For a while I had posted a property checking extension for I7, intended to make sure that all objects and rooms in the game at least had some description defined. This turned out to be buggy because of the way the standard rules handle room descriptions, so I took it down for a time until I got around to figuring out what was wrong with it.
I have now solved this, so version 2 is up in the usual place. Apologies for the inconvenience/delay/etc.
The One Room Game Competition is a competition for games set in a single location; entries are allowed in English or Italian. This year there were five English entries, though one was written in Quest, so I skipped that. My (somewhat spoilery) reviews of the others follow:
The One-Room Game Competition is nearing the voting deadline on December 22 — but there is still time to participate! The games are generally short, and the voting requirement is that you vote on at least two games, so a couple of hours would do it.
People often ask me for examples of Glulx multimedia designs; and since I happened to be working on something with an easily extracted lesson, I’ve taken out the relevant code and made a separate project of it.
The idea is that we have a graphical sidebar along the left side of the screen that functions in place of the game’s status line. At the bottom of that sidebar, next to the command prompt, is a clickable compass rose that displays the available exits in each room, and indicates which of the exits lead to already-visited locations. (This is pretty much a combination of the screen layout from City of Secrets with the color-coded compass from Bronze.)
In a finished game, there would be cool pictures and stuff in the upper part of the status bar, or maybe a clock indicating the game time, or some kind of score-counter, or a whole glistening dashboard of steampunk gears and dials tracking seven simultaneous kinds of progress…
But for this example, we just do the compass rose. Here it is, with green letters for new places and white letters for familiar ones:
Anyway, if that all strikes you as interesting, you can try out the gblorb file. Or you can run it for yourself:
(Edited to add: the gblorb file produced will probably not run correctly under Gargoyle or Spatterlight, because they do not use the most up to date version of the Glulxe interpreter. For these purposes, I recommend Zoom on the Mac and Windows Glulxe on Windows.)
I recommend a few things you could be playing (One Room Game Comp, C40 entries) and something you could be writing.
We’re not supposed to talk about the ORGC games during the judging period, so I won’t. Of the C40 games, so far I’ve only played with Cryptographer, which aside from being implemented on the z-machine is not vastly different from other cryptogram puzzles. Still, entertaining if you like that sort of thing, and I do.
Thesis: Many of the most memorable non-player characters in IF are ones the viewpoint character already knew before the game started.
Supporting positive evidence: Michael from Anchorhead; many or perhaps most of the characters in Robb Sherwin’s games; Miss Sierra and Princess Charlotte in Varicella.
Suggested explanation: it’s really hard to get to what is interesting about someone in the first few minutes or hours of acquaintance, so in games where we’re meeting everyone for the first time, a lot of energy has to be wasted on the building of trust and mutual figuring-out.
Also, the viewpoint character can’t make any general observations about the history and personality of other characters, because he hasn’t known them long enough — so the whole tool of direct exposition is off limits. Showing and not telling is good a lot of the time, but telling can be a valuable shortcut when you want to get to the interesting parts of a relationship.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 