Category: interactive fiction

Worldsmith (Ade McT/interactive fables)

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Worldsmith belongs to a category that is still pretty rare, even in this age of growing opportunities for commercial IF: it’s for-sale parser IF. A demo is available for free, but the full version is $5.99. Not only that, but the author has collaborated with furkle (of SPY INTRIGUE fame) to skin an Inform 7 game with images, video, hyperlinks and custom menus. The surrounding images help communicate status information, with images of the NPCs you’re conversing with, and/or the planet you’re currently constructing.

Then there’s the gameplay. Worldsmith is heavy on both simulation and procedural text; I’ve seen a lot of authors start work that made ambitious use of those, but very few actually finish something of that scope and complexity.

The essential premise is that you are a world-builder in competition with several other world-builders (a very high-powered version of the Great British Bake-Off, perhaps). In order to do this, you must combine fundamental elements such as Air and Fire to make planets; set the planets in chosen orbits in your pet solar system; seed those planets with life; and then nurture the life to a degree of sentience that will survive in the wider universe and be able to leave its home planet before said planet becomes uninhabitable.

So far as I’ve seen, this is very much a systems game rather than a puzzle game. There is loads of information to learn about how various elements combine and what sorts of creatures they are likely to produce. Though you get a tutorial (a rather exasperated encounter with your teacher, who evidently feels that you really should have mastered the elements of world-construction by now), there’s a dizzying amount to retain, and you’ll likely find yourself reviewing your instruction manual quite a lot.

I haven’t managed to win. On the contrary, I’ve made a series of half-baked planets and seeded unsuccessful life on them, and needed to restart several times. (It turns out that if you teach your lifeforms too much too quickly, they’ll probably just destroy themselves, so slow up, Prometheus.) But I feel like I’m learning, so this is good restarting, rather than the bad frustrating restarting when a puzzle game has gone unwinnable.

In response to the decisions you make, your world is formed with differently described land forms, creatures, and technologies. It’s probably the closest thing to Spore-in-text-form that I’ve seen.

Still, eventually I realized that if I wanted to blog about this piece, I was going to have to go against my usual preference and write it up without having played the whole thing. So that’s a big caveat. I have some things to point out about Worldsmith but I have not seen anything near all of it, and certainly not most of its storyline.

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Reigns

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Here is Reigns, a game about managing a series of kingdoms currently available on Steam for a few dollars. (Or £1.99, for those of us buying in the UK.) The mechanics are simple. Each turn you’re presented with a choice, typically presented as a request by someone in your kingdom. Swipe left to refuse; swipe right to agree.

Your decisions affect some or all of the four stats at the top of the screen, which correspond to the well-being of the church, the populace in general, the army, and your treasury. If any of those stats reaches either maximum or minimum states, you will die and be replaced by your heir, who will start from where you left off (but with stats set back to average). Some of those death reasons are pretty contrived: make too much money and your citizens will throw a feast in your honor, where inevitably you will choke to death. But the need for balance makes this much more difficult and interesting than if it were safe to just max out your treasury, for instance.

There are a few minor complications that turn up after you’ve played for a bit: for instance, you can make decisions that add semi-permanent resources to your kingdom, such as a placement on the Silk Road that provides income every turn regardless of what else you do, or a siloing system that helps protect you in the event your kingdom runs out of food. And there’s also a combat mini-game that you can unlock after a bit of experiment.

Still, there’s a heavy component of chance here. You don’t know in advance what cards are going to turn up, and you can never just autonomously choose an action. So you may be able to see that your Treasury stat is edging up and up, dangerously close to triggering the Deathfeast, but not be able to do anything to offload your obscene wealth.

Each card also comes with a small amount of story, and because those stories are dependent on your existing stats, this feels like quality-based narrative — though without the wild proliferation of different stat types that one sees in Fallen London. Like other QBN pieces, this means it offers cause-and-effect chains the authors might not have specifically anticipated. During one of my reigns, I accepted a marriage proposal from an adjoining kingdom in order to avert a war; then I let my new wife throw a feast, but the feast bankrupted the kingdom and brought my reign to a precipitous close. Oops. Did the authors intend that sequence? Not necessarily, but it results naturally from the way stats move.

There is a longer arc that plays out over the course of multiple reigns, but it’s easy to go through a number of deaths without getting any new content for that piece of the game.

Ultimately, the story experience is a little dilute for my tastes. The tinder-style mechanic, the randomness of card availability, and the fact that you die so often, all made me sit back rather than sit forward. After all, the stakes are low (what do I care if yet another king dies of gangrene after an ill-advised boar hunt?) and my control is likewise limited. Still, Reigns is entertaining in short spurts, and I’m always interested to see new QBN-ish pieces, especially ones not written in the StoryNexus toolset.

Disclosure: I played a copy of this game that I bought with my own money.

Mid-August Links

I’ve been quiet the past month because I’ve been traveling almost the entire time, so apologies for that.

August 23, the Oxford/London IF meetup is hearing from Minkette on escape rooms, immersive theatre, and other work in the narrative of objects. We’re holding this one in a more central London location, near King’s Cross, to experiment with trying to be a bit more accessible to people who had a hard time reaching Greenwich.

Sept 1 is the deadline if you’d like to sign up to enter IF Comp this year.

Sept 4, Oxford/London IF meetup has an open problems session in Oxford.

Sept 15, Strange Tales 5 is a London event with talks on unconventional storytelling approaches.

New Releases

IntroComp games became available: these are game beginnings, submitted by various authors. Anyone is invited to vote, and voting is based on whether you would like to play the rest of the submitted work.

Christopher Huang has released a second game, Point Blank Blank, in his Peterkin series; like Mustard, Music, and Murder, it’s a logic puzzle game about alibis.

New Tools

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Amazon has made available a new tool to make interactive adventure games for their voice-activated Alexa box. The description and screenshots available so far make it look like it’s only equipped to do branching, statless CYOA-style pieces.

Meanwhile, this isn’t a tool in general release, but it might inspire some: Lea Albaugh writes about a fortune-telling machine that she built for a wedding, which incorporates procedural text generation, image recognition, card printing, and many other neat features.

In other news, I’ve started a Pinterest board on IF visualization — mostly narrative structure visualization and puzzle graphs, but a few other things as well. I haven’t tried to copy over the whole of the Twine node garden or every single CYOA graph from Sam Kabo Ashwell’s blog, but there are representative samples and links if you want to dig further.

New Reviews and Other Content

Despite being on vacation, I did pre-schedule a couple of articles for Rock Paper Shotgun: What Will You, the Detective, Do Next?, about a number of classic mystery styles rendered in IF; and Strangely Thought, in which I cover Fabricationist DeWit Remakes the World, Harrison Squared Dies Early, and several other games about deeply unusual worlds and protagonists. (Summit gets a moment, too.)

The long, long-running IF zine SPAG launched a new issue this month, which is full of interesting things. SPAG also now pays for content, so if you’re interested in writing reviews or craft articles or other IF-related material for them, you should consider pitching. I particularly recommend Lisa Brunette’s article on storytelling in hidden object games and how that’s evolved.

Mid-July Link Assortment

IF Comp 2016 is open for entry.

New Releases

From Christopher Huang, we had the small mystery puzzler Mustard, Music, and Murder. B Minus Seven released At Anchor, a brief and poetic story about searching a beach for items.

I’ve also been hearing good things about Open Sorcery, a sizable Twine game from Abigail Corfman that came out in May. One version is free, but there’s a larger, more expanded version for iOS or Android that you can buy.

Meanwhile, the Texture IF tool has a significant update and now has a library of available works and a number of improvements. The library includes new work from Jim Munroe, Robert Yang, and Jake Elliott. And if your tastes run more to inkle’s tool ink, the new inky project provides an editor for working with that system.

The Willow Effect is a PC-only IF game (so I haven’t tried it). It’s currently gathering support on Steam Greenlight, though the game is also already available on itch.io.

images-across-a-shattered-sea-stewart-c-bakerImages Across a Shattered Sea is new from Steward C. Baker on Sub-Q Magazine, though reprinted from Writers and Illustrators of the Future 32. Unless I’m misunderstanding (conceivable!), the original version was non-branching text, and that it has been reworked for Twine: in the current version, it’s structurally an unfriendly gauntlet until the final act, when there are branches leading to two more fully-fleshed outcomes.

It’s an interesting piece for several reasons, but one is that it reads very much as something that comes from the genre expectations of SFF publishing, rather than from the genre expectations of traditional or Twine IF. The first several pages are about setting up the rules of this universe, in order to then explore what they can do.

Coverage

It’s been a good time for IF coverage. Here’s Extreme Tech on the Hadean Lands release, and Rock Paper Shotgun on Killing Time at Lightspeed (not from me!).

Impish Words, Spirited Games is a Facebook page devoted to IF news, if you like following this kind of thing on FB.

BlogHer interviews Melissa Ford about her book introducing Twine for younger writers. Meanwhile, Anna Anthropy has written a kids’ book introducing Twine and other game-making tools; Kill Screen has an interview with her about the project.

Craft

This ctrl500 post on cyclical patterns in dungeon design has some techniques that work for traditional IF maps and multiple-solution puzzles as well.

Related Disciplines

Here’s a review of a tabletop version of an escape room. This sounds slightly strange — the sense of immediate presence is essential to what escape rooms are about, generally — but it sounds potentially entertaining.

Jim Munroe on Texture and “Pretty Sure”

Texture is a tool for choice-based interactive fiction, but one with explicit verbs rather than simple links in the text. Designed to feel natural on touch screen devices as well as in the browser, it lets you drag a verb from the bottom of the screen and position it over one or more hot spots in the text.

Here I’ve dragged a “remember” tag to hover the highlighted “your son” text, constructing my own command:

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A beta version of Texture has been around for a while – I first wrote about it in late 2014, and Jim Munroe and Juhana Leinonen have been working on it on and off since then. But that early version was still lacking a number of features. The new iteration is much more complete, both in terms of what the tool can do (better handling of variables and lasting state from page to page) and as a player-facing experience. The new version launched with a small but impressive library of titles, with new works from Jim Munroe, Robert Yang (who has often starred here before), and Jake Elliott (Kentucky Route Zero).

Jim’s big contribution is Pretty Sure, a short story about parenting: I would say a science fiction story, and there are science fictional elements, but it’s really mostly a story about human interactions and responsibilities. Jim was kind enough to talk with me about the making of Pretty Sure and the design decisions that went into it.

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