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.

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.

Andromeda reawakening?

Today on intfiction.org I read Rovarsson's new review of Andromeda Awakening and I thought, "This is timely," as I will have an Andromeda-related announcement to make somewhere in the next eight weeks.

If you like a sci-fi parser game with a lot of what they're calling worldbuilding these days, and puzzles, you should go check out the pair of Andromeda Awakening (2011) and its sequel Andromeda Apocalypse (2012) by Marco Innocenti, both from IFComp, the latter the winner of IFComp 2012.

Link - The Andromeda series games on IFDB

The wicked cover art for all the games is also by Marco.

After the first two, you get a series, with games by other authors adding to the world via two Andromeda Legacy competitions (that I helped judge). These games are Andromeda Dreaming (Joey Jones), Tree & Star (Paul Lee), Andromeda Ascending (Truthcraze) and the currently unavailable Andromeda Genesis (Joey Jones).

Reading back my own analyses of these –

Andromeda Legacy 2012 results link

Andromeda Legacy 2013 results link

– I was reminded of how tightly these games work with details from the original pair. I would say that without playing Awakening, Dreaming is part-incomprehensible, and Genesis is entirely incomprehensible; plus you need to have played Dreaming before playing Genesis! From the not-incomprehensible perspective, Dreaming is a five star game for me. Re: the absence of Genesis online, Joey Jones has said publicly that he did it in too much of a rush, and would have liked to revisit and properly develop it. That was a long time ago, so I admit I'm not holding my breath for that postcomp version.

The other two additional games, which are a lot more linear and action-based, have a different relationship to the original pair. One can have some fun with Tree & Star and Ascending without playing Awakening/Apocalypse first, but both get a lot of their effects or amplification from integration with the preceding stories, or rely on direct reference to them to develop their meaning.

Tree & Star might be the most playable on its own. Ascending shows deep knowledge of both Awakening and Apocalypse, and makes a lot of specific jokes about them. Actually, it's an outright comedy, and now I see it as the Thor Ragnarok of the Andromeda games.

Finally, there's another game, the retro quasi-amusing remake of Andromeda Awakening as Andromeda 1983. Here the original game is redone as a simpler-style adventure (with cool graphics by Marco and a C64 soundtrack by me) that might have come out for the C64 or Apple II in 1983:

Andromeda 1983 gameplay

The extra games have been played a ton less than the originals. I guess that's a combination of them lacking IFComp exposure, the fact they're seen to require more investment by playing other games first (broadly, they do require that) and the fact they inevitably differ from the tone established by the first games. If you're ready to see different facets of the original world, though, I'd encourage more people to play the followups. It looks rare to me to see parser games that follow up on their originators and which Are so tightly integrated with the originators' details. That's how the additional Andromeda games have operated to date.

Other links:

Marco's Andromeda page (http://www.andromedalegacy.com/) (unsecure link... tsk tsk!)

I've written two pieces of music for Andromeda games so far. Here are playable Bandcamp links:

Black Giant (for Andromeda Apocalypse)

Andromeda 1983 (for Andromeda 1983)

Parser IF and music

I don't think parser-based interactive fiction and music are easily mixed. I say that both as a player and as a musician who has made music for parser games, my own and others'. I'm not saying they can never work together, but that they can easily not work together. I decided to gather my thoughts on this topic while preparing to offer a commissioned music prize for IFComp 2019, details of which in my next post.

Probably the first point of parser-music difficulty is that playing parser IF is psychologically analagous to reading. Most people don't read novels with a looping soundtrack cued to the material they're reading in the background, or expecting audio punctuation of particular moments in the text. It can break concentration, or make concentration impossible.

Reading is also about generating the life and world of the material in your mind via the words. It's interpretational. If it's accompanied by music, the audio stream seems to arrive as something literal, and may not gel with what your mind would generate in response to the text if left to its own devices. There is of course a mental space in which to interpret music in its own right, but you tend not to be interpreting music in a cordoned-off area of your brain if it's accompanying a game, the same way you tend not to interpret a film soundtrack in a cordoned-off area of the brain while watching that film for the first time. So I think there are neuroscience issues involved.

Musical taste is also temperamental, and people's gut reaction to music is immediate. In the sole musical space, people can do mental work to go towards music, or try to figure it out, if it's not to their taste. Not everyone can or will do this anyway. So in the context of an IF game, I think this is an additional hurdle players would rather not jump after the others I've mentioned. If they don't think they like the music they're hearing, they'll probably switch it off right away so they can concentrate on the game.

As an author, you can forget about all this and just be an artist and lay down the music you want anyway, but this isn't really a dictatorial triumph if it turns out people turn it off at first opportunity.

The challenge, then, is to have music that works for your game, so people will interpret it positively as part of the experience.

Strategies might fall into two areas: cued and ambient. Neither is foolproof, but here are a few observations.

Cueing music is about attaching pieces of music to particular events in the game. These events can be elements of the game's presentation, or in the game itself.

The title screen comes up: that's an event. (Personally, that's my favourite event at which to place a musical cue, and I think the one ripest for success) You gain points or make progress. You die. You solve a major puzzle. You enter a new area.

I think cueing works well because it's discrete, preventing any particular piece of music or sound from outstaying its welcome, and psychologically it leverages the event itself to make the audio work. The music is perceived as part of the fabric of the event, not as a separate stream of information atop the main one dispensed by the game. Players in general are used to audio cues from other media.

Ambient music is more dangerous in IF, but authors never stop having secret (or non-secret) desires to make it work, and to include a soundtrack for a whole IF game. (Try Robb Sherwin's Cryptozookeeper for example, a correspondingly large download due to the audio content.) When I say ambient, I broadly mean that a piece of music is playing all the time during a period of the game, unconnected to specific game events occurring within that period. This is not the same as the chosen music being considered 'ambient' in genre, though it will generally be true that the less direct and more ambient the piece of music is, the less danger there is of it impeding player concentration.

Ambient music runs into all the dangers I mentioned earlier. If people don't like it and it's going to keep playing, it'll be off. If it at all interferes with their concentration, it'll be off. If it doesn't gel with their view of the gameworld, it'll be off. If it loops too frequently or is heard for too long due to the time required for a particular stretch of the game to be completed, it'll be off.

Of course, there can be contextual allowances and exceptions. If a game is short, or bombastic, or somehow has a looping soundtrack aesthetic, ambient music has a greater chance of success.

If I think of the games I've put music into, I've had a different experience with each, most of which I'll recount here.

Six - Of my own IF games, I think the audio probably worked best in this one. The music and FX are cued to events, but never run very long. There's also enough of them that they're able to impose an aesthetic in the long run. And there's one part of the game that uses the audio for gameplay.

Leadlight Gamma - I included an ambient (approach, not genre) soundtrack in this game which could be controlled from a built-in virtual mp3 player of sorts. I didn't think hard about how it would or wouldn't be used, so in retrospect, I view it as kind of an experiment. Some players found the virtual music player unintuitive, and the soundtrack probably wasn't long enough for something that could be left running and looping. I think the music itself probably ended up a little weirder or bleaker than I'd anticipated, too. The final problem was that the music wasn't handled properly by all IF interpreters, and doesn't run online. Actually, my Leadlight Gamma soundtrack experience put me off making a similar IF music effort again unless the technical situations change.

Andromeda Apocalypse - I created a theme track called Black Giant for Marco Innocenti's IFComp game. It hit a couple of logistic hurdles. One was that it was missing from the initial upload of the game to the 2012 comp. For people who tried this game later, I think the music only plays if you win. Having not heard any music before that point, did you (winners of that game) have the volume on and up at your moment of victory? If so, were you also in the mood for unexpected music at the time? I really like this track as a match for the subject matter, but I don't know how many people heard it, or did listen when it struck. This leads to another lesson about IF music: players have to be introduced to it and/or ready for it in order to receive it.

Kerkerkruip - I created a multi-phased main theme for this rogue-like with an approach inspired by music from the original Diablo. The author's ideal would have been to have a lot more ambient music in the game, but I only had time for this piece. I think the track works well with the game's opening title loop.

Andromeda 1983 - Marco Innocenti made a retro 8-bit graphics version of his sci-fi game Andromeda Awakening, and called it Andromeda 1983. Correspondingly, I made a 1983-style track using the Commodore 64's sound palette. The track was designed to loop, and moves through several relevant moods, so given the affordances of the retro style, I think it worked well.

My next IF game will have only one piece of music, and that will be for the title page.

ANDROMEDA 1983

Marco Innocenti has just released ANDROMEDA 1983, an 80s'n'8-bit-styled fun-emphasising remake of his first Andromeda game, Andromeda Awakening from IFComp 2011. It's as if Andromeda Awakening had been released in 1983 for the Commodore 64, Apple II and ZX Spectrum as an adventure game with graphics and music. I produced the looping SID chippy soundtrack for the game.

1983 ain't heavy. As Marco said on intficiton.org,

"DISCLAIMER: this is not REALLY intended as a REAL GAME. It's 50% a joke and 50% nostalgia. You, Constant Readers, will tell me where do you fall. It's pretty short, it won't kill your time too much...

PS: Don't expect anything easy or polite to the player. What's actually there, trying and helping the player, was made by the Inform people and it's still there because it was too much struggle to remove. Honestly, it is a feeling I wanted to replicate, and that feeling had no synonyms, most of the time."

As a fan of the original game, I got an extra kick out of 1983, but play-wise it can stand on its own. It obviously wasn't worth trying to reproduce all the complexities of the original game in this format, so it's become a new, simpler game using some of the same basic story, locations and ingredients.

As a grizzled Apple II and Commodore 64 veteran, what really bowled me over when Marco first showed me this were the graphics. It's a very specific aesthetic he's recreated incorporating both the colour palette of the Commodore 64 and some of the pixel-dithering tricks used to produce textures on the considerably less colourful Apple II screen – as if the game's creators had indeed tried to port the game's graphics as consistently as they could across these different 8-bit machines.

Switching to Andromeda

Through things I said recently in a podcast, and in extremely vague form on the front of my Heiress Software homepage, I communicated that the next Inform 7 IF game I would do would be 'the murder one'.

I expected and expect this to be very difficult to do, for concept and design reasons. That's on top of my having had few specific story ideas for it yet.

The thing at the moment is that I need my creativity to be bolstering my motivations in life in general, not vexing me. Persisting with the planning stage of something really difficult ('the murder game') has been vexing me. So I've decided to switch to a project I'm confident will start to give me some gratification immediately. The third listed project on the Heiress webpage, namely 'A sci-fi game set in the Andromeda universe'.

---

If you don't know about the Andromeda games, they're a series of parser-driven sci-fi adventures started by Marco Innocenti with Andromeda Awakening, which he entered in IFComp 2011. His sequel, Andromeda Apocalypse, won the 2012 IFComp. Then Marco held two Andromeda Legacy competitions in which he invited other IF authors to make games set in the same universe. I co-judged both competitions.

The first comp produced Joey Jones's Andromeda Dreaming (the winner) and Paul Lee's Tree and Star. Both games expanded on the Andromeda mythologies in interesting ways.

The second comp produced Jim Warrenfeltz's Andromeda Ascending (the winner) and Joey Jones's Andromeda Genesis (not on IFDB now, but probably will be real soon thanks to my badgering).

I'm replaying all the games at the moment. I need to revisit Ascending in particular to remember how it fit in. I found Genesis to be disappointing when Jones's Dreaming was so good.

Collectively, the Andromeda games show that the concept of different authors producing IF parser games set in one universe is both viable and doable. The games fit together far better than anyone involved expected – not that there was even a rule saying they had to – and what's interesting is that the connections were produced entirely by the individual authors. There was almost no oversight or top-down coordination. The authors just kept generating material that fit into the sockets of mythology established by the original game, and by Marco's 'cheat sheet'.

I suppose there are actually a lot of examples of this kind of thing going on in fiction at large. What immediately comes to mind is Star Wars's expanded universe. All of those offshoot novels and comics that had to submit to some rules set above them. Maybe what helps the phenomenon work in any venue is when the people involved are attracted to the original material enough that they want to stick to its rules. The more you follow some of the rules, the more you may feel like you're a part of the entity you admire.

Andromeda is not Star Wars. This is unfortunate in the sense that I would like to be involved in a franchise that would rake in millions of dollars. But Andromeda Awakening has something in common with Star Wars in that it established a universe mysterious, charming and open enough to attract admirers interested in expanding it. The results so far have shown an impressive coherence of aesthetic, and been impressive in general. And I want to join in and add my bit.

---

As this will be a full-sized game, I'll have the luxury of my bit being large-ish. I've had some good conceptual ideas and specific story ideas so far, and I continue to cogitate on them and write them down (type them in) as they come.

Technically, I'm concerned about progress on various Inform fronts based on the example of the past few years. (I list these gripes and apologise for them about once a year on intfiction.org. This year they are additionally informed by my experience of selling Leadlight Gamma.) My concerns will probably cause me to skew towards having fewer bells and whistles in the game than I'd like. There are lots of Inform play venues with no sound, no graphics, no colours or none of the above. There's no up-to-date Mac interpreter. No Mac interpreter advances for four years. No screen reader support on Macs.

I found it headachey trying to get Leadlight Gamma to deal with all these hurdles as best it could in a commercial context. A wise man (David Kinder) once said to me, 'Don't write around interpreter bugs.' That inspired me to strike forward as much as I could, but when I found I was going to have to tell players to be mindful of problems A and B and C and D to compensate for all the exceptions in the game delivery system, I slid backwards, because I don't want to tell players that stuff in the case of a commercial game. People don't want to pay for a game and then kick off their experience with it by reading through a list of potential problems and omissions it may exhibit.

Ultimately I balanced the game features so I could retain some moderately advanced tech (the dynamic map works everywhere) and only have to warn players about a few possible problems. Doing all the accessibility work on Leadlight Gamma and then not being able to share it with Mac users remains a particularly teeth-gritty point.

Regarding the content of my Andromeda game, I won't say more than what I've already said. I'm not much for talking about a thing I'm working on. That's what interacting with the thing once it's finished is for. I know that's not what the kids want these days. They want ceaseless updates and promo stills and character information and stretch goals and not-too-spoilery-spoilers and personality videos and ARGH!!!...

I might cave in later. Otherwise, at least on the front of this game, I'll see you when it's done. Which will not be for a fair while, obviously.