Undo Restart Restore

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.

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 [...]