What follows is totally spoilery commentary on a partial playing of Jon Ingold’s “Make It Good”, with some speculations based on the game state I’m currently in. So I strongly recommend not looking unless you’ve played the game (it’s enough fun not to want spoiling) or have at least put in a few hours’ playtime (in which case you may be more or less where I am).
La la la la la etc…
Another game from Spring Thing: this time it’s Jim Aikin’s A Flustered Duck. But first, we must fill this space with something for the RSS feed. Perhaps I can interest you in a recipe for tea-smoked duck? Or duck with pomegranate sauce? If cooking isn’t your thing, perhaps you’d like to order duck in a dark-chocolate demi or a crisp duck cake small plate?
Oh, all right, I suppose live ducks are okay too. Forward we go, and there are more than usually SPOILERS ahoy.
Jon Ingold has released a new detective game in the mold of Infocom’s Witness.
I haven’t played more than a little way into it, but it looks like hard-boiled goodness and all the ANALYZE and ARREST fun I remember from Deadline. Just the status bar with its fussy details about time and whether I’m wearing gloves… well, it gives me a little reminiscent thrill.
On the other hand, “Make It Good” looks a good bit more novice-friendly than those Infocom mystery offerings, which is terrific, since they weren’t very.
It’s available now for download or for online play via Parchment.
New Homer in Silicon is now up. (Yeah, it’s soon after my previous column, but that one was a bit late coming out, I think to avoid overlap with the GDC coverage.)
I am looking at another Spring Thing game, this time Richard Otter’s Vague.
Here is where we fill in the RSS feed with meaningless chatter of some kind. I’m going to use this space to mention that apparently PlayFirst is having an April sale, so if you’re thinking of trying Emerald City Confidential or one of the Chocolatier games, this is a good time to do it. I haven’t posted my review of Wandering Willows yet, but I’ve tried that too — it’s very cute and a bit more grind-y than I prefer, but very well polished; if you like the demo, you’ll probably really enjoy the remainder of the game. And in general I am in favor of PlayFirst’s branching out and sponsoring many styles of game beyond the typical match-3/time management/hidden object stuff associated with that market.
Anyway! With that spoiler-free bit out of the way, let us proceed to the game.
So Alabaster lately has really been feeling like that Zeno’s paradox in which Achilles can only run 1/2 of the remaining distance, and then 1/2 again, and the finish line always remains right where it was…
However. Had a really miserable bit last night/this morning when I thought that a beta-tester had turned up a deep-seated bug in the way Alabaster (and the core library) parse quip names, and that this bug was so heinous that the only way to fix it was going to be to meddle with the parser template at the I6 level, and that, besides, this showed something rather discouraging about I7’s flexibility, and in general ARGH.
But no, actually, the problem was something completely stupid (but hacky and baroque) that I’d done a few months ago to try to reduce the number of times I7 had to consult grammar lines when parsing quips. I took the ugly machinery out again and now it all parses right.
Have also implemented a bunch more of the art program. It is starting to look a lot more coherent to my eye, while retaining a number of subtle ways of communicating changes in the underlying game state.
Added two of Aaron Reed’s extensions for newbie-friendliness, Smarter Parser and Poor Man’s Mistype.
Edited the game’s help text.
Added a tutorial mode to offer a new player some detailed hints here and there — I mean, Alabaster’s conversation system is already giving a lot of hints about the kinds of things that the player can do, but the tutorial mode gives additional guidance about non-conversational commands.
Still outstanding: run the current version past the artist, incorporate any additional material from him; rebuild the website as appropriate for a finished release of the game; provide links to accelerated Git for different platforms, so that people can play the most streamlined possible version of the thing.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 