These Dreams

  Getting time to work on the DPRK game again lately has been nice. I've had to bug Roody yet again for assistance lately, but he's always happy to help with Hugo related issues.

 I've been focusing on the 2nd PC of the DPRK game over the past few months.. random stabs at the story and code. Taken many steps back when starting to code and realizing I don't even have a proper flow for the event written yet, but that's part of what makes creating games like this so fun; play-testing and adding things that are not implemented yet, testing them, and repeating the process. The third PC won't take too much longer finish up, but tying all three PCs together with decisions made by each, inventory changes, etc will take a while to clean up. The "alpha" test was released some time ago, and I plan on releasing the "beta" around November of the year..

 Not getting my old interactive dreaming Inform7 project properly updated with all the graphics window and other fancy screen effects extension stuff basically shit me out of IntroComp this year. I was a bit disappointed but will shoot for next year. This is worth revisiting..

 It's really neat that my friend Irfon told me about the "modern IF scene" around 2008-2009.  I'm still really thankful to be introduced a new world of "text games" I figured only existed in my own head and a very select few of others back then and before then. I've met some really cool people along the way both on the internet and off.

 I've also got ideas about creating some sort of dream share API or website lately..

Yukihiro Takahashi ("It's Gonna Work"): "I had a dream. You gave me a sign.. and put me on a new track."

Moving On

Yesterday, I came home to a surprise. I went to update something related to my Ultima Online shard, and realized that my site now resolves to a Roadrunner.com help page. The site has resided there for about ten years now, as I never really needed a lot of space to host it. In about 3 hours I had uploaded all my data from a backup and redone all the URLS to the site, but you may still find a quirk here or there before I catch it. The old address was home.roadrunner.com/~fragmeister and the new address is retrolab.servebeer.com.

The new site is hosted by Amazon.com and so long as I keep refreshing the free domain name (or finally pay for it), it should stay there for some time to come. Also, all games and source code in my "Files" section should be working correctly now, because they are also hosted on the new server. The old site had a lot of files that were linked to Fileplanet, which is "no longer being updated and is in the process of being archived". Always a good idea to make frequent backups.

With that out of the way, I have a couple of game-related things to mention. The DPRK demo (Interactive fiction written in Hugo) is just around the corner. I just need a couple more hours to tie up some loose ends. The demo will feature the first PC's section of the game as well as an introduction to the second PC. I'm mainly looking for feedback on 2 things from the testers of the demo; how interested you are in certain aspects of the story (what should be focused on more) and what do you like or not like about the interface (The text parser commands, the layout of the windows, etc). It should only take a few minutes to play, but there are reasons for replay here and there due to story forks dependent on things like held objects and NPC interactions.

IFComp is also starting soon! I'm currently beta testing one game for it and hope to play a lot of the entries, and will try to review one or two once the time comes. I didn't really have anything near enough to completion to feel comfortable entering myself this year.

Retro Shard is back in order again lately new interest from a couple of people. My girlfriend has been doing a lot of play-testing on it, and I've gotten around to creating a new dungeon and finally creating a desert area. Next up will be creating a region within the desert area to allow for people to collect sand for glass-blowing. The new dungeon still needs some more spawners (monsters and treasure) to be fully complete, but that shouldn't take too long. Check out the Retro Shard section if you are interested in playing 2D Ultima Online on my server. It's free and fairly straightforward to set up.

There's been a new version and a few revisions of Inform7 released since I last worked with it. I'm interested in the OSX version, but figure the best thing to do is continue on DPRK until all of the extensions my last unfinished Inform project was dependent on are working in this new version. That last unfinished project was the "Interactive Dreaming" game. I recently took some pictures that I think will fit into the game nicely, and still have the beginnings of a cool sound track a friend of created a track for. The game itself was progressing okay as far as content, but the conversation system (the one I used in Lunar Base 1) was mothballed. If anyone has any recommendations for clean yet dynamic conversation systems that I may have missed in the past two years, I'd like to hear them.

End of Summer Update

 The dust has been collecting here since Janurary. Time for an update!

Free time has been very short since the last update. Things with my current job never did slow down. If anything, they became more intense and time-demanding. The work is both exciting and interesting for me, so I can't complain. Some of the things I've either learned from scratch or improved along the way prompted me to start my own web browser game engine, which is a Wizardry-like CRPG type thing. I'm not sure how much will actually get done with this, but it's a fun side project to tinker with. But of course, nothing half as Robb Sherwin's upcoming game, Cyberganked.

Within the bits of free time I've had, I found myself reverting back to simpler things. Actually playing some games rather than writing them, and most of these being older games. I acquired a Commodore 64 setup over the past few months, including a Zoom Floppy. More than a few hours have gone into playing games like Wasteland and other RPGs on this setup. This has been a bit of inspiration for creating my own "retro" graphics for use in my games.

One such game is one I worked on some more this morning called "Surf's Down". It's original intention was for it to be a non-traditional IF written in Hugo for an upcoming Hugo Comp. That competition has yet to come, but I continue working on it here and there because it's been a good learning exercise for me as I write the more complex DPRK game. Hopefully the short source code of Surf's Down will also serve as good example code for others learning Hugo as well.

Surf's Down is basically a Hugo conversion of an old Atari 2600 game prototype which was never released, called Surf's Up. I fired up the game on an emulator and was actually a bit impressed with some of the design aspects of the game, especially the beginning phase of paddling out into the ocean. I've been a surfer for quite a while myself, and despite the very out-dated graphics, I felt the game managed to somehow capture the feeling of going out into the waves. Unfortunately, the actual gameplay phase of the Surf's Up left much to be desired. The gameplay in my game is decision-based, yet all decisions are made using cardinal compass points.

Progress on Three Days in DPRK has been much slower than I had hoped for. At one point, I was considering trying to enter it into IFcomp 2013. In retrospect, I'm glad I did not. While the game is roughly three-fourths complete, it would have been way too much of a rush to try to finish something I'd be confident in entering. Instead, I look forward to playing the games of others. Perhaps I'll have something ready for Spring Thing 2014. Though, I think Interactive Dreaming would be a bit more well suited for that one.

The actual code of Interactive Dreaming hasn't been touched since my last update here, but the story and materials for the game continue to slowly build. The conversation system also needs to be redone now that I've removed a prototype system I used in Lunar Base 1. Trying some recent ones others are using has some ideas about what I'd like to use or create myself, but I'm still researching this. A new release of Inform may affect this as well. While I'm eager to try the new version once released, I'm not sure how smooth it will be to compile Interactive Dreaming along with all of its required libraries.

2013 IF Plans

This year I will be working more on Interactive Dreaming along side another project I've recently started, called Days in DPRK.

The general prototype framework of Interactive Dreaming feels okay, but one of the first things I will be doing is completely changing the conversation system. I originally used one that ended up in Lunar Base 1, but that doesn't feel flexible enough to be quite what is needed for dream conversation. I think I will just test out a few systems or try creating a hybrid of one specific for the anxiety/lucidity statistics. For now, the best thing to focus on is fleshing out most of the rooms and developing a few puzzles that will also utilize those stats.

(Interactive Dreaming)

Days in DPRK will be my first game written in the Hugo language. Because there's sure to be a bit of a learning curve, I don't want to get too over-ambitious with my plans for it, but I do think it will be an amusing adventure (though it may be a bit short). The concept is that you are spending 1 day in the life of a tourist in North Korea, the 2nd day you are a resident of Pyongyang, and the last day you are in another different situation. I don't really want to elaborate on the plot much further than that for now.

(Days in DPRK)

Other than that, I don't know that I'll be doing much else. Paid work lately has been rather hectic, but I am learning stronger programming skills as a result of that which will help in all future game programming projects.

End of Year Update

It's been a while since I've taken some time to post here, so I figured that I would get one more up before the end of the year. This blog is 2 months shy of being a full year old now and I hope to keep with it for some time to come.

2011 has been a fairly interesting year. I completed my first interactive fiction and entered it into Spring Thing, completed a much more polished version of that and released it to my website, and also began 2 new projects. I've become a lot more comfortable with Inform7 which I started learned a bit over a year ago. I do hope to learn more about other IF programming languages in the future though.. TADS, Adrift, Hugo, and Quest. So far I've only tinkered around a bit in Quest. Playing games written in the other three, I've noticed interesting different aspects to each.

I haven't quite decided on the final title of my recent science-fiction IF, but I can say that it's coming together quickly now. The story itself, the table of events so to speak, and the puzzle are all pretty much complete. I just need to spend a few more hours coding it all in I7 and playing around with it before releasing a test version. The source code of this project is much neater and easier to work with than the extremely long (albeit and also sloppy) source code that became Hallow Eve. This is due to having less than 5 total rooms, few characters, and less free range random problem-solving. It's also a short game in general.

The "interactive dreaming" game should be taken off the backburner around late February. The length of delay for the release of it will be dependent on how soon I can get out and take a few more photographs I need for the game. If it's well received, it may become part of a series. As of now I'm unsure how long it will be. It looks like I could get a lot of use out of the puzzle and travel framework if that's what I wanted to do, however it's still completely untested by anyone but me.

If anyone would like to test the science-fiction game beta that should be done in three to four weeks, leave me a comment or something and I'll shoot you a copy. See you next year!

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.

Comparing Other Interactive Dreams

Today I was on the IFDB and did a search for the term "dream", looking for other games within the "interactive dreaming" theme. On the second page of the search results I came across a game called Dreadwine by Eric Eve. Dreadwine was submitted to a small competition that I had never previously heard of called IF Dreams. I decided to play all 3 games in the IF Dreams 2006 McDream Minicomp to see how they compare with how my newest interactive fiction project.

All three games in this competition were quite different from each other in terms of how the games flowed. I found The Retreat by J.D. Clemens to not feel very dream-like at all. In contrast No Famous by Erik Wennstrom felt almost too dream-like in ways. Dreadwine by Eric Eve was sort of a middle ground between these two extremes. Playing these definitely gave me a few things to think about with my own WIP.

Note: There may be a spoiler or two in the paragraphs below regarding these three games. 





The Retreat

Nothing that occurs in this game strikes me as anything that couldn't just as believably happen in the physical real world. The introduction to the story tells of some great apocalypse that is coming and essentially everyone is doomed. So now, you've been invited to party away your last living moments over at some guys house that you only vaguely know.

There are many NPCs with a lot to say, and talking to them normally made the story progress. The party continues until your impending doom approachs closer, forcing you and NPCs further into the party house. There was no twist for me at the end. No surprise. Nor did the ending give me any more reason to believe that what I just experienced was dream. Perhaps the dream that inspired the author to create this game was realistically vivid?

Dreadwine

This story begins in a café where you are accompanied by two NPCs. A bottle of foreboding wine sits on the table, and there is talk of something very strange and diabolical happening. It is soon that you realize that you had best escape this town as soon as possible to prevent meeting the same fate as the other citizens. Phrases such as "...it's strangely quiet for so crowded a spot" and the fact that other NPC encounters are "almost as insubstantial as ghosts" add an eerie and dream-like feel to the environment.

There are fourteen total rooms. Only a few of those (as far as I can tell) really drive the story. There may have been more I could have done with the boat, though I couldn't convince my female companion to get in the boat with me after pushing it into the water. This game ends in an obvious 'wake-up' from the dream. There weren't a lot of abstract occurrences in the story to make the game more dream-like, but the dream itself apparently inspired the author to write a good story.

No Famous

This game certainly did not lack an element of abstract dream-like strangeness. In fact, it actually over-does it a bit in my opinion. Right off the bat, I sense that I'm in a seriously wacky dream. I'm dealing with the presence of trolls, and I'm in the forest ready to ride a dining room table over rushing water with my sister. After making my way to a river bank, there's an elevator door here which feels completely out of place (the way many doorways in dreams can quite possibly be). All of this is reasonable to me, until I enter the elevator. I wasn't mapping this as I went along, but I'm pretty sure that effort would have been for not. Am I naked in a school? Naked in my own house? An airport? It's hard to tell because the game seems to tell you all of the above at the same time.

The goal of this is to get yourself to wake up after performing a few actions in the dream. References are made about realizing you are impossibly many miles away from where you should be and general disassociation, both of which I can relate to in personal dreaming. The 'dream within a dream' concept was a bit much for this game, as it involved more looping through the same locations that you aren't even sure that you are actually standing in.  I would say that out of the three games, this one is the closest to being a sort of "dream simulator". Unfortunately, there isn't much of an aspect of story-telling at all and that the mechanics of the game were a bit overly confusing for the effect of the simulation.

Interactive Dreaming - Barbie Did It First

The other day I was watching my girlfriend play a few old 8-bit Nintendo games. One of which was Barbie. I remembered seeing my sister play that game when I was younger. The main thing I remember about the game was that I found it to be way too hard to be a "little girls game". Another thing I remembered was the strange setting of the game.

 Barbie was a platform game, meaning you walked from side to side while jumping and avoiding obstacles and enemies. Each level was a "dream", and Barbie must collect "Zs" to avoid her dream from ending. If it does, she sits up in bed and has the option of waking up or going back to sleep.

These concepts of the Barbie NES game are nearly identical to ones I am using in my new interactive fiction, Interactive Dreaming. In the case of my game, five levels of "anxiety" are used instead of "Zs". Once your anxiety is filled, you are also then sitting up in your own bed and contemplating the same choice. However, a couple of differences with my game is that you may not always return to the same "stage" as Barbie did, and there's also another factor which may cause your dream to fade; lucidity.

Still, I was amused at the similarities. I've tried thinking of other games that follow a similar model, but I can't really think of any. If anyone reading this thinks of one, let me know. Nightmare on Elm Street (also for NES) came to mind as well, but the point of that games was actually to not fall asleep.

Right now in the development process of Interactive Dreaming, I'm almost through the prototype and planning stage. I've shifted more towards actually producing content for the game (although some of the images used are place-holders for now) while polishing the general design framework of it, including the conversation system. Although I intend for the first installment of this game to be rather short, it will probably end up being a non-competition release unless the timing is right. This way, I will take plenty of time to polish and test things.

Interactive Dreaming - The Character & The Conversation

A few weeks ago, I created an introduction sequence prototype to my game that basically allowed you to create your own protagonist. Although I found it simplistic on the surface, the more I played around with it the more I frankly became intimidated of the concept. The prototype of the conversation system has also brought this more to light. This post describes the process of how I am deciding what will be the final conversation system in my interactive dreaming game and what the player itself has now become. 

Originally, when the game initialized you were asked by an “NPC” what your name is, followed by asking your "mood of the day" and what sex you are. I had planned on the latter two questions triggering variations in the story. “Mood” is an easier variable for me, because my first few drafts of the story depend on your mood before you went to bed dictating what sort of dream sequences you may encounter on your journey. Trying to facilitate the same for female perspectives is a whole other can of worms. I knew that I could code it, but I also knew that I would need to relay story plots somehow to my girlfriend or my sister for them to give me some insight of how the story should be told from a female perspective. The more I think about this, it just seems like a bad idea for this story no matter how much I would like to include those additional features..

Having your choice of gender determining some aspects of the story also brings up another issue. What if the player is playing male, but wants to interact with the NPCs in the story in a homosexual or bisexual fashion? I have no idea how to even going about implementing these sorts of choices or situations while still making them realistic, and I'm as clueless about making these elements realistic as I am with the female element.

These are my actual dreams I am creating these stories from for the game. However, in our dreams we sometimes act in ways that we wouldn't even attempt in our waking lives, or perhaps even undergo some sort of transformation. In Hallow Eve, I tried to keep the character as “blank” as possible. This really isn't a good choice for interactive fiction to a lot of people, unless the game's story is completely gender-neutral. I think for this story it would be best to stick to the boring old typical male protagonist. Even more boring is that this protagonist would  be me.

Now, for the conversation system. Originally, I thought of a system that I found simple as a kid such as the one in Ultima V. Initiate a conversation by triggering it with a “talk” command, print the first bit of text with a few words in bold as “topics”, then allow input of any of those bold words to get some text on that topic, and finally accepting the word “bye” as a way to terminate the conversation. For my attempt at this, I figured I could just plug in Keyword Interface by Aaron Reed. Including that gave me a conflict error in Inform7 dealing with color table code that I already had in place for use with Glimmr stuff. It also made me think that although this an excellent extension if I wanted to use the interface for more than conversation would probably be overkill for what I would ultimately need anyway.

For the time being, I've ended up using a numbered menu that I originally created for generating the sex and mood of the player. At this point I'm fairly certain that I'll remove choosing gender and entering your name, but use the numbered menu for conversation. The current system still uses a general trigger for talking to NPCs, “TALK TO X”. The NPC will then say some text, immediately after which a menu of responses will display. This will be more like Fallout 3 or Dragon Age II than The Secret of Monkey Island. That is, the choices will be real forks in the conversation and even the main game plot itself; rather than just seeing a few funny choices, but ultimately knowing which one would advance the plot. These choices should be both varied and dynamic.

Although I've got quite a bit of the general story framework done in text outside of my project, nothing is set in stone yet. I'm still having a bit of fun experimenting right now. I haven't set myself any sort of deadline for completing the game except for wanting to get it done within about a year. Any input on this is greatly appreciated. 

Interactive Dreaming GUI Update

06.12.11 Note: I just heard back from someone with iFrotz. A new version has been released that addresses the missing elements, but the clicking on compass directions issue is still being addressed.

06.13.11 Note: Screenshot added of the prototype playing in iFrotz version 1.5.3.

With two out of three of the games beaten that I mentioned in an older post, I have been working more on my new project in between my full-time job and playing some Cryptozookeeper. I'm trying to settle on a final layout so that I do not have to keep going back and changing things as I write the actual story code. I have it looking very close to what I want it to be when I'm done. I just need to add a few more buttons and make a few more minor changes.

Here is a screenshot of the new layout thus far, running in Gargoyle..

Both of the status bars have been re-sized and re-arranged to the right of the screen. The scenery picture has been centered a bit more over the story text. All elements of the UI draw correctly when re-sizing the interpreter window.

Owning a fancy Apple device would be nice (I'm not quite the Apple hater that I was back when I created Corporate Doom), but I simply can't afford just about anything recently made by the company. However, I am trying to ensure that the game plays well on Ipad and Iphone, because of the current popularity of such devices. Who knows? Maybe I'll own one myself one day. In the meantime, I must rely on others to test the game on these pricey platforms. Luckily, the tester that helped me trouble-shoot Hallow Eve owns a Mac and an iPad, and he has tested the prototype on both.

Here is the prototype loaded in Spatterlight for Mac..

I'm satisfied with this. It looks exactly the way I expected and intended. Now let's see what it looks like in Zoom for Mac..

We have a line drawn here I've never seen before. However, it's in a non-annoying place, so I'm not bothered with it at all. This is fine. 

One note the tester gave me was that in Zoom you have to double-click the compass directions to remove, while this only requires one click in Spatterlight. Again, no biggie. I can live with that. Alright, now something I was really curious about; the game loaded in iFrotz for iPad..

Uh-oh. That's not good. As you can see, my meters are missing in this version. It's as if iFrotz had no problem with displaying anything that displayed graphics from files, but it could not draw "primitive" words, boxes, or rectangles at all. The tester also reported to me that if he tried to use the compass to move in this version, it would start to bring up the virtual keyboard, then completely crash the system. 

From what I understand, iFrotz is the only .gblorb interpreter for iPhone or iPad. I have read that glulx support in iFrotz is "still new and fragile", though I've also seen some recent updates. I'm going to point this out to the iFrotz bug-squashers in hopes that it will be addressed in the next update. 

EDIT: As noted above,  iFrotz 1.5.3 addresses the graphics issue seen in a previous version. Now all I have to wait for is the action of clicking elements in the UI to perform functions to be working. Here's an image of the prototype running in 1.5.3...

In the meantime, I'm going to carry on with the game as-is while testing in Gargoyle for Windows and Linux. Adding the last few UI elements, taking and adding more photographs for scenes, and setting up some more game mechanics. I've been writing the story and plot themselves separately in a word processor, instead of just jumping in head-first as I did with Hallow Eve. I welcome any recommendations, comments, or criticisms any of you reading this may have.

My First Steps In Utilizing Glimmr

Work on the "interactive dreaming" game has begun. Rather than jump head-first into everything thing all at once, I've been trying to outline the story as much as possible a solid system for the user interface. A few lines of Inform7  code have been written in a small project to test manipulating the graphics.

With proper planning, I should get an interesting alpha version with a few rooms done by around the end of May or early June. The story of this game will branch in many directions depending on the actions of the player, and I would like to avoid "good ending or bad ending" conclusions. One reason for this is replay value. Replaying a lot of the story just to get to one or two forks in the plot for a good or bad ending isn't something that I think would make someone want to play the game again in most cases. Again, proper planning will be the only way to ensure this goes smoothly.

That said, on to my first attempts at putting simple graphics into an Interactive Fiction. I'm currently using the Glimmr Drawing Commands, Simple Graphics Window, and Bitmap Font by Erik Temple extensions to get this done. In addition to the bars shown in this crude prototype of the user interface, I would like to also add graphics displaying of a visual of some destinations or scenes, a compass rose, and perhaps some other bells and whistles.

Here is the first "test room". Note the empty blue bars on the right:

Now, the player types in the command "look at fish". In this test, doing this action raises the "lucidity level" to 50%, and filling the box with red color:

Once I had the extensions installed, I looked at the source code of Glimmr Drawing Commands for the "retro" example to help me get started. I was pleasantly surprised with the ease of drawing and positioning simple graphics. The next day, I had written a line of story code to redraw the boxes and words and draw an additional rectangle into one of the bars by using "every turn" rules. 

While in Inform7, the redrawing phase goes fairly slowly (especially in the Gnome version). However, when loading the exported gblorb file in the Gargoyle interpreter to actually play it, the graphics are redrawn instantly. Hopefully, I won't run into performance issues or bugs when coding the rest of the "every turn" rules to manipulate all positions of the 2 status bars. 

I know it isn't very pretty, but it's a start. Making things more fancy will come much later after getting more of the basic mechanics and framework finished and tested.

More to come...

Interactive Dreaming

If you've ever had conversations with people about their dreams, you have probably noticed that while there are some common themes, many people dream differently. A lot of people will say something to the effect of "I know I have dreams, but I don't really remember them in the morning." Others may have such elaborate stories of their dreams that you may question them as to whether they actually had this dream, or if they sensationalized with their own imaginative story-telling.

It is my assumption that for most people, a dream is usually in 3rd person. The dream is presented almost like a movie to the dreamer. This movie is a rapidly-changing collage of sights, smells, feelings, tastes,  sounds that only your brain can bring you. I don't think that we will ever have a form of technology that allows us to accurately record and play back dreams. How many times has someone experienced what seemed like a horrible nightmare, only to feel a bit silly when trying to explain to someone else how terrifying it was to have a 2-ton toaster on giant chicken legs chase you down the street?

There is another form of dreaming which is the least common, called "lucid dreaming". If you didn't know, lucid dreaming is basically where the dreamer is aware that he or she is asleep and dreaming. Once the awareness is there, the dreamer then can begin actively participating in the dream or even change it. I frequently have these sort of dreams. I believe what started it was learning how to wake myself up as a child. Whenever a dream would get scary, I would tell myself to blink. After about the 3rd or 4th "dream blink", my actual eyes would blink, and I would wake up. As an adult, waking life can seem like the nightmare at times and dreams can sometimes be a wonderful escape, so I find myself doing the reverse; trying to keep from waking up. This can be hard once a dream goes lucid. It's as if soon after you realize that you are dreaming and really enjoying the pleasurable abstract mix of fantasy and reality, the dream tends to fade.

Dreams often inspire great writers to create worlds and the objects within them. I doubt that many of these are exact translations of the dreams themselves, because dreams can jump from one situation to another, or one part of the world to another days away, all in a matter of seconds. However, at least for me, repetition can flesh things out rather well. I often dream of certain cities or landscapes that I have never visited or even seen anywhere in my waking life, yet these places feel like actual locations in my mind. I can often revisit them. Sometimes I can return to a location and say something like "Oh hey, there is an awesome bar and arcade this way.." Sometimes I find it. Sometimes I get lost. Sometimes it's closed. There is an amusement park that I frequent, but for some reason it's always almost closing time. There are also the people or animals that I've  never met. I can't say that I've never seen them.. perhaps I have? With the hundreds of faces many of us see from day to day, it's hard to say whether or not these are also imprints from our waking lives.

How many of you have created something from a dream, in some attempt to share it with others? A painting, story, anything like that. The idea of creating a video game of some sort was always appealing to me. A scary, rusted old building with monstrosities and portals all about from a nightmare would seem like an ideal level to build in Radiant for Doom 3 or Prey. However, what about a pleasant dream about staring on a beach while gazing at an ocean with masses of tourists walking around? The Doom 3 engine doesn't seem like a good candidate. If you want both in the same game, it's not as if you could just switch over to the Crysis engine for the desired effect. In fact, trying to project many dream landscapes would be an extreme undertaking. Dream landscapes are extremely variant. In front of you may be the ocean, but to the left of you is a massive, dry and mountainous canyon. Behind you may be the door to your apartment.

I think that interactive fiction is the best medium to even attempt to start creating a "dream game". Take  Through The Looking Glass for example. There was a game created by Magnetic Scrolls called Wonderland that I felt was very true to the book and the weird, random things occurred fluidly. In contrast, years later when Alice came out, the game felt very empty to me. I've always been a fan of Id Software engines, but the Quake III engine just couldn't pull me into the game. Perhaps that's why the game was made the way it was.. it was a more "evil" version of Alice who ran around and slashed things with a butcher knife that could be much portrayed much easier than the Alice of Wonderland, who was occupied with solving strange puzzles in a strange and unpredictable world.

This is one reason why I'm very inspired to make my own attempt at a "dream game" using Inform 7. Rather than being one, huge "dream world" though, it will be a series of short-stories. Some locations will revisited, as well as some characters. I want the stories to be very free-form, completely removed from any constraints or expectations of both our conscious lives and traditional interactive fiction. That being said, I will probably begin experimenting with adding some two-dimensional graphics to help guide the player along his journey. If a worded description of a room is too bizarre, perhaps a few hours in GIMP to create a visual representation of it would be helpful? Dream worlds can be confusing, nonsensical places.. but  I do know which direction it is to that awesome Arcade Bar that only exists in my mind.