Several people have suggested to me that we should do more demo fairs in the future. I’m not done wrapping up the last tasks for this one — I’m still finishing the SPAG coverage, and I owe mail to some authors — so the prospect of running one again myself is vaguely daunting. But in case it’s useful in the future, here are some postmortem thoughts.
Have just sent in a couple of fixes for extensions to do with description.
Version 10 of Room Description Control: a minor fix to get rid of deprecated phrases. If you’re not worried about the presence of “change foo to bar”, there’s no need to update this one.
Version 4 of Single Paragraph Description: a significant bug fix. Changes to Inform internals meant that SPD was incorrectly noting which items needed to be reported in the room description. The new version gets rid of the crufty I6 inclusions of the previous version — which weren’t working right now anyway — and replaces them with native I7. It also introduces the feature of respecting BRIEF and SUPERBRIEF: in those cases, it won’t print the description text for the current room, but will still list non-scenery items.
These should show up on the extensions website soon.
Homer in Silicon this time is on a visual novel called Matches and Matrimony, which (as you may already guess) lets you play through a Jane Austen plot or three.
Just mailed off a couple of extension updates:
Version 4 of Measured Liquid fixes a bug whereby unblocking the rule against swimming in a lake didn’t actually make it possible for the player to swim there. A new example tests this behavior to guarantee its compliance in future builds. There is also a tiny cosmetic tweak to a situation that arose only when an NPC had been commanded to drink a liquid and that was producing the output
Clark drinks the crantini, leaving the empty cocktail glass empty.
The first “empty” is now omitted from output, as it was for the player.
Version 4 of Approaches removes remaining deprecated “change” phrases (I swear I thought I’d already taken care of that, but hey ho) and also gets rid of a bug that produced a runtime error in the example “Easy Keys.” (Tighter type-checking in Inform wasn’t letting it get away with something that had worked previously.)
These should appear on the Inform extension page in due course.
Prise multiple is a new project from François Coulon, creator of Le Reprobateur (“The Reprover”) on which I previously wrote here and here. Like Le Reprobateur, Prise multiple (“Multiple Takes” or else “Multiple Sockets”) allows the player to play with and recombine pieces of a story never fully spelled out, using segments of live video. The piece consists of a number of short scenes (listed down the left side of the screen), each performed four times with a different arrangement of actors. (One of them is the lead actor from Le Reprobateur.) Reshuffling the actors is rather fun, because they have distinctly different personal styles ranging from grave to smarmy. And the videos are very carefully timed to make this trick work; I hate to think of the technical effort that must have gone into making sure the dialogue timings were exact enough for easy switching.
The story that emerges is not meant to be taken seriously. The main character sits at his desk, haranguing three subordinates who never themselves speak, and who might from context be agents, policemen, private detectives, or something else entirely. (There is at one point a reference to their possessing uniforms, but they certainly don’t dress in uniforms during the shots we see.) The world of these characters has been overrun by “the punks,” who are responsible for everything wrong — from terrorism at the airport to cannibal attacks. The characters are largely off-hand about these disasters. (“The nuclear apocalypse that struck mankind two years ago… you remember it?”) Over the various scenes Prise multiple echoes and mocks many of the common tropes of disaster plots and superhero movies, from specific threats (kidnapping, hostage-taking, radiation, virus attacks, terrorists, cyborgs, space aliens, invisible ninjas) to the girlfriend you can’t keep because your enemies will get her and the hero with the suddenly-revealed tragic past.
As the themes of the work emerged, I often wondered whether I was missing something about French culture. If it is common to blame crimes on “the punks” in French news or political commentary, then perhaps there is more of a social critique here than I am entirely equipped to recognize.
From the perspective of someone perhaps lacking this context, Prise multiple is altogether a slighter piece than Le Reprobateur, and not particularly a game, but it is quirkily appealing.
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”
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 