Slowly but Surely

 Last year I had tried to get the DPRK interactive fiction game completed by Christmas. That didn't happen. Besides my job still chugging along at a pretty grueling pace, other things just pop up. Foundation work to my house, repairs and appliance replacing at the trailer I inherited near the coast; it's always something! This is the first year I didn't even take the time to play and rate the Spring Thing interactive fiction competition games. It honestly came and went before I even realized it.

 On the bright side, things are a little less stressful now and I haven't taken on any new time-consuming projects. A friend of mine is working on a new MMO type game and I've assisted here and there.. but now he's hit a wall with the networking of the Godot engine that can't be solved until there is a newer version of the engine it seems. I've made a couple of electronic tunes you can listen to here, but that isn't time consuming either. I only sit down to try to make music when I have an idea for a song or am in a certain mood, which is rare.

 Today I'm working on DPRK again and wanted to update this blog before I forgot about it again for a few months (heh-heh). Over the past year I'm probably averaging about 3-5 hours a month total of adding bits of code here and there, testing things, and adding new graphics. That isn't great but I suppose it's better than nothing. I've had to tell myself to basically not force myself to try to do things that will be too time consuming just for a gimmick or puzzle feature. The time came long ago where I just have to focus on the content itself as the game isn't meant to be very puzzle intensive anyway. Instead, it should be fairly easy cruising to get an ending, wonder if things could have ended differently, and then hopefully play the game again and try different things for different results.

IF Updates

Today I moved everything from my "if" folder on my personal webserver running in my living room over to my Amazon Web Services instance. My main homepage @ http://home.roadrunner.com/~fragmeister/ has not changed, and all IF-related links there are now routed to the new host. Any old links to any of my old interactive fiction titles with retroshard.no-ip.org in the URL are now broken.

During this process, I added some new material as well. You can now view the source code to Lunar Base 1 on the website. Blackness has also been added along with its source code and a "making of" section that shows my notebook scribblings as I planned out what I would code within the 3-hour time limit of EctoComp 2013.

No Spring Thing entry for me this year. Currently focusing on getting a beta test / teaser of sorts for the North Korean game originally announced here over a year ago. It is being written in Hugo and is using the current version of Roodylib.

Lunar Base 1

After some consideration and plot changes since the initial concept, I am now discarding the "working title" of the new sci-fi interactive fiction game and settling on naming it after one of the main locations within it. I felt that using the word "stranded" within the title has not only has been done before with other games, but also it encroached on the plot itself a bit much. Why assume that the player will even be stranded at all?

Originally I stated that I probably wouldn't enter the game into any sort of competition. I later had second thoughts after really getting into the development of the game and it becoming more than a short experiment. The game itself though is still quite short compared to the time investment needed for playing Hallow Eve to completion, too short for Spring Thing 2012, which I missed the deadline of putting in intent to enter anyway. Perhaps it will be entered into the next IFcomp if it is well received by the beta-testers. Lunar Base 1 should be sent out to beta testers within the next couple of weeks! If you are interesting in being a beta tester, please leave a comment or contact me through my website.

I would also like to thank everyone that gave me input on my last blog discussing the colors of the moon. It helped me feel a lot more comfortable with the words I put down in my descriptions.

New Sci-Fi IF Started

(old NASA public domain image)

About a week ago, I finally decided to give the Quest interactive fiction creation system a try. I think it's a fairly nice system. Creating a simple adventure in it is pretty easy. While thinking of a short "test story" to create within the system, I remembered an idea I had years back of a stage play of sorts I had thought up involving 2 astronauts stranded on another planet. After about two hours of fiddling with creating this in Quest, I decided that I could probably code the desired effect better and faster within Inform7. With that decision made, I ported all of my existing text into Inform7. I haven't completely abandoned Quest, but right now it just isn't a system that will suit what I'm trying to do any easier or more effective than I7.

Two other works of IF come to mind in this genre: Fragile Shells by Stephen Granade, and an old game called Stranded (a game with the same title was also released in 2001 about being on an island) and another game for Commadore 64 that I watched a play-though of on YouTube. Stranded is a very short game with graphics. It borrows a lot of concepts from the Dr. Who television series and has more rooms than I would want to implement for my own sci-fi IF. Fragile Shells is set in a space station and there isn't any NPC interaction (or graphics), instead relying on excellent descriptions and puzzles to move the game along.

The working title of this new sci-fi IF is "Stranded on the Moon", though that is subject to change. Although the setting is very desolate, NPC interaction should prevent the game from feeling too "empty". Along for this ill-fated journey is another astronaut named John, who may not handle a chaotic and isolated situation as well as you. There is a heavy theme of "what if" at play, as this is science fiction. What if man never set foot on the moon until the year 2050? Could the lethality of the lunar surface be underestimated? What else could be there waiting for us? I think such a setting would not only be fun to create, but also fun to play.

At this point I now have three interactive fiction works in progress. The new project, the "final version" of Hallow Eve, and my Interactive Dreaming project. I'm still set to release Hallow Eve by October 31, 2011 and I hope to get a couple of beta testers to try that out around October 15th. I plan on cramming a lot of work into that next week... as much of it is basically grunt work and bug-fixing. Interactive Dreaming contains quite a bit of media and is still in a experimental stage. I may be entering that into Spring Thing 2012. This new sci-fi game will also be a bit experimental but will also be very short. I hope to keep it in the Z5 (short, text only) standard. It will not be entered into any competition. Instead, I will just release it along with the source code when it is completed and tested.

Hallow Eve - Spring Thing 2011 Retrospect

Spring Thing 2011 came and went. My game, Hallow Eve, placed 6th out of 6. I am not deeply disappointed, nor am I happy about this. Some voices from the community I have heard suggest that I should not have even submitted Hallow Eve to the contest, but I am certainly glad that I did. It has been both an enjoyable experience and a learning experience. I must say that the organizer, Greg did a great job with the competition proceedings.. he even worked with me on my lack of a Paypal account.

Criticisms along the lines of "This feels like a bad simulation of a bad b-rated horror film" would be pretty scathing if I didn't agree with it. The low-brow crudeness of many aspects of the game was completely intentional and that seems to click with the people that actually enjoy the game. I can't say the same for a game like Bonehead. In contrast to me saying "Oh, you like horror? Check out my game, please pardon my oldschool mess.", Bonehead is geared towards those who are interested in baseball and is extremely well-presented with fancy glulx effects.

Some advice I received from the reviews was great. Emily Short and some others emphasized on the pacing of the story being off. Why was the pacing off? The plan. My 16 year old plan was all over the place with tons of things I wanted to bring into the game, some of which I made huge stretches to make even slightly logical. I was confident the game didn't have any game-halting bugs in it, but some important ones were brought to my attention such as a timing issue with one event and random "understanding" issues with the parser. When I launched the game after release, I noticed an end quote that was spaced way down from where it should have been.. must have been an accidental keystroke in the wee hours of the morning before Spring Thing 2011 submission time. That alone told me I was probably in for it.

A major criticism of the game I didn't agree with was that the game seemed to have no conversation system to speak of. I spent many hours creating "topics" to ask or tell just about all of the NPCs, but there was zero hinting to the player that these topics even existed. I had actually thought of bolding topics that you could ask or tell a person within narrative and description texts (A system similar to Ultima V), but part of me thought perhaps that could spoil things for some players. I regret not adding bolded text now.

There should be one more release of Hallow Eve, complete with a website and source code sometime between now and Halloween of this year. In that release I will revisit the game to address complaints with the system itself and add other small improvements. I welcome anyone who enjoyed the game to leave suggestions about story elements you would like elaborated on or perhaps even added.

My Deadline Approaches...

As it stands now, I have about two weeks left to finish the "testing beta" version of my first interactive fiction title, Hallow Eve. It is now at about 90 % completion. However, the current situation is much like a friend of mine said yesterday; "Isn't the last 10% the longest stretch?"

The idea of a Halloween-themed text adventure came to me about 18 years ago, when I was around 13. I didn't think there really were enough Halloween-themed games that even felt like they captured the spirit of the holiday. I wrote up a basic story with a simple map, and attempted to create them from scratch in both QBASIC and Turbo C ver 1.1 off and on for about 2 years. Eventually, the result was always some endless loop of sloppy mess after only getting a few commands, objects, and rooms coded. I think I envisioned some sort of text adventure that would be similar to a graphic adventure I had played called Hugo's House of Horrors, only with an "edgier" story.

By now, I've done a lot of other maps and mods for the IdSoft engine games, including a Flood Control Dam #3 map based on the infamous location in Zork I, in addition to other gaming development. However, the thought of attempting another text adventure never crossed my mind again for quite a few years. In the summer of 2010, I'm having a conversation with the same friend I mentioned earlier. After talking a bit with him about the new release of the Get Lamp documentary, and talking about old Infocom games in general, I eventually wonder aloud if there were any better tools available these days to write Interactive Fiction. He mentions Inform7. I immediately began writing my first, rough version of Hallow Eve in Inform and have had a lot of fun learning the language. I also connected with an IF community around this time that I didn't even know existed, and they are some of the friendliest and insightful people I've ever talked to.

My intentions are to enter the game into the Spring Thing and to do so I have to officially claim my intent to the organizers by March 1st. If I don't at least have my game at 99% and haven't placed my game into the hands of a tester or two, I won't feel comfortable entering. After March 1st, I will have one month to turn in the "final" version.

At this point I really have no clue how my game will be accepted by the IF community. A lot of modern IF works utilize innovative schemes that break from old tradition, but mine seems to feel much like an old Infocom title in many ways. I'm trying not to worry about that so much as just ensuring that the game is solid and that the story is entertaining.