Music Room Inform source code (from Cragne Manor) now public

Chill: Black Morn manor board game. The map reminds me of Cragne Manor.

Andrew Plotkin maintains a nice webpage hosting Cragne Manor Inform source code files that have been shared publicly by their authors. The other day I sent him my 30k-word source for room M1F5, The Music Room, 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:

• 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 "wadrick-pack-the-new-room" and "wadrick-unpack-the-old-room" teleport people and objects in and out as the player moves through the different sub-rooms.
• 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.
• There's also a reasonable amount of code (in "Section - Wider world rules") 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 "(about the vomit)", and as funny as that was for a few minutes, it was more genuinely an annoyance. So I moved aggressively on the whole issue.

Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter planning notes available

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 post on the forum along with some explanatory notes.

IFComp 2022 review: Nose Bleed by Stanley W Baxton

Nose Bleed 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Andromeda Acolytes at $9200 of $14k with 54 hours go go!

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.

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!

Here's the main link again:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure

I'll also link you to my latest backer update to let you know where my head's at. Note that if you're already receiving my direct Kickstarter updates and remember me quoting The Phantom Menace, you've read this update.

Here are two other IF Kickstarters I'm backing right now...

(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)

Stereotypical

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:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure/posts/3588864

Grimfel

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!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grimfel/grimfel-grimdark-fantasy-interactive-fiction-visual-novel/

Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter passes $6500 – About the IF Competitions, Kickstarter prep and avoiding the Stanford Prison Experiment

The Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter has passed $6500!

I've been speaking to backers and getting some very nice feedback, too.

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. HERE'S THE PROJECT LINK.

What might also sway you:

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.

Kickstarter Prep and IF Competitions

... 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.

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 2019 GDC talk shared to me by Dan Fabulich of Choice of Games. 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.

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 Stanford Prison Experiment, which one audience member at the talk jokingly compared its proposed methods to.

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

1. Captain Verdeterre's Plunder by Ryan Veeder – a newbie-friendly time-limited scoring game whose highest score had never been established

2. Napier's Cache 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

3. Necron's Keep 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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

So don't delay, back Andromeda Acolytes today.

Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter a week in: Approaching $5000

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.

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.

My exhortation to you all: Be or Stay excited and help me get a text adventure over the line!

In my most recent backer updates, 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.

I've also created a Spread The Word 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.

I've been blasting the main artwork around the place so often, for this post I thought I'd use the teaser artwork:

Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter is live!

My exciting news is that today I launched my Kickstarter for my sci-fi text adventure Andromeda Acolytes:

Here's the page:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure

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 Andromeda Awakening.

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 visit that page. I hope you'll back me! And don't forget to spruik the link to anyone and anything you think might be interested.

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:

https://wadeclarke.com/ifdemos/andacdemo/

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.

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.

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.

If you back the game or spread the word or help me in any way, I offer you my sincerest thanks.

Necrocomp. It's on now (July 25-29, 2022)

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 Necrocomp, which I'm running now (July 25-July 29, Australian time).

The game you'll be playing in Necrocomp is Necron's Keep 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.

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.

The competition prizes are all adventure/RPG/interactive fiction computer games. Mostly from Steam, with some from itch-io or direct download.

To read the rules of Necrocomp and get the online play link, visit my topic on intfiction.org

Join in, have fun.

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 Request Access button on its Steam page. The Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter opens on August 3.

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.

Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter adopts pre-launch stance

A bit of "Plan 10", an ancient webcomic of mine

The Kickstarter for my sci-fi parser adventure Andromeda Acolytes 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.

Here's the page link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadeclarke/andromeda-acolytes-a-state-of-the-art-sci-fi-text-adventure

If you're not on Kickstarter yet, pressing the button should lead you into the process of signing up, too. 

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.

Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: Phenomena by Dawn Sueoka

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.

–––

Phenomena by Dawn Sueoka, a Back Garden 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.

I like the poems. Some are sensorial and about gazing at the sky ("Only the flimsiest stars were visible"), others are metaphorical about what's up there. The one called AND HOW WOULD YOU UNPACK THAT? 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: "Hello, darling!" Some of the last poem could be a quasi-text-messaging gotcha:

"This was never a story about UFOs!

It was a story about the night all along lol."

I also love comedic dialogue that magnifies pettiness, and the last line of the poem called HE WOULDN'T SHUT UP ABOUT HIS PLANET is, "Go back to your stupid planet, then, if you love it so much!"

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.

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.

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.

Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: A Single Ouroboros Scale by Naomi Norbez

A Single Ouroboros Scale 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: Bigfoot Bluff by P.B. Parjeter

Bigfoot Bluff, 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.

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.

And, for a good while, I genuinely thought the game was trolling me. Part of the HELP says:

"... 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...

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."

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.

Here are examples.

What if I...

– Put on some aviator glasses I found on a crash dummy in a downed plane?

>wear glasses

The glare from the reflective coating gives your position away

Score minus two

– Examine the drone I saw hovering near the plane?

>x drone

The drone focuses its lens and you hear a click as it photographs you.

Score minus one

– Try setting a weather-altering machine to SNOW in hopes of making me harder to see?

>set weather to snow

You set the weather machine to snow.

It begins snowing. Your tracks will only make you easier to follow.

Score minus one

Try setting the same machine to WINDY instead?

>set weather to windy

You set the weather machine to wind.

The wind picks up; this will only blow your scent around.

Score minus one

After twelve score-altering events had occurred in the game, I had made a net gain of only three points.

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:

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: Hypercubic Time-Warp All-go-rhythmic Synchrony by Ben Kidwell and Maevele Straw

Hypercubic Time-Warp All-go-rhythmic Synchrony (HC from here on) is the semi-autobiographical parser sequel to 2016's also semi-autobiographical Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony by the same authors, Ben Kidwell and Maevele Straw, and which was also introduced via Spring Thing.

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 read my 2016 review of Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony in this blog.)

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.

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.

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.

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:

"... 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..."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: The Prairie House by Chris Hay and Kelsen Hadder

* 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.

In Adventuron parser game The Prairie House 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.

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.

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:

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* The author cites the films Picnic at Hanging Rock and Deathdream as recent influences. I know both films well, and while the influences don't appear in an overt way, I can detect them.

* If you have a decent amount of money to spend on a collection of international folkloric horror films, have a look at All The Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium Of Folk Horror, 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.

Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: Confessing to a Witch by HeckinRobin

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 Confessing to a Witch (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.

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.

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.

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.