Leadlight Gamma reviewed at Gamerz Unite

Leadlight Gamma just received a positive review over at Gamerz Unite. It's fun to see it on a site with a big focus on LAN parties. That's to say, not on a site where I might traditionally have expected it to be reviewed.

I think it's a fun time for IF in terms of being able to see a wider range of reactions to your game if you let a wider circle of people know about it than just traditional IF circles. This effect has probably been more evident – or maybe more transparent – to people producing choice-based games, since they travel more easily than parser-driven games. And sometimes their authors had no connection to longstanding IF circles in the first place.

So there are buyable parser games around like The Warbler's Nest or Death off the Cuff or Hadean Lands or Leadlight Gamma, et al., which have appeared and said, 'Here I am.' (Hadean Lands said it louder, but I think you get where I'm coming from. Textfyre also released parser games commercially, though with a more fully-fledged business model which, as I understand it, proved hard to sustain.) Other buyable parser games, like Cypher, still go with the 'It's the return of the text adventure' schtick. We're in a time where I expect you can get traction (albeit different kinds of traction) either way, but I think increasingly you don't need the 'ye olde' schtick. There's so much serendipity in the kinds of games a person can buy now that I think a parser-driven game looks like just another type in this context.

I would say it's more important that the game or project is good than whether it solves problems the IF community has raised about whether the medium faces some kind of developmental blockage. And of course, the two goals aren't mutually exclusive.

In my previous big game, which was Six, I explicitly tried to make a super helpful parser. If I did that game now, the only thing I would change is that the instructions would be delivered in tutorial form as well, on top of their written form which exists both in the game and in a booklet. But I don't intend to revisit it just for that.