November 28, 2008: How I spent my Thanksgiving vacation

I have accomplished little that is productive:

- I was working on something IF-like, until I realized that all the puzzles were soup cans out of every game ever, and my PC's voice wasn't happening. So I scrapped the whole thing, figuring that if I hated writing it, people would hate playing it. (This one definitely falls on the 'playing' side of the terminology spectrum.) I have time until the deadline.

- I watched Firefly for the first time since Erin told me to after watching it for the first time (after being told to by Carolyn. Who hadn't seen it for the first time.) Not the whole season, mind you; I'm working on that. Pacing myself.

- Thanksgiving dinner, of course.

~*~*~

It's nearing 2009, and I should be thinking of my top albums of 2008. This is going to be difficult, because nothing really excited me.

OK, that's not true. If you know me at all, you know that I've been absolutely flabbergasted by just how good Speedbath is. But I can't count that as a 2008 album; Kristin isn't releasing it until early next year. The tracks that are available now are works in progress. Just how much progress has been made, of course, remains to be seen. They're great now. I can't imagine them better, but I'm sure they'll end up that way.

Speaking of which, a week from today I will be in Chicago seeing her.

The other albums which I've enjoyed this year would qualify except that they didn't come out this year. I finally found a copy, for instance, of _Love Life_ by Tychonaut, which would definitely make my overall top 10. The Throwing Muses albums I picked up were also excellent. While I'm still in that general family of artists, Lakuna and the McCarricks had two amazing instrumental albums which I loved. None of these came out in 2008.

So I'm left with a dilemma: in about three weeks I am going to have to produce a top-10 list for this year, and I'm going to have to deliberately overpraise some things. I'm not in any position to judge 2008 as a Year In Music, because I've only experienced a tiny sliver of it. I was a whole lot luckier, though, with last year's sliver.

Granted, for the past few weeks, I've been listening to what most people would consider crap, so my opinions about music might not be trustworthy. I'm not going to tell you what this crap is. Just know that it's worse than whatever you think it is. No, it is.

~*~*~

Was watching Pirates of Penzance videos on YouTube, and one of the commenters said, in YouTube-ese, that their school production had changed the song to make it quiet, to fit the lyrics. Meanwhile, somewhere out there, the poor lonely point of the song is abandoned, COMPLETELY UNGOTTEN.

Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2008: Another IF post.

First order of business: I'm keeping these cut tags up for a few more weeks - I figure people might not want to be spoiled. For all posts from now on, unless I say otherwise or get rid of them, clicking "Read more" won't actually let you read more. I know how disappointing this must be, I know.

A few weeks ago, I said I'd have an example of my Basic Real Time extension ready. I finally have one. It's a loose adaptation of the dawn scene from The Phantom Tollbooth.

The dawn scene alluded to earlier - well, the prelude to the dawn scene actually; the real scene isn't anywhere I could find on Google. But this is what's going on.

The extension.

The writing is probably completely overblown. I wrote the majority of this between 3 and 4 AM, dead tired but unwilling to abandon the idea. This is a total excuse, but hey. Furthermore, it's liberally peppered with substitutions because it's boring to read the same text over and over. Machine-generated text tends to suck a bit. This is also a total excuse.

IFcomp 08: General thoughts

There isn't a Read More! cut-tag in this post that actually does anything, incidentally. I plan to get rid of them as soon as I'm able because I don't like cut tags and they've leaked onto all my other posts. Nevertheless, I'm still going to put a wodge of text up at the beginning for the RSS feed. A wodge of text that looks a great deal like this paragraph. There may be SPOILERS ahead, but I'm not sure until I write.

There are reviews in this blog for most of the games. I never got around to playing April In Paris and most of the Alan/Adrift/PC games. I was a beta tester for Violet so I did not post a review for it.

I'd like to say, first off, that if any of my reviews came off as overly critical, I apologize. I'm not out to crush souls, honest. And you can always ask for clarification. I can't reiterate this enough, actually. If I came off as an asshole, it wasn't intentional.

I can comment on a few trends:

- Message Games. I am in no way opposed to greater themes in IF. In fact, I think we need to do more with greater themes. But they really don't need to take the form of painting your theme in great big block letters on a great big anvil and then dropping it on the reader's head. The reader, dazed, stumbles around, only to be shouted at from a giant megaphone: "MESSAGE! MESSAGE!" Channel Surfing, Grief, and Freedom fall into this category.

- Writing. Edit your game before you submit it, _please._ If you're not good at this, get someone to do it for you. I'm not talking about one or two typos. I'm talking about games that are littered with errors in just about every response. Too many examples to count.

- Writing style. Simple errors aren't the only problem that can occur with writing. Several games (Trein, for instance) had redundant or wordy writing. Some games (Opening Night) had too sparse writing. Some games' tones were off (Recess At Last, for one. Channel Surfing and Berrost's Challenge will be discussed below.) On the positive side, I scored Everybody Dies (and Violet, if I had scored it) high largely because of good writing.

- Technical errors. I get the impression that lots of authors didn't test their game themselves. This is not optional. Just do it. Too many examples to list.

- Smugness. Just...don't. Not only is it bad in general, but when your readers will be voting on your games, it's also highly detrimental to your chances. Berrost's Challenge, Riverside, and Channel Surfing go here.

Don't take any of the above as discouragement. A lot of these were your first or second games. Also, take my opinions with a grain of salt; I have never, after all, submitted a game of my own. Fortunately, many excellent writers have. They're the ones who placed high, now and in the past. See what they're doing well.

IFcomp 08 reviews: Project Delta

This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.



Everything that could possibly be said about this game has been said by other reviewers. Lots of people Inform and TADS for a reason. Suspicious .exe files are not good. This isn't IntroComp.

To this, I'll add that the system is an unwieldy hybrid of a CYOA and a parser-based system that made me totally stuck when it was time to check my inventory. It really doesn't have sense to have options be parser abbreviations.

I can't say much about the story because the full story isn't there. The writing, for what it's worth, is serviceable. If only it was in the service of a workable IF system.

IFcomp08 reviews: When Machines Attack

This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.



When Machines Attack (I choose not to capitalize like the author does.)
by Mark Jones

The opening. Eeeagh. I can't give this a fair review, because every time I play it I load up that opening and want to kick something. I know it's supposed to evoke how boring this stuff is in real life, but then again, we don't play Super Meeting World.

Put this stuff in a guidebook that you can >LOOK UP things in. I'm sorry. Even a command to skip it.

(Disclaimer: I didn't get past this part. Maybe it's brilliant after this part. Therefore, I'm not voting on this.)

IFcomp08 reviews: Riverside

This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.



Riverside
by Jeremy Crockett and Victor James

Two options:

1) This is a deliberate troll. In that case don't waste my time.
2) This isn't a deliberate troll, and the authors just happened to make up a trolly ending. In that case, the story's so railroady that it needs a set of traffic signs, not to mention underimplemented and buggy. The writing could be decent if I wasn't convinced of trollitude.

IFcomp08 reviews: Trein

This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.



Trein
by Leena Kowser Ganguli

This is an old-schoolish kind of game, with castles and intrigue and plots. Not to say this is a bad thing; it is what it is. Because there have been games like this, however, one of these games stands or falls on its writing.

Now, I'm a huge supporter of more descriptive writing in IF. It's what is going to push the field away from Zork and towards literature. So I appreciate that this game is attempting it, but it feels like a massive first draft. For instance, take this room description:

"South End of The Shadowed Alley
You follow the Shadowed Alley as it curves to the South. It is a dead end. This area used to covered at some point - you can see the remnants of the roof on the ground, now useless lumps of wood and plaster. Above, you can see the last fingers of the evening light as they begin to fade into the night. This is a dead end. Following the Alley to the North leads back to the Shadowed Alley."

Leaving aside the obvious grammatical errors and capitalization quirks - generally, if you're going to be capitalizing in unorthodox ways there had better be a fantastic reason for it, even more so in prose - the "last fingers...fade" is a mixed metaphor and the final two sentences are superfluous. Revising this, of course, will leave you with a much shorter roomdesc, but that's good. It gives you more space to pack in evocative details and scenery and the stuff that immersive worlds are made of.

Other rooms fall along the same lines. The writing's trying to go beyond a simple, terse description, which is great, but doesn't quite make it. Atmosphere requires subtlety which I didn't quite get out of this. Furthermore, there's the action-in-the-description thing. If you're going to use a metaphor such as the wind brushing against you like a phantom, it loses something when you see it again and again in the room description every time you >LOOK.

Is this easy? No way. Am I an expert at this? Hell no. It takes polish, for everyone. I didn't really get the sense that this happened.

This need for polish extended into the technical realm as well. A few I noticed: The self description mentions that you're wearing dark clothes, even if you remove said clothes. Some nouns which could've been opportunities for atmosphere text (the shadows in the castle, for instance) weren't implemented. A lot of objects either needed to be marked scenery or given initial descriptions to avoid the constant repetition of "You can see a Noun here."

I encourage the author to write more IF; this isn't bad at all as a first draft. It's a first draft, though. More beta testing could help, but what would help more is authorial revision. I've said this a lot because it applies so often. Polish, polish, polish. Polish alone won't make a top tier game, but the lack of polish is often what keeps games out of the top tier.

IFcomp08 reviews: Nerd Quest

This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.



This could have been an OK, if slightly unoriginal puzzle game. If only it was written in TADS or Inform.

Look, I respect the amount of work that went into this, but it's the wrong sort of work. Work directed towards the wrong ends. Every year people decide to homebrew parsers, despite the fact that 99% of the games that result get scathing - and very similar - reviews because of it. If you're going to code your own parser, it has to be on a level with what's out there already. That's what people are used to. They'll grumble when they don't get the functionality they've always had (for me, this was "x" for "examine," and "verbose".) Even if you do create a fantastic parser, that's time that could have been spent on the game itself. And so it is with Nerd Quest.

The game itself was hard to judge, as I rely on verbose mode a lot more than I realized. It's an office game. Most of the descriptions are only a couple words or maybe a sentence long. The major puzzle, while clever on paper, doesn't quite translate. When I type >take bottle I really want to take the whole bottle, not just one pill, and besides if you tell me I "take a pill" I think that I swallowed it because of idioms. And I find it hard to believe you could:

A) Use bamboo to blowgun a laxative
B) into someone's coffee,
C) without him noticing.

Sure, there have been great puzzles that don't quite make logical sense or don't work in the real world, but they have to be pretty good to pull that off. This one didn't.

But these are minor issues. I suspect a lot of this will improve quite a bit by moving to one of the established parsers. There's no shame in it; plenty of programmers use them. Look at Graham Nelson. And think of all the time you'll save that you can put to use reading about game design, coding up the game, and testing it. You've already got a leg up on some of the other authors in this comp because of all the work that went into this. Now what you need is care-redirection.

IFcomp08 reviews: Draculas Underground Crypt

This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.



So between the punctuation error in the title and the apologetic message in the intro, I went into this game with about rock bottom expectations.

If your game isn't ready, don't submit it to the comp. It's that simple. I know a year can seem like a really long time to wait, but there are plenty of minicomps. RAIF just announced about six more. Spring Thing could use attention. So if your game isn't ready, don't submit it to the comp. I can't say this often enough. If your game is not ready, do not submit it to the comp.

That said, this wasn't the worst by any means. The prose, although littered with errors, often produces genuinely funny bits. Although there were about a thousand design and technical issues, the core idea here seems like it's got a lot of potential. I could see myself as a fan of Dracula-related goofiness.

This needs about a few months' worth of chiseling and proofreading and beta testing. I encourage the author to keep working, though. It's possible to juggle college and IF. It might take a bit longer, but it's possible.