From Introcomp 2011, “Chunky Blues” is a noir mystery set in the town of Bleakton, MA, with some pleasingly innovative puzzle mechanics.
The first part of my feedback is not spoilery, and talks about the puzzle mechanics in general. Then there’s a spoiler space, followed by some more specific discussion of what I think does and doesn’t work.
A couple of the submissions to the Demo Fair focused on procedural generation of content or of surface text. (There was meant, in fact, to be another demo to do with narrative generation that didn’t get finished in time; a real pity.) This wasn’t something I’d explicitly suggested as a focus for the program, but it emerged from the process a bit.
Continue reading “IF Demo Fair themes: procedural generation”
Recently on the intfiction forum someone asked me how to code puzzles in I7. I found that a bit of a stumper, but I cobbled something together, and he liked the answer enough that he suggested I post the reply more permanently on my blog. So I’m doing that, with a little bit of editing and fleshing out.
Continue reading “Coding Puzzles”
I’ve tried to play this a couple of times before and never gotten anywhere with it, in at least one case because I didn’t realize I needed the feelies. This time I’ve actually gotten inside the pyramid.
I usually find Infocom a curious mix these days: I loved them at the time but now I have ingrained habits that make me impatient. Infidel doesn’t understand “X” for examine, or accept UNDO at all; needs to be manually set to a fixed-width font because it doesn’t have separate parameters for font types; and features food, thirst, and inventory management to a degree I’ve never liked. (Admittedly, given the setting, I find it more convincing than in many another game that the protagonist really might die from not having water frequently enough. But it still makes for a frustrating experience.) Oh, and did I mention the inadequately-clued sudden deaths? And the object you can ATTACK over and over for many snarky messages, when the solution is to BREAK it?
Still, I have to say that (even though I’m only a little way into it), I really like the hieroglyph puzzles: the player encounters ASCII art messages on the wall, and has in the feelies a glossary of a few of the symbols, but must construct an understanding of the rest from context and comparison.
This is (obviously) a very old technique and yet still sadly uncommon. I very much want to see more of systematic puzzles in IF — ones that rely on some consistent physical or magical principle, or build up some knowledge base, or have a nifty gadget that can be used in a variety of clever ways. There are already some great examples: the magic grammar in Suveh Nux, the orgy of physical destruction/elimination puzzles in Conan Kill Everything and To Hell in a Hamper, the superpowers in Earth and Sky and Heroine’s Mantle, the alliteration puzzles in Ad Verbum, the linguistic recognition puzzles in Letters From Home, the combat puzzles in Gun Mute and its ilk, and the diverse uses of the main device in Adventurer’s Consumer Guide. The learnable spells in Enchanter and its sequels sort of qualify, but only sort of, because most of the spells are so specialized and so few of the spells interact; but Balances offers a satisfying twist on this idea. Sam Kabo Ashwell also has a list of “Distinctive Puzzle Style” games based on similar criteria, though it only partly overlaps with mine.
Yet for every one of these, there are distressingly many games with very ordinary puzzles.
So I finished! Won! Yay!
(No, you don’t understand. That was REALLY HARD. I don’t remember the last time I was playing a game with this degree of obsessive absorption… “Blue Lacuna” was also absorbing but in a different way, as I spent a lot of time kind of floating pleasantly around and/or inactively stuck. Here I spent a lot of time actively stuck, trying and retrying solutions…)
Anyway, some only-very-mildly spoilery remarks after the cut.
I’ve been thinking again about actions and how they’re expressed, and how the communication of an action relates to player agency.
Let’s say, for now, that agency is the player’s ability to affect the world and story, and it depends, in turn, on whether the player can form a reasonable guess about the results of an action before taking that action. If the player cannot guess or does not care where the action will lead, there is no agency; the player is providing the energy for forward motion but is not meaningfully steering the work.
The thing is, different kinds of actions are themselves susceptible to different degrees of agency. We’ve been moving slowly (and with varying degrees of success) away from having all IF commands be of the sort appropriate to physical action.
If we consider the types of agency involved in different kinds of action in the real world, we will be able to come up with better ways for the player to command non-physical actions.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 