcarolle in Yellow turns out to be a dangerous and tricky game, with frequent physical threats to the PC, death on the cards and numerous abrupt changes of place and reality. However, it also has a strong, often linear trajectory that keeps it from being too hard. I found most difficulty stemmed from under-implementation. It doesn't cater to enough synonyms and possibilities for the amount of prose there is. This combined with a few timing-critical scenes makes for some frustrating passages. On the plus side, the THINK command will almost always point the player in exactly the direction they need to go. I didn't use THINK on my first playthrough, but used it a lot on the second to shore up identify-the-noun moments that had repeatedly held me up.</p><p>As the attractive Eva, the player must get around an excitingly compressed version of Venice, occasionally act in the film she's in (by following its script!) investigate the stalker who appears in both Eva's life and the film, and manually handle her wardrobe. Cue giallo-typical nudity, both appropriate (having a shower) and justifiable but glamourised (being nude in a prolonged dream, except for a mask). This being a giallo, the game comments, via Eva's thoughts, on the way the camera observes the female body through an exploitation film lense.</p><p>There are a lot of entertaining scenes and tricks that toy with agency as an IF player, as a woman PC and as an actor in a film. The world of the game is as aggressively sexist and sexual as many giallo films were, and those films already experimented a lot with people's roles. The agreed-upon prototype giallo is Mario Bava's <b>The Girl Who Knew Too Much</b> (1963) which foregrounded, in one stream of the genre, a kind of outsider female experience. The American heroine in that film takes a holiday in Rome, witnesses a murder there and eventually solves it. Eva is Barcarolle's outsider protagonist. She visits a city in another country to shoot a film and also has to play a tourist in that film. The player even has to shoot photographs during Eva's acting scenes.</p><p>Some giallo could be very gory, with particularly outré deaths that are now regarded as proto-splatter-film. Barcarolle hits these genre notes, too. It features a knife murder committed through the eye, a speedboat attack and a hanging by designer scarf. The fresh and well-informed performance of so many giallo notes in the game is really impressive.</p><p>Giallo films were ultimately open to exploiting any dimension of cinema sensation they could in their commitment to producing involving, shocking, thrilling and twisty murder-mysteries. Bigger twists and shocks were better, even if they didn't make a lot of sense. Some giallo were tightly plotted, others lurching shock machines, but most had their eye on overall audience satisfaction. This hectic quality can be perceived in Barcarolle in Yellow, too. Some of the game's shocks involve unexpectedly sudden endings or upendings, or the placement of moments of fourth wall breakage. There are in fact multiple endings to the game that riff on the bizarre nature of solutions to giallo murder mysteries; I found four endings so far and can tell there's at least one more.</p><p>I've played a couple of Victor Ojuel's other games over the years. They both featured vivid or innovatively-realised geography, and that's true again of Barcarolle's handy version of Venice. The games also needed more implementation work to my eyes, and that's also true of Barcarolle. Because I like this game very much, I would also like to see a solider version of it, without all the excess line breaks, with the typos cleaned up and all those synonyms added and programming beefed up to remove the bumping-against-the-walls moments. However, with its strong hint system, Barcarolle won't leave a player stranded if they do hit the walls, and that's more important for today and for players' IFComp experience with the game. I also appreciate what programming an IF game as event-driven as this one is like.</p><p>In conclusion, I highly recommend Barcarolle in Yellow. It shows great and affectionate knowledge of the films and related cultural milieu that inspired it.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-41958585071615760212023-04-14T00:02:00.003+10:002023-04-14T10:58:12.662+10:00Spring Thing 2023 music prize details<p>This post offers a few more details about the Spring Thing 2023 prize I'll be offering than will be able to fit on their screen.</p><p>The prize is a music commission. I'll compose and produce something for you, or derive something from unreleased recordings I have if they're the ideal match and you like 'em, for your chosen purpose, which can be pretty much anything.</p><p>Previously the prize was chosen by the receiver (in IFComp). In the Spring Thing context, it's received randomly. In the IFComp context, I did things like make music for games people were making, or a theme track for a cable TV show.</p><p>I specialise in instrumental and electronic music, but can do or wrangle many styles and things, so long as you don't want vocals.</p><p><b>Here are my Restrictive Clauses!</b></p><p></p><ul><li>If you get this prize, you have to call it in within a year of claiming it. If we haven't made the music within the year, the coupon evaporates.</li><li>For non-commercial use, the purpose can be almost anything. For commercial use, the piece can contribute to some creative project you've made or are making. I can decline if the purpose is hazardous, inscrutable or commercially murky, etc.</li><li>Length is a limitation, but up for reasonable negotiation in context. For instance, some electronic or ambient music can be made quite long in the same time it would take to produce a shorter piece in some other kinds or genres. Composing to vision also takes more time.</li></ul><p></p><p><b>Links to my music</b></p><p></p><ul><li>My long-term electronic music project is <b>Aeriae</b>:</li></ul><p>( <a href="https://clananalogue.bandcamp.com/album/peril-triage" target="_blank">Peril Triage</a> is my most recent EP of new stuff. <a href="https://aeriae.bandcamp.com/album/de" target="_blank">DE</a> is a live set. <a href="https://clananalogue.bandcamp.com/album/victris" target="_blank">Victris</a> is my most recent album.)</p><p><a href="https://aeriae.com/" target="_blank">https://aeriae.com/</a></p><p><a href="https://aeriae.bandcamp.com/" target="_blank">https://aeriae.bandcamp.com/</a></p><p></p><ul><li>Some other pieces I've made in different genres can be found on the following Bandcamp page:</li></ul><p></p><p><a href="https://wadeclarke.bandcamp.com/" target="_blank">https://wadeclarke.bandcamp.com/</a></p><p>of which, the ones listed below were actually for IF games:</p><p><a href="https://wadeclarke.bandcamp.com/track/black-giant">Black Giant</a> (sci-fi theme)</p><p><a href="https://wadeclarke.bandcamp.com/track/andromeda-1983" target="_blank">Andromeda 1983</a> (C64 style in-game)</p><p><a href="https://wadeclarke.bandcamp.com/track/kerkerkruip-main-theme" target="_blank">Kerkerkruip</a> (Diablo-esque)</p><p><a href="https://wadeclarke.bandcamp.com/album/leadlight-gamma-original-soundtrack" target="_blank">Leadlight Gamma</a> (horror, eclectic)</p><p><a href="https://wadeclarke.bandcamp.com/track/ghosterington-night-theme" target="_blank">Ghosterington Night</a> (cheesy spooky)</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-48463216263359993412022-12-14T23:55:00.000+11:002022-12-14T23:55:22.109+11:00Music Room Inform source code (from Cragne Manor) now public<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPtKbNhjmtB61EGs8tItt44GEQedgAmm6QhJPid5fTe0CCK92AwF4u-_IPvlKF7kJFpp7XWDeDhuVNFQjL6MZsTgJeizdeus8eiArRoPAZzO5UlQGZd9e0W2PDT5TLj2kWhiyj76wY6CK3i8szBNxKZ0l9Bt3_YKLytHaX7ZuOHLYw3HdgtzgMbznD/s818/pic199433.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="818" height="294" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPtKbNhjmtB61EGs8tItt44GEQedgAmm6QhJPid5fTe0CCK92AwF4u-_IPvlKF7kJFpp7XWDeDhuVNFQjL6MZsTgJeizdeus8eiArRoPAZzO5UlQGZd9e0W2PDT5TLj2kWhiyj76wY6CK3i8szBNxKZ0l9Bt3_YKLytHaX7ZuOHLYw3HdgtzgMbznD/w400-h294/pic199433.webp" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chill: Black Morn manor board game. The map reminds me of Cragne Manor.</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Andrew Plotkin maintains <a href="https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/cragne/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a nice webpage hosting Cragne Manor Inform source code files</a> that have been shared publicly by their authors. The other day I sent him my 30k-word source for room M1F5, <b>The Music Room</b>, so it can now be downloaded from or viewed (in easy-to-read format) on the page. Obviously, the source is completely spoilery for the location. A few observations on it:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I opened ten other sources at random and I guess one thing I can say about mine is it appears to be the most commented of the sources. This will help if you want to try to follow it much, because the room transforms amongst eight different guises during play. The phrases <i>"wadrick-pack-the-new-room"</i> and <i>"wadrick-unpack-the-old-room"</i> teleport people and objects in and out as the player moves through the different sub-rooms.</li><li>There are thirteen rules in the source intercepting all the actions (I could find!) that a player can use to launch a vital object into a room at a vital moment in order to stay alive.</li><li>There's also a reasonable amount of code (in <i>"Section - Wider world rules"</i>) diverting/suppressing every alternate path to conversation. Tons of paths had been added by a coordinators-supplied conversation extension that may be great in its own right, but which I recall they ultimately regretted adding, because it created so many potholes for authors. My problem was that with the extension in place, Inform constantly harped on the topic of the vomit object I'd created. If someone was allowed to type ASK in my room, the game would immediately print "<i>(about the vomit)", </i>and as funny as that was for a few minutes, it was more genuinely an annoyance. So I moved aggressively on the whole issue.</li></ul><p></p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-81881031724765321862022-11-26T11:01:00.001+11:002022-11-26T11:01:06.682+11:00Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter planning notes available<p>During my 2022 Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter, I said on the intfiction.org forum that once the campaign was over, I would share my planning notes. I've now done that (they comprise a a ten-page PDF of about 4700 words) in a <a href="https://intfiction.org/t/andromeda-acolytes-kickstarter-planning-notes-pdf/58876" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">post on the forum</a> along with some explanatory notes.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-52360524519435662312022-10-02T14:43:00.000+11:002022-10-02T14:43:03.455+11:00IFComp 2022 review: Nose Bleed by Stanley W Baxton<p><a href="https://2694.play.ifcomp.org/content/Nose_Bleed.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Nose Bleed</a> by Stanley W Baxton, is a clicking-choice-based story with graphic elaboration – ostensibly about social anxiety – that elicited a combination of visceral nausea and hysterical laughter from me; a pretty strong combination for a ten-minute (to play) game. I don't think the first game I've tried in any previous year's Interactive Fiction Competition has made me feel ill so quickly, so after a fashion, this was a good start.</p><p>I'd say that if nose bleeds, or blood coming out of your body in general, either in prose or as animated spatter on the screen, or from the cover image below, are likely to make you ill, then both this game and my review are likely to make you ill ill. You have been warned.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8TjcbBoHFGtmkC3fZe4KSwARDcO8ZkPcoXpOrnVDnelSeVoRyjus-4aGGr6g4Mp84bUCSGXYHpHJkfqLwZ_vg_3jWasxZUyLPQ8svdz8ycii5HiGRRFxGtfBzsFe2RZ_HboYQPykiYtgvzUrjf1tSopsDFQsj2OO_S8K6V9HjHza8cMw_SDq-wETV/s630/nose-bleed.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Nose Bleed cover image" border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="630" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8TjcbBoHFGtmkC3fZe4KSwARDcO8ZkPcoXpOrnVDnelSeVoRyjus-4aGGr6g4Mp84bUCSGXYHpHJkfqLwZ_vg_3jWasxZUyLPQ8svdz8ycii5HiGRRFxGtfBzsFe2RZ_HboYQPykiYtgvzUrjf1tSopsDFQsj2OO_S8K6V9HjHza8cMw_SDq-wETV/w320-h254/nose-bleed.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>The player-narrator of Nose Bleed works in an office. They're meant to be doing something with spreadsheets but they feel barely capable. The details of the work, or indeed of anything but the narrator's flustered mental space, and later, their spectacular nose bleeds, are omitted by the game. Their headspace and the negative self-talk going on in there are the main event. I am not a psychiatrist, but I have been incapacitatedly socially phobic (two-and-a-half decades ago – treated over years, ultimately left behind) and this looks to be the psychological terrain of this game. Also, the content warning says "social anxiety". In the protagonist's distorted mindset, they expect to be negatively evaluated by others all the time. The narration is a spiral of feeling incompetent, incapable, distressed, depressed, and wanting to flee situations.</p><p>When the PC's nose starts to bleed during the work day, it comes in like a metaphor for their anxiety. It starts, it can't be stopped, it seems uncontrollable, others can see it and evaluate them negatively as a result. The bleeding gets worse. The PC is invited to an event they can't get out of, and the blood keeps-a-coming. Choices about what to do next are made by dragging words on the screen to nouns that light up. The actions tend to be basic ones that are either ineffectual (rub nose) or fobbed off upon selection by the protagonist's own self-defeating brain (apologise).</p><p>What makes Nose Bleed so nauseating is the way the blood is animated on screen. The paper-white backdrop is stained first by a single streak, then as spots that appear, and finally as an unstoppable animated splatter that follows the cursor about. Coupled with selectable prose options like "Lick" (the blood off your lip) the effect of all this was to begin to induce in my arms that strange weakness that precedes blood-related nausea for me. And then I began to laugh. The whole thing was reaching the intensity of a skit where a patient sits in a waiting room while geysering blood. Or of the most spectacular nose bleed I ever experienced second-hand as an adolescent, where I was in a car with two sisters, and one of them started jetting from the nose in time with the pumping from her heart. The streamers of blood would hit me whenever the car turned a corner. As much blood gets all over the prose in Nose Bleed. It piles up on the on-screen choices and nothing can stop it. The PC doesn't even try basic techniques I'm aware of like pinching the nose while tilting the head back, though they do come up with the head tilt alone.</p><p>Nose Bleed's finale has a kind of twisting escalation that reminded me of a David Cronenberg film or two. I'm not sure what meaning I ascribe to the very last event in the game, but I'll give it time to percolate. The game's overall design is excellent, moving quickly from banal office work and equally banal thoughts, via the start of a typical nose bleed, through the discomfort of being unable to stop the bleed, to an eventual wittily programmed and (to me, hilarious) graphical geyser. I kept thinking as I played, "Surely, it stops here," but I was repeatedly wrong.</p><p>If all that animated blood is in danger of having an eclipsing effect, I could say that having all one's thoughts eclipsed by one panicky thing is like social phobia, after all. In Nose Bleed, the blood literally gets in between you and the interface.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-70892349087354686972022-08-22T18:01:00.001+10:002022-08-22T18:01:23.592+10:00Andromeda Acolytes at $9200 of $14k with 54 hours go go!<p style="text-align: left;">If you've yet to back and/or promote, we're obviously entering the crunch time, so please don't delay in backing and/or promoting as suits your life situation.</p><p>Tell people you're backing a sci-fi game on Kickstarter and it's nearly there. And you can tell them in person or on socials or forums or wherever!</p><p>Here's the main link again:</p><p><a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure</a></p><p>I'll also link you to <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure/posts/3588864" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">my latest backer update</a> to let you know where my head's at. Note that if you're already receiving my direct Kickstarter updates and remember me quoting <i>The Phantom Menace</i>, you've read this update.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Here are two other IF Kickstarters I'm backing right now...</span></h4><p style="text-align: left;"><i>(I'd share some graphics but my graphics are screwy on Planet IF at the moment, so I'm leaving them out until I hear back about that)</i></p><p><b>Stereotypical</b></p><p>Did you know that Scott Adams (through his company Clopas LLC) is also Kickstarting a game at the moment? The Kickstarter for ios/Android game Stereotypical finishes soon after mine. I am backing the project and have faith in the pitched base game described on the page, though I don't think the campaign video is very good. There's also a community element involved in the creation of the game. Check it out yourself:</p><p><a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure/posts/3588864">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure/posts/3588864</a></p><p><b>Grimfel</b></p><p>I'm also backing Adam Frank's Grimfel, a fantasy Interactive Fiction/Visual Novel hybrid "about your character's gruelling journey through the age of great desolation""(!). I really like the aesthetic he's developed for the game. It offers base content and then ongoing scenarios. If you like these kinds of stories, and in a dark and not-fey mode, check this one out!</p><p><a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grimfel/grimfel-grimdark-fantasy-interactive-fiction-visual-novel/">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grimfel/grimfel-grimdark-fantasy-interactive-fiction-visual-novel/</a></p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-89320276464295418402022-08-16T15:31:00.001+10:002022-08-16T15:31:58.447+10:00Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter passes $6500 – About the IF Competitions, Kickstarter prep and avoiding the Stanford Prison Experiment<p><b>The Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter has passed $6500!</b></p><p>I've been speaking to backers and getting some very nice feedback, too.</p><p>There are eight days to go to reach $14k as I type this. If you hadn't thought about backing me before, I obviously wish to stir that thought in your mind. What I'm making is ambitious, and you'll also be helping to raise the monetary water level for all IF. <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">HERE'S THE PROJECT LINK.</a></p><p><i>What might also sway you:</i></p><p>Today, I'm going to tell you about the IF competitions I ran that preceded the Kickstarter, because they're actually the wildest part of this whole thing. And since they weren't actually directed primarily towards those already involved in IF, they're the part that most of this audience might know least about.</p><p><b>Kickstarter Prep and IF Competitions</b></p><p>... I started on the Kickstarter prep a year and a half ago. The biggest challenge in these things is trying to establish a community or critical mass before you begin, including a sizeable chunk of people who are initially strangers to you.</p><p>I built a Discord server and programmed it with teams, a community-building idea described by Mike Rose of No More Robots (games) in a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg7tRh0k_a8" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">2019 GDC talk</a> shared to me by Dan Fabulich of <a href="https://www.choiceofgames.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Choice of Games</a>. Dan is the gent who got me to take my Kickstarter prep seriously. So in equal seriousness, I'm grateful to him, while in Joke Land, my constitution wants him to pay it restitution.</p><p>To the competitions. I decided to invent a version of what had been proposed in the GDC talk that would be appropriate for IF. Also, I wouldn't be stirring up a crowd for a game release as was being done in the GDC talk, I'd be stirring one up for a Kickstarter. And finally, I wanted whatever I did to not resemble the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stanford Prison Experiment</a>, which one audience member at the talk jokingly compared its proposed methods to.</p><p>So at this point I was venturing into unexplored territory. I began by vetting IF games to find ones suitable for use in competition. This was hard because most don't use scoring, most have walkthroughs, and those that do use scoring are often too old school. I eventually chose</p><p>1. <a href="https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=8u5me2jkkw3icqa9" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Captain Verdeterre's Plunder</a> by Ryan Veeder – a newbie-friendly time-limited scoring game whose highest score had never been established</p><p>2. <a href="https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4np21bl7mr02wsk2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Napier's Cache</a> by Vivienne Dunstan – No score involved, but it's a character and story driven game of the kind I am pitching myself, and I regard it as the best example of this kind of game that is easiest to play. And</p><p>3. <a href="https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=w8c5ngckvclnjum1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Necron's Keep</a> by Dan Welch – A totally unheralded D+D game that frankly I believed only I knew about, at least in the IF circles I frequent. Not newbie-friendly at all, and with bugs, but detailed and lots of fun, and a good last comp discriminator.</p><p>I then contrived with the authors and keepers of these games to temporarily hide their help materials from the internet. (Except in the case of Necron's Keep, whose author I've never been able to contact. Logistically, that was okay. I was plainly the world's foremost expert on the game at the time, apart from its author.)</p><p>I set up servers with these games on them, and autorecording of player transcripts on the servers. Discord didn't offer certain user ID functionality I needed, so I had to build a Discord bot for that and keep it running 24/7. My friend Andrew Schultz was the Python brains behind this. I created text-adventuring boot camp materials. I solicited and promoted the competitions around the internet, ran them over three weeks and awarded the prizes. This segued into a beta test of the game on Steam, which segued into the Kickstarter launch.</p><p>However, the number of users who'd showed up in the Discord was factors below what I wanted, needed or expected. I had to nix the map-making and poetry-writing competitions around Napier's Cache, and reach back out to IF veterans to compete in the case of Necron's Keep, as I hadn't been able to build up a new player base that was in shape to tackle that game. This last detail shows I overestimated how far I could bring people in three weeks. As disappointing as all this was, other good things came out of it that were of a non-numerical nature. Acquaintances were becoming more like friends. Some IF folk spontaneously offered knowledge, advice or help. The Necron's Keep competition was a lot of fun and brought an unheralded game to people's attention. And my promotions created a general awareness of what I was doing in gaming circles relevant to this project.</p><p>All I've described above is completely outside the Kickstarter itself. That's a whole other set of work. Integrating and dealing with Steam, too, is a whole other set of work. When my Steam beta test broke on launch, Steam took 36 hours to reply – 75% of the time the test was initially planned to run. Dealing with Apple is also work. I am now an Apple developer, too. I have to keep my certifications up to date and notarise my app each time I rebuild it for Steam.</p><p>The strangers-to-community-build is the big element of the pre-campaign I could have tried again from other angles. I (or anyone) could have spent an infinite amount of time at this phase until I'd worked it out. Solving this for a mature, pure prose IF game remains a puzzle. But what I'd already tried was such a massive amount of work, and had cost me so much time, I didn't want to spend more time. I wanted life to go forward, so I began the Kickstarter.</p><p>In terms of how I've promoted the campaign from day to day and the manner in which it's grown correspondingly, I'm really pleased with my work. If the campaign doesn't reach the target I set, I think it will really just be because I didn't build a high enough pre-backership, that critical mass I keep referring to. I took some extraordinary actions to try to develop it but they didn't pan out. Nevertheless, here I am!</p><p>So don't delay, <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">back Andromeda Acolytes today.</a></p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-71858970695259891322022-08-11T14:58:00.004+10:002022-08-11T14:58:56.342+10:00Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter a week in: Approaching $5000<p>I've raised more a third of the game's pledge target in a third of the time. $4800+ towards a pure text adventure in 2022 is a very good look, and I've had strangers compliment me on the ground campaign.</p><p>Bendy-downy graph trends say that the pledge completion percentage should be ahead of the time passed percentage at this point if you're to ultimately succeed. So while success isn't an impossibility, it's the less likely outcome. I won't talk about this kind of stuff at length now. I'll just say that I have learned a tremendous amount about promotion and Kickstarters over the lead-up and the doing, and I plan to share my experiences, and my 30000 word+ to-do list covering the last year and longer, when this is all over.</p><p><b>My exhortation to you all: Be or Stay excited and</b> <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure" target="_blank">help me get a text adventure over the line!</a></p><p>In my most recent <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure/posts" target="_blank">backer updates</a>, I shared two very different pieces of original music I had up my sleeve for the title page, the first classical organ, the second all electronic, and some in-game prose about the character who composed the first piece.</p><p>I've also created a <a href="https://andromedaacolytes.heiresssoftware.com/spreadtheword/" target="_blank">Spread The Word</a> page (Aaron Reed's Kickstarter was the template) with practical advice, plus all the beautiful banners and screenshots you might want to see/share/use.</p><p>I've been blasting the main artwork around the place so often, for this post I thought I'd use the teaser artwork:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigDYjpeiFfgn4oFi6Bukv4oz5Swl74RMsPnfPMmKr9XqGrHD5JW0wfoziofTV0JOfdzNtdz0nYNCeqp5DmILIRxyoLnj1d-dELL5bqENZ1ufX3OakiedG0n2DJFucleiHw38ZWjzg96vXawqwNNaIv0anmsLqA2pH1bqmnASPkWdxOIWH4Dq1FY-qV/s960/andac-preview-cover-960.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Andromeda Acolytes Teaser cover" border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigDYjpeiFfgn4oFi6Bukv4oz5Swl74RMsPnfPMmKr9XqGrHD5JW0wfoziofTV0JOfdzNtdz0nYNCeqp5DmILIRxyoLnj1d-dELL5bqENZ1ufX3OakiedG0n2DJFucleiHw38ZWjzg96vXawqwNNaIv0anmsLqA2pH1bqmnASPkWdxOIWH4Dq1FY-qV/w400-h400/andac-preview-cover-960.jpg" title="Andromeda Acolytes Teaser cover" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-73442884994586108372022-08-04T19:49:00.003+10:002022-08-04T19:49:40.970+10:00Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter is live!<p>My exciting news is that today I launched my Kickstarter for my sci-fi text adventure <b>Andromeda Acolytes:</b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsfWRuiNdEqioks0DppGQ8yjeNtEv399ZfEd9usHIhpUTpFvIoTO_j-129Da-5B-U7-bMxyDVVVDIwEDYf2VW8ZUnzkIHumX79HMhWDVkqu95cJriv2wzZQYgAtIidN4lNxAv4NZ27FAhkuTUURJh1cgLzulFn7GJtI7LS20E4iogRf1erz7h4G4d-/s600/andac%20just%20launched.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Andromeda Acolytes banner" border="0" data-original-height="337" data-original-width="600" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsfWRuiNdEqioks0DppGQ8yjeNtEv399ZfEd9usHIhpUTpFvIoTO_j-129Da-5B-U7-bMxyDVVVDIwEDYf2VW8ZUnzkIHumX79HMhWDVkqu95cJriv2wzZQYgAtIidN4lNxAv4NZ27FAhkuTUURJh1cgLzulFn7GJtI7LS20E4iogRf1erz7h4G4d-/w400-h225/andac%20just%20launched.jpg" title="Andromeda Acolytes banner" width="400" /></a></div><p>Here's the page:</p><p><a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure" target="_blank">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure</a></p><p>I'm running the Kickstarter campaign for three weeks. I think the resulting game will be a novel and exciting one, bringing longer form character POV to a parser-driven adventure while keeping the sci-fi, puzzling and mystery elements that define the Andromeda games initiated by Marco Innocenti in 2011's <b>Andromeda Awakening</b>.</p><p>If this is something you'd like to see realised – or you suspect you'd like to see it realised but perhaps need a bit more seduction via the information-richness of my Kickstarter page – please <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure" target="_blank">visit that page</a>. I hope you'll back me! And don't forget to spruik the link to anyone and anything you think might be interested.</p><p>In this blog and in Planet-IFfy circles, it's a relief that I don't have to sell the idea of a text game or interactive fiction in the first place. I thought I might instead say something about the first chapter of the game, which I've released as a playable demo:</p><p><a href="https://wadeclarke.com/ifdemos/andacdemo/" target="_blank">https://wadeclarke.com/ifdemos/andacdemo/</a></p><p>I had minor nerves that this chapter might not be showy enough for the Kickstarter. The early chapters introduce different PCs, one per chapter, and in each case the chapter begins during what is a normal day in the life of that PC on the planet Monarch. If you're familiar with the scale of recent parser games, you might already note that it's not usual for a parser game to introduce PCs at such length.</p><p>Also, I'd say the first PC, Korhva, is the least demonstrative and most reserved of the cast. This makes her a little more challenging to write, and maybe harder to get a handle on.</p><p>Nevertheless, the first chapter is the starting place for the story, so I never really considered using anything else. It's also technically strong. I started this work in 2019, so the first chapter's had more testing than any other.</p><p>If you back the game or spread the word or help me in any way, I offer you my sincerest thanks.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-57849911983370253792022-07-25T11:12:00.003+10:002022-07-25T11:14:44.350+10:00Necrocomp. It's on now (July 25-29, 2022)<p>Want to try your hand at a swords'n'sorcery parser adventure and compete for high score glory and Steam/itch game prizes during a five-day play window? These are the wages and circumstances of <b>Necrocomp</b>, which I'm running now (July 25-July 29, Australian time).</p><p>The game you'll be playing in Necrocomp is <b>Necron's Keep</b> by Dan Welch. This combat-RPG is janky and buggy, but also fun and challenging. Get ready to die A LOT as you try to find out what happened to the archmage Necron. Grapple with xp, levels, spells, spell components, hit points – and no UNDO – as you try to get the highest score you can.</p><p>Necrocomp is open to everyone. I'm hosting it simultaneously from intfiction.org and my Andromeda Acolytes Discord server. Technically it's the third competition in the Discord, but I've realised it's too great a challenge for text adventuring newbies, hence I'm casting the net open to more regular or experienced players of parser games.</p><p>The competition prizes are all adventure/RPG/interactive fiction computer games. Mostly from Steam, with some from itch-io or direct download.</p><p>To read the rules of Necrocomp and get the online play link, visit my <a href="https://intfiction.org/t/necrocomp-is-on-now-monday-july-25-friday-july-29-inclusive-utc-10/56963" target="_blank">topic on intfiction.org</a></p><p>Join in, have fun.</p><p>PS – My sci-fi parser game Andromeda Acolytes is having a beta test preview on Steam from July 30 to August 2. It's now accepting signups on Steam. Just press the green <i>Request Access</i> button on its <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1742310/Andromeda_Acolytes/" target="_blank">Steam page</a>. The Andromeda Acolytes <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure" target="_blank">Kickstarter</a> opens on August 3.</p><p>The beta is for chapter one of the game which, as you might expect of a first chapter, is fairly gentle, and includes the tutorial.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-73277796656833831732022-05-27T19:05:00.000+10:002022-05-27T19:05:01.972+10:00Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter adopts pre-launch stance<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgelnziSbi-uzYjkSDW5Pp1oH6Ljlod7wGjKiquoCfD_4AUDvtnrYVWh8ACvje3ctsq6uGv0n3G57ZxhAWRPKqJOMOWqnlr5B93eMxrBSiuVI_g7W0S_S5csM8whbHf_D9X9AtaZMYe8JUTsTJU8v6EXf9hylRiI84XGtfw5fRwm6KesZgrXcqITqG7/s851/pt06-edit02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Flying saucer with caption "Is this thing on?"" border="0" data-original-height="719" data-original-width="851" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgelnziSbi-uzYjkSDW5Pp1oH6Ljlod7wGjKiquoCfD_4AUDvtnrYVWh8ACvje3ctsq6uGv0n3G57ZxhAWRPKqJOMOWqnlr5B93eMxrBSiuVI_g7W0S_S5csM8whbHf_D9X9AtaZMYe8JUTsTJU8v6EXf9hylRiI84XGtfw5fRwm6KesZgrXcqITqG7/w320-h270/pt06-edit02.jpg" title="A bit of an ancient webcomic of mine, "Plan 10"" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A bit of "Plan 10", an ancient webcomic of mine<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>The Kickstarter for my sci-fi parser adventure <b>Andromeda Acolytes</b> has acquired pre-launch status. What this means is that Kickstarter have vetted and approved my campaign presentation. It doesn't mean that you can SEE that presentation yet! Such excitement remains locked up until launch day. But moving back to the topic of what it does mean... it does mean you can now press a NOTIFY ME button on the pre-launch page so that you will get an alert the moment the campaign goes live.</p><p>Here's the page link:</p><p><a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure</a></p><p>If you're not on Kickstarter yet, pressing the button should lead you into the process of signing up, too. </p><p>I've been prepping this Kickstarter for about a year now, so if you bump into me in the street, please ignore any cock-eyed look I happen to have on my face. We Kickstart-preppers start seeing weird minor obstacles approaching from all directions all of the time.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-73648787593729529952022-04-22T20:16:00.001+10:002022-05-17T11:31:48.341+10:00Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: Phenomena by Dawn Sueoka<p>Preface: When I tried Phenomena, I didn't realise it had some mechanical interactivity in it; you can click the lines in the poems to change them. I reviewed it without this knowledge, and that's the review you're about to read. Phenomena made a bit of a mistake in not giving any direct instructions about how/where you could change elements in its presentation.</p><p>–––</p><p><a href="https://www.springthing.net/2022/play.html#Phenomena" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Phenomena</a> by Dawn Sueoka, a <a href="https://www.springthing.net/2022/play.html#backGarden" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Back Garden</a> entry in Autumnal Jumble 2022, is a set of seven seven-line poems about UFOS. These poems are static from a technical perspective. It is their shared subject matter, and the broad similarity of their trajectories and on-screen presentation, that invites cross-reading of them. The author encourages readers to do this in the epigraph; this is the site of interactivity. The author says that the inspiring model is the 1961 book "A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" by Raymond Queneau.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZS0jhodQ8Q9lusR22qBg6fDhdbfD40MNNrhBM3Iz_GRdabzfsY4o7hDj5SRRVmSr5hraKOTS2hljoKGF5GOHYE1e3jFykuFn4vm9McTGmh1TkSHQN8LQlQ5gxliBkHTjKiF9QVIEKQj0PTTp4XFp17oCrySKnd9hQ6hQiLuGDbi7uX_RggA8VOTl_/s408/phenom.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="361" data-original-width="408" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZS0jhodQ8Q9lusR22qBg6fDhdbfD40MNNrhBM3Iz_GRdabzfsY4o7hDj5SRRVmSr5hraKOTS2hljoKGF5GOHYE1e3jFykuFn4vm9McTGmh1TkSHQN8LQlQ5gxliBkHTjKiF9QVIEKQj0PTTp4XFp17oCrySKnd9hQ6hQiLuGDbi7uX_RggA8VOTl_/s320/phenom.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>I like the poems. Some are sensorial and about gazing at the sky (<i>"Only the flimsiest stars were visible"</i>), others are metaphorical about what's up there. The one called <i>AND HOW WOULD YOU UNPACK THAT? </i>reads like an art film depiction of a pscyhoanalytic session under hypnosis. I was surprised that there were a few laughs and cute moments about the place, too. The first poem quickly moves from its evocative introduction to a camp bit of dialogue with which to greet a flying saucer: <i>"Hello, darling!" </i>Some of the last poem could be a quasi-text-messaging gotcha:</p><p><i>"This was never a story about UFOs!</i></p><p><i>It was a story about the night all along lol."</i></p><p>I also love comedic dialogue that magnifies pettiness, and the last line of the poem called <i>HE WOULDN'T SHUT UP ABOUT HIS PLANET</i> is, <i>"Go back to your stupid planet, then, if you love it so much!"</i></p><p>The modern or colloquial elements woven amongst more expected (by me, in poetry) lyrical content in Phenomena make me wonder if some stochastic element was used to help make the poems. What I can say of each poem is that it has a satisfying dynamic of its own.</p><p>This brings me to the invitation to interactivity. Once I noticed each poem had seven lines, I tried flitting between them to see if I could slice equivalent numbered lines amongst the poems to new effect. The reason this didn't do much for me is because I'm already quite satisfied with the poems. Why muck around with complete entities I like? The other issue is one of technical facilitation. I'd have found the poem-slicing easier if I could have at least clicked instantly on any poem at any time so that the poems would visually replace each other on-screen. Instead, poems are separated by a BACK button. Still, I noted that a couple of poems, while maintaining an internal dynamic, consist entirely of one type of content. Poem five has only one-word lines. Poem six is all direct speech. In this way, they would allow their respective content types to be slid into any position in another poem.</p><p>I enjoyed reading Phenomena's poems as they are, and I was interested to learn of the "A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" idea, but since the whole thing's presented digitally, I think its invitation to read its poems in different ways would be more appetising if it leveraged some programming or a user interface that would help a reader do this.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-68840248184552181312022-04-17T15:31:00.001+10:002022-04-17T15:32:13.917+10:00Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: A Single Ouroboros Scale by Naomi Norbez<p><a href="https://www.springthing.net/2022/play.html#ASingleOuroborosScale" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">A Single Ouroboros Scale</a> by Naomi Norbez is a hypertext trip through the archive of a fictional hypertext author, AlgieFreyir. The archive entries all have a trajectory towards extremity: The author's work is never received the way they want in IFdom so their internal fury mounts. Their mental health declines and their frustrations increase. Their lucidity decreases. Their physical health declines and death looms. The reader's position in this is as a moderator on the Jot Archive Volunteer Project, tasked with ultimately deciding whether AlgieFreyir's material is worth archiving. Or at least venturing their opinion on the topic to a doddering/patriarchal-seeming, gatekeeping overseer called REvans.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgva-lRWySCBTBcH9GBMA24h-VHO7bH8ygUZ4BGMdPx35gXS9RfrcPvqHTNclpyQUgYdtXNq6MrDw9xGlWR5R8x-rmi1lu58gtQO_8hxfUVw40OMCF1VwLM3s5rX3utOWKkCQLVVYLEUaWB2hYsn-07GI7_Z428k_D44Dot9S3IaNX-9H4VxlbxWLuO/s800/asingle.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgva-lRWySCBTBcH9GBMA24h-VHO7bH8ygUZ4BGMdPx35gXS9RfrcPvqHTNclpyQUgYdtXNq6MrDw9xGlWR5R8x-rmi1lu58gtQO_8hxfUVw40OMCF1VwLM3s5rX3utOWKkCQLVVYLEUaWB2hYsn-07GI7_Z428k_D44Dot9S3IaNX-9H4VxlbxWLuO/s320/asingle.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>This is a frightening read. Dying, being forgotten, thrashing against everything in the space you've chosen to work in. It works best as a wave of honest emotion. For logic or likeliness of the specificities of the IF world the foreword says it mirrors, it often doesn't make sense. For instance, digital storage space is cheap. The content-blind IF Archive can and does archive everything that anyone puts into it. The IFDB (Interactive Fiction Database) is the same, to the chagrin of some. IFWiki is editable by anyone. This hypertext's situation of having a prejudicial gatekeeper deciding which articles to save or delete on a one-by-one basis to shape history is better read as a metaphor for the broader feeling of rejection of one's work the game fixes on, and a tie-in to the fear of being forgotten in general.</p><p>The dynamic of the narration is excellent. The minutiae of thoughts skittering back and forth, and the general evolution of AlgieFreyir's outlook from an almost naive positivity to thorough, passive-aggressive bitterness by the end, is perfectly written. Inevitably, a good chunk of it is thoroughly unpleasant to read, too, in the way that a litany of negativity usually is. It comes back to the need for love near the end, but by that point it's also like a cry from a tunnel. Too little too late for the narrator.</p><p>Pieces with an autobiographical slant often lead me to an autobiographical slant as a reviewer. I don't know if the result is a review-review as I usually call the thing I'm writing about an IF; it's something else I haven't named.</p><p>I dislike and try to ignore moves to frame my response to creative work before I've experienced it, a few of the kinds of things Ouroboros says in its foreword. I do believe you put art out there, people receive it, and for the most part, you don't tell them how to receive it. Otherwise you may simply be the new gatekeeper you decry.</p><p>Once I started reading, I found the narrator character irritating in terms of his constant moves to pre-frame responses to his own ideas, the blind spot of desiring empathy but being so solidly bound up with his own assumptions as to share little of it specifically. This is reflected again in the Ouroboros-like circle of the idea of reputation that surrounds the narrative. The narrator wants a name and reputation, but all the baddies (the popular, the revered, etc.) are people with names and reputations. In turn, this made me think that part of the issue for the character is being in a social vacuum. They declare in the finale of the text that they've lost almost all their friends. The kinds of conversations the narrator is having with themselves aren't the kind that people can have healthily in their own heads at length. We need other people. Some of us need psychiatrists. By bouncing an idea off a real person, we can often return to reality in seconds. This is potentially one of the curses of intelligent people, that they can mount and sustain such negative self-talk for an eternity. I once read a description of this phenomenon by a "reformed" depressive as "a perverse form of mental masturbation". As someone with long term major depression and anxiety essentially behind me now, I wryly related to that description from my sense of where I am today.</p><p>The end of Ouroboros is interesting in that in different dimensions, it may be a very anti-hope piece of narrative or a generous conceptual gesture on the part of the text. At the conceptual end, it lets the reader decide whether they want to advise REvans to keep AlgieFreyir's Jots or delete them. The player can also choose to read as much or as little of AlgieFreyir as they like before they make their decision. In light of the thrashing of the entire narrative and its frequent foreclosing of other's thoughts and responses, this feels like a respectfully democratic moment for the player, an acceptance that others get to make up their minds about something offered to them. In the anti-hope camp, there is the fact that that REvans will veto the player's decision anyway, deleting AlgieFreyir's material and kicking (in a superficially genteel way) a recalcitrant player from the volunteer position. Again, the title image is appropriate: the snake will eat itself, the impulse will go around and self-destruct. Since I read REvans more as a metaphor than a real person, I didn't find the anti-hope element to be too heavy or didactic. It's certainly an accurate representation of the narrator's state of mind.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-22275634090553761332022-04-16T12:27:00.002+10:002022-04-16T23:39:38.720+10:00Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: Bigfoot Bluff by P.B. Parjeter<p><a href="https://www.springthing.net/2022/play.html#BigfootBluff" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Bigfoot Bluff,</a> by P.B. Parjeter, is a busy parser adventure game of bizarre comedy. You play a paparazzi (?!) Bigfoot trying to snap a picture of your dad, a Bigfoot, in a national park he controls. You're doing this for reasons that are hard to understand at first and hard to articulate later. Plus the park has cryptids (? again) in it. And you're photographing them. Why to both? Well, it works out eventually, but this doesn't feel like the kind of game in which one should be fumbling for understanding as often as one is.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLRZzBcgePYLrPSazTmvXFxv5D3SxRrgm2zsZsici-iIRiISvyW5Mar2Cs1GRUrneaf5K1UrXNNVaLk3kfSIbJmilvjFvD7D6kfsp8nZh99w_48MQ2DsQyKBj3wtjDNl6NtKueZOsjuENcK3DJEQ1Ggpob-Maie38PLmtJqwlS_1RXWdU7_7Rw7NcP/s467/bigfoot%20bluff.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="467" data-original-width="467" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLRZzBcgePYLrPSazTmvXFxv5D3SxRrgm2zsZsici-iIRiISvyW5Mar2Cs1GRUrneaf5K1UrXNNVaLk3kfSIbJmilvjFvD7D6kfsp8nZh99w_48MQ2DsQyKBj3wtjDNl6NtKueZOsjuENcK3DJEQ1Ggpob-Maie38PLmtJqwlS_1RXWdU7_7Rw7NcP/s320/bigfoot%20bluff.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>BB taps the vein of fun eight-bit adventures with its tons of amusing objects to collect, little puzzles all over the place and a sarcastic parser voice. It's quite compulsively enjoyable already, but simultaneously frustrating to play. Part of the trouble is in the realm of combinatorial explosion. With so many crazy objects in the game (you can sling a goat over your shoulder, dig chocolate out of a pie, wear a falconry glove, take photographs of things, build disguises out of bits of park detritus, etc.) interactions amongst them are underimplemented. This much stuff calls for that much more development work. Many great ideas I typed in received default rejection messages, making my perception of puzzle difficulty go up. There are also minor bugs and almost no synonyms, which leads to time spent retyping and rephrasing good commands.</p><p>And, for a good while, I genuinely thought the game was trolling me. Part of the HELP says:</p><p><i>"... Try to do various things that will help you stay hidden in the park. As you do, your score will increase and you will be able to track down Bigfoot Senior and catch him on camera...</i></p><p><i>Bigfoot Bluff is a forgiving game even though undoing is disabled. If you lose points, don't worry! Just keep playing and you will more than make up for the lost points."</i></p><p>So the score is related to stealthiness. If you act stealthily or increase stealth, your score goes up. But if you bumblingly draw attention to yourself, you lose points. I grew to find the numerous ways you can lose points increasingly hilarious, and suspected that the game's help message about its forgiving nature might be part of the joke.</p><p>Here are examples.</p><p>What if I...</p><p><b>– Put on some aviator glasses I found on a crash dummy in a downed plane?</b></p><p><i>>wear glasses</i></p><p><i>The glare from the reflective coating gives your position away</i></p><p><i>Score minus two</i></p><p><b>– Examine the drone I saw hovering near the plane?</b></p><p><i>>x drone</i></p><p><i>The drone focuses its lens and you hear a click as it photographs you.</i></p><p><i>Score minus one</i></p><p><b>– Try setting a weather-altering machine to SNOW in hopes of making me harder to see?</b></p><p><i>>set weather to snow</i></p><p><i>You set the weather machine to snow.</i></p><p><i>It begins snowing. Your tracks will only make you easier to follow.</i></p><p><i>Score minus one</i></p><p><b>Try setting the same machine to WINDY instead?</b></p><p><i>>set weather to windy</i></p><p><i>You set the weather machine to wind.</i></p><p><i>The wind picks up; this will only blow your scent around.</i></p><p><i>Score minus one</i></p><p>After twelve score-altering events had occurred in the game, I had made a net gain of only three points.</p><p>It took me a long time to get on the wavelength of BB. To really understand the premise, and what I was trying to do, and why, and how I should be going about it. I think part of this may be that the intro is too sparse. The premise is deliberately silly, but it's also sophisticated. The opening line is:</p><p><i>"Ten years ago you renounced Bigfootdom to become a paparazzi. Now it is your job to do an exposé on your reclusive sasquatch father. Welcome to... Bigfoot Bluff."</i></p><p>This bit of prose requires unpacking and raises a lot of questions. But the game just starts with you standing in a Parking Lot of short description. Probably the HELP text would be better placed as part of the introduction, and it could all stand to be more focused. I don't think having to make sense of everything slowly by playing the game is the best fit for BB, but that's how it is now.</p><p>The game builds up an effective aesthetic that is simultaneously funny and a little menacing. The emphasis on surveillance inevitably makes you feel like you're being watched. The descriptions of the park don't need to be extensive to create a strong sense of place, a naturally beautiful wilderness with your father's menacing cabin sitting in the middle of it, and the PDF map helps, too. There are wacky cryptids about the place, such as the Garbogriff, for you to photograph, and the taunting announcements / nature talks your father is strangely obliged to give by loudspeaker at such times are amusing as well as truly weird. His later revelations are even weirder and wilder.</p><p>BB describes itself as a sandbox game. I don't think I've ever really understood the term, but here it seems to refer to both the nature of the map, and perhaps the mechanic whereby there are many puzzles to be solved, but that you don't have to solve them all. I found this to be a relief because I had a good amount of unused stuff left in my inventory at game's end. And that end is quite spectacular.</p><p>BB is a detailed and very funny game, but its implementation isn't a match for its content, and I believe it's unnecessarily hard to get into. I'd like to see these issues addressed in a future update.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-43363349306478436452022-04-14T22:29:00.003+10:002022-04-14T22:49:58.257+10:00Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: Hypercubic Time-Warp All-go-rhythmic Synchrony by Ben Kidwell and Maevele Straw<p><a href="https://www.springthing.net/2022/play.html#HypercubicTimeWarp" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Hypercubic Time-Warp All-go-rhythmic Synchrony</a> (HC from here on) is the semi-autobiographical parser sequel to 2016's also semi-autobiographical <a href="https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=blvdzahqq9xdb8f2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony</a> by the same authors, Ben Kidwell and Maevele Straw, and which was also introduced via Spring Thing.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbDJYTfCQ8R2kPAirs0mggQtE1qRaoLdTdHdZ9qvOEYGIKIjXKS-A5kQg0jDmcJtJ-pvj4awfcf5bD0xWrzo2H5U0Hb-SqEXPgh3BtHynn37qQADiDerFXNU-eA3K_WretC_YwA32JImS0NPOakGRjgTCz5MBBthsbb6915v3tPeSFHj4tsbwb8Q78/s706/hypercubic.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="609" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbDJYTfCQ8R2kPAirs0mggQtE1qRaoLdTdHdZ9qvOEYGIKIjXKS-A5kQg0jDmcJtJ-pvj4awfcf5bD0xWrzo2H5U0Hb-SqEXPgh3BtHynn37qQADiDerFXNU-eA3K_WretC_YwA32JImS0NPOakGRjgTCz5MBBthsbb6915v3tPeSFHj4tsbwb8Q78/s320/hypercubic.jpg" width="276" /></a></div><p>I found the first game to be extraordinary. It's a hippiedom-infused, life-living sim seen through the window of manic depression, and transfused with plenty of bike-riding, fictional computer tech, new age alternate realities, loving, drug-taking and blasts of mathematics. In spite of its chaos, it displays an almost perfect marriage of form and function in relation to its subject matter, and is wildly written, and fun as well. (You can <a href="https://importantastrolab.blogspot.com/2016/04/autumn-all-stars-2016-review-harmonic.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">read my 2016 review of Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony in this blog</a>.)</p><p>The follow-up, HC, has deep connections to the first, albeit in a fractalised, non-continuous way. Memories and events recur, or are revisited, or are re-analysed, or are fit into a continuing narrative of what has been happening with the authors since the first game. While all of the same subject matter returns in this second episode, the result is superficially less satisfying than the first because this time around, the framework is not conspicuously gamey. The player may still be the PC, now known as Mycroftiv (the narrator Ben from the first game) but they aren't a doer in a game world. They're invited to read what amounts to Mycroftiv's hypercubic journal of their memories and experiences. Each location in the game functions as one of 64 journal entries, and they're divided up in a virtual filing cabinet navigated by a bit-based nav system worthy of an Andrew Schultz game. The player's goal is open-ended: they can read entries as they see fit, and try combining some of the objects they find along the way. Objects like a Boolean Prime Ideal or a Measurable cardinal axiom. Examining these objects gives points, which is a measure of progress, but not a particularly important or logistically useful one in this game.</p><p>As I found the first game very moving, I found reading the entries in HC just as moving and stimulating, and somehow enveloping. They deal, through the authors' anecdotes, with family relationships, the nature of friendships, peak experiences via people and nature, and theories of "the mathematics of loving communication". Thus encapsulated, that last one may sound flakey, but the journal entries devoted purely to mathematical theories are not light reading. While two authors of the work are credited, the narrator voice is Ben Kidwell's / BenJen's / Mycroftiv's.</p><p>In both games, what I feel as I play them is the accuracy of the reality espoused (or theorised) by their authors, because in its bizarre way, it is perfectly articulated through wonderful writing that is never didactic. The narrator can be frank and proselytic when in their manic phases, but they're also tempered by acknowledgment of their mistakes, by moments of standing outside themselves, and by a lot of extended musing on the nature of empathy. The major declared mistake that forms a cut-off point in their life for the genesis of this game sounds especially disastrous (giving voice to sexual interest in a teenaged ward during a ritual invented during a manic phase) and this declaration is made in the first lines of the game. All the player's reading is declared to be about to happen "backwards in time... before everything shattered." So there is a sad frame placed around the game. However, its core narration is clearly an espousal of optimism. The sum of its multi-dimensional journal of positive memories, breakthroughs, mathematical progresses and wonderful human connections is an Eternal Yes.</p><p>Like the first episode, I see HC as demonstrating a perfect melding of form and ideas. The author's favourite idea, articulated in a thousand different ways, is about the interconnectedness of all things. The hypercubic nature of the game's journal connects its 64 locations in a fashion that allows you to get between any of them in fewer moves than it would take on, say, an eight by eight grid. This is a mechanical demonstration of what it may be like to have access to another dimension. In turn, the player's path through these locations may be entirely random (people who don't get binary numbers) or may follow a certain logic (people who know binary and can use the game's binary coordinates to lawnmower the journal). Somewhere on their journey, the player will likely find the journal entry that muses on the nature of free will and randomness:</p><p><i>"... I'd like to propose instead that free will is better understood as what randomness feels like from the inside. The intuitive sense that free will is different from randomness is a dichotomy between the external view of dice rolls as meaningless and arbitrary versus the meaningfulness we feel motivates our own choices. A more careful examination of the definition of 'random' shows that the identification of 'random equals meaningless' is not objective. The real definition of random is simply anything that cannot be externally predicted on the basis of available information..."</i></p><p>For all its wildness, the game has this seer-like, synchronous way about it, and contains journal entries addressing almost any mechanic or idea demonstrated by the performance of the game itself. Some of these entries are indirect, others explicit. One that made me laugh was the authors discussing whether the entries describing mathematics would prove too thick for readers. I'd already found my concentration wavering when trying to follow some of those entries down at my lay level. Another entry stepped out of the game to posit that the player is actually a character in another game played by 17-dimensional chipmunks.</p><p>It's with tricks like these that the game seems to be what it proclaims reality is: a demonstration of complete interconnectedness in ways we can't anticipate or understand. That it's also an emotional diary of creative experiences, introspective moments growing out of bike rides, jokes, and mathematical ponderings, demonstrates the authors' great instincts for mapping the personal onto the cosmic and the existential. And that it has no end as such, instead just failing to provide new material at some point – petering out, even – seems to be saying something about the imperfect movement between different episodes in our lives or creative outputs.</p><p>I think the game is also superbly written from word to word. The voice is persuasive, lyrical, able to build ideas clearly when necessary, and also able to explode them with illegal syntaxes when necessary. While HC drops its gaminess relative to its predecessor, its lack of a need for world model implementation has allowed the authors to take even more flight with their prose, at greater length and as often as they like.</p><p>I find it hard to imagine just how HC will fall on players who never tried the first game. It's bound up with that game's contents like the posited hypercube. A cube placed in the first game, and which then expanded simultaneously in all directions, might produce the vertices of the second game as a diffracted take on the old mixed with the new. Given that the parts of the old that reappear are reconstituted in detail, I suspect they might work and stand alone for new players. And if you like HC, you should certainly return to the first game to experience its more purposive take on an earlier stream of the story. Both games come with optional outside-the-game music, and HC's extras folder contains css files with theory and speculation about Enlightenment Escalators and Harmonic Ultrafilters. Together, the two Harmonic pieces comprise one of the most singular visions in IF.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-2818685091569712432022-04-08T22:33:00.005+10:002022-04-10T11:07:25.068+10:00 Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: The Prairie House by Chris Hay and Kelsen Hadder<p><i>* When I first posted this review, I mistakenly claimed the soundtrack was partly original. It's actually entirely original, all by Kelsen Hadder. This mistake came from me misreading part of info on the itch.io page. The mistake has now been corrected in the following review.</i></p><p>In Adventuron parser game <a href="https://www.springthing.net/2022/play.html#ThePrairieHouse" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Prairie House</a> by Chris Hay and Kelsen Hadder (I'll call it PH for short) the PC is a student involved in soil-collecting field work on the Canadian prairies. Running out of light at the end of an enthusiastically spent day, they drive to an empty but storied communal field house to stay the night. The game's mystery-based trajectory of spookiness is a steadily upwards one.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZkfolgoNYacrQpCYvazdxg1yxzYdgpy_NBFX2SgFD0AJiqPvhgfMbTDhEsPq1qSYktVqZY8qpDurD_guVNwfkyy_aXYMMf802B8Hp-80mLlYgK9jomu1S7RJnzIy238ajyvm0qcv2GK81s-7-Z5NbVmvELSf4PEpWPQftuwDcBp6MsgcTGAihbVd-/s600/prairie-cover.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZkfolgoNYacrQpCYvazdxg1yxzYdgpy_NBFX2SgFD0AJiqPvhgfMbTDhEsPq1qSYktVqZY8qpDurD_guVNwfkyy_aXYMMf802B8Hp-80mLlYgK9jomu1S7RJnzIy238ajyvm0qcv2GK81s-7-Z5NbVmvELSf4PEpWPQftuwDcBp6MsgcTGAihbVd-/s320/prairie-cover.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>I played PH on a Mac Pro (mid-2010) and itch.io's online player for it wouldn't run in either my Safari or Brave web browsers, so I just downloaded the game. I had no trouble playing in the Brave browser once I was running a local copy.</p><p>PH took me about half an hour to complete on my first play, and I was thoroughly enveloped by its atmosphere and story details all the way. The experience builds to solid folkloric ghost tale chills, and even gets in a quality and non-cheap jump scare en route. The game's prose of geography and props is minimal in general, but expands at the right moments. It cues fear right from the first screen:</p><p><i>"As you look around the open grassland, and nervously at the nearby aspen groves, you feel utterly exhausted and alone, and you realize how vulnerable you are."</i></p><p>Part of playing any IF game is divining its general outlook on how to make progress through it. Is it going to be a game where you're meant to grab everything that isn't nailed down? A game where you'll advance if you just pay attention to the PC's thoughts? Or something else? PH starts off looking pretty open. There are good number of objects on the first few screens, but the game shows quickly enough, by policing what you can and can't take with you, that it's not going to be a kleptomania piece. It's important that it gets this out of the way early, because the later scariness might have been easily derailed had the player been allowed to muck around too much during it. That's to say, had they expected that they should try lots of prop and inventory busywork during the spookiness, simply because they could. The spooky sequences need to cast a kind of unbroken spell to hold their effect.</p><p>There is one parser shortcoming in the game, and I don't know if it's due to Adventuron itself or author programming, but objects with two-word names only respond to one of the words. And sometimes it's not the first word. (e.g. a rare orchid is only recognised if you type "orchid", not "rare"). I'd hope most players would clock this during those item-heavy first few locations, but I'd also hope this could be addressed in an updated version of the game.</p><p>The feeling the game creates is a specific one with many notes. On the one hand, there's the environmental sparseness of the prairies, the power of nature out there and the fear that comes from being alone in it. But PH also evokes the comfort of finding civilised shelter at a time when you're scared, and also the great indirect civility of the community-minded folk who look after and use the field house. The third note is the history of the house itself, manifest in the mementos and books found inside. Their contents, and the immigration backstory, set up a mystery and some ghost lore. The note wrapping all of the others together in PH is the supernatural reality that encroaches during the night.</p><p>PH has an original atmospheric soundtrack by Kelsen Hadder and wields some evocative eight-bit / minimal-palette-style graphics at times. It's also glazed with incidental chiptuney sound effects that simultaneously make the whole thing feel like a lost horror game for the Nintendo Entertainment System – had that console ever hosted parser games or a keyboard with which to play them. PH further offers seven font and colour-controlling themes a player can choose from, both before and during play. My main theoretical interest in these was to see what the scene graphics would look like in different colours, but these graphics usually occur during cut scenes, a time when you can't change themes.</p><p>While the game is simple and accessible in its delivery (I scored ten out of ten on my first game, but I'm not saying you suck if you don't) it builds a rich and particular world in a short space of time, and succeeds in developing eerie tension, further enhanced at a visceral level by the soundtrack. This kind of spell can be hard to sustain in IF, and I was completely under the spell during this game. The aesthetic is entirely coherent and the overall effect is charming as well as eerie. Yes, horror can charm.</p><p><i>* The author cites the films <b>Picnic at Hanging Rock</b> and <b>Deathdream</b> as recent influences. I know both films well, and while the influences don't appear in an overt way, I can detect them.</i></p><p><i>* If you have a decent amount of money to spend on a collection of international folkloric horror films, have a look at <a href="https://www.diabolikdvd.com/product/all-the-haunts-be-ours-a-compendium-of-folk-horror-severin-blu-ray/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">All The Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium Of Folk Horror</a>, for sale at Diabolik DVD. No, I am not affiliated with Diabolik. Yes, I spend a lot of money there. No, I do not own this particular item yet.</i></p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-78585054773997845542022-04-06T12:43:00.000+10:002022-04-06T12:43:21.230+10:00Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: Confessing to a Witch by HeckinRobin<p>Whether it's beautiful-beautiful, or Hallmark-beautiful, or actually in some sweet soft-Photoshopped stock image zone inbetween, the cover for 2022 Autumnal Jumble Back Garden entry <a href="https://www.springthing.net/2022/play_online/ConfessingToAWitch/index.html" target="_blank">Confessing to a Witch</a> (by HeckinRobin) made me sit up straight. I generally like witch subject matter and I often begin a festival or comp with something short. This game fits those bills, being both a Twine piece and a demo.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC6V484yaCUCXDJA6zSz0VYJEM43zUuORpmOyNxh9iqOv-3xcHXTMREGjTANevReYbMhMkT7iZYW6_0N9aAMLzu9b8wESvyALsJieDRwn0ZMjzzHcRL_veeKhLnpfEbP073SxEiPsaqIi4g-eve8GJ7GvMHnP3x7BaHkjg7gHNMbysr52Th3jEk0NJ/s600/confessing-to-a-witch-cover.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC6V484yaCUCXDJA6zSz0VYJEM43zUuORpmOyNxh9iqOv-3xcHXTMREGjTANevReYbMhMkT7iZYW6_0N9aAMLzu9b8wESvyALsJieDRwn0ZMjzzHcRL_veeKhLnpfEbP073SxEiPsaqIi4g-eve8GJ7GvMHnP3x7BaHkjg7gHNMbysr52Th3jEk0NJ/s320/confessing-to-a-witch-cover.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />The game is narrated in the first person by a girl who's setting out to confess her romantic feelings to her friend Juniper Merryweather. Juniper's "a talented witch with a bright future ahead", a line that tells players a lot about the gameworld. The presentation is of an attractive click-to-proceed kind, with a saturated autumnal photo of the scenery on each page and a well chosen ambience of background music. I found the combination of the narrator's building nervousness in the prose and the inexorable first person visual trek towards the house (through a forest, over a bridge, towards the house, etc.) to be surprisingly effective. "Surprisingly" makes it sound like I expected there to be something wrong; the surprise for me was simply that even without a parser, this presentation took me back to the earliest graphic adventure games. The way they used graphics showing each scene in the first person.<p></p><p>The author gently mocks her own Photoshop/stock-image-wielding skills in some post-demo text, but I think the choices they've made are good. The images they've edited to incorporate fantastic elements have a high contrast, lolly-coloured aesthetic that sold this witch world to me. It's perhaps also helpful that the images aren't filling the screen. As postcards on a black background, they're working. The accompanying background music has a strolling-through-the-woods piano plinkiness combined with some low held chord menace and tension. Again, well chosen.</p><p>Without spoiling anything, all's not well with Juniper when the narrator arrives at her house. This is the setup for what the author says will be a text-based adventure with original art. Narratively, the stage has been set, and would still have been set had the game consisted only of the prose, so that's a good sign. If the game retains the mysterious, slightly tense and pendingly romantic tone the demo achieves, it should come out well.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-1270067507713523022021-11-03T13:22:00.001+11:002021-11-03T13:26:43.677+11:00IFComp 2021 review: Closure by Sarah Willson<p>In Sarah Willson's parser game <b>Closure</b>, teenaged Kira has snuck into the dorm room of her newly ex-boyfriend TJ (using her spare key) intent on nabbing a particular photo of the couple for future reminiscence purposes. As she commits this rummaging crime of the century, she texts her best friend, YOU, THE PLAYER, detailing her every move and asking what she should do next at each juncture. The result is a charming game of rummagey revelations, presented in one's browser with an excellent marriage of content and aesthetic framing, and which took me twenty-three minutes to complete.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7kymyW23ojCfgYM42GTotX52qDx2cVIV8qe2YNZBPzTek25bbKKbPeD197iOw6jNXaeC3u7LCwkzf39pHSSTU0od_XS_lQ0Um2q7PrPRo5srM98g8SXLIAeOsRVOec_m4lrah2i9Kxv0/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="closure cover image" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="700" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7kymyW23ojCfgYM42GTotX52qDx2cVIV8qe2YNZBPzTek25bbKKbPeD197iOw6jNXaeC3u7LCwkzf39pHSSTU0od_XS_lQ0Um2q7PrPRo5srM98g8SXLIAeOsRVOec_m4lrah2i9Kxv0/" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>I think it would be easy to oversell the game's presentation as the answer to the question of why it works. When Closure is played in a web browser, it certainly puts the player in the right frame of mind to see the speech-bubbled messages appear onscreen as messages do, but what's considerably more important is the dynamic flow of the prose and its accuracy as (pretty articulate, considering the situation!) text message writing. The divisions between successive messages indirectly convey the flow of thoughts in Kira's mind, and also lead the player to visualise the physical actions Kira might be taking between texts. The game can't mention all of her lurching about, lifting and dropping things, her gaze alighting frantically on this and that, her occasional standing back to consider the situation, these things that she must be doing, but I experienced them in a peculiarly vivid way for their absence.</p><p>I was actually playing Closure offline initially (I play almost any game offline if given the chance) and even in that situation where the messages didn't appear in bubbles, I already appreciated how well the game was presenting as a text messaging simulation. Prior to IFComp, I had read and responded to some of the author's presentation queries on intfiction.org. It was only via the ABOUT command, which mentioned something like "CSS magic", that I realised perhaps the author had found a solution that was browser-based, and which caused me to check out what she had done with the game online. So I can confirm that Closure works just as well without any CSS assistance.</p><p>The game is well-implemented in terms of cleverly fobbing off many typical parser actions in context, or translating them into the game's context in cute ways. For instance:</p><p><b>>x me</b></p><p><i>i'm using that picture from new year's as your contact photo!! hahaha</i></p><p>Mechanically, it is a one-room game in which you need to search everything in the room to reconstruct the backstory as to why TJ broke up with Kira. This isn't a particularly difficult task, but the revelations are laid out well, with Kira realising things about both TJ and herself in the process and the player being compelled to keep digging.</p><p>The next paragraph is 100% spoiler:</p><p>From what's learned, it's clear neither character is a titan of complexity (au contraire), nor was their situation. This all suits a still-in-high-school relationship. From being on the outside of Kira's experience, I moved into it a bit, and could think things like, "Yeah, you should have tried to understand TJ's extensive sneaker collection a bit more if you really wanted this relationship, not just made fun of his extensive sneaker collection." Outwardly, this sounds superficial, but I can buy it. People have broken up over infinitely dumber things. I also don't know the nature/extent of the sneaker-teasing; maybe it wasn't actually so dumb an interaction in reality. Also, it wasn't only the sneaker-teasing; there's the liking-metal-music teasing. The conceit is that Kira is texting in harried fashion as she snoops a dorm room, so I can also accept the lack of details regarding these events within the context of the game. Can the game stand up without such details? I've argued here that it can, except that the final revelation of TJ's having run off to marry someone else felt weird and extreme. It's clearly not an impossibility, but it didn't feel like the right end for this game to me.</p><p>I think Closure presents its situation as a game about as well as anyone has ever presented this kind of thing in IF. The texting conceit, the thoughts of the responding character as modified by this mode, the prose used to convey it, the dynamics of the text itself and the thoughtfulness of how Kira responds to conventional parser instructions are all handled wonderfully. The only misstep for me was the final revelation.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-71032808423437890352021-11-01T22:34:00.012+11:002021-11-07T16:44:22.521+11:00IFComp 2021 review: AardVarK Versus the Hype by Truthcraze<p><b>(<a href="https://intfiction.org/t/aardvark-versus-the-hype-extended-ending-sequence/53300" target="_blank">Update: On November 5 2021, author Truthcraze reworked and extended the ending of the game. You can read about that in his intfiction.org post at this link</a>)</b></p><p><b>Disclosure 1:</b> I was supposed to help beta test this game. Due to a bunch of bad timing of availability and communication, I didn't. Therefore, when and if I see any bugs in it that I could have staved off, I feel I can only flagellate myself.</p><p><b>Disclosure 2:</b> The author, Truthcraze, had sneakily let it slip in advance (i.e. he told me directly) that this game was likely to appeal to fans of the film <i>The Faculty</i> (1998) amongst other things, and I am a fan of that film.</p><p>This game did appeal to me, and continues to do so. It took me 63 minutes and 29.4 seconds to complete.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeBxlkNCMqOWcIfZ0Kg5JMtrGUNSndLtgjdLjpW62mkn-74rDBeaRbmSYduSu9V28kDxs7lhq-et6YtRDFBjf0QBkgIX0RiOduhjgX2LnCRMm6pj5L2_TYziNarNvXg980TFgVHq_zo7U/s609/aardvark.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="609" data-original-width="609" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeBxlkNCMqOWcIfZ0Kg5JMtrGUNSndLtgjdLjpW62mkn-74rDBeaRbmSYduSu9V28kDxs7lhq-et6YtRDFBjf0QBkgIX0RiOduhjgX2LnCRMm6pj5L2_TYziNarNvXg980TFgVHq_zo7U/s320/aardvark.png" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p><b>AardVarK Versus the Hype</b> (AVH) is an extremely funny parser adventure about a bunch of teens whose rock band, AardVarK, suddenly becomes very important for the project of life's continuance when a corporate/alien entity known as Hype starts flogging its soft drinks ("sodas" for the handful of Americans out there) to innocent high-schoolers. The brew's side-effects include mindless shillism and bleeding from the orifices.</p><p>The game is set in 1997, a time when popular culture was still dominated by the recent explosion of alternative music into it but before the internet had made any excursion onto the same turf; the game is blissfully free of the internet. If I was going to hazard a cultural thought of the kind I don't know that Truthcraze would approve of in the case of AVH, I'd suggest the simplicity of The Kids versus The Hype conflict is already a bit nostalgic for the eighties, a time when individuals-sticking-it-to-commercial-behemoths plots were easier to articulate. The film <i>Reality Bites</i> (1994) captured the zeitgeist of young Americans of the 1990s trying to retain their cred in a culture that was beginning to facilitate the commodification of everything.</p><p>Such drama is not what AVH is about. It's about the eternal comedic struggles of being a teenager (well, eternal since the 1940s or so, so not very eternal at all, actually) and about the nineties version of them in particular. The player gets to control all four members of the band AardVarK at different times with a SWITCH TO (PERSON) command. The switching isn't bound up with complex puzzles. It's essentially for narrative purposes. These teens are boys and girls, punks, goths, would-be frontpeople, singers and guitarists. The nineties wack is clearest in their dialogue stylings. There is a ton of multi-option dialogue in AVH wracked with a mixture of self-consciousness and excitement as the teens try to blurt out their explanations of weird shenanigans and corporate shills.</p><p>It's not so much what the characters want to say to each other that changes across options, only how they're going to say it. Bravado, hostility, coolness, honest dorkiness and cluelessness are some of the modes the player can choose amongst. Just reading all the different options, including the 75% not chosen, makes for a good chunk of the comedy. There's rarely any revisiting of unpicked dialogue paths because the story and conversations are too busy screaming forward for that.</p><p>The seat of the game is a wonderful repeating set piece joke involving the Gas'n'Stop convenience store, a location that has been thoroughly plundered and destroyed by the time all the main PCs have abused it. There are also jock-guarded parties, night-time trees to be climbed, cars that are rocking, and condom-purchasing jokes executed in good taste. Furthermore, AVH has some cool tricks of delivery up its sleeve. One is the way it will suddenly override the player's typed commands with replacement evil ones if the current PC gets possessed by The Hype. Another occurs in a situation where the PC's car turns over, at which point some of the printed text does the same thing. I don't remember seeing that joke in a parser game before.</p><p>AVH is a game that wants to help you finish it. It has graded HINTs you can ask for, but it's constantly prompting for free anyway in an amusingly harried voice. I think part of this stems from the fact that it's trying (successfully) to create a sense of lively action, and having players stand around examining everything is anti-action. The game would rather remind you of the next thing you're meant to be doing than let you gawp. There's also a decent amount of fourth-wall-breaking, and its version of the parser voice versus character voice dance is a cute one. I hit some bugginess across the game (remember paragraph one: I am now hitting myself with a stick) but the only thing that actually tripped me up was a guess-the-verb moment which was cleared up by the HINTs.</p><p>I admit I'd have liked some more reinforcement of differentiation amongst the teens identities across the game, what with all the SWITCHing amongst them that goes on, and the victory scene felt rushed <b>(<a href="https://intfiction.org/t/aardvark-versus-the-hype-extended-ending-sequence/53300" target="_blank">Update: On November 5 2021, author Truthcraze reworked and extended the ending of the game. You can read about that in his intfiction.org post at this link</a>)</b> but these aren't major complaints for a story this funny and engaging. I laughed aloud a lot, admired the many forms of comedy wielded by the writing and loved the Gas'n'Stop situation.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-51589035238914253552021-10-15T21:23:00.009+11:002021-10-16T00:09:25.822+11:00IFComp 2021 review - The House on Highfield Lane by Andy Joel<p><i>The House on Highfield Lane </i>or<i> </i><i>The House... on Highfield Lane </i>if you believe the punctuation on the cover image – and which in any case I shall now on refer to as <i>House – </i>bills itself as 'horror without the horror'. I would probably bill it as a mystery, fantasy and sci-fi parser adventure, which ironically covers all the major genres minus horror and romance. The PC is sassy teenaged Mandy who, fresh from school one afternoon and still done up in its accoutrements, finds herself compelled to enter this house in her neighbourhood after finding a letter addressed to its occupant. Wide-ranging, puzzly adventure game shenanigans ensue in a steampunk-leaning environment. There are big-small spatial gags, some quirky NPCs, a Frankenstein-styled laboratory and creepy silver-faced background folk who always manage to run away.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkOUb2CrBc7dykvATHJuuMF0oui4tz6JCr8UG4h63D3NpvsniATWihujt4JijMpgpyBiWwHmyMSCKwp5dh3OXKvXizc0zfpYrrnNks7LN9nlXat178vjUSpyGhc7WCUOxL1ccGhJoK3cQ/s512/house-ellipses.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The House on Highfield Lane cover art" border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="512" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkOUb2CrBc7dykvATHJuuMF0oui4tz6JCr8UG4h63D3NpvsniATWihujt4JijMpgpyBiWwHmyMSCKwp5dh3OXKvXizc0zfpYrrnNks7LN9nlXat178vjUSpyGhc7WCUOxL1ccGhJoK3cQ/w320-h320/house-ellipses.png" width="320" /></a></div><p><b>Summary</b></p><p><i>House</i> took me a bit over two-and-a-half hours to complete. I spent more than an hour just exploring and fiddling with things without managing to solve any puzzles, though thoroughly in the mood all that time and not with any sense that I wasn't getting anywhere. I then turned to the provided invisiclues webpage for help, and used it a fair bit from them on because of time pressure, thinking (in vain as it turns out) that I might be able to get through the game in less than two IFComp hours.</p><p><i>House</i> induces curiosity and enchantment, demonstrates interesting and sometimes challenging design, and is a great first outing for the latest iteration of the Quest authoring system. Indeed, it's the best-implemented Quest game I've ever played, though still not perfect in this regard (though what game is?) <i>House</i> is kind of hard, though, in a complex way. I don't mean that the puzzles are all complex. I mean that what's hard about it is complex to tease out, and has a nature I suspect will fall quite differently across different players, as might its third person narration. Ultimately, I loved the atmosphere of <i>House</i>, and quite liked the puzzles in spite of my troubles with some of them and the invisiclues.</p><p>P.S. The heroine swears A Lot! Mostly with the two most common rude words. I'm not going to say them because this blog is not a home to filth.</p><p><b>WEIGHTY CRITICAL DISCUSSION SECTION</b></p><p>I found the key joy of this game to be its development of a prolonged atmosphere of unyielding mystery. There's a derangement of reality at work that reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, as do Mandy's flip reactions to this reality. And like in Alice, there's a sense that there is some overriding meaning behind the weirdness. That's mandatory in this kind of game to prevent the feeling you're just solving a bunch of arbitrary puzzles.</p><p>The prose is narrated in third person present tense –</p><p><i>"Conscious that dust is about ninety percent dead skin, Mandy decides not to study it too closely."</i></p><p>– which is one of the less common viewpoint choices adopted for IF. I think the first way this choice helps <i>House</i> is that it gets the player through the unreality barrier faster. The game starts with what is arguably a lot of unexplained weirdness. My initial sense of separation from Mandy (she's not 'You' or 'I') helped me accept the lack of explanation. Once inside the house, Mandy quickly runs into some major discrepancies of physical scale and geography. Perceiving Mandy in the third person helped me appreciate the scale of theses scenes visually, as if I really was standing back and seeing a film frame of a relatively tiny girl in a room hundreds of metres high. Over time, Mandy's flip comments on the situation brought out her personality, and made me feel closer to her.</p><p>Returning to the topic of the game's puzzle challenge: That the first relevant puzzle entry I looked up in the invisiclues after playing for close to 70 minutes was named for an object I hadn't yet seen or heard of speaks to the difficulty of writing comprehensive invisiclues. This event did worry me, though. Was I really so out of touch with this game? Or had I missed some fundamental mechanic?</p><p>Fortunately, neither case applied, but I would say <i>House's</i> puzzles lean hard for a variety of reasons. First, some of them are old-school-styled, involving a lot of mechanical experimentation and repetition (rotate the object, look outside, see if anything happened. If it didn't, rotate the object again, check again etc. And have the idea to do all this experimentation in the first place). Second, this game is rich with interesting objects that seem like they'd help solve multiple puzzles, but usually only one solution is acceptable. I could think of several objects I possessed that could very feasibly be used to catch another falling object, amongst them a giant floppy hat and a magically embiggened chamber pot, but the game didn't have any programming in place for these attempts. The solution to this particular problem involved roping in an NPC I didn't even know I could communicate with, since he didn't speak when spoken to. Teaching players all the ways they can interact with NPCs in your game is vital for any game. Since the base level of game content here is solid, I don't see it as a great omission that House didn't have heaps of alternate solutions in place already, but I do see it as a necessary site for improvement when a game is at this level.</p><p>Finally, there may be a stylistic issue that obscured some of the game's numerous props, all those paintings and windows and pipes and levers and bureaus and drawers spread out all through the text. Most IF games cater to this angle of interpretive difficulty by using presentation systems or logic to set elements off; the exits, or prominent objects or geographical features, etc. <i>House</i> wasn't so great at this, presenting most of its prose in solid blocks, so I forgave myself for missing some stuff.</p><p>The lead character of Mandy isn't built out of personal details, but out of a lot of behaviours and attitudes players might recognise from girls in this age group. I especially like the way her cynicism for schoolwork is tempered by the occasional excitement she experiences whenever she realises she can apply something she learned at school to real life. Her frequent sarcasm makes her a good fit for the classic strain of sarcastic parser voice that also gets a workout in <i>House</i>.</p><p>This game is the maiden voyage for QuestJS aka Quest 6. QuestJS was developed by Andy Joel, author of <i>House </i>and current head of the Quest project, and is a JavaScript incarnation of the Quest engine. <i>House</i> is a great ambassador for the new Quest, which is what you want in a maiden voyage. In the first place, it's engrossing and well-implemented by any standards. Second, it's the best-implemented Quest game I've played to date. I've been playing Quest games for about a decade and they've always been a bit querulous. You could only play on PCs, playing online was too buggy, and the parser was flakey. <i>House</i> seems to have eliminated all these problems, and the standard of its parser is way up. Unfortunately my transcript was missing all my own typed commands, but this feels like an easy tech fix.</p><p>I feel I have to address the game's final riddle <i>(no spoilers to the actual answer here, though if you want to know even less about the question than a measure of spoiler-safe info, stop reading now. Then again, wouldn't you have already stopped reading much earlier?)</i>... it is, as a joke, pretty good. As a puzzle, it's probably terrible because it relies entirely on the player's own knowledge if they want to be able to solve it themselves, with the out that they will soon be given the answer if they can't. But they don't know there's an out coming when the riddle happens. And the game had previously enforced a PC/player knowledge divide in the opposite direction, with a riddle to which most players would know the answer but which they weren't allowed to solve until they had first made the PC research that answer in-game.</p><p>The kindest spin on all this is that the game adopts two opposite positions as a joke. Even then, I'd ask is it worth doing this when there's a high risk of annoying players on one or both occasions? Reviewer Bitterly Indifferent wasn't as indifferent as he generally claims to be in the case of the knowledge enforcement of the first riddle, <a href="https://pmjg.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-house-on-highfield-lane-ifcomp-2021.html" target="_blank">as evinced by his linked-to review here</a>. This type of enforcement was, coincidentally, recently discussed on intfiction.org in <a href="https://intfiction.org/t/replay-programming-dilemma/52834" target="_blank">this topic</a>. The upshot is that I don't think ending any game with this kind of riddle is a strong way to go out, and even in the case of this game, which at least gives you the answer if you can't get it, it will be received as an unrewarding ending by a subset of players.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-35302608481279773322021-10-06T20:36:00.006+11:002021-10-07T13:07:51.718+11:00IFComp 2021 review: The Spirit Within Us by Alessandro Ielo<p><b>The Spirit Within Us</b> is a parser-driven thriller with crime and mystery elements that opens with the injured and bleeding PC waking up in a bedroom. Amnesia-game-fearers need not fear per se; the amnesia is well justified and quickly overcome. The whole game plays out around this house setting in what feels like real time, and ultimately with an emphasis on realistic action.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPZEeRA3XydK-gs1fcuftn_nVysJZdvPZxs-jDgrc4VaOrxgpPaZ1KXuS3cQCCkkYNvzdfDPcuZkMCrWhzuyq5a6QnlrKm1LZnqDYAHqQlfEzk14MUuuJQ0UMayDlzvKduk8DD4Zx_ekM/s700/spiritcover.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The Spirit Within Us cover image" border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="700" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPZEeRA3XydK-gs1fcuftn_nVysJZdvPZxs-jDgrc4VaOrxgpPaZ1KXuS3cQCCkkYNvzdfDPcuZkMCrWhzuyq5a6QnlrKm1LZnqDYAHqQlfEzk14MUuuJQ0UMayDlzvKduk8DD4Zx_ekM/w320-h320/spiritcover.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>The author describes Spirit as psychological, but I found the prose too sparse and some of the content too vague for it to succeed at that level. It is evident English isn't the author's primary language and its use here is functional. The section of the game based in the house presents as an almost default set of IF content: a bunch of rooms, doors, fiddly doors, openable things and plain objects from daily life — sinks, toilets, boxes, etc. If it weren't for the timed interjections of the PC's returning memories and the few interesting book props, this phase could be a boredom challenge for the player.</p><p>The author wrote the game and its parser from the ground up using C. While that parser effects the basics, the game's needs have definitely outgrown it. My transcript shows I once entered seventeen commands trying to eat a pill from a packet of vitamins before I succeeded, and twenty-three trying to execute the last action required by the game. What to do was obvious, but I had to consult the walkthrough to get the right phrasing.</p><p>The story that is revealed and the violent situation that grows out of it in light of the player's explorations and recollections are more compelling on paper than in the game. They're particularly filmic, as well. I've seen a lot of thriller and horror films make good use of the "waking up in a messy and potentially violent situation" scenario when they're also withholding some information from the viewer. Spirit is in this terrain, but unfortunately doesn't have the prose detail to sell it.</p><p>There's also a health timer element for the PC that induced a bit of unintentional amusement for me. The PC starts losing hit points from his injuries as soon as the game starts, and the player has to keep finding enough food and supplies to keep them up until the end. This mechanic does seem to be well balanced in terms of raising player stress levels while not being too savage under the hood. I finished the game without dying on my first play, and with plenty of health left, and this only took me about twenty-five minutes. (I acknowledge that geographically, I had good luck during my playthrough. After I'd made the whole map in my head, I could tell I'd fluked the ideal direction to explore in on a couple of occasions.) But the amount of time I'd spent rummaging around for food – fruits from gardens, leftovers from kitchens et al. – seemed to be too great a portion of the game experience. It's the major mechanical feature atop the find-and-use puzzles and some semi-randomised combat.</p><p>From the epilogue, I learned that the author's stated intention was to create a game with some moral challenge/choice. But again, the psychological content wasn't evident enough during play to make it clear I was making any moral path choices, at least in terms of my choosing them against apparent alternatives. If an action seems the obvious one needed in a game, I will take it. I don't come to these games to test my own morality, and I know this a difference between me as a player type and some other player types out there. Certainly the ending text I received was of the kind to indicate what the other endings might be compared to the one I got, but I'm not interested in replaying to see them.</p><p>I like the kind of story and situation this game presents, but its sparseness of writing and implementation mean the story doesn't really land, or with the right impact. The game's title is also too vague, in retrospect. I'd still say Spirit may be of interest to players who like a game with a bit of contemporary grit. And its mystery remains a little abstract, which is to say, I have questions about the backstory and I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to. This situation could just be due to the limitations of the prose. Even if it is, the particular degree of vagueness where the details have ended up is not a bad one.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-17400126139108674322021-10-03T15:46:00.000+11:002021-10-03T15:46:21.557+11:00IFComp 2021 review: Dr Horror's House of Terror by Ade McT<p>I always start an IFComp season with a horror game, since horror is my home turf, mentally, spiritually, fan-wise and way-of-life-wise. This year I chose to go with the parser game <b>Dr Horror's House of Terror</b> (DHHoT) by the redoutable Ade McT.</p><p><i><a href="https://ifcomp.org/ballot" target="_blank">(Link to ballot page with links to game: You might need to be registered with IFComp to see it? Search for 'house of terror' at https://ifcomp.org/ballot) </a></i></p><p>I didn't finish DHHoT in two hours and, as far as I can tell, I was a long way from finishing. This outcome alarmed me, as I'm one of those people who seeks to avoid really long games in IFComp (re: the rules; you must lock your vote at the two hours of play mark.). I was given fair warning: the game is labelled "Longer than two hours". However, with my horror chutzpah I'd thought, "I bet that time label overestimates the duration and underestimates my great skill levels." I did not find the label to be an overestimation. I did not find my skill levels to be great, but they were sufficient.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbTokpouL58wthyphenhyphenAYHH0xwt2s2lymE2UCx9ZPc1QH8f9zpWCQJHxgrtY7uYkUV1DNjPwzypt1-8_cBkc2wAQ2CoddN4BHFItMScwBkuVN-u3jBL79l4Fr6TEOB5QArqcnYYjMOZr7Scv4/s462/dhot.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="462" data-original-width="425" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbTokpouL58wthyphenhyphenAYHH0xwt2s2lymE2UCx9ZPc1QH8f9zpWCQJHxgrtY7uYkUV1DNjPwzypt1-8_cBkc2wAQ2CoddN4BHFItMScwBkuVN-u3jBL79l4Fr6TEOB5QArqcnYYjMOZr7Scv4/s320/dhot.png" width="294" /></a></div><p></p><p><b>Summary!</b></p><p>In this comedic horror adventure with a surfeit of exclamation marks, you play an actor of questionable skill appearing in the new vampire flick for Mallet Studios. After incensing the film's director, you find yourself embroiled in supernatural life-or-death shenanigans all over the studio backlot. The game is lively with dialogue and NPC action, solid with mostly mechanical puzzles, and has a deft light touch over an underscore of the uncanny that grows out of its highly varied studio settings. Implementation is very good but not great (there are a lot of omissions of inconvenience, and I feel more actions could have been implemented) and I didn't totally understand the mixed-up time aesthetic as a choice. Overall, an engaging long form puzzler with some extra juice for folks who appreciate the films referenced and the luvvie world. The playtime is three hours plus, and how much plus I don't know yet.</p><p><b>Detail!</b></p><p>Geographically, this game can be viewed as a series of hubs. Most of the hubs are sets for different horror films. These sets riff on the production styles of both the 1930s/1940s Universal horror films and 1960s/1970s British Hammer films, and on the classic monsters that appeared in both studios' films. The hubs have self-contained puzzles as well as elements that help you solve puzzles elsewhere. So even though the map isn't huge, this style of puzzle construction takes a lot of work to tackle. The environment quickly goes from being gated to semi-gated to open, meaning you may have to explore everything in the open area before you can work out what puzzles there are and what tools might help solve them all. I should point out there's a hint file with the game that I didn't use. I felt the difficulty was about right for me and that I'd be more satisfied going without.</p><p>The surface tone of DHHoT is initially light, and the humour is very perceptive of the world of dry-witted British luvvies, all these actors constantly caught up in the preciousness of their work and the gossipy connections of thespian life. This lightness becomes darkly funny as the game pushes you into a confused reality, the adjacent film sets and their different worlds being quite disorienting. The monsters may be real and the actors may not be acting, but even as the latter realise this they're still speculating on how life's going back at the Old A, or the prospects of the chap who went to Brazil to appear in "If you like it, Missus".</p><p>When there is gore, it has a slapstick silliness about it that fits the overall lightness. The creepiness of the game is in the reality gulf depicted in its cloistered studio world. Your actor pals are largely oblivious to the nature of the weird, trapped life they're leading, and your'e the only one who notices the grisliness of some of the studio props (or not-props). Still, your PC takes goings-on at least half in their stride, and they have to, narration-wise, or the game would be entirely bogged down in reactions to every strange occurrence. It's solid with prose already for a game of this pitch.</p><p>At first I assumed DHHoT was set in the 1960s or 1970s, based on the kind of typical-for-Hammer vampire film Mallet are making in the opening scene. But then I came across a keypad-locked door and security cameras. After that, I encountered the elaborate set for a werewolf film which definitely seemed to be a version of Universal's famous backlot from the 1940s, and not something Hammer could or would have done in the 1970s. The game also distracted me every time it mentioned the name of the character Blake Lively, a contemporary female actor in reality but a male Laurence Olivier-type playing a vampire in this game. It may be that the author christened him thus primarily for the sake of the joke of having Blake Lively's name on the cover of the game, and I have a sneaky admiration for that kind of commitment.</p><p>I ended up concluding that DHHoT is set in no particular real time. Its reality is constructed out of anachronistic ideas related by theme that the author wanted to put into this world. I actually wish it was set in a particular time and place, because that would have made its specific references resonate more strongly with me. People who don't know this turf as well as I do, and those who've grown up in the postmodern maelstrom of the 2000s, will probably not notice or care about this.</p><p>After a few hours, I had cleared one-and-a-half hubs and explored another two. There were hubs I hadn't even entered yet. So that speaks to the ultimate volume of this game.</p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7365691000021371162.post-45561920686015382322021-06-14T15:38:00.001+10:002021-06-14T15:38:52.771+10:001. Remember newsletter 2. Tristam Island review<p><b>1.</b> I recently contributed to <b>Remember</b>, Hugo Labrande's monthly newsletter about text adventures. The topic of issue seven was Horror, or more specifically, why weren't there more horror text adventures in the 1980s?</p><p>You can subscribe to Hugo's newsletter at the following link:</p><p><a href="https://mailchi.mp/d6b9066312dd/remember-newsletter">https://mailchi.mp/d6b9066312dd/remember-newsletter</a></p><p>The topics of previous issues have included Compressing Text, Women in Text Adventures, A History of Text Adventures in French, and Where Doesn't the Z-Machine Run?</p><p><b>2. </b>Earlier this year, I reviewed Hugo's new .z3-format adventure <b>Tristam Island</b> for Juiced.GS magazine's March 2021 issue (<a href="https://juiced.gs/index/v26/i1/" target="_blank">issue contents list link</a>). Tristam Island is available on 36(!) different platforms (<a href="https://hlabrande.itch.io/tristam-island">https://hlabrande.itch.io/tristam-island</a>); I reviewed it for the Apple II.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmyxv7q55PQl1vsPKiGAcK13X9dCOml8RI1c34CVSpZ-Qv10hPCnY6y9h5YsRF-p5GfZk0aynB1HS7KLkgDpxdufiwevn94XAmrl8j_lBtIJQJKIquBnJXeagEND5mJ0upPDdrpbh0zOk/s253/tristam-cover.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmyxv7q55PQl1vsPKiGAcK13X9dCOml8RI1c34CVSpZ-Qv10hPCnY6y9h5YsRF-p5GfZk0aynB1HS7KLkgDpxdufiwevn94XAmrl8j_lBtIJQJKIquBnJXeagEND5mJ0upPDdrpbh0zOk/s0/tristam-cover.png" /></a></div><p>Juiced.GS is a print-only and commercial magazine, so I can't just go sharing my review of the game at this point, but I can let slip that it was positive, as evinced by the four stars I gave the game over on <a href="https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=6gtq9ahrolz2ry2" target="_blank">IFDB</a>.</p><p><br /></p>Wadehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12865175113451722306noreply@blogger.com0