Uploaded to the Inform extensions site a small extension that adds some tutorial advice to any game: specifically, it introduces LOOK, EXAMINE, TAKE, DROP, INVENTORY, and compass directions, as well as the meta-commands, in an order that depends on the opening layout of the game.
The tutorial mode can be turned off (of course), and its specific advice may be replaced with alternative instructional rules.
Often in IF design I think back to an old Gamasutra post on rapid game prototyping. (For a while I couldn’t find it again, having sort of sketchy memories of when it ran or what a good search term would be. But now I have, I thought it might interest other people as well.) I particularly like this bit:
“Juice” was our wet little term for constant and bountiful user feedback. A juicy game element will bounce and wiggle and squirt and make a little noise when you touch it. A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do — tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input. It makes the player feel powerful and in control of the world, and it coaches them through the rules of the game by constantly letting them know on a per-interaction basis how they are doing.
IF doesn’t do wiggles and squirts much, but it has its own kind of juice — fun and unique responses to as many commands as possible. And to judge by the success of Lost Pig and Suveh Nux on JayIsGames, I think this is part of what gives IF its appeal with newbies and people who aren’t hardcore IF fans.
When I plan plot-heavy IF, I think of it in terms of a sequence of scenes. This doesn’t mean that the gameplay needs to be rigidly linear: scenes can occur in varying orders, or there can be plot branches, or scenes that can be skipped depending on player action. But I nonetheless do the organization in terms of scenes. A scene has a definite beginning and a definite end. It usually has to take place in a specific area of the game map (which may mean that the player triggers it by entering that area [as in City of Secrets] or that I move the player myself when the scene is scheduled to start). Following some writing advice I got long ago, I try to make most of the scenes end with some kind of clear hook. At the end of the scene, the player should ideally have a new take on what is happening, or a new problem to solve, or a new question about what is going to happen next. Exciting the player’s curiosity about something is especially powerful in getting the player to keep playing.
But the conventional writing advice tends to be insufficient when it comes to the types of scene that IF supports. I find that in interactive fiction my scenes tend to come in several styles, identifiable by the sort of interaction I expect from the player.
In rough order of intensity, they are
The current issue of PC Plus (in the UK) is carrying a tutorial I wrote on interactive prose and description. (Code samples in Inform, but the design advice applies to other languages as well.) This is one of two; the second piece, on action design, is due (I think!) for next month.
Recently there has been a bit of an argument raging on several blogs about how much a game idea stands alone, how much it’s worth without any implementation, apropos of Squidi’s 300 game mechanics page.
I’m not going to dive into this debate, mostly because the point I’d want to make has already been made eloquently and repeatedly by other people: that the process of implementation includes a certain amount of further design work, raises questions that aren’t covered by the original specification, and so on. It tends to warp an idea in other, subtler ways, too. (A great book on this, not about game design but about art, is Baxandall’s Patterns of Intention
On the other hand, not every game idea is viable even in its basic form: it’s either not a description of anything that could be elaborated (because it’s about incidental features of the game), or it leads inevitably to terrible implementation problems. So Squidi has genuinely accomplished something by serving up an assortment of ideas at least some of which are really pretty decent starting places.
I occasionally look through the search terms that have led people to this site, to see whether I’m providing what people are hoping to find, and one of the things semi-frequently mentioned is “ideas for interactive fiction” or “if premises” or the like. I wonder what these people are looking for — maybe, in fact, something like Squidi’s list, only IF-specific instead of directed to other kinds of (primarily video) games.
Short essay question:
Suppose someone handed you a brand shiny new library for implementing conversation in IF. What kind of thing would you want to use it for? What options do you want to make sure have been accounted for? [more inside]
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 