Leadlight Gamma '40 Secret Pages' sale for itch.io week 2016

As part of the the inaugural itch.io week (May 9 to May 13) celebrations, I'm putting my 8-bit interactive fiction meets survival horror meets CRPG hybrid, Leadlight Gamma, on sale, and with a pile of bonus content that's only available during itch.io week: 40 scanned pages of handwritten design material and three alt and inbetween Belinda illustrations. None of this stuff has been released before in any incarnation of the game or on its websites. And once itch.io week ends, the extra stuff is going back offline.

Click here to go to the 40 Secret Pages Sale page on itch.io

Click here to go to the Leadlight Gamma page on itch.io

THE LEADLIGHT GAMMA 40 SECRET PAGES SALE DETAILS

• For the duration of the week, the minimum price of the game will drop from its usual price-of-a-black-metal-album US$6.66 to US$2.20. That's a strangely evil saving of 67 percent!
• If you buy Leadlight Gamma during this week, you'll be able to download the 40 handwritten pages and the Belinda illustrations.
• Because I'm Australian and a day ahead of itch.io, my sale window will stretch from May 9 to May 14.
• ALREADY BOUGHT THE GAME ON ITCH.IO SOME TIME IN THE PAST? Just log into itch.io between May 9 and May 14 and you'll be able to download the extras.

Here's a new vid with 89 Leadlight research pics in 20 seconds, set to 'Girls' from the game soundtrack, to get you in the mood (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4ThmA-jpDs)

Autumn All Stars 2016 review: Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony by Ben Kidwell and Maevele Straw

The PC in Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony is a self-described middle-aged hippie in Wisconsin. He's a mystic, musician and computer programmer about to release the incredible ANTS software that will allow the alteration and merging of different strands of reality, to what I would euphemistically describe as great positive effect. The author says that the resulting trippiness is an attempt to convey the experience of a summer manic episode in which he believed himself to be a character in an interactive fiction game.

I think Harmonic itself is an amazing game. The crucial thing is that its manic astral mysticism and free-associating subject matter are the province of its prose, world and characters, but not of the underlying structure. The game design is well-considered and has many addictive mechanics recognisable from both old and recent gaming. Harmonic's core gameplay carrots reminded me of a bizarrely disparate group of life simulation games, from Animal Crossing on the Nintendo GameCube to Shenmue on the Sega Dreamcast.

In Harmonic, your PC's base is his house, and the game tracks time through each day and night. You can wander out and around the town, meeting and making friends, warping their realities and yours for the better, setting up projects for later and dealing with social engagements. Some characters will email you. Some events will occur spontaneously (eg a birthday party to attend) and others are unlocked, after a fashion, once you've brought the correct circumstances into alignment. Events are also gated by time, travel restrictions (you can summon your pushbike to your side at will by typing LUNAR, but you have to get your cycling skill up to be able to ride to further parts of town) and major social and puzzle progress through the game.

Why are you doing all these things? Primarily because you're living in the now and having a great time. You're also gradually advancing the cause of new positivity that you began by unleashing your reality-altering software. You can enjoy the experience of this world in its own right, but there's also a simultaneously generous and rigorous score system with a maximum score of 999 which tracks how much of the game content you've experienced. You can get points for doing all kinds of things both grand and elementary, from playing the piano or finding a new place in the city to major stuff like binding whole reality concepts together with your BIND power. There are also optional ending points at which the game tells you how awesome you've been for achieving a certain degree of completion, and then says something like, 'You can keep on playing, or just type WIN now if you'd like.' I was too engrossed in Harmonic to stop playing by the time I reached the first of these points, and carried on until I had more than 700 out of 999.

This IF take on life simulation is catchy in its own right, but it is the freewheeling prose and dialogue, bursting with musings on the mystical, the philosophical and mental health, that makes Harmonic a game that could exist in no other form than interactive fiction. In the same way that the sturdiness of the game's structure does not mirror the unfiltered flood of information you might associate with the recreational drug-taking writ large in the game's events, the writing itself is basically precise even as the ideas contained within it fly around and attach to each other easily. And crazily. Lots of them are cute moon pie, fireworks, astral explosions and love irradiation, but lots of them are interesting or novel in a more cerebral way. The two types are often wrapped around each other, and as long as the game was, I never got tired of reading new conversations, or of clocking the next philosophy of some coffee shop owner or Loonie co-op member.

An early coffee shop encounter with one of the female baristas the PC admires sees her politely listening to his musical-moon-unity theories even as she needs to shut him down just so that she can get her work done. The PC is a bit disappointed but soon puts things into perspective. I thought this was a good observation about kindness, practicality and acknowledging realities generated in others' minds. Later in the game, after the influence of ANTS has advanced considerably, what's in the PC's head becomes the freewheeling fabric and nature of the city itself, and the restrictions of the practical are lifted. There is lots of drug-taking (frequent enough that, paradoxically, I barely noticed) some care-free sex, parties, journeys on the wheel of time, teleportation, time travel, astral crystals, a pizza shop and an arcade with a Tempest machine. This is a game where the response to the WAIT command is, 'You feel yourself traveling through spacetime at the speed of light.'

Harmonic offers all kinds of helps for negotiating its large inventory of content. Actually, so many are offered at the start of the game that I was a bit overwhelmed. You can THINK about things to do, get general HINTS, get people or object-specific HINTs, EXPLORE at random, and you can also customise the progress of time and scheduled events, a concept you are unlikely to appreciate until you've been playing for awhile. There are also multiple meta commands which give you background information from the author, and in the reality-exploding style of the game, it's made clear that it's fine to read these before or alongside the game itself. Reality will eventually have exploded to the extent that I don't know if anyone could solve the last puzzles without hints, but this outcome seems to suit the nature of the whole piece, which is about drawing all realities into one plane. Life, the game, the author, the hints and all information in general. (Also, an anticipatory review the author wrote of the game as if someone else!) The game's cover painting conveys this collapse of dimensions nicely.

There's also a soundtrack of mp3s to be played at particular piano moments in the game, but I found this to be the only element that didn't really work. The first issue is that the songs are dispensed by copy-paste links within the game. Stopping typing, going outside the game, downloading the files one at a time and listening to one before continuing, if you intend to experience it at the directed moment, is too cumbersome to the overall flow, and something most players would consider technically cumbersome per se. The other issue is that the simple, average-fi room recordings of these piano songs are in no way able live up to the bath of figurative crystal light that the game's prose frequently emits.

Harmonic is a big, fun game that is generous about ways in which you might experience it. It offers a main story track, lots of optional content, lots of helps to access both of the above, interesting meta content and scores of ideas about existence, both wacky and thoughtful. Also, I didn't know anyone could make a game I'd really like that also had this much recreational drug-taking and Grateful Deadism in it, two things I would normally have to endure through gritted teeth. Philosophically, I understand that one of the (many) reasons I respond so positively to Harmonic is because the game is organised and disciplined art, even though it's about a lot of things and people that aren't necessarily organised or disciplined. I do feel the primary author shared or simulated (or both) a difficult-to-share personal experience successfully, too. This is my pick of the Main Festival Spring Thing games that I have played.

* Tech note – I was at first a little surprised the author managed to keep the whole game in the smaller Z8 Inform format, rather than having to go up Glulx. Then I learned the game was written in Inform 6, which provides more economical/sparse initial programming conditions than does Inform 7.

Autumn All Stars 2016: Penultimate post

For time reasons, the last game I will be reviewing in Spring Thing is the one I am currently playing: Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony. I am about halfway through it. After I post that review sometime tomorrow, I will be going to a low to no internet location for a week for a holiday. (Not a holiday from Spring Thing. A holiday in life.)

Autumn All Stars 2016 review: The Xylophoniad by Robin Johnson

The Xylophoniad is a joking, mashup take on numerous characters and situations from Greek mythology. You play the part of veteran adventuress Xylophone, and find yourself assigned by a bored king to knock over a few light tasks like ending the Trojan War, rescuing prisoners from Hades and killing the Bicyclops.

I imagined the Bicyclops was going to turn out to have two eyes side-by-side, which would have had the effect of making it look like anyone else, which would in turn have resulted in comedic, illogical screaming from onlookers along the lines of: 'Argh! Two eyes! It's hideous!' – but it turns out that the second eye of a Bicyclops is above the first one. And that is pretty gross.

This entertaining parser adventure does remind of the classic Scott Adams games in some of its nature and puzzles, but rarely in degree. The aesthetic of those 16 kilobyte games was determined by the hard technical limit of the 16 kilobytes. There are no real limits here. There are choices, and any mimicry of older games is carried out to an irreverent extent rather than a slavish one. The Xylophoniad (or THE X as I will now abbreviate it) delivers its humour in some particularly goofy and cartoon-like ways, elicits jokes from cute and simple NPCs who appear as caricatures of their legendary selves – or 'non-canonical versions' as the game likes to say – and keeps the player busy with a large ancient world split into separate regions. The region separation feels like both a staple of gaming in general (like levels, a way to divide up content and aesthetics) and a way to make THE X feel more manageable. Because no matter how cute the game may appear to be at the outset, when a king tells you to perform three impossible-sounding tasks before breakfast (it was the 'end the Trojan war' one that especially raised my anxiety levels) – you're likely to feel at least a tad flustered about the day ahead.

Fortunately, and as I should probably have anticipated, the explicit solutions to the major challenges are pretty wack. Don't dwell on how to end the Trojan War all by yourself (... ARGH!!!). Just get out there and be the best traditionally klepto adventuress you can be, exploring, finding ways to pass recalcitrant portals, solving puzzles that crop up using a mixture of logic and illogic, and helping NPCs with their usually not-too-obscure problems. Achilles is histrionic, the medusa is apologetic, Daedalus is MacGyver and Helen of Troy emits unusual noises.

I don't think much knowledge of Greek mythology is required to deal with THE X's puzzles. In cases where a particular piece of knowledge might help with a particular puzzle, the game either tells you about it explicitly or collapses it into a joke that has the side-effect of indicating how the situation would have been in a canonical version of the story. I found myself at an impasse a few times and got past each one using the typical graduated hint system that comes with the game. If I'd had more time to play, I probably would have continued to experiment with the gameworld and overcome one or two of the impasses on my own.

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This game runs in Versificator, the author's own parser engine. It seems to handle pretty well, though this game doesn't distress the actual parser part of it much in terms of the player having to type any complicated commands. I only encountered two things that bothered me, one tiny and specific and one a little more general. The former was that I did try looking UNDER or putting things UNDER other things in the game, and it didn't give sensible responses. The more general thing is that pronouns for people don't update to reflect who's in the room. For instance if you X ACHILLES, 'him' keeps referring to Achilles, even if you leave Achilles well behind and go and see Daedalus, and say TALK TO HIM.

I didn't think much (at all?) about parser pronouns until a few years ago when Emily Boegheim on intfiction.org pointed out she generally played parser games using pronouns all the way. This led to a poll, which led to a surprising result showing maybe half the respondents used pronouns a lot or all the time. I then went and reprogrammed my previous game so pronouns worked really well, and I've done them well ever since. Now I too use them when playing, because gosh darn it they're so convenient, especially when characters have names like 'Sisyphus' which must be typed in full. So my feature suggestion for author Robin Johnson and Versificator is that the engine's pronouns update themselves in smarter fashion.

Autumn All Stars 2016 review: Three-Card Trick by Chandler Groover

In the parser game Three-Card Trick you play Morgan the Magnificent, a magician seeking to assure that he's never again upstaged by Ivan, that other magician whom he considers to be a charlatan hack. This short, linear and impeccably written parser adventure debuted in the first Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction (an exposition whose name I hope to not have to type too often in life, and given its quadrenniality, my hope should be realised) and now reappears in Spring Thing 2016. Three-Card Trick manages to develop multiple dimensions of surprise and suspense over its duration, and thus, like a good magic trick, is itself surprising in a delighting way.

The archness, pride and arrogance of both magicians comes through in the narration and the dialogue via all kinds of showmanship, ranging form the boastful to the oily to the spectacular (spectacular within the parameters of a card trick). Each card that is turned over and each bold pronouncement presents another dramatic moment in which the story could easily take a sharp turn, and the author zooms in on a lot of these held-breath moments by having the player hit a key to draw out each word of a sentence. I personally think this device needs to be hitting home above a pretty high threshold to merit its use, and it's handled about equal best I've seen in this game.

The craft of directing player action to a single end in a linear parser game is wrangled breezily. The phrases you need to type are often dispensed verbatim as part of prose descriptions in the preceding paragraphs. Subtlety doesn't really matter because these directions coincide entirely with the strong motivations of the narrator and the scope of the required actions in the game. Nor does the overall linearity mean that Three-Card Trick is underimplemented. Most good idea tangents work, and almost all people and things I tried looking at were described through the consistent prism of Morgan's condemnational eye.

About the only thing that even mildly perturbed me was that the compass the player is handed at game start, which is supposed to make navigation super-easy by allowing one to type IN and OUT to move towards or away from goals, confused me. Not the idea of it, which is great, nor the explanation for it, which is basically 'it's magic', but just that in this scheme that's trying to be so simple, I found it ironically easy to be uncertain about where IN was going to lead next and where OUT was going to lead next. Sometimes I had to reverse when I found myself going the way I hadn't anticipated.

There's some weird humour attached to the title of the game in light of what it reveals to be the significance of the 'three-card' element of the trick. This plays to the idea of misdirection in magic, as if everyone who is amazed by this trick was somehow figuratively looking in the wrong direction, or figuratively dwelling on the wrong thing, in the first place. It's also strange that the people at the exposition can be repeatedly amazed by the same trick when it's being repeated in back-to-back performances, though the game certainly points a finger at their notions of fashionability. I found that these unusual little openings in the gameworld, applicable to but unnoticed by its characters, added a speculative dimension to the experience of a kind that I think is hard to get out of parser games that direct player action as strongly as this one.

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I recently showed my three and a half year-old nephew how to do a magic trick using a special trick cup and ball that I got out of a showbag when I was a kid. I was impressed that he had the dexterity to manipulate the ball-hiding fake lid on the cup, but after he did the trick and I acted surprised at the ball's disappearance, he put his finger inside the fake lid and whispered confidentially, 'The ball's in here.'

Autumn All Stars 2016 sorta review: Fourdiopolis by Andrew Schultz

What is the fourth dimension?

Some people say it's time.

Some say it's Odorama, the scratch and sniff card system that accompanied the John Waters film Polyester.

Some say the fourth dimension is the tesseract, the four-dimensional analog of the cube. As the cube is to the square, the tesseract is to the cube – and obviously that's all the explanation you need from me to perfectly understand the concept in its entirety. Dragon Magazine, a major resource for Advanced Dungeons & Dragoners, went a bit nuts with tesseract articles in the 1980s. You could dump a group of adventurers in a tesseract and then stand back and laugh at the poor bastards as they tried in vain to map the thing, or slew each other while arguing over where the ceiling was.

This all leads me to Andrew Schultz's Spring Thing game Fourdiopolis. It's the logically titled sequel to his 2013 game Threediopolis. Andrew's a friend of mine, so I don't normally review or rate his games in competitions and things, but since Fourdiopolis is in the Spring Thing Back Garden and I spent a few hours playing it this evening, I feel like talking about it. I will be as coy about the puzzle details as everyone has always been about the puzzle details for Threediopolis, for reasons that all of those people who have been being coy already get. Know that Fourdiopolis is, like its predecessor, a wordplay/quasi-maze game.

Before I booted Fourdiopolis up, I was wondering how this game would build on the mechanics of Threediopolis. The new addition is simple at a glance, but it very significantly increases the possibility set for the solutions. This multiplies the difficulties wrapped around the various methods you can lean on to solve the puzzles, and definitely makes for a harder game overall.

If you never played Threediopolis, the initial puzzle is just working out what you're meant to do. If you have played Threediopolis, Fourdiopolis begins with you resurrecting the skills mustered in the first game. Their interplay is trickier this time and you won't get as far taking wild, inspired swings. Not that there was anything wrong with those; there were a strangely high number of ways you could approach each puzzle in Threediopolis, including the wild swinging, and that number has increased in Fourdiopolis. I found I kept getting better at this game in basically a straight line fashion over the couple of hours of play. I continued to notice new interrelations, new clues and patterns, and they all helped me start to attack some challenges proactively rather than start out with guesses and then poke or jimmy the holes. At one point, the gears did change, leading me to think, 'OK, now I'm seeing the extra hardness that Andrew talked about in his unnecessarily-scaring-people-off blurb.'

The great thing about playing Three or Fourdiopolis is that the experience is very much its own thing. What I find most interesting is how the games give you basically no advice on how to go about things. Eventually you find one way to do something, then another, then others that relate to both, then more. It's like building a neural network whose structure becomes more apparent the longer you stare it. In the case of Fourdiopolis, non-savants might have to sink some serious time into it to progress with the further-in stuff. But there's not really anything else like either game, and they're very addictive once you get stuck in. They're also the kind of game where you can easily break off and come back later, or on another day, and you may find when you do so that having let things percolate in your mind in the interim can suddenly lead to a blast of progress.

If this all sounds interesting and you haven't played either game, you might want to start with the first one. Note that it's not essential to do so. But playing Lode Runner before trying Championship Lode Runner wasn't essential, either. It just made for an easier life overall. That's a non-enforceable analogy about the relationship between the games. I've already got a lot of satisfaction out of my progress in Fourdiopolis so far.

Dumb stories from the past episode 387: Failing to review Gotomomi

Gotomomi by Arno von Borries was the first game I tried during IFComp 2015 and the first I didn't write about because, due to the silly capriciousness of life, my post would have been more than 50% stupid stuff not to do with the game itself. It wouldn't have been a review of quality, only a bedraggling post by someone who gave up on the game anyway once they did get it going.

It's not that you can't give up on a game and say why, but when you factor in the extra-game elements in this case, plus that it was to have been my first review of the comp, I felt it was just going to be an unwarranted disservice or aggravation to the game's author and a crummy start for me. Because of time pressure during IFComp – too many games, barely enough time to write about them in detail unless the planets align during a particular year – I know that I'd always rather just move on to the next game if something weird happens. On the plus side, all entrants are equally subject to this kind of prejudice of haste amongst judges, reviewers, players.

It now occurs to me that I probably shouldn't have talked up this anecdote. Anyway, I'd just had a birthday and been given a major gift: an iPad Mini 3. My mum and dad gave me that, and my sister gave me a physical keyboard to go with it. I thought something like, 'Wow, watch me play IF out in the world using these bad boys!' and promptly took them to the local shopping centre. This place is a hub for some quite hoity-toity fashion shopping in Sydney, so you shouldn't in any way underestimate the glamourousness of the people who swan about in it, or of its architecture, while you're in the process of imagining what it might be like. I wasn't there due to my glamour, though. I was there because it's local to me and an attractive and airy place, and because I sometimes have a coffee there.

So I sat down at a table with a coffee amidst all the glass and marble and light and broke out the iPad Mini 3 avec keyboard. I forget exactly why I picked Gotomomi to kick proceedings off, but I do broadly remember that I picked it believing it would suit my circumstances. After I started the game using IFComp's online player, I was horrified to discover that the player didn't play nice with my physical keyboard. The iPad kept toggling the virtual keyboard and 'continue' prompts. In other words, after typing a command on the real keys, I always had to tap a particular small spot on the screen to prep the iPad to return focus to the physical keyboard. I persevered with this scheme for a little while because this was pretty much the iPad's maiden voyage, and I was deliberately trying to have A Nice Time. But I was being dumb – you can't play a game this way. So, having mucked about, rather in vain, with the open-ended game that is Gotomomi, and having tried not to associate it with my being stymied right on commencement of IFComp, I finished my coffee and went home with a small thundercloud over my head.

Some games later I revisited Gotomomi on my desktop computer. I wasn't enjoying its vague open-ness, though I thought I was onto something when I got involved in a task as specific as gutting fish. This fish-gutting scene in Gotomomi is the Tetris of fish-gutting scenes. I know that Tetris has already been implemented in the parser at some point by one or more smartarses, but having played Dead Man's Hill, I can say in retrospect that I found the mountain of tiny granules of typed actions required to progress through Gotomomi's fish-gutting scene – under time pressure – to be agonising and infuriating, rather than a witful simulation of weapon-handling, which it was never meant to be. And I wasn't even sure whether I was progressing or not. Alarm bells were ringing on my sanity, plus I probably did remember my sour afternoon at the shopping centre after all. So I just downed tools and said, 'That'll do, Gotomomi. That'll do.'

And that's my dumb story from a year ago.