Design Notes for Comp Games

The IF Comp is now over — full results and stat breakdown here — and a number of authors have been posting post-mortems and notes about their thoughts while writing. I love reading these things, as they’re often revealing insights into people’s processes.

They are, of course, spoilery by their nature, so read with care.

Coloratura (and see also earlier posts for details on specific aspects of the design)
Solarium
Moquette, plus a second post about technical features
Machine of Death
Threediopolis
Tex Bonaventure (specifically the final puzzle)
Impostor Syndrome
Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder
The House at the End of Rosewood Street

#PRACTICE2013

Practice 2013 got off to an excellent start with a talk about breaking competitions. This is an area I know basically nothing about, so it was fascinating to hear about the issues involved: subjective vs (supposedly) objective methods of scoring bboy battles, cultural concerns around commercialization vs retaining a “raw” (and thus more authentic) battle experience, gender issues, and the degree to which bboy performances resist being made more accessible.

Several people in the audience compared bboy competitions to Street Fighter matches, but I’m not a very competitive player of video games.

I am, however, very interested both in playing and in attempting to create virtuosic games — pieces that inspire awe and surprise because they accomplish something that one would assume was impossible. I sometimes feel a bit guilty about this taste because skill is not the only criterion of quality, and because I do not want games culture to be as exclusionary as breaking culture appears to be. Talking only about high-end craft can make it seem like one is only interested in showing off or placing people in hierarchies of skill.

Still, watching the breaking battle after tonight’s talk reminded me of the human value of virtuosity. Because those dancers were amazing. Watching them was exciting and surprising and funny and joyous.

Admittedly I may be the only person on earth who yells “Holy shit!” when I see some really awesome parsing taking place.

Reminder: Oxford Publishing Society Evening, 20 November

We are fast approaching the talk Graham Nelson and I are giving at the Oxford Publishing Society Evening. Several other cool people are talking as well about games and ebooks. Drinks etc. start at 6:30 PM, talks at 7:15.

Normal price for non-OPuS members £10.00; there’s a special price for readers of this blog, £5.00. This is paid at the door (where presumably you just tell them that you read about the offer here).

Registration, directions and information about the other speakers is here.

IF meet-up in the UK?

I’ve moved to Oxford, and that means I’m no longer in range of the Seattle IF crowd or other local US meetups. I could see starting something in the UK, though, if there were interest. This could be something along the lines of PR-IF, the Seattle IF group, or the SF Bay IF meetup: a chance to get together and talk about craft, share tools and works in progress, possibly play games together, and whatever else seemed interesting to the members.

There are some indications of curiosity on Twitter, but I know not everyone follows there. So:

Halloween IF

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Fallen London has some new content for Halloween, and as I haven’t been back in a while, I headed over to check this out.

Fallen London has changed a good bit since I last spent significant amounts of time there. Some of the more grindy bits now let you just pay a larger number of actions all at once (5, often) in order to get an immediate effect. The Bazaar has new goodies in it that I haven’t seen before. The game of Knife and Candle has been completely redesigned.

What really excites me about “Hallowmas”, though, is that they’re trailing some of their end-of-story content, and also some in-game tie-ins to their forthcoming, much-anticipated Sunless Sea. I’ve been curious for a long time to see how they wrap up some of the strands of this story, especially since what I do know about it is pretty awesome.

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Mike Snyder released a Twine game for Halloween, Hallowmoor, about an epic battle between witches and skeletons in a fantasy kingdom. I haven’t finished it myself, but it’s substantial and highly polished. It’s also an interesting one for people who care about the formal relationship between Twine and parser games, since it’s got a bunch of features — a dynamic, updating map; a compass rose that shows exits; an inventory with usable objects; state that tracks the location of NPCs — that I associate more with parser pieces. There are also definitely puzzles, including a clever body-swapping mechanic.

(Full disclosure: I’m stuck about halfway in, at the moment.)

Ectocomp is a yearly IF competition with games written about a Halloween theme, with three hours or less allowed for development time. This year there are a startling twenty-four entries, many from authors you may already have heard of.

So far I’ve only had a chance to try a small handful of them, but there are some entertaining bits here, and most will only take a few minutes to play.

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Anna Anthropy has a CYOA out called a very very VERY scary house. It’s highly-branching, low-state stuff, telling the story of a couple of pre-teens breaking into a suspicious mansion, in the spirit of early CYOA haunted house books crossed with Encyclopedia Brown. (Also, as far as I can tell, family-friendly.)