Author: emshortif

Mystery in London, and Incompetence as a Design Goal

Recently I tried Mystery in London, a search-for-lost-objects game. I’m not sure what possessed me to do this; possibly it was the pretty screen shots, or possibly it was curiosity about what this genre involved.

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Chocolatier 2

Or: In which I make 630 million dollars.

Some time ago, I tried Chocolatier, a game about running your own chocolate factory. Overall, I thought the game play fell short of what it wanted to be, but I had fun anyway because of the chocolatey goodness of it all. (See also Sushi Go Round.)

A few days ago, JayIsGames announced the existence of Chocolatier 2, and I downloaded the demo, figuring that I probably wouldn’t purchase the full version this time around. But in fact, they’d fixed quite a few of the things I thought were underwhelming about the original, and the second episode is considerably better rounded as a game; by the time I finished the demo hour, I was hooked. Again.

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Another day, another extension

Have uploaded to the Inform extensions page updates of Locksmith and Facing, and a new extension called Approaches. Approaches implements a GO TO… command as found in the manual, but produces somewhat more elegant output, coping with cases where the player’s movement is blocked by a door or some other kind of movement requirement. For instance:

You go north to the aforementioned unwelcoming hut, north again to the unattended pathway, north again to Paris and west to Bois du Boulogne.

or

You go north to the dusty street, then head west to the church. Entry into the church is barred without a hymnal, though.

or

You go north to the open field, then head north again to Seamus’ Hut. Unfortunately, you find you lack a key that fits the hut door.

or

You go to Crimson Chamber by way of Grooved Channel, Shallow Jade Amphitheater, Silver Filigree Prison and Mandarin Casket Room.

or… well, many other variations of your own devising, really. If you try it, though, remember to make sure you have the new Locksmith, too.

Three Room Description Styles

As die-hard I7 authors may know, I’ve had available for some time a Room Description Control extension which allows for greater control over how room descriptions are printed — in particular, what we want to leave out, and what order we want to print descriptions in.

Room Description Control requires, though, a kind of front-end extension as well, to form the paragraphs of the description. Until now, there have been two options, neither of which really conforms to the default Inform description.

I have now released a third version, Ordinary Room Description, which tries to stick as close as possible to the way Inform prints descriptions by default, allowing the author to use the special abilities of RDC without giving up other aspects of Inform’s room description printing.

After the break there are examples of output from all three variations: Single Paragraph Description, Ordinary Room Description, and Tailored Room Description.

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