Threediopolis is a parser-based wordplay game with minimal story, running probably at least half an hour and possibly quite a bit more, depending on how fiercely you choose to avoid hints and walkthrough helps. No spoilers in the review.
Continue reading “IF Comp 2013: Threediopolis (Andrew Schultz)”
The House at the End of Rosewood Street is a surreal, parser-based game centered on the life of an odd-jobs man. It’s one of the more sizable games I’ve run into in the comp so far.
Continue reading “IF Comp 2013: The House at the End of Rosewood Street (Michael Thomét)”
Our Boys in Uniform is a choice-based game focused on a political reading of American history, propaganda, and claims of exceptionalism. Review after the jump, any spoilers after a longer spoiler space.
Continue reading “IF Comp 2013: Our Boys in Uniform (Megan Stevens)”
Reels is a choice-plus-text-input-driven game with a minimal slice-of-life framing story. Review follows the break.
Robin & Orchid is a parser-based slice-of-life puzzle game about some kids hanging out in a church basement, looking for ghosts. It took me the full two hours to play, and could have taken longer had I not resorted to hints.
Continue reading “IF Comp 2013: Robin & Orchid (Ryan Veeder and Emily Boegheim)”
Chris Conley has now released Threaded Conversation, a much updated and revised edition of the Inform extension I used for Alabaster and Counterfeit Monkey. You can download it here.
Threaded Conversation’s purpose is to create prompted dialogue for conversation-rich games, and to deal with parsing ask/tell input intelligently. It also comes with an extension called Conversation Builder that allows for developing conversation dynamically, the way Alabaster did in its input-gathering stages. Chris has added significant amounts of new work past where I was able to take the project, though: beta-testing, cleaning up code, and in particular revising the icky bit of code that handles parsing input when the player types a conversation command but the conversation hasn’t officially started yet, which has to figure out who’s being addressed and then restart the parsing process afresh once it has the proper context for reading the subsequent speech keywords. (Trust me, this is icky, and it was pretty broken in the code iteration I handed off to Chris.)
I’m very grateful to Chris for taking this over for me at a point where things became too busy for me to keep up, and putting so much of his own thought and effort into it. I hope folks will find it useful.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 