Author: Juhana

Are puzzles an integral part of IF?

Sometimes it strikes me how deep the puzzle-centered thinking is infused into the medium. I have played, and been annoyed by, many games that tell a great story and then break the flow by haphazardly cramming in a couple of puzzles, presumably because "IF must have puzzles."

There's one integral, defining aspect to IF and it's the world model. The author creates a virtual world and a story that takes place in it. So far this is only a simulation; to make it a game the author adds game mechanics and they are, more often than not, puzzles. But are puzzles the only option? Is there really nothing else we could do with a virtual world?

What about puzzleless IF, I hear you ask. There are a lot of those, right? Sure, but most of them are just puzzle games without puzzles, or with trivially easy puzzles. Removing puzzles and adding nothing in their place does not improve the situation. Without any game mechanics IF turns into hypertext fiction.

Galatea and its descendants are good examples of non-linear stories with strong non-puzzle game mechanics, in this case conversation. If I may take a look into the crystal ball, I suspect that in the future the puzzle aspects will diminish or at least they have changed considerably. Just like mazes and hunger puzzles have made room for better puzzles, the puzzles we write today will make room for even better design. More importantly puzzles will not be considered the only or even the primary option for IF game mechanics.

The key is to realize that puzzles are just one option for IF game mechanics and they are prevalent (I suspect) mostly because of tradition starting from the very first Adventure. "An adventure game is a crossword at war with a narrative," the famous quote by Graham Nelson from 1995, has been the guideline for IF design. I'm afraid we're stuck with conventions that have grown to define the medium and are now preventing us from seeing more options. It's time to look farther and create something new instead of just improving what we have.

Still going strong

You might have heard that Neophyte from In the Company of Grues blog had to drop out from the IF Trainer project at least for a little while because of real life issues. This doesn't mean the project is dead—I'm still working on it and it's going through alpha testing right now.

If you're interested in helping or seeing how it looks like right now you can head to the alpha testing information page and take a look. The project schedule has been pushed forward about a month and I'm hoping to release something in time for PAX Prime at the beginning of September.

Collecting real life gameplay data with Parchment

There was a lot of talk during PAX East and elsewhere about collecting real life data from people playing IF. I'm proud to announce that I've hacked the Parchment web interpreter to do just this: it saves transcripts to the server every time a game is played.

Try it out yourself: Click here to start a game and then open this page to a new browser window. Enter a command in the game and see how the transcript in the live feed updates. (If you don't see your game in the live feed page, reload it. It shows the three latest games being played at the time the feed page was loaded.)

And then there's the beef: I've made a rudimentary statistics page that shows some interesting information using the collected data, including most used commands and average turn count and playtime.

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The IF Trainer project

As you might have heard from elsewhere, I've been asked by the author of In the Company of Grues blog to design and code a game that would be suitable to teach newcomers how to play IF. This is a pretty sweet deal because we're having the entire development process completely transparent. The development wiki is at inthecompanyofgrues.com/iftrainer where you can see how the game is coming along and leave your own comments.

We're aiming to release at the beginning of September, in time for PAX Prime and before IFcomp starts to avoid being overshadowed.

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The TADS fatigue

I have two things to say about TADS 3: a) as a programming language it's most excellent and b) the library is huge.

TADS's learning curve is very steep at the beginning but I have a feeling that once you get a decent grasp of the language you can do advanced stuff quite easily. With Inform 7 the learning curve is almost the opposite: you can get in with no effort at all, but when you get to the advanced stuff you hit a brick wall.

This is the third time I've started trying to learn TADS. The first two times the library was just too overwhelming and I didn't get very far before just becoming tired. Now I've picked it up again and it's going better than before. While I've never had as much fun programming as I have when working with Inform, TADS is also fun but in a different way: the feeling of harnessing its raw power is what makes TADS a pleasure to work with.

Just to tame this beast I'm going to do my next project in TADS. An old acquaintance is about to return...

Some useful Inform 7 extensions

Very often I turn transcripting on when I start playing IF. As a side effect Zoom automatically runs the command VERSION, which in case of Inform 7 games shows the list of extensions the game uses. More often than not the list is empty.

I'm a big fan of extensions. Creating an IF game takes enough time as it is, so any way of avoiding reinventing the wheel someone has already invented and made public is a big plus. Extensions don't get enough use, and I'm not alone with this opinion: Aaron Reed has called for more exposure, including blogging about the best ones. I'll take a head start by introducing some of my own favorites.

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