Undo Restart Restore

Almost one year ago to the date I released Starborn, a short keyword-based scifi story made with Inform 7. Now I’m proud to present an Undum-based version, enhanced with Vorple, of course. The content is essentially the same. Instead of typing the keywords you click on hyperlinks that are highlighted in the text and shown [...]

The tool formerly known as “Transcript recording plugin for Parchment” has been successfully used as a betatester transcript recorder with at least one game, and even in the currently running IFComp. Thanks to liberal version numbering scheme it has now reached version 3 and has been renamed IF Recorder. Here are the major new features: [...]

I’ve made an Undum port of Cloak of Darkness. A literal translation of a parser IF game into hypertext fiction doesn’t really turn out to be the best game design there is, but it does demonstrate most of Undum’s core concepts pretty nicely. Play the game here Annotated source code: zipped package or the JavaScript [...]

As promised, the transcript recording plugin for Parchment has now been published. As the player is playing the game, the plugin sends the transcript to the server where it’s saved to a database. The author can then later view the saved transcripts or use the information in the database to calculate statistics. The plugin saves [...]

Earlier I posted some statistics from transcripts collected from online plays of Starborn. Based on those statistics I released a new version at the end of January, mainly adding synonyms based on the most common typos players had made. Looking at the data from before and after the update, here’s what happened to the total [...]

Starborn is a short interactive sci-fi story that uses a simple keyword interface instead of a standard IF parser. It was made as a speed-if for this year’s New Year’s Speed-if event on ifMUD. It was released to the public about a week ago and at first gained the usual amount of interest: the logs show 7 online plays on the release day and less on the next two days.

Last Wednesday however C.E.J. Pacian wrote a blog post about it which was picked up by the IndieGames.com blog. From there a couple of people tweeted about it and suddenly the play count jumped to about 600 plays per day. The main Parchment site reported similar amounts of traffic.

I’m running the online version of the story on a modified version of Parchment that saves the transcripts to the server. I now have 1557 transcripts consisting of 23 896 turns (and counting, but the traffic is slowing down considerably). To my knowledge this is more play data collected than for any other single IF game so far.

So here’s a random bunch of analysis from those transcripts. There are no spoilers other than keywords used throughout the game, but if you haven’t played yet the data would probably make more sense if you at least checked out a couple of turns just to see what the parser looks like. Online version and downloads are available.

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.”

I’ve had to learn this lesson several times. Here’s a couple of examples.

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 [...]

I made an Invisiclues-style HTML hints page for a friend of mine and decided to share it with the rest of the world. The page is here with instructions to use included. Feel free to use it for any purpose.

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 [...]

I begin this post by stating that I have two things to say about TADS 3: a) as a programming language it’s most excellent and b) the library is huge. Then I will proceed in saying more things about TADS.

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 visibility, including blogging about the best ones. I’ll take a head start by introducing some of my own favorites.

An article about designing the puzzles of the 2008 game Escapade!, including the puzzle design map used in the process and discussion about how to create and use a similar map to design interactive fiction games.

One thing that seems to trip authors every time in I7 is finding the name of the action to work with. Here are some hints for finding the name of the action when you encounter the “that did not make sense as a description of an action” error.