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.
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 more than just plain text: it preserves text formatting and saves status lines as well, so the transcripts look (almost) the same as the actual game. (See this example of Bronze with status lines, colors and text formatting. Note that Parchment uses small caps in place of bold text.) The saved transcripts can be viewed with or without the status lines. In addition when the game waits for a single keypress, non-alphabet characters like enter, space and arrow keys are marked in the transcript.
There's a live demo with a transcript viewer available. Games played in the demo installation can be seen in the viewer.
The plugin and accompanying tools can be downloaded from Google Code where you'll also find installation instructions. Only Z-machine is supported at the moment, Glulx support will be added later.
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 amount of invalid commands:
I presented a demo of Vorple, a user interface library for IF, at the IF Demo Fair in Boston last month. The demo or rather the proof of concept has now been published (with minor additions) at a brand new domain vorple-if.com. A brief description is available along with the demo, and further developments are announced through @VorpleIF Twitter account.
Emily Short and the comrades from People's Republic of Interactive Fiction are hosting a demo fair for user interface and NPC interaction innovations.
My entry to the fair is Vorple, an interface layer to be integrated with existing web interpreters and an accompanying UI library. It would work together with Parchment, Quixe, Undum, or some other web interpreter or system that would provide the engine running the actual game.
Vorple has two main features: giving games access to JavaScript and Vorple's library, and providing ready-made functions and features that could be easily added to games. For example, an Inform 7 author could do something like this:
To players it would be just like any other web interpreter, but for authors Vorple would provide means to break free from the virtual machine into what is admittedly another sandbox, but one with a lot more possibilities. Authors who want total control could insert JavaScript commands that control the user interface or add whatever JavaScript/HTML elements they wish. People who don't want to mess around with JavaScript could use the ready-made elements and functions like shown above.
The players would benefit of an independent UI layer even if the game author wouldn't use any of Vorple's features. You could use independent JavaScript widgets like notepad or (auto)mapping that would work with every game.
An interesting side effect would be that if Vorple were made to work together with Parchment and Quixe it could act as a general-purpose interpreter like Gargoyle or Zoom, making the difference between Z-machine and Glulx even more invisible to the player.
The features demonstrated at PAX will be:
This is just a taste of what the library will include. The best part of course is that because the user interface and the game could communicate between each other the author would be free to come up with all sorts of interesting new interfaces and game mechanics outside the standard set of features. For example I had an idea of a time travel game where travelling into the past would actually change the content of previous turns that happened in the future—this would be impossible in any of the current interpreters, but perfectly doable with Vorple.
As said Vorple will be presented at the demo fair at PAX East in Boston this Saturday starting at 8 pm. If you're around come take a look; you won't need a PAX badge. The demo will be posted online later, but I'm travelling during March so it might take a couple of weeks.
Vorple won't be out for some while as it's currently just a bunch of stuff thrown together to demonstrate the basic concept. In the meanwhile you can follow @VorpleIF on Twitter for release announcements and updates on the progress.
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.
The IntroComp 2010 games have been pretty good. Here are spoiler-free mini-reviews for Plan 6 from Inner Earth, Memento Moratori and Waker.
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.