Just about to leave for New York and from there to Boston to attend PAX East and its abundant IF events. Hope to see you there!
Designing the puzzles of Escapade!
(Please note: the following article discusses the game Escapade! in some depth, so it will contain spoilers.)
I'm not much of a puzzle enthusiast myself. The problem with puzzles is that they tend to come in the way of a good story. Now, to contradict myself completely, so far I have released mainly puzzle games myself. With Escapade! the purpose was to make a puzzle game I myself would enjoy as a player.
In Escapade! your goal is to escape a jail cell. The twist is that there are many ways of escaping, but after all but one of the escapes (the final puzzle) you are caught and returned to the cell. At the end of 2008 the game was submitted to the One Room Game Competition 2008 where it took the second place.
Continue reading "Designing the puzzles of Escapade!"
Raising the Flag on Mount Yo Momma released
Here the game finally is. Once again what was supposed to be a short distraction between "more serious" projects turned out to be more work than called for. It started its life as an idea to a speed-if, so forgive the rather silly premise. Puzzler enthusiasts will hopefully get some enjoyment out of the game as it has a good bunch of more or less traditional IF puzzles (no mazes!) As usual the Inform 7 source code is available.
- Play online
- Download the zblorb or z8 file (see installation instructions here)
- Inform 7 source code
For some reason Parchment hangs after displaying the banner, so no online play before I get that sorted out. Sorry about that. (edit: the recent version of Parchment seems to work fine.)
It occurs to me that this game is very similar to the previous one. I swear, this is the last comedic one-room (or one-area) puzzle game from me for a while. Then again it has been very educational and I might just write a couple of posts of the things learned making these two games, so stay tuned for more!
2009 XYZZY Awards voting has started
2009 was a good year for quality IF games. A great year, in fact. It's time to give recognition to the best of them as voting for the 2009 XYZZY Awards begins at the brand new web site.
The problem, which I'm glad to have, is that there are so many games that would deserve an award, especially in the "best use of medium" category. I would like to nominate four or five games and the same amount in the "best game" category. And I haven't even played all the must-play titles yet!
New year's IF under betatesting
Taleslinger organized the third New Year's speed-if event, Newer New Year's Speed IF, some weeks back (although due to many happenstances it's still a sort of ongoing event). I had an idea for a game I had been thinking about for about a year and decided to finally make it.
Apparently making speed-IFs isn't my forte because the end result was something more the size of an average IFcomp game than a speed-if. It's large enough to consider a proper game, so I'm having it tested before it's released to the general public. If you have some extra time in the next couple of weeks (the planned release is sometime in February), it would be great if you'd see the call and blurb here. I can be contacted by e-mail, juhana dot if at nitku dot net.
An action by any other name: Finding the names of actions in Inform 7
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.
Let's say we have in our game a coin and a slot machine and we would understandably want to handle PUT COIN IN MACHINE somehow. So we write this:
The Casino is a room.A slot machine is in the Casino. The player carries a coin.Instead of putting the coin in the slot machine:say "The coin falls through the machine and straight into the winnings tray. It must be broken."
Looks all good, right? But when we try it, the compiler says this:
Problem. You wrote 'Instead of putting the coin in the slot machine' , which seems to introduce a rule taking effect only if the action is 'putting the coin in the slot machine'. But that did not make sense as a description of an action. I am unable to place this rule into any rulebook.
This happens because "putting it in" is actually not the action's name. Even though when playing the game one action can have several verbs that are synonymous (eg. TAKE and GET do exactly the same thing) but in the code each action has only one name (eg. taking). Actions are like those demons in folklore where you have to know their true name before you can control them.
How do you find an action's real name then? There are a couple of ways, but these two are probably the easiest.
The first method is to open the index page and take a look at the Actions tab. (This is the Mac IDE, the Windows and possibly Linux versions have the buttons in slightly different places.)
This page lists all actions and all verbs that are available in-game. Scroll down the page and find "put".
The command PUT has different meanings depending on the context but the line we want in this case is "put [other things] in/inside/into [something]". This shows the name of the action: inserting it into.
The drawback of this method is that the index tab is not always available if there was a problem compiling the game, so you might not get to see the list without trimming the non-working parts of the code and compiling again. There's another way of finding the name of the action right in the game itself. Go to the game running in the IDE (where the debugging verbs are available), type ACTIONS to turn the actions listing on and then the command you wish to manipulate (although this suffers from the same problem as the index in Linux and possibly Windows IDE; see the comments below):
>actions
Actions listing on.
>put coin in machine
[inserting the coin into the slot machine]
That can't contain things.
[inserting the coin into the slot machine - failed the can't insert into what's not a container rule]
The emphasized line shows that the action that the game tries is "inserting it into", which is the name of the action we need to use in our case.
Five easy improvements to your game
Here's a list of five easy things to do to give that final polish to your IF game. These are all things that many players come to expect from a well-made game and experience has shown that a lack of these basic things suggests a lack of overall quality as well.
IFComp 2009: Correlation between rating and the number of testers
Everybody's always talking about how important it is to have your game tested (or at least I'm always talking about it). But does it really matter? Surely if you have a great idea and enough enthusiasm you can do without?
Continue reading "IFComp 2009: Correlation between rating and the number of testers"