DPRK Due in 2017

I gave up producing for IF competitions over the past few years. While they were fun to enter, eventually work became way too time-consuming aside from wanting to spend more time playing games than writing them. However, in the meantime I've slowly been creating a new game in the Hugo engine I've mentioned a few times before titled Days in DPRK.

 

The making of Days in DPRK was motivated by both my fascination of  North Korean history  and the country itself, as well as wanting to move away from the Inform7 system and work more in Hugo. Hugo is not a "plain English" language like I7 is; it's more like "real programming" languages I've worked with before. After playing games like Cryptozookeeper by Robb Sherwin, I was really inspired to make my own creations in Hugo. This not to say I'm ruling out ever making anything in Inform again; I enjoyed creating games in it and enjoyed messing with the Canvas extensions to create the UI for the Interactive Dreaming prototype I was working on a few years back. Who knows, perhaps that will be re-visited one day.

DPRK is a bit like Lunar Base 1 in the respect that it tries to be a life simulation of sorts with commands thrown in to do things such as get out of a chair before moving. RoodyLib has helped to implement many things I wanted done in the game. Making things seem realistic in a room can be time-consuming, let alone in a game with many more rooms than LB1 and the concept of 3 playing characters that divide the game into thirds and connect to one another. This year, I hope and plan to finally tie it all together. Even after it is, there will be a quite a bit of  "polishing" to do on things such as setting/editing mood music/ambient sound for the remainder of the non-demo scenes, and editing Creative Commons images to suit my needs for the game.

Speaking of which, I look forward to people cooking here..



..until next time!

IFCOMP 2016 Reviews

I've been playing a few games from the 2016 Interactive Fiction Competition at random that have interesting cover art or concepts to me, and have written a few short reviews for 7 games out of the bunch. If I have time to play and review more, there will be a part 2 to this blog.. but I wanted to go ahead and get a few out.


*** SPOILERS BELOW! **

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*** Color the Truth by mathbrush ***

 This is a mystery game that looks like it will have a lot of conversation in it. After reading the ABOUT text, it looks like the gameplay system will be more complex than the old Infocom mystery games.

 Actually, at the very start the game throws out a handful of conversation topics and the system of choosing topics and "linking" them feels pretty smooth. Changing characters when an NPC gives a statement feels a little weird. I started to think perhaps just a wall-of-text would suffice for these events, but that would eliminate the possibility of throwing in a couple of puzzles here and there during the flashback.

 Repeating actions in the flashbacks can seem a bit annoying, but is nessasary for revealing new bits of the investigation. Pretty cool game.


*** Snake's Game by Nahian Nasir ***

 First "web" game of the bunch I tried. I'm partial to parser games, but I do really like a CYOA once in a while if the story is good. The story is definitely weird, but actually wasn't as weird or creepy as I was expecting. The choices seemed pretty linear. This one really isn't bad, but I didn't enjoy it all that much.


*** Ariadne in Aeaea by Victor Qjuel **

 This is a parser-driven game written in Inform7. It's a pretty amusing story, but none of the humor made me laugh out loud. I was hoping the topless ceremonial lady in the cover art was somehow depicted in the game, and she was! Old auntie. Nice.

 The environment of the game itself seems well-rounded. NPCs react different when you walk by in in different attire than you did previously and other features. I did end up glancing at the walkthrough probably a bit too more than I should have early on, so I can't really speak to the difficulty of the puzzles.. but for the most part they seemed fairly easy and not too obscure with exception to probably would have had a bit of back-tracking to do had I not skimmed the walkthrough early on. There perhaps could have been less rooms and more time spent on more parser understandings.. such as "herder" when referring to a "goatherder".


*** Riot  by Taylor Johnson ***

 Another CYOA game. This one got me interested in the beginning, but then I end up with the same complaints I have with many of these types of games. My choices seem either too linear, and at times I'm asked to make choices that I wonder if any sane being would do, like correcting a random strangers broken nose. I straightened a friends dislocated finger in RealLife when I was about 12 after making an impulse decision, but I was young and he was no stranger. I don't think it ever healed correctly either..

 I felt like this story was ok, but not great. I did get into it more than Snake's Game.


*** Toilet World - by Chet Rocketfrak ***

 This sounds promising. Though on closer examination, it's just a "joke" game. Whatever, let's give it a shot. I'm told I'm in this glorious world of toilets, surrounded by toilets. Cool. I think I got this.

> X TOILET
You can’t see any such thing.

 Oh hell nah. So, in short what we seem to have here is a "joke" game that's basically a few room descriptions filled with typos, no implementation of objects, nothing to really do. Or maybe I'm missing some grand game behind the scenes that I couldn't figure out how to throw the right parser commands at to unlock. Probably not however, considering there is no walkthrough included.

** Ventilator - by Peregrine Wade **

 Ha! Now this one has some humor to it, at least in the death messages. There's no walkthrough included either with this parser game, so I didn't expect it to be too long. The few puzzles are pretty abstract, but it didn't take me long to figure them out. The ending was kind of a head-scratcher, but I found this more fun than the web-based games so far.

*** Cactus Blue Motel - by Astrid Dalmady ***

 A web game with some cool-looking text upon starting up. You play a girl on a road-trip with two of your friends traveling across the desert until you come to a stop at a desolate hotel. The game has nice visuals, but oh man these choices. The actual path to the finish line seems like it's fairly linear, but I'm forced to re-ask various NPCs questions over and over again until new options pop up. The author perhaps should have made previously asked questions that you've already read responses for disappear. The story seemed kind of interesting but the gameplay system made it very difficult to enjoy.

Getting RunUO to work in Amazon Linux

I had run an Ultima Online server for quite some time on an old PC running Ubuntu Linux. Once I backed up all of the data from the shard and turned off that old box, I never got around to relaunching the server until this weekend.

Since I am already running an Amazon Linux instance for my website and a Quake II server that is very rarely used, I copied up my entire RunUO 2.0 folder backup to the server and got started. The first step is installing Mono.

sudo yum install mono

I tried then starting the server and ran into errors regarding missing DLL files. This was fixed by using:

sudo yum install mono-*

In the Scripts/Misc folder I had to update the address line in ServerList.cs to my new DNS as well as update any data paths (there are only a couple so long as you aren't using a lot of custom scripts with hard coded data paths) that it whined about when trying to start the server again.

At that point, it looked as if all was well. That as until I tried to walk into a moongate to transfer to another area. The server instantly crashed. In the terminal running the server, I see that it can't find a specific zlib version. I was able to find the version it was complaining about not seeing (zlib.so.1.2.3.4) here at http://zlib.net/fossils/ and compiling the file was simply a matter of "./configure" and "make". I then copied the compiled file to the /lib folder. At that point, everything was running smoothly!

The old RetroShard website is back online at: retrolab.servebeer.com/lab/rs Leave a comment if you have any questions about the setup I've described. It's not very detailed but hopefully points out the main problems you may run into.

2016

Two years have gone by since my last interactive fiction full game release, Blackness. Blackness was written in 3 hours for Ectocomp, so it's rather short and there isn't a lot of attention paid to detail. There may be a chance of entering that competition or another short competition this year with another small game written in Inform7. While the Hugo IF authoring language has now became my favorite platform for authoring IF, I do miss some of the conveniences and quirks of I7 and never have gotten around to using the OSX version of it much.

However, I did manage to get a demo of DPRK released. It didn't get a lot of play-tests, but the few random ones I did hear reports back from on sounded very positive aside from a movement bug. Around Christmas of last year, I returned to the project to begin working on the final version of the game. With a lot of help from Roody (author of RoodyLib) I've started a "simulation lab" of sorts to start developing and testing encounter and combat systems. There is still a lot of work to be done, but I think the project is still promising and have a positive outlook to get the rest of the content and system coding done by the end of the year.

In other Hugo related-project news, Cyberganked is also coming up! Robb Sherwin has created a character using a picture of myself and I will be writing up some dialogue drafts soon for him to digest into the game, as well as doing some testing as needed. I'm really looking forward to the release of this game and to playing it. Anyone who enjoyed Wizardry and text games I think will as well. Roody has also been hard at work on RoodyLib for this past year.. which Cyberganked and DPRK both utilize. He's also been working on things such as handicap-friendly interfacing and other Hugo magic lately.
 
In 2015, I did manage to keep a group of 6 going for a table-top RPG going since December of 2014. As a listener of Burzum, I heard of a game that Varg Vikernes created called MYFAROG. I missed out out the first printing in Halloween of 2014, but managed to score a 2nd printing copy of the 1st addition shortly after that. We began as me playing the role of "MythMaster" (Dungeon Master) which was a fun practice returning to creating stories, characters, local areas, etc on the fly while keeping campaign solidarity. Most of the players eventually bought books, and one player took over the role of MythMaster long enough for another player to spend a few months in another country and for me to actually play as a PC.. an experience I haven't had in a very, very long time. I blogged about our game here if you are interested in how it began.

I also hope to get a refurbished monitor from Arcade Buffett soon in the mail to finally get my Neo-Geo MVS-2 arcade machine running again. I bought this cabinet (my first!) in January of 2015 at an auction for 425$ before fees and it worked fine aside from monitor issues. The main culprit of the issues was a crappy Kortek chassis. After a lot of de-soldering and soldering to replace all of the capacitors and the flyback transformer, I learned the hard way replacement flybacks are just not available for the crappy Kortek. So, I ordered a complete monitor as I plan on keeping this machine for years anyway and want something solid (and non-Kortek). I may buy a seperate chassis and yoke to rebuild another monitor with the leftover Zenith 25 inch tube.

The only major non-work or non-DPRK distraction I can see coming up? The new Doom game in May. If it's all it promises to be, expect to see more in the Id Software section of my website! I've still got a "Photon Doom" project I have on a backburner that may end up ported from Doom3 to that. I won't know until I play it. If it's not fitting to Photon, Doom3 BFG will be the target for a new Photon Doom mod. If anyone reading this is already planing a Photon mod for any game engine, please contact me. I'd be interested in sharing ideas and assets.