Skip to main content

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.

Continue reading this post »

Invisiclues page

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.

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.

Continue reading this post »

The TADS fatigue

Some useful Inform 7 extensions

PAX East vibes

Leaving for PAX East

Designing the puzzles of Escapade!

Raising the Flag on Mount Yo Momma released

2009 XYZZY Awards voting has started

New year’s IF under betatesting

An action by any other name: Finding the names of actions in Inform 7

Five easy improvements to your game

IFComp 2009: Correlation between rating and the number of testers

IFComp 2009 review: Earl Grey by Rob Dubbin and Adam Parrish