Author: emshortif

Indigo

The Indigo New Language Speed-IF a couple of months ago challenged people to write games in languages they hadn’t used before, based somehow around the theme of Indigo. I don’t do a lot of Speed-IF these days — I have less time than I used to, and it’s seldom that the parameters suggest to me an idea I think would really be a fun, solid concept.

However, this particular challenge was based around something I had been meaning to do anyway (try writing something in TADS 3) at a time when I happened to have temporary access to a Windows machine on which I could run the TADS Workbench. The name “Indigo” suggested a game in the same series with Bronze, Alabaster, and Glass, and I happened to have a puzzle mechanic in mind that I’d been wanting to try out for a while but didn’t think was extensible enough for a full-length game.

So I gave it a try, and it was a good time. There was enough guidance in the library and Eric Eve’s manuals that I was able to get my idea up and running, with several complete puzzles, in the couple of days I had available for coding. I also tried to go with the grain of the library and capitalize on the strengths of the system. Much of the puzzle design is essentially found art: I found library classes that looked promising or that I just wanted to try out (the candle, the odor that announces itself when the containing object is opened, various types of travel connector) and then spun puzzles around them. I think it would have been harder for me to finish in the time available if I’d gone in with a more specific design in mind.

The result is inevitably rough-cut. There wasn’t time to run a beta-test, and the about text mendaciously claims there are hints (because I was planning to do that with the hint class provided, and then got confused and totally ran out of time). And thanks to the weird conditions under which I wrote it, it would be hard to release an update. I’ve never had much luck setting up TADS 3 on my Mac laptop (possibly thanks to user error); the Windows machine where I wrote Indigo was borrowed and is no longer available to me.

On the other hand, Indigo has a puzzle mechanic that I’m pleased with. I’m less sure that it is effective at telling the story I had in mind — a version of Rapunzel that entirely omits the prince — but the most important elements are there. People who played it on ClubFloyd told me they enjoyed it, even in its current condition. So, not a major release and not one that conforms to my usual expectations about testing and polish, but for the people who have expressed interest, it’s here.

Plotting for Interactivity: The Set-Piece or Crisis

This is the first post of a sequence on plotting and interactivity, each taking on a traditional fiction-writing task and then talking about how that task is altered by the presence of player choice. The series is agnostic about whether interaction is through challenging gameplay (solving puzzles, shooting, etc., as in old-style text adventures and modern video games), is expressed through multiple-choice options (as in choose-your-own-adventure books), or is communicated in some other
way.

A set-piece is a big scene the reader can see coming and can look forward to a while, either in fear or in hope, before it’s reached… seeing a scene like that coming, watching it build to crisis, is one of the major ways of creating tension, drama, and suspense in a story. — Ansen Dibell, Elements of Fiction Writing – Plot

A set-piece needs, more than any other scene, to be tightly paced and move forward quickly. It needs to meet player expectations — deliver information we were expecting to find out, bring in conflicts or connections we anticipated — and yet it needs to provide a spin on the narrative that sends us off looking for something new. Those are the story requirements.

Continue reading “Plotting for Interactivity: The Set-Piece or Crisis”