Month: January 2013

Future Voices (inkle)

Future Voices logoFuture Voices is an iOS-based anthology of eleven CYOA stories from inkle, culled from an open competition. As one might expect from inkle’s work, it’s an aesthetically pleasing object: it uses Frankenstein’s imagery of pieces of paper being attached to the end of an ongoing, developing story. Proofreading is not flawless — I ran into a handful of typos here and there — but this is a fairly rare problem, and overall the app is an elegant-looking piece of work, tactile and classy.

I’m also delighted to see someone running with the concept of anthologized interactive narrative: curating and promoting the best material from the wide variety of freeware is still a really useful role for publishers or publisher-equivalents. And I gather that the competition leading to this anthology drew work from a wide range of authors, some of whom had no previous experience with interactive writing.

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Making of Counterfeit Monkey: Puzzles and Toys

This is the first of a couple of making-of posts about Counterfeit Monkey, in case people are interested: these are a bit like some of the making-of material I’ve published about Bronze and other games, but I’m splitting it up between story discussion and puzzle discussion.

We’ll start with puzzles. This is going to be spoilery, so if you’re still planning to play, I recommend finishing the game first.

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Zero Summer: Fifty Miles South of Lexington

Zero Summer IconIn November I wrote about the StoryNexus game Zero Summer. At the time I didn’t play their for-pay content, Fifty Miles South of Lexington, but I’ve done so now, and it deserves its own discussion. Fifty Miles is its own short story, which you can buy from within the main game of Zero Summer using Nex, once you’ve progressed far enough to move around town a bit.

From the StoryNexus perspective, Fifty Miles South of Lexington is pushing the envelope of what the engine can do. Which is a good thing! Every new storytelling engine needs some content that pushes it to or beyond its capacity; that’s how the formal capacities of the machine are discovered. Experimental stuff typically feels just a little bit odd, though, just because it is doing something that may be hacky and weird for the affordances of the toolset. Consequently, the following is a review both of the content of Fifty Miles and a discussion of StoryNexus’ ability to cope with this kind of content.

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CM Release 3

Once again, the Monkey site contains an updated release of CM that doesn’t handle all the bugs reported, but cherry-picks the ones that seem to be causing the most confusion to the greatest number of players, or that were extremely easy to fix.

Among other things, this includes improvements to the handling of the car; greater clarity in the “utilitarian-style” inventory listing about what is being carried in the backpack or worn at the moment; some debugging of issues with hard mode; and the addition of a number of objects that really ought to have been possible to generate.

Rot13’d change log for releases 2 and 3 after the break.

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Interim CM Release

Release 2 of Counterfeit Monkey is available from emshort.com. (I know, it still says release 1 on the website.) This release does not tackle all the bugs that have been reported to me, but it does handle several that were particularly significant to the play experience: one that prevented highlighting from working as it was supposed to, and two affecting the endgame that were under some circumstances preventing people from seeing all the outcomes it should have been possible to see.

I mean to tackle the rest of what’s been reported as well, of course, but as that might take a few more days to complete, I wanted to make this available now.