Style | StandardCards

Planet Interactive Fiction

Wednesday, 20. November 2024

Zarf Updates

Remembering Kory Heath

We learned yesterday that we lost game designer Kory Heath. Sad news—my dear friend and collaborator, Kory Heath, after enduring years of chronic pain and depression, ended his life. He was a genius, also funny, kind, patient. I'm so grateful ...

We learned yesterday that we lost game designer Kory Heath.

Sad news—my dear friend and collaborator, Kory Heath, after enduring years of chronic pain and depression, ended his life. He was a genius, also funny, kind, patient. I'm so grateful we could spend so many years, laughs, and tears together, and that he knew he was deeply loved by all of his friends. --@cooperjohn.bsky.social, Nov 19

A table with groups of colored plastic pyramids. Each group is marked with a black stone or a white stone. Photo by Andrew Petrarca, BGG

Kory's best-known game was Zendo, a deduction challenge game and an absolute masterpiece of elegant design.

In the above image, what rule distinguishes white-marked groupings from black-marked groupings?

In this example, each group is two or three pyramids, not necessarily touching. Only the pyramids matter for the rule. The stones just mark whether the rule fits the group or not. Answer in BGG link.

A screenshot of a green grid with a purple block. A screenshot of a Werewolf game, with nine tiny avatars on the setup screen. Blockhouse and Werewolf.

But Kory was wildly active. He did an early iPhone sliding-block puzzler called Blockhouse, and an iPhone implementation of Werewolf. Look at all our baby faces playing Werewolf... That was a non-networked implementation! You passed the phone around. (Online mobile games were hard in 2009.)

Both games are long gone from the app store, of course. (Keeping an iPhone game running for fifteen years is even harder.)

His final work was The Gang, in collaboration with John Cooper. I know nothing about it; I didn't even know it was out. That's on me. I lost touch.

I wrote last night that I knew Kory when I lived near him and John and Andy Looney in the late 1990s. This memory turns out to somewhat confused. Kory moved to the DC area around 1999 or 2000; by that time I had moved (back) to Pittsburgh. But I visited DC regularly in those years, and we all went to the same gaming conventions. So I saw "the gang" regularly. Kory was always in the middle of it.

Kory was great. I don't want to go on because other folks have said it better. But genuinely a genius, creative, a nice guy. Just entirely nice.

I ran into Kory at GDC, it might have been 2016 or 2017. He was working on some kind of mobile game idea. At the time, I might have been too. We were both excited about each others' work.

I don't know what happened to that. I wish he'd had more success and better health and less pain. He could have had a lot of stuff left in him.

Other people posting memories:


Renga in Blue

Ultimate Adventure (1982)

So, let’s be honest, we’ve been through a lot. We’ve fought dragons, traveled through time, explored futuristic cities, and raided Egyptian tombs. We’ve encountered some of the toughest puzzles ever written, and even conquered some of those without looking anything up. We’ve defeated a demon lord (twice) and re-enacted the “you shall not pass” scene […

So, let’s be honest, we’ve been through a lot.

We’ve fought dragons, traveled through time, explored futuristic cities, and raided Egyptian tombs. We’ve encountered some of the toughest puzzles ever written, and even conquered some of those without looking anything up. We’ve defeated a demon lord (twice) and re-enacted the “you shall not pass” scene with a balrog by destroying a bridge. We are now an ultimate adventurer, and we need an ultimate game to match.

We need a game where we face off against bears, sharks, squids, meteors from the sky, and we PUNCH THEM IN THE FACE.

Via World of Dragon.

Ultimate Adventure is by Phil Edwardson of Americus, Kansas, who studied printing technology in the 70s; this is his only amateur effort. It is another one of the games from tapemag Chromasette that ended up getting picked up by Microdeal for a Dragon port. (See: Mansion Adventure.) As a brief reminder, CLOAD was the very first tapemag and published for TRS-80, and Chromasette was a spin-off started after the Tandy CoCo became available.

From the May 1982 issue, in which Ultimate Adventure appears.

I also need to make a correction, as I previously implied CLOAD must have had better sales than Chromasette due to the rarity of the latter. According to the editor Dave Lagerquist, Chromasette actually exceeded CLOAD in sales (he estimated 3000 subscriptions at its peak, although he didn’t remember if it was 3000 for each publication or 3000 combined). In the same interview he mentions — relevantly for today — that CLOAD submissions had gone through a hobbyist-to-professional cycle as people started to master programming for the original TRS-80, so that by the time Chromasette kicked off in the summer of 1981, TRS-80 Model 1/3 programming had “matured” into complex machine code games; the Tandy CoCo’s debut in September 1980 essentially “reset the stage” so people were experimenting and writing hobbyist work again.

Also from the May 1982 issue.

Ultimate Adventure, despite the name, is only marginally an adventure. It belongs in the strategy-adjacent genre seen most recently with the Apex Trading Haunted House and not recently at all with Lance Miklus Treasure Hunt.

The goal is to obtain $1000, starting with $250. The starting money is because everything needs to be bought; there are no puzzle-solving items to be found “in the field”.

The small-ish map of the game consists of various biomes connected by “portholes”. These portholes are “teleportation portals” and normally just behave like rooms but there is a random chance one will send the player to a different location.

Yellow marked rooms are the “puzzles”. For example, you are unable to enter outer space without a space suit on. You are unable to dive underwater without scuba gear. The game is fairly polite about telling you what’s wrong.

Going back to that price list, the knife and the gun are weapons, some items help protect against a hazard which might or might not appear. Consider, for example, the “fur coat” which clearly goes to the arctic; you may simply not get cold in the arctic by luck, and even if you do, it will be a decrease of strength points penalty, rather than the end of the game.

Even if you don’t have a weapon, you can still try (as the game’s instructions suggest) typing HANDS and getting through via chutzpah. Here are two different results from punching a bear:

The CLUE will let you know where a treasure is hidden…

…and buying the shovel will probably do something useful? I never quite figured out if it helped with the treasures or not.

Other than random encounters with biome-appropriate hazards…

The game is prompting for an item here.

…the gameplay consists of visiting each one and typing SEARCH. This may or may not yield a treasure. A little “line moving” animation accompanies the search.

Multiple searches tend to be required. Each search is accompanied by a random chance of a bad hazard. For example, while searching underwater I found a treasure (SUNKEN TREASURE WORTH $224) but I got set upon by a giant octopus in the process.

The helpful thing — the thing that makes the game manageable — is that one of the rooms is an Infirmary. When you step inside your strength, which tends to get battered around by the various hazards of the game, gets restored to full. This place can be re-visited as many times as you like.

This ends up making the game more or less just a matter of patience. While it can be un-nerving to searching through a mine field without appropriate protection, you can try to literally punch anything to get your way out of it.

Hazards can roll at any turn, and that can include right after encountering another hazard. So it is possible to get three polar bears in a row charging, and it likely is even more possible if the difficulty is cranked (it goes from 1 easy, to 5 hard).

I have no trouble with strategy, but Ultimate Adventure doesn’t really scratch that itch: it doesn’t have any interesting choices to make other than “do you push your luck searching, or go back to the infirmary now”. A very young me desperate for entertainment might try to scrounge the turn count down but again, the game is lacking in the ambiguous choice and multiple viable routes that really makes a strategy game work.

We did get to punch tigers! And landmines, somehow.

Tuesday, 19. November 2024

top expert

let’s TEST IF #1: being a playtester

Did you answer the author’s questions? playtesting is a way of life. Note: I write about my experiences writing about and making parser games, though most of this essay is not system-specific. We’ve been talking about making games for quite a while now, but we haven’t talked about testing them. Playtesting is essential to making […]

Did you answer the author’s questions?

playtesting is a way of life.

Note: I write about my experiences writing about and making parser games, though most of this essay is not system-specific.

We’ve been talking about making games for quite a while now, but we haven’t talked about testing them. Playtesting is essential to making a good game. If you follow larger IF events that have review threads at intfiction.org, you have likely seen again and again reviews that mention testing, as in: “this needed more testing,” or “this problem would have come up in testing,” or “these typos would have been caught during testing,” or “this content warning should have been run by testers.” Off and away on some shadowy discord somewhere, someone might say, “playtesting would have prepared the author for these reactions.”

If you’ve published a game before, you can imagine how frustrating it must be for every review of your game to be about testing. Wouldn’t you rather read reviews about what is actually in your game? Reviews about bugs are disappointing: you had specific things in mind as an author: stories, or problems, or mechanics. Themes, characters. This is where you would like players to focus, most likely. Achieving this without some level of testing will usually be a matter of luck.

If you put a lot into your work, don’t skip testing. Doesn’t your game deserve the best?

There are two types of perspective or participant involved in testing a game: the author, and the tester. It’s good to try both roles, even if your main interest is testing your own work. Why? In the first place, it will be helpful for you to understand what testing is like and how the interactions go between involved parties. Second, there is the community element: help the community out! In my experience, it’s hard to find testers who vibe with your work and answer your questions. Be one of those people, be the change and all that.

More selfishly: people who test games have an easier time finding testers. Unless you’re IF famous (and I don’t mean me, I have to hustle for testers), you are going to need the goodwill. It’s for that reason that I’ll start with advice for playtesters first.

so you want to be a playtester.

If you want to test games, you need to be where people are looking for testers. For parser folks, that might be intfiction.org. You might be active on some discord servers where people talk about authorship. If you’re doing a Neo-Interactives jam, for instance, you can look for other entrants, and possibly test for one-another. The key is to hang out with other IF people. Someone will ask eventually.

Asks don’t always contain a lot of information. Don’t be afraid to ask for clarification! Here are some things I generally want to know:

  • Is there a timeline or a due date?
  • If this is a puzzle game? If so, are there hints (I’m not much of a puzzle tester)?
  • General info (genre, etc)
  • What information does the author want? As in, are there specific questions to answer?

Usually, an author will offer most of this stuff on their own. You may have other questions! If it’s a question anyone would want to know about (when is it due), I ask publicly. I might ask other questions in a PM expressing interest.

It’s good to be clear on expectations before you commit. Why? Usually, authors have a specific number of testers in mind. If you commit, you are taking up a slot. There’s an opportunity cost for the author if you back out or simply never test the game. Make a firm commitment and find out whatever you need to know if you aren’t sure.

It’s not too serious; for most games testing is a minor effort of a few hours. Just remember that authors likely have an emotional investment in their work, so try to keep promises involving it. At the same time, it’s possible that something will come up that prevents you from completing the test. That’s alright! Just be sure to let the author know right away. They will almost certainly understand. Communication, as the cliche goes, is key. Don’t make them come looking for you.

playtesting in action.

You’ve made a commitment, and now you have a game file. If you’re testing a parser game, you will want to keep a transcript. For Inform 7 works, that’s as simple as typing “transcript” at the command prompt. Alternately, the most recent version of Lectrote automatically keeps transcripts. I play exclusively with Lectrote for this reason. If you’re as forgetful as I am, you might want to consider it! You can download the latest version here.

OK, you’re transcribing your play session. Now what? Keep notes in the transcript! The convention is to type comments directly into the game, preceding your comment with an asterisk (“*”) symbol. For instance, if someone misspelled “their,” I’d key this in at the prompt:

>* "thier"

If I had a comment about a hint or a clue, I could type in something like:

>* am I supposed to do something with the frob? I'm having a hard time with this.

We can just as easily comment on the text itself:

>* great description, really strong vibes

Play the game, taking notes as you go. If you get stuck and there are no hints, message the author for help. Don’t wait too long. Sometimes, bugs seem like puzzles, so you don’t want to wait until you are intensely annoyed with the game. You probably won’t be a good tester if you are completely out of patience, so there’s no need for it to come to that! Get help from the author.

What kinds of things should you be looking for while testing and commenting? Priority number one is ANSWER THE AUTHOR’S QUESTIONS. For all you know, a professional editor is proofreading the punctuation even as you play. If you only send back comments about commas, you have spent hours on something that the author cannot use. The only thing you know for certain, so far as their needs go, is in THE AUTHOR’S QUESTIONS. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t comment on other things. Here are some ideas:

  • Since a professional proofreader is unlikely: typos.
  • Story beats.
  • Puzzles (clues, difficulty, etc.).
  • Mechanics or gameplay loop.
  • The map or game world.

Another good idea: every tester (well, usually) will finish the game. That means that the only thing that you know will be thoroughly tested is the main throughline, i.e., the critical path for finishing the game. There are no guarantees that testers have looked at anything else. Your best chance to give the author information they aren’t getting elsewhere is to get off the beaten path. Some simple ideas:

  • Try to examine everything.
  • Try pointless or even nonsensical commands like PUT [something] IN SOMETHING for many different nouns.
  • Try TAKE ALL everywhere.
  • See if there are custom error messages by doing things like typing ADLKJHASD at the prompt.
  • Be curious.

Once you get all of this together, you can write a short summary of your experience in a message containing your attached transcript. What should go in there? The first thing, of course, is to ANSWER THE AUTHOR’S QUESTIONS. What else? If there is a core loop or mechanic, give an evaluation. Would anything make it better? What makes it great? How do you feel about character, or setting? The story? Address the key elements of the game in terms of play and writing but consider going further. In my experience, it is rare to get “big picture” feedback about themes, or meaning, or just how everything is working together. This isn’t a checklist or a lit paper, of course. Even saying a little about the overall text will be helpful to the author.

What about the suggestions and their tone, though? As I already said, the author likely has an emotional investment in their work. And well they should! I suggest we bear that in mind, and honor it. Some general thoughts:

  • If there are a lot of spelling errors, suggest the author run spellcheck on the transcripts. There’s no need to note 50 spelling errors; just point them to a method for finding errors. Inform has a spellcheck option, though it may not suit the author’s needs (be aware that somebody else is probably pointing them out anyway).
  • If there are a lot of grammatical errors, I might just suggest spending more time on grammar, whether it’s looking for someone specifically willing to help out in that capacity or else running it through some sort of machine checker or productivity software. It’s worth noting that grammar can emerge from specific social conditions, so it’s good to be thoughtful (be aware that somebody else is probably pointing grammar errors out anyway).
  • The whole “say x good things for every negative thing” is a bad rule that leads to disingenuous feedback. But be sure you are saying the good things that are real.
  • If there is content that audiences will find off-putting, I wouldn’t necessarily tell an author to change it. I would tell them that audiences and critics will likely have trouble with it. One point of your feedback is to prepare them for reviews, be they good or bad. The author of a game should not be surprised if audiences dislike something. They may not care, which is the right of every artist, but they should never be surprised.
  • Your advice should always focus on helping the author meet their goals, even if you have different preferences. Saying “I don’t like reading a lot” about a game with a lot of text isn’t helping, it’s complaining. What is needed for the author to realize their vision?

What if a work seems hopeless? Completely unredeemable? Well, “unredeemable” is a very rare case. It is more likely that the author is unwilling to redeem it. That’s their business! And who knows, in the long run, they may be right. We can’t know that. All we can do is take stock of what’s in front of us. If I were a playtester of a work that appeared to have very poor prospects, I would prioritize the foundations. Anybody can fix commas, and these can be fixed very late in the development cycle. But problems with core loops or worldbuilding are nearly impossible to address in a late-phase or beta work. Tell the author where you would spend your time first.

I think I might start by saying, “Like most works in progress, a lot of polish will be needed when it comes to copyediting grammar and spelling. Those can be worked out later in the project. My advice would be to prioritize work on x, to make sure you have a solid foundation.” No lies!

Don’t argue; your goal is to give a thoughtful and constructive assessment. What an author does with it is up to them.

Take a last look at your message to make sure that you have ANSWERED THE AUTHOR’S QUESTIONS. If so, fire away! There’s no obligation to say you’d be willing to test again, but if you are, it’s nice to say so.

If you are both considerate and honest in your feedback, you have met your obligation. If you’re new to this, you’ve also learned something about what it might be like to test your own game.

Hope to see some of you over at Bluesky! I just joined.

next.

Getting your own work tested.

Categories:

One response to “let’s TEST IF #1: being a playtester”

  1. Tabitha Avatar
    Tabitha

    Great post!! I especially appreciated “The whole “say x good things for every negative thing” is a bad rule that leads to disingenuous feedback”–100% agree!–and the part on how to respond to a very rough work. Thank you!

    Like

Leave a comment


Zarf Updates

Four weeks in the blue sky

I set up a Bluesky account at the beginning of September, just to see what the process was like. (Easy, turns out.) But I didn't give it a push until around October 23rd. That's when I pinned an intro and started following people. My motivations, ...

I set up a Bluesky account at the beginning of September, just to see what the process was like. (Easy, turns out.) But I didn't give it a push until around October 23rd. That's when I pinned an intro and started following people.

My motivations, I admit, were mercenary. I was two weeks out from launching Leviathan and The Beyond, and I figured I needed swing all the social media oomph I could reach.

Well, the launch happened. (Went okay for small narrative games. Not going to pay the mortgage.) I'm still on Bluesky. It's been a sociologically interesting few weeks. I figured I'd write down my impressions.


So, the backstory. I joined Twitter "late" (November 2010). Like a lot of nerds, I enjoyed Old-Time Twitter. Then Twitter got big and people started talking about the toxicity and harassment. If I may condense a messy decade into one sentence.

I watched the whole will-they-or-won't-they Twitter acquisition saga with amusement and disgust. (Should have been terror, but we weren't thinking far enough ahead.) But I drew a line: if the deal closes, I'm outta there. Thus, in October, I said goodbye to Twitter. I logged out for good(*) and deleted all my Twitter clients.

At around the same time, I started using Mastodon for... well, about the same stuff I'd used Twitter for. That is: (a) following people who I knew personally; (b) announcing my games, blog posts, observations, and general status to a large circle of followers; (c) responding cheerfully to anybody who wanted to discuss (b).

Notice that's an asymmetric relation. On Twitter, I had way more followers than the number of people I followed. (Twitter stats looked like 3797/275, as of my 2022 data export.)

If you followed me and I didn't follow you back, I hope you weren't offended! That's just how I chose to use Twitter. I'm both introverted and mildly obsessive, so I needed to keep the Twitter (chronological) stream down to something I could absorb in short glances. If the firehose scrolled in faster than I could read it, I would try to read all of it anyway and that would be real bad.

I also needed to not watch my numbers go up. I turned those follow/like/boost notifications right off. This means that those 3797 followers certainly included a lot of bots and fake people; I didn't try to filter. Couldn't afford to.

Anyhow, I decided to use Mastodon the same way, and that worked fine. (Masto follower/following stats are 1969/247 right now, and I'm sure that's mostly real humans.) In fact I think it worked better, because I joined the mastodon.gamedev.place instance. That tilted my interactions towards "people I run into professionally or socially" and away from "the entire shuddering mass of humanity". Great!

(* I logged back into Twitter one more time, on Nov 7 2024, to press the "deactivate account" button.)


I didn't think so much about this when I waded into Mastodon. Mastodon felt quieter, but of course I was starting with a fresh account. (I certainly didn't have 1900 followers on day one!)

But now I'm wading into Bluesky, again with a fresh account. (Currently: 325/154, going up daily!) And it really is like coming back to Old-Time Twitter....

...I have mixed feelings.

In retrospect, Twitter had a lot of stuff that I was not into. And I'm not talking about the toxicity and harassment (which, I am relieved to say, never landed directly on me). I'm talking about the good social interactions. Forwarding the news of the day. Finding a new twist on the meme everybody is repeating. Retweet with your last book/teacup/Simpson's quote. "You may not like it but this is what peak <whatever> looks like." Shitposts, in the most enthusiastic sense.

People manifestly love this stuff. Bluesky is getting a huge wave of people who feel like they can finally leave Twitter without giving that stuff up. But it's not what I was on Twitter for. It's what I rolled my eyes and scrolled past so I could get to people talking.

To be clear: I'm not complaining and I don't think Bluesky needs to change. (I don't think you need to use Bluesky differently.) But scrolling past all that stuff is a bit of drag, a bit of daily energy cost. When I bailed for Mastodon, this little muscle in my neck relaxed. I didn't realize how good that was until I got onto Bluesky and felt it tense up again.


There were other surprises.

Twitter had a dense, juicy client ecosystem. I lived on Echofon (mobile) and Tweetbot (desktop). The ability to pick your interaction UI was a big part of what made Twitter work.

Mastodon was built by nerds and they brought the "client ecosystem" mindset with them. (Often the same nerds that had built the Twitter clients, after Twitter burned down the client API.) I settled on Mona but there are many options -- desktop, mobile, and web.

I took it for granted that Bluesky would work the same way. Nope! There are several web interfaces, but few client apps. On mobile I found just three: the official client, Graysky (possibly already end-of-lifed), and Skeets. Oh, I see OpenVibe too. For native desktop: nothing. Zilch.

(MacOS now lets you run iOS apps on the desktop, but this fails badly for the official Bluesky mobile app and for Graysky. I didn't try the others.)

I wound up using Safari's "open this web page as a fake app" feature on the main Bluesky page. I expect Chrome and Firefox have similar features, although I haven't looked. This works sufficiently well. In particular the web-app window doesn't share cookies with regular Safari, and it doesn't disappear when I hit Quit in Safari. (Shut up, I quit Safari all the time. I don't use tabs either.)

So I can use it, but the ecosystem speaks to a pretty narrow idea of who the Bluesky user is. Twitter got used a whole lot of different ways by different people. Mastodon embraced that plan. Bluesky may evolve that way, but it's not the current notion.

A quick example: Mastodon clients typically have a preference for "show images full-size or as thumbnails." And a preference for "hide the like/boost numbers". These allow for the different ways people with brains use the platform.

The Bluesky web interface (which, again, I'm using on desktop) does not have these prefs.

Mastodon client screenshot. The photo is a thumbnail floating right. Bluesky client screenshot. The photo fills most of the pane. Mastodon (above) and Bluesky (below) views of the same message.

I love your cat photos, I will click on your cat photos, but I don't want my stream to be 90% pixels up front.

I expect the variety of Bluesky clients will increase (even if it's all web clients). But this is the current setup. And, like I said, it's just exhausting for me in these small ways.


I said "sociology", right?

There's a pretty uniform Mastodoner take about Bluesky. This is my paraphrase, not a quote, but it's what I hear:

The folks flocking to Bluesky don't realize that it's run by the same jerks that built Twitter. (By Jack Dorsey, by venture capitalists, by crypto bros, etc.) It feels like Old-Time Twitter right now but it's going to turn into Late-Stage Twitter real quick. Or else Elon will buy it.

It's important to realize that this isn't true! I mean, yes, that's what will happen. But the people who are flocking to Bluesky, including me, know perfectly well what happened to Old-Time Twitter. And to every other VC-funded social network. The #1 thing people told me about Bluesky a month ago, when I asked, was "Enjoy it while it lasts."

I feel like this is the big shift, the reason there is no true "Twitter replacement". People are still willing to use centralized, corporate systems; but they now think about exit plans. They know that Livejournal Twitter Bluesky does not love you.

(The Bluesky protocol is in principle decentralized, but all the growth right now is the main site. Again, this may evolve over time; but today you have to think of Bluesky as having a single point of corporate failure.)

Of course this goes both ways. There's also a pretty common Bluesky take about Mastodon:

Mastodon is confusing and hard to use and the people who use it don't care. They are elitist jerks who want to keep you off their precious defederated network.

Well, I'm not saying I'm not an elitist jerk. But I hope it's clear that a small cozy network with a circle of familiar people has social value. I am genuinely happier browsing Mastodon.

This take isn't just Bluesky, either -- some of Mastodon sees itself this way. A couple of days ago I posted:

Mastodon will never be the next big thing, and that’s why I’m on Mastodon. -- @zarfeblong

No, I didn't crosspost that one to Bluesky and yes, it was a bit of a subtweet. (Subtwoot.) But that got a storm of replies. (45, which is a storm for me.) And the replies were about 96% "Amen"; 2% "You're wrong, federation is the Next Big Thing"; and 2% "You are everything that's wrong with Mastodon!" I blocked that last one, but wow.

Again, to be clear, I want Mastodon to get easier to access. (Although I have not contributed to the codebase.) I just think that being the Network With Momentum is not either an obvious or necessary goal. Especially in this time of defederation.

And, again, I will keep using Bluesky! But I will use it in a more structured, bounded way. (Also true of Discord, e.g.) I will step in, post, interact with people, and step back. I don't need to carry Bluesky on my phone -- at least not today.


I guess that, for completeness, I should cite the Bluesky/Mastodon take on Twitter:

Twitter is collapsing. Finally!

Sigh. It's a nice thought, but it's not true. Twitter is surviving just fine.

The scale of a successful Network With Momentum is genuinely hard to think about. (I'm certainly bad at it.) Twitter had almost a quarter billion daily active users in 2022, and most of those people were not your crowd.

This means that the "holy crap, everybody left Twitter and now it's just an echoing graveyard" event isn't new. It happened in October 2022. Then it happened again -- to different people -- in January 2023. And probably February and March. And several more times after that, as Elon deployed increasingly repellent rounds of shenanigans.

The point is, everybody you know can bail on Twitter and there will still be a whole lot of people left on Twitter who didn't notice any change.

I don't know how many. Twitter doesn't report meaningful numbers. Yes, I'm sure we're in the middle of a significant outflow. But this is a story of the month, not a change in the social media landscape.

The more important point: Twitter is not doomed. There is no "tipping point" beyond which it must fail. This is because Twitter doesn't need to make money.

Oh, Elon hoped it would make money. His 2022-2023 shenanigans can be comfortably explained as a series of ideas for making money off Twitter. Each idea failed (remember blue checks?) and was abandoned almost immediately in favor of a wilder idea. (Remember the universal payment app?)

But we haven't heard one of those in a while, and that's because the last one worked. To wit: monetize the tweet firehose for the input-starved AI industry. Twitter's terms of service now include LLM training; that went into effect a few days ago. And, hey look, Elon's xAI company is in the middle of raising six billion dollars.

The Generic Boring TwEslaXSpAIce Empire can lose lots of money on Twitter if that brings in $6B in xAI investment. No matter how many of your friends leave, there will be a heck of a lot of people left. Enough for a while.

And that's not even considering possible regulatory changes in the coming year. I can think of many bad, bad possibilities. But I won't borrow trouble for this post.


Where does this leave me?

I'm using Mastodon. I'm using Bluesky. No Twitter or Threads for me. Discord is a yes, but only for a few servers.

I intend to post all (ok, nearly all) of my comments on both Bsky and Masto, so you're welcome to follow me on either platform or both.

For both platforms, I am sticking to the plan of following a small list of people. Again, I mean no offense if I don't follow you back. You're welcome to reply to me or @-mention me at any time. I'm here to chat; I'm just keeping the firehose pressure low.

If the platform situation changes in the future, I'll adjust my plans. I think we all get that now.

Monday, 18. November 2024

Renga in Blue

Firienwood: For the Rest of Your Days

I have finished the game; my previous post is needed to make sense of this one. Mind you, I’m not sure how much sense things really make. This game is, in a way, easier for beginners than veteran players: veteran players (ahem) might actually sit down and try to figure out the connections between the […]

I have finished the game; my previous post is needed to make sense of this one.

Mind you, I’m not sure how much sense things really make. This game is, in a way, easier for beginners than veteran players: veteran players (ahem) might actually sit down and try to figure out the connections between the various rooms, and why some things appear or don’t appear at random, while a beginner might be satisfied wandering to the end without any such documentation.

Illustration of the hallowed mountain Amon Anwar, part of the Firien Wood, via the story “The Path to Amon Anwar” by Matěj Čadil.

I really did make an honest attempt at first at mapping…

…but I kept having connection not make any sense, and directions that went one way during one play-iteration go a different way on another. On top of that, testing exits always could randomly lead to being randomly walloped by a goblin with no chance of rescue, or even by a balrog (who appears at any time).

I found the general idea of the authors was to have hyperconnectivity. By which I mean: there would be two or three or even five ways to get between two points. This can be a fun and charming aspect to early games: Zork might drop the trapdoor after you enter its world at first, but gives quite a few ways to get back to the daylight (someone with more flexibility than others) and it gives the impression of a universe with lots of options; here, it feels more like the authors were just drawing in links at random. There’s a trapdoor that lets you wrap around back to the starting area. You can somehow land back where the boat is (and take the remaining set of items) with the boat never having left.

This only opens from the other side, which is dramatically interesting, but the other side is roughly six steps away and just as easy to get to as walking through the trapdoor, which is not so interesting.

Eventually I managed to randomly come across someone saying the word NEIRIF. This is a trigger to send you to another part of the map that is quite important.

No puzzle solving, just patience and luck I didn’t get walloped by a balrog this playthrough.

This lands you just outside a tree with a rope and some food; all you really need to do is grab one piece of food. Later, nearby, there’s a hungry person who will help you assuming you share.

With the wizard hat on from the starting area, the staff that the dog brought over works and you can WAVE STAFF to form a bridge (and then, with some parser difficulty, CROSS BRIDGE). This leads to a new area where you can just wander around until you find the golden bird, the whole point of the quest.

Hang out and a wizard will eventually appear. The word ZOOT previously just gives a rumbling noise, but here it actually wins the game, for some reason (and yes, I just got annoyed and looked this up rather than actually solve anything).

Referring back to the paradox of the two reviews, yes, I could see someone blustering to the end in a few hours and assuming (given that very little in the way of puzzle solving happened) that this was an easy game. I could also see someone impossible stuck for weeks because of the RNG going in weird directions.

The design intent clearly had the player whacking at monsters — you can get 10 point per monster, and you can use the staff to send down lightning bolts on things. But back even in 1982 we didn’t care that much about score and it was a mainly a way to notice “hey, you missed some puzzles”, not get a genuine feel of achievement the way a new record on Asteroids might.

Via Acorn Electron World.

I feel like the authors zeroed in on aspects they liked (hyperconnectivity, monsters, randomness) without thinking that the structure they’d be left with wasn’t fully sustaining. It’s the sort of game where since the designer knows their map they easily can get a different impression of play than an actual human who has no insider knowledge. I’m hoping they got some feedback which can be applied later, since this is only the first of four games, even if it is the only one of the authors that lands in 1982.


Choice of Games LLC

Coming Thursday! “Haunted Hearts Hotel” Demo out now!

Check in to your hotel, and check out the ghosts! Sexy specters await you – but can you fix up the hotel in style so that the living guests will find luxury, too? Haunted Hearts Hotel is an interactive erotic paranormal romance novel by Elle Grace. It’s entirely text-based, 140,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of y

Haunted Hearts HotelCheck in to your hotel, and check out the ghosts! Sexy specters await you – but can you fix up the hotel in style so that the living guests will find luxury, too?

Haunted Hearts Hotel is an interactive erotic paranormal romance novel by Elle Grace. It’s entirely text-based, 140,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

We’re excited to announce that Haunted Hearts Hotel is releasing this Thursday, November 21st!

You can play the first three chapters for free today!

And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam!


The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

November meeting (online)

The Boston IF meetup for November will be Monday, November 25, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

The Boston IF meetup for November will be Monday, November 25, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

Saturday, 16. November 2024

Renga in Blue

Firienwood (1982)

Brytta, 11th King of Rohan, was not to be given a peaceful reign, despite being beloved by all and given the name Léofa. The War of the Dwarves and the Orcs had caused numerous orcs to leave their realm in the Misty Mountains to find settlement in the White Mountains just south of Rohan. Brytta […]

Brytta, 11th King of Rohan, was not to be given a peaceful reign, despite being beloved by all and given the name Léofa. The War of the Dwarves and the Orcs had caused numerous orcs to leave their realm in the Misty Mountains to find settlement in the White Mountains just south of Rohan. Brytta went to war to remove their scourge, and by his death was thought to have destroyed them; this was not so, as they were merely in hiding.

Brytta slaying the orc chief, from the Lord of the Rings Online game.

The next king, Walda, met unfortunate circumstances 9 years into his reign. As Tolkien explains in Appendix A of Lord of the Rings:

He was slain with all his companions when they were trapped by Orcs, as they rode by mountain-paths from Dunharrow.

Walda’s son Folca took up the task of vengeance for his father, and swore to never hunt a beast until all orcs were removed from Rohan for good. This task he accomplished by the age of 60, so he followed this up with a trip to the Firienwood (or Firien Wood, or Firienholt) on the border between Rohan and Gondor. It held a mighty boar, and while Folca the orc-slayer managed to defeat the boar, he soon died after from tusk-wounds.

The battle depicted in 3d form, via Mithril Miniatures.

Today’s adventure is from another British company (MP Software) where I have only been able to scrounge out the barest of information. Their adventure Firienwood first gets mentioned in the November 1982 issue of Personal Computing Today as “coming soon”, and I’ve been able to confirm it is listed as existing by the February 1983 issue (reaching the street January 1983) and the internal copyright date says 1982, so we’ll roll with that; if it didn’t quite squeak in being published by the end of ’82 it was close enough. (Thanks to Ethan Johnson who helped with my search.)

As far as I can tell Helen Seymour and John Hudson produced all the MP Software products; this is the first of four adventure games they made (later: Crown of Mardan, Sadim Castle, Woodland Terror). They were originally for the BBC Micro, but also ported (with likely very little change) to the Electron. The address listed (even on later printings) is a clearly residential area in Bromborough, Merseyside, suggesting the pair were yet another garage-operation (well, the houses don’t have garages, but you get what I mean).

From Every Game Going.

This is harkening back to the cavalcade of Crowther/Woods clones but adds an element which makes it almost uniquely painful. It’s easier to explain in context what I mean, so let’s dive in–

Our aim is to find a golden bird of paradise, and there’s a Wizard making things difficult. We are rather unusually told up front that monster kills are worth 10 points each, which is more like RPG than adventure behavior.

Our adventure, not shockingly, starts near the title forest, and if we try to go in we get tangled in and die via thorns.

The intent seems to be to funnel the player towards a boat at the very start, where you pick three out of six items (as you can’t carry more on the boat).

I already know the hambone gets used almost immediately, and I think the sword is necessary, and I’ve found use for the keys. This is not an absolute guarantee that this represents the set that must be chosen. Philosopher’s Quest had two gimmicks, one where a bonus item could be scrounged, and one where an item that doesn’t get taken nevertheless gets found anyway. So I could see (despite me using the keys early) another set of keys somehow surfacing, or maybe a way of putting them out forward. (Having said that, the most obvious action, tossing stuff in the river hoping it gets carried somewhere helpful, doesn’t get parsed.)

Taking the boat leads to a cave with a “vicious dog”. This is where the bone comes in handy.

Specifically, the dog suddenly not only becomes happy, but brings forth a “Wizards Staff” that “has many powers”. The only power I know of so far is that it lights up automatically in darkness.

From here comes the traditional cave-in-many-directions, and I’ll give a pair of screens which might explain my struggle:

Specifically, past this point in the game, a goblin can attack at any time. The goblin will have a random chance of killing you on sight. If it doesn’t kill you, you have a chance of doing KILL GOBLIN via the sword and having success, but then the goblin can still return at any moment. “Any moment” includes actions like “check if an particular direction has an exit or not” or “check if the passage that you entered from the east lets you go back the same way to the west, or if it is one-way”. This has one of those unfortunate twisty maps wherever everything everywhere needs to be checked but this is also combined with a high probability of death at any moment.

(Oh, in addition to N/S/E/W/NE/SE/SW/NW, LEFT and RIGHT are directions too sometimes.)

The very curious thing is that the two 80s reviews I’ve run across (not intentionally, just trying to find files for the game) both mark this as a “beginner game”. Both are reviews for the Electron, though, rather than the original BBC Micro version I am playing. I may switch it up if this gets too terrible and see if the authors lightened up the RNG death in the revised version. What I can’t do is simply hack BASIC source, as this is a machine code game.

Friday, 15. November 2024

top expert

let’s write IF #17: lyric storytelling widget release 1

We made it! Download the Let’s Make IF Lyric Storytelling Widget here. If you’ve been reading along, you know that this project I’ve been calling “Portrait With Wolf” is a kind of poetry widget. It creates screens of parser poetry, each one boasting familiar features of a parser game. Here’s an example: Still Life with […]

We made it!

Download the Let’s Make IF Lyric Storytelling Widget here.

If you’ve been reading along, you know that this project I’ve been calling “Portrait With Wolf” is a kind of poetry widget. It creates screens of parser poetry, each one boasting familiar features of a parser game. Here’s an example:

Still Life with Wolf ^-^ 
A good time by A Loving Friend
Release 1 / Serial number 12345 / Inform 7 v10.x / D

Press the "enter" key or choose a letter to have your fortune told.

Wolf Gallery (unoccupied)
It's a cool morning in late March, and the air through the windows is sun-drunk and brisk. The floors smell like wood soap, shining dully in the indirect light. Here, the real vanishes into the possible, each day longer and warmer than the one before.

This table certainly looks safe and stable.
(*C*) cat card
(*T*) turnip card
(*B*) boot card
(*A*) astronaut card

>c
A friendly, charismatic predator.


*** How Precious ***


Let's try again!

Over the course of seventeen posts, we’ve discussed ways we can change what prints in this format, using text substitutions and tables. It would be easy, I’ve said, to change the text: just edit the tables! My idea has always been that authors could enter their own text in a template to make their own games.

how do I make screens like that.

The first step is to create a new project in Inform 7 and copy in this code. If you compile it, you’ll see what the basic structure is.

## A FAKE TITLE ## 
## A FAKE AUTHOR ## by ## A FAKE SUBTITLE ##
Release ## 1 ## / Serial number ## FAKE SERIAL NUMBER ## / Inform 7 v10.1.2 / ## FAKE COMPILER VERSION ##

## TEXT BETWEEN BANNER AND ROOM NAME 1 ##

## ROOM NAME 1 ##
## ROOM DESCRIPTION 1 ##

## SENTENCE OR SNIPPET INTRODUCING THE OPTIONS 1 ##
(1) ## NAME OF OPTION ONE 1 ##
(2) ## NAME OF OPTION TWO 1 ##
(3) ## NAME OF OPTION THREE 1 ##
(4) ## NAME OF OPTION FOUR 1 ##

Every bit of quoted text that has two pound signs in it (##) is something that an author can replace with their own text. At a very basic level, this is all that’s required. Fill in your text, and you have a game. Really!

what about endings.

Out of the gate, the Lyric Storytelling Widget can have five endings. Each option has an ending associated with it. If the player makes the same choice more than half the time, then the game will have the “option one” ending. In other words, over the course of four turns, the player chooses option 4 three times. That will trigger the “option 4 ending.”

What about ties and other cases? Those lead to the “default ending.”

Writing these endings is easy. Just update the table with your own text:

table of concluding texts
outcome	option	tombstone	epitaph
default	--	"## VERY SHORT DEFAULT PHRASE ##"	"## THE ACTUAL DEFAULT ENDING TEXT ##"
[]
firstE	option_one	"## VERY SHORT FIRST PHRASE ##"	"## THE ACTUAL FIRST ENDING TEXT ##"
[]
secondE	option_two	"## VERY SHORT SECOND PHRASE ##"	"## THE ACTUAL SECOND ENDING TEXT ##"
[]
thirdE	option_three	"## VERY SHORT THIRD PHRASE ##"	"## THE ACTUAL THIRD ENDING TEXT ##"
[]
fourthE	option_four	"## VERY SHORT FOURTH PHRASE ##"	"## THE ACTUAL FOURTH ENDING TEXT ##"

Once again, no code required.

but I want to change things (change code).

That’s great! Change away! Perhaps four choices and four endings feels like too much. It’s easy to cut back to two or three. I’ve made a lot of comments in the code, so if you feel like experimenting, those should help you along. In this case, removing options is easy!

  1. Go to the place in the source code where the options are defined: Volume 3 (the options).
  2. Comment out (I recommend doing this rather than deleting) the options you want to remove. Work backwards, removing 4 first and, if desired, 3 as well. Don’t start with just 3.
  3. Go to the place in the source code where the commands are defined. Just search the text for Part 2 (commands).
  4. Comment out the commands related to the options you just removed.
  5. Finally: go to the table of contents and comment out the table rows for every option you just removed

That’s it! You work now only offers fewer choices per turn. You can add them, too, if you are comfortable following these steps in reverse.

Maybe you’d like to remove the total number of turns in your work. That’s easy, too. Just comment out rows from the tables themselves. In every table that has an “index” column (i.e., almost all of them), comment out the relevant rows, starting from the back. If you want three choices, go through and comment out row four. If you want a single choice game, comment out rows 4, 3, and 2.

That’s it. Really! This template uses a count of rows to decide endings, so all of that logic stuff should be handled automatically.

The reverse, adding turns, is what you probably expect: add rows to every table with an “index” column.

NOTE: keep your tables in sync, and leave blank, empty rows. Inform gets upset when it checks empty rows/fields. Don’t panic, though, these errors are easy to catch and easy to fix. Just be aware.

but I want players to be able to do things like EXAMINE and TAKE.

That’s all disabled, but you can enable it! The back half of this project is code dealing with Inform’s built-in commands. While it isn’t hard to reenable certain commands (just comment out what’s there), be sure you want to add them to your testing protocol, especially if you’re thinking about elaborate constructions like “take all from possibility space.”

You can find more discussion in the comments for my “removing built-in commands “Disabling Inform 7 Commands” extension. You can find it here.

Disabling Inform 7 Commands by Drew Cook

I strongly encourage you to get something working with with this widget before experimenting with adding/enabling commands.

neat. what else could I do.

Some possibilities:

  • get rid of the header and fake final question stuff, and make a traditional linear narrative instead.
  • introduce more complex state tracking and use conditional texts or even complex “to say” definitions to make a more sophisticated choice game.
  • make a personality quiz.

what’s next?

So far as this thing goes, I have a someone complicated major work based on this design. It is feature complete, and will be in Spring Thing 2025. Please look forward to it! I’m also working on a similar template people can use for linear stories. This template is a work in progress, so I will continue to revise it, especially if I get helpful suggestions or feedback from my fellow authors.

So far as my own IF stuff: I have some game criticism I need to post, and then we can get back to Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight. That’s right! D and Marbles, two characters from the RTEverse, are back. We’ll focus on scenes and implementing a little puzzle/toy that our young protagonists will hopefully have fun playing with.

Thursday, 14. November 2024

Zarf Updates

My top blog posts

Over on Bluesky, someone asked whether everybody's blog traffic has declined over the past few weeks. (Original message requires Bsky login so I won't link directly.) This got me looking at my blog stats, which I normally never, ever do. Short ...

Over on Bluesky, someone asked whether everybody's blog traffic has declined over the past few weeks. (Original message requires Bsky login so I won't link directly.)

This got me looking at my blog stats, which I normally never, ever do.

Short answer: I don't think so? But my blog is tiny and the data is noisy, so how would I even tell. Some of my posts get popular -- though never what you'd call "viral". Most don't.

But why not peek at the data? I have logs going back to June 2023, when I moved off of Blogger.com. Yes, it's navel-gazing. But now that I'm shifting some weight onto Bluesky, I might have some followers who haven't seen my older posts.


A line graph, running from 2023-06-29 to 2024-10-31. The biggest spike is around 2024-09-01. Daily unique IPs in my blog traffic.

My first cut was daily unique IPs in the HTTP requests. The three spikes are:

You could maybe argue that my traffic went up around May of this year, and then fell off again after September, but what do you control for? I wrote seven blog posts in the spring months (see chart) but thirteen in the summer, what with being laid off. No surprise if the summer got more visits.

But the serious confounding factor is that the Oregon Trail post has images. So of course it caused more traffic! (I am proud of the ASCII art in the Tic-Tac-Toe post, but it's not <img> tags so no extra HTTP requests.)

Also, of course, the vast majority of the HTTP requests are bots, crawlers, and feed-readers. I could try to filter those out but it probably wouldn't change the picture.


Let's try this differently. What are my most popular posts over the whole year-and-a-half of logging history? Remember, I imported my old posts from Blogger (and kept the URLs!) so I can measure the current traffic to my entire blog history.

Here's my current top twenty:

(Sorry, you get slugs rather than post titles there. You can figure it out.)

Same top three, but the Microsoft post is now the winner. That's the one where I pushed the idea of Activision/Microsoft open-sourcing the old Infocom IP. Apparently people were big on boosting that.

Status: Didn't go much of anywhere. I got in contact with someone at then-Activision and someone at Microsoft, but it kind of washed out in a sea of "We'll see what the lawyers say." Which, to be honest, I expected.

I'll check back! It's been most of a year since I last nudged anybody. This is a good reminder that I should follow up.

Other than that, the Tic-Tac-Toe puzzle post holds up very well. That makes me happy. (Take a look if you enjoy logic puzzles!)

And it's nice to see some older blog posts (Zork inventory logic, 2017) hold people's interest.

People really love the substantive posts about videogame history and technology. Infocom source code, Zork fan maps, that Oregon Trail book (which isn't old history, but made for nice photos). People seem to regularly cite my deep dive into Google's search terms.

On the flip side, my game reviews (indexed here) do not get high numbers. I'm fine with that, really. I am confident that people read the reviews; they just don't pass them around to their friends shouting "Ooh, have you seen Zarf's take on Myst?!" (Spoiler: I liked it.)

But my intensive inquest into filthy sea shanty lyrics also got lost in the weeds. It landed 37th -- people read it, but nobody boosted. I'm sad about that. I worked hard on that one. Oh well.

On the funny side, there's a lot of badly written crawlers out there. I get a surprising number of hits to URLs like /2023/11/null and /2024/08/null. Not to mention /2024/07/zqxjzVqqPMGKyu.html. No idea where that came from.

Also something, possibly a feed reader, is very insistent on checking for ArticleDetailImageFullInactive.png and similar image names.

Apologies to the legions of bots poking /wp-login.php hoping to see blood spray. Static site generators for the win.


So do I now have a roadmap for maximizing my blog's engagment? Psshh no. This is for fun. I promise to keep writing about whatever I feel like.

I definitely won't blog more blog posts about the posts on my blog. Enough navel for one year. Anyhow, I've poisoned the statistics! This post will bias all future lists in favor of the ones already enshrined here.

Such is data.


Choice of Games LLC

“Werewolves 3: Evolution’s End”—The ultimate battle of humans vs. werewolves!

We’re proud to announce that Werewolves 3: Evolution’s End, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app. It’s 33% off until November 21st! The first two games in the “Claw, Shadow, and Sage” series Werewolves: Haven Ris

Werewolves 3: Evolution's EndWe’re proud to announce that Werewolves 3: Evolution’s End, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.

It’s 33% off until November 21st! The first two games in the “Claw, Shadow, and Sage” series Werewolves: Haven Rising and Werewolves 2: Pack Mentality are also on sale, 30% off until November 21st!

It’s the ultimate battle between werewolves and human supremacists, and your werewolf pack is caught in the middle of a four-way fight!

Werewolves 3: Evolution’s End is the third installment of Jeffrey Dean’s acclaimed “Claw, Shadow, and Sage” series, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 680,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

After years of conspiracies, secrets, and escalation, the fight has finally come out into the open.

In one corner, there’s the Human Sovereignty Movement (HSM), a paramilitary mercenary force, dedicated to eradicating all werewolves, led by your father, Colonel Williams, who is secretly a werewolf.

Opposing them, there’s Packleader Sonoma, a werewolf supremacist who would gladly kill and even torture HSM operatives. She plans to deploy an experimental bioweapon to turn humans into werewolves (never mind that most humans don’t survive the transformation), starting with the HSM.

The US military is fighting both sides, as high-ranking werewolf undercover agents inside the military try to stop the HSM and Sonoma’s bioweapon, even if that means killing your entire pack.

And then there’s Maker, the mysterious scientist who developed Sonoma’s bioweapon, performing cruel and unforgivable experiments on humans and werewolves alike in her obsession with “accelerating evolution.” When your pack fell prey to a mysterious disease that unleashes feral rage, Maker developed a weekly injection to suppress your inner beast. Now, the pack must protect her until she can discover a permanent cure for the disease. But Maker’s true motivations are unknown. Is she your pack’s last hope or its greatest threat? Will your greatest enemy turn out to be your own feral self?

What future are you truly working towards? Do you wish to bring about peace between humans and werewolves, or to destroy humanity so that wolves can reign in the ashes? Choose your friends carefully, and keep your enemies at bay, because the ultimate battle is coming.

  • Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bisexual.
  • Continue all five romances from the first two volumes of the trilogy, and deepen your relationships with your favorite characters.
  • Return to the Nail, the top-secret prison facility, fighting your fears as you search for answers.
  • Battle against your own feral nature as you race against the clock to save your pack.
  • Work with activists and journalists to shape the public perception of werewolves: will humans see you as friends in need, or fearsome foes?
  • Aid Maker in her groundbreaking scientific research and discover long-buried truths – or turn on her in retribution for the harm she has done to werewolf-kind.
  • Navigate your fraught relationship with your father, help your friends uncover their own families’ secrets, and start looking ahead to future generations.

What fate awaits you as you race towards evolution’s end?

We hope you enjoy playing Werewolves 3: Evolution’s End. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

Wednesday, 13. November 2024

Post Position

The OUTPUT Anthology is Out!

I’m delighted that after more than four years of work by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and myself — we’re co-editors of this book — the MIT Press and Counterpath have jointly published Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023 This anthology spans seven decades of computer-generated text, beginning before the term “artificial intelligence” was even coined. While … Continue reading "

I’m delighted that after more than four years of work by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and myself — we’re co-editors of this book — the MIT Press and Counterpath have jointly published

Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023

This anthology spans seven decades of computer-generated text, beginning before the term “artificial intelligence” was even coined. While not restricted to poetry, fiction, and other creative projects, it reveals the rich work that has been done by artists, poets, and other sorts of writers who have taken computing and code into their own hands. The anthology includes examples of powerful and principled rhetorical generation along with story generation systems based on cognitive research. There are examples of “real news” generation that has already been informing us — along with hoaxes and humor.

Page spread from OUTPUT with Everest Pipkin’s i’ve never picked a protected flower

Page spread from OUTPUT with Talan Memmott’s Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)]

Page spread from OUTPUT with thricedotted’s The Seeker

It’s all contextualized by brief introductions to each excerpt, longer introductions to each fine-grained genre of text generation, and an overall introduction that Lillian-Yvonne and I wrote. There are 200 selections in the 500-page book, which we hope will be a valuable sourcebook for academics and students — but also a way for general readers to learn about innovations in computing and writing.

You can buy Output now from several sources. I suggest your favorite independent bookseller! If you’re in the Boston area, stop by the MIT Press Bookstore which as of this writing, has 21 on hand as of actually publishing this post, has 14 copies!

Book Launches

November 11 (Monday): Both editors will speak at the University of Virginia, Bryan Hall, Faculty Lounge, Floor 2. Free & open to the public. 5pm.

November 20 (Wednesday): Online book launch for Output, hosted by the University of Maryland. Both editors in conversation with Matt Kirschenbaum. Free, register on Zoom. 12noon Eastern Time.

November 21 (Thursday) Book launch at WordHack with me, David Gissen, Sasha Stiles, Andrew Yoon, and open mic presenters. $15 (purchasing a ticket online is recommended; WordHack has sold out the past several months). Wonderville, 1186 Broadway, Brooklyn, 7pm.

December 9 (Monday) Book launch at Book Club Bar with the editors, Charles Bernstein, Robin Hill, Stephanie Strickland, and Leonard Richardson. 197 E 3rd St (at Ave B), New York City’s East Village. Free, RSVP required. 8pm.

December 13 (Friday) European book launch with the editors, Scott Rettberg, and others TBA. University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative, Langesgaten 1-2, 3:30pm. Free & open to the public.

Tuesday, 12. November 2024

Renga in Blue

Das Geheimnisvolle Haus (1981)

Germany got a jump start on computing early. The earliest “real computer”, arguably, was via Konrad Zuse with his Z3 in 1941; fortunately for Zuse’s modern reputation, it failed to drum up much enthusiasm with the Nazis, and while it got used for some minor aeronautical calculations, the monster application of the war — codebreaking […]

Germany got a jump start on computing early. The earliest “real computer”, arguably, was via Konrad Zuse with his Z3 in 1941; fortunately for Zuse’s modern reputation, it failed to drum up much enthusiasm with the Nazis, and while it got used for some minor aeronautical calculations, the monster application of the war — codebreaking — was left to the Allies.

The Z3, from the Computer History Museum.

After the Nazis were defeated, post-war restrictions meant aviation and nuclear research were banned. So, while Zuse met Turing in 1947 and later founded a company (Zuse KG) and IBM had a presence (their German spinoff Dehomag was redubbed IBM Deutschland GmbH in 1949) it still took a while for computing in Germany to really be established. (I’m referring now to West Germany; East Germany went to the Soviets and has its own story.)

In 1955 the Allied occupation ended and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council) was founded. Computers quickly started to occupy universities, with half of them having mainframes by 1960. Local private companies started to face off against IBM. Siemens got on board early (1954, before restrictions were lifted) and went after big industry. The radio and television company Telefunken (parent company AEG) made a mark with the TR-440, dominating the university market, but AEG’s lack of enthusiasm eventually led to their large computing operations being sold to Siemens; Siemens kept up with the industrial-scale computers, while AEG focused more on mid-range business operations. A few more companies like Triumph-Adler focused on office settings.

Ludwig Zagler posing with his chess program written with Siegfried Jahn for the TR-440: Daja (1974). It could only be run at night. Picture from Der Spiegel, April 1976.

Missing from all this is home computing. Referring to a May 1980 issue of Mikro + Kleincomputer, the Schweizer Computer Club had access to Apple, Pet, Sorcerer, Superbrain, and TRS-80: none of those are from German companies. The big locals were still focused on business and industry; Triumph-Adler, which started to try their hand at the personal market with their Alphatronic, was never a consumer hit. (According to one author, they originally tried to “sell them like typewriters” in batches.)

Alphatronic PC from late 83-early 84, via eBay.

The foreign companies of the Trinity, then, were the dominant force in 1980, although in a different order than the US: Commodore PET, Apple II, TRS-80. Commodore would eventually creep up to be dominant all the way to Amiga, but for the time of our story there was still a pitched battle. TRS-80 had a brief moment in the sun not in its original form imported from the US, but as a cheaper clone via a company from Hong Kong.

Hannover Messe was an “export fair” which had been running since 1947; in 1970 the fair added the Center for Office and Information Technology (Hall 1) which included computing devices.

In 1980, Fred Trommeschläger was at Hall 1. He had previously sold electronics (interrupted in the mid-70s by a foray into aviation), but he pivoted from electronics to computers when they became more profitable, forming Trommeschläger Computer GmbH. He sold imports of TRS-80s (via the Tandy headquarters in Belgium) but tried to undercut his competition on price. He was tipped off that there was a cheaper TRS-80 alternative showing. The machine was being sold was the Video Genie by EACA, a Hong Kong-based company that had been founded in 1970 by mechanical engineer Eric Chung (previously of Fairchild, the same company that eventually released the first home console that uses cartridges).

Trommeschläger sent his employees scouting, found the machine at the fair, and got an invite to a sales meeting. Negotiations happened in Holland with multiple companies vying for rights, and Trommeschläger managed to impress the representatives from Hong Kong — landing an exclusive deal — by arriving in his own plane (remember, he briefly had went into aviation!)

Sales blew up, with volume going by by a factor of five from 1980 to 1982. Volume went up in 1983 as well, but there was a catch: EACA imploded. Eric Chung was reported fleeing with a briefcase containing 10 million USD. One issue was simply Tandy themselves, which had brought up a lawsuit in 1981 for infringement; it was settled out of court, but it must have represented a significant financial hit. Additionally, while the Video Genie was a success EACA had also gone into other products like radios that were a failure, and then also decided to compound that with speculation on property (!).

This left Trommeschläger’s company in trouble, as they had already done more hiring and had already announced future product based on the EACA’s upcoming computers (now vaporware). They tried to adapt a different computer (the Ferranti PC) and re-dub it with the now-known-in-Germany Genie name, but it wasn’t enough, and his company went down in 1984.

The reason why all this is important is that it meant the Video Genie name became more well-known in Germany than the original TRS-80; while the US had magazines like 80 Micro supporting the TRS-80, Germany had Genie Data. Also, one of the copies of today’s selection (Das Geheimnisvolle Haus, The Mysterious House) is in a directory titled genie1.

I found this game while looking for another game, Geheim-agent XP-05, the existence of which had been sleuthed out by commenter Rob; it was thought to be lost. I dug around the far corners of the Internet and managed to find the secret agent game in a public German archive by checking every disk. XP-05 was on disk 5. From disk 7 I found this:

ELEPHANT is the CLOAD game Elephant Graveyard by John R. Olsen.

I had a copy of HAUS.BAS already, but variations can differ, so I opened the source code and hit paydirt:

21050 GESCHRIEBEN IM OKTOBER 81 VON UWE SCHUSTER

October 1981! My other copy mentioned Uwe Schuster, but not the date. This places it as the earliest German adventure game currently found. I will not give any guarantees there isn’t older; early German computer history still needs study. I can say that when Mikro+Kleincomputer did a review of Apple Adventure in February 1982, it was written as if adventures were a new idea. It explains that you communicate using commands of two words, and that you are searching for treasure, that there are “beinahe unendliche Labyrinthe” and you should make a map.

We have some clue as to Uwe Schuster’s influences, as while one copy contains a year and month, the other contains an author statement.

Dieses Programm erhielt seine Anregung von “Haunted-House”. Es erschien mir reizvoll, dieses Thema weiter auszubauen. Da mir die Abenteuer von Scott Adams gut gefallen, habe ich versucht, dessen Schema zu übernehmen, um ein lästiges Scrollen des Bildschirms zu vermeiden. Gewiss ließe sich das Programm noch weiter ausbauen, aber ich hoffe dass es trotzdem Spaß gemacht hat.
(Uwe Schuster)

The program was inspired by the game “Haunted House” and the author wanted to expand on the same idea, following the pattern of Scott Adams that avoided screen scrolling. While we’ve had multiple game titled Haunted House only one has been for TRS-80, the very early Robert Arnstein one sold by Radio Shack.

The instruction screen I gave earlier indicates shortcuts move around (N, S, W, O) take inventory (B) or redraw the screen (R). However, there’s also a full verb list, and following my procedure with Languages I Am Not Great At, I grabbed the list from the source code directly:

NEHME -> TAKE
NIMM -> TAKE
HOLE -> TAKE
GEBE -> GIVE (functionally DROP)
LASS -> LEAVE (DROP)
STELLE -> DROP
LAUFE -> RUN
GEHE -> GO
STEIGE -> CLIMB
SAGE -> SAY
SPRICH -> SPEAK
RUFE -> CALL
SIEH -> SEE
SCHAU -> LOOK
SUCHE -> SEARCH
FINDE -> FIND
BRICH -> BREAK
SCHLAGE -> HIT
BRECHE -> BREAK
SCHNEIDE -> CUT
TRINKE -> DRINK
GIESSE -> POUR
SCHUETTE -> SHUT
SCHLAFE -> SLEEP
WARTE -> WAIT
HILF -> HELP
OEFFNE -> OPEN
SCHALTE -> SWITCH

Despite being inspired by a haunted house game, this really is more of a “mysterious” house: there are no ghosts or other spooks to battle against. There is a little magic. Our goal is to escape with all the treasures (three of them).

The description follows the minimal format of “you are in a suchandsuch” and most of the rooms have one item in them, either takable or non-takable (above, a guest room, with a bed).

You’re in a living room, with a carpet. The carpet can be taken.

Balcony with railing, which can’t be taken.

Breakfast room with endless coffee cup, which can be taken, and mysteriously doesn’t count as a treasure.

The house is mostly wide open, and the starting approach should be something like Eno: break and smash and tear stuff looking for hidden objects.

For example, there’s a television set showing the Arabian Nights, and you can smash it into pieces with a hammer. You can also smash the coffee cup (not helpful) and a mirror (helpful, I’ll show that off shortly). A knife also gets use as you tear open an upholstered chair, revealing a diamond, and a coat, revealing a wallet.

That makes for 2 out of 3 treasures, suggesting this game will go quickly, but it turns out treasure 3 (which is needed to escape) was kind of hard to find. But let’s go back to smashing the mirror first:

The mirror breaks into thousands of pieces which immediately dissolve into nothing. Behind is a bottle of acid.

With the bottle of acid, and destruction still on my mind, my eye turned to the marble floor in the room immediately adjacent.

The acid dissolves the floor reveal a magic word: KERKY. Upon then doing SAY KERKY, I was teleported to the room shown above (“secret room”, with a “hole in the ceiling”) and was told that “all good things come in threes”. What this is hinting at is that the word only works three times to take you to the secret room, after which it will teleport you to random places, including a mid-air drop killing you.

I have fallen from the 13th floor! The adventure is over.

With my eye on the hole in the ceiling, I brought over a ladder from a nursery, and was able to climb to a roof.

I climb through the ceiling and get to the roof of the house. It’s very cold.

Going in a direction seems to randomly either kill you or land you in a room back in the house. It was here, at 2 out of 3 treasures, that I was very stuck. Just to list the inventory available:

key, cup of coffee, knife, bottle opener, jug of cognac, ladder, hammer, carpet, diamond, wallet

The jug of cognac is also auto-refilling and is essentially to opposite of the cup of coffee. I hadn’t found a use for the key but it turns out that I never would: it’s a red herring. Looking at the carpet just states “a vacuum cleaner wouldn’t do any harm” so it took me poking inside the source code (it’s 10k, roughly the size of Raspion Adventure) to realize it could be transformed into a flying carpet.

But how? I tried various uses of the magic word, setting the carpet on the roof, plummeting off the edge while holding the carpet, whacking at the carpet really hard, and still no magic appeared. I finally broke down studied the relevant source portion rather than just glancing:

7100 IFX>23THEN7200:ELSEW1$=”B”:W0$=”A”:GOSUB12000:IFW0=1ANDCO=1ANDW1=1THENPRINT”DER BODEN LOESST SICH AUF UND EIN SCHILD WIRD SICHTBAR”:PRINT”DARAUF STEHT: MAGISCHES WORT “:D$(2)=”SCHILD MIT MAGISCHEM WORT”:M(2)=1:S$(3)=”SCHI”:S$(4)=”MAGI”:GOTO131
7110 W0$=”H”:W1$=”F”:GOSUB12000:IFCO=8ANDW0=1ANDW1=1THENPRINT”DER TEPPICH FAENGT AN ZU SCHWEBEN”:S$(11)=”FLIE”:D$(6)=”*FLIEGENDER TEPPICH*”:SC=SC+1:GOTO131

The first line 7100 is the result of pouring acid on the marble floor. I realized 7110 must also involve pouring a liquid of some sort.

The above depicts me on top of the roof pouring the jug of cognac while the carpet is sitting their waiting to absorb its precious energies. After this is done on the next turn (no matter what you type) you’ll fly off to safety.

The carpet floats up and away with me. I’m saved and have found all the treasures.

It is possible I am missing some subtle hint in German to this, or maybe there’s some mythology involving alcohol and flying carpets? The source code is here if someone would like to try a poke.

I found it interesting that while Mr. Schuster managed to pull off a two-word parser just fine, he stuck with a fairly grid-like map like the French Colditz game by Marcel Le Jeune. Most games from the US and UK insisted quite early on with having twisty maps, yet these two early examples of non-English adventure games eschewed cavelike-maze layout altogether. This may be because in both cases the influence came primarily from Scott Adams; while Adams had some mazes they were fairly small and didn’t really dominant in the same way the Crowther/Woods mazes did.

Or it could be that figuring out a parser from scratch (which both authors had to do) was complicated enough as it was, so they decided to keep the map aspect simple to keep track of.

Unfortunately I have not be able to unearth anything more about the author. His name shows up in a 1986 German magazine, but just in asking a question to the editors. While Marcel Le Jeune knows of the first-original-adventure-game-in-French status of his work, if this really is the first adventure game in German, I’m not clear if Uwe Schuster is even aware of it.

Monday, 11. November 2024

Choice of Games LLC

Coming Thursday! “Werewolves 3: Evolution’s End”—Demo and trailer out now!

It’s the ultimate battle between werewolves and human supremacists, and your werewolf pack is caught in the middle of a four-way fight! Werewolves 3: Evolution’s End is the third installment of Jeffrey Dean’s acclaimed “Claw, Shadow, and Sage” series, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 550,000 words and hundreds of choices, without gr

It’s the ultimate battle between werewolves and human supremacists, and your werewolf pack is caught in the middle of a four-way fight!

Werewolves 3: Evolution’s End is the third installment of Jeffrey Dean’s acclaimed “Claw, Shadow, and Sage” series, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 550,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

We’re excited to announce that Werewolves 3: Evolution’s End is releasing this Thursday, November 14th!

You can play the first four chapters for free today!

And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam!


Zarf Updates

Zarf photographs

Several months ago I write about making a new little photo tagging app. It's called phogg (for, I guess, "photo bloggor") and I've been diligently using it ever since. I now have about 2150 photos stacked up on my home media server. That's great, ...

Several months ago I write about making a new little photo tagging app. It's called phogg (for, I guess, "photo bloggor") and I've been diligently using it ever since. I now have about 2150 photos stacked up on my home media server.

That's great, but does the world care? My home media server is firewalled. You can't see it.

But occasionally I want to show off my photo collection to somebody. I mean, not the whole collection -- there's a lot of chaff and random food photos and photos of the people in my life, and I don't share that stuff without permission. But a curated subset.

Surely this is easy, though? I already have a widget in there to generate as the catalog as a static web page. I just need to tag some photos as "public", and then write a script to upload the tagged set to my public web site.

"I just need to write a script" is a dangerous phrase. I got a rough draft up quite quickly, and then realized two things:

  • Public photos need titles as well as tags. So I had to add a title-editing field to the phogg UI. (I could have gone full Tumblr, with hyper-descriptive tags, but I decided not to. I curate my tag set too.)

  • A photo site needs an RSS feed. Obviously.

So that was a bit more work, but I did it, and look! Photos! Feed!

A screenshot of the photo collection page. It's titled "Zarf Photographs" with a note "Images copyright by Andrew Plotkin. All rights reserved." Tags are listed in column on the left. Zarf's photo gallery, now browsable by tag. (RSS feed here.)

Enjoy! A couple of warnings though:

I expect to update this page in batches. I take photos. Every few days, I sync them off my phone to my home media server and tag them. Every few weeks, I'll curate the recent acquisitions, tag some "public", and push them to the web site.

Also, nothing about this system tracks when a photo was uploaded. The metadata only shows when the photo was taken. The good news is that when a new batch of photos appears, they'll have correct dates. The bad news is that if I add a batch of old photos, they won't show up in the RSS feed -- the feed only lists the most recent 48 photos.

Also, while I've titled every image, I'm afraid I haven't provided alt text. I apologize for this. Alt text is a different job and it's rather a lot more work. Maybe later.


And now, a few favorites from the collection. Click for full-size.

The front of a turboprop nacelle, showing the propellor, but the propellor is distorted into strange horizontal ribbons that don't seem to touch the shaft. The front of a turboprop nacelle, showing the propellor, but the propellor is distorted into strange vertical ribbons that don't seem to touch the shaft. Strobe effect of a turboprop jet propellor (permalink, permalink)

The first photos I saved off my then-new iPhone in 2009. The scan speed on the camera was slow and it produced this lovely effect.

Two flamingos flying right-to-left against light clouds. They are gangly, with their necks held a long way out in front and their feet sticking a long way out behind. Flamingos at Comaccio (permalink)

Flamingos flying by at the Comaccio salt flats, Italy. Flamingoes do not look like they should stay in the air.

A wall painted to look like the shadows of two people walking past. A wall painted to look like the shadow of a person walking past. From Untitled (Shadows), Liliana Porter (permalink, permalink)

For several years, the Boston MFA had this mural showing silhouettes of museum patrons. This shadow isn't me. I didn't pose for it. But it sure as heck looks like me!

A large rosebush covered with small white roses. To the left is a smaller, spindlier shrub with deep red roses. They are friends (permalink)

My house has a vigorous antique white rose; it is the senior tenant of the place. We recently added a red rose for company. I try to photograph the roses every June.

A grey suitcase painted with lines of bright sky-blue spots. My sea-slug-themed luggage (permalink)

Nobody gonna confuse my luggage with theirs.


And now the code nerd notes.

As you see, the public-facing site is purely static. Static sites are great; they don't break.

Getting the photos up is a pretty rickety chain of scripts. The phogg tool runs on my media server. But I have to run a command-line entry point (phogg publicize) to upload the "public" photos and tag info to my web host. Then I run another copy of phogg there, again with command-line entry points, to import the photos and generate the static pages.

None of it quite fits together, because I didn't envision this double-server setup when I built the original tool. Arguably I did it wrong. (Maybe I should just upload the sqlite database and work from there?) But it seems to work fine for now.

Remember when I said "I should split the app framework out into its own project"? (No, why should you, but I did say that.) Now I have: tinyapp. This is a WSGI-hosted app framework, which is... okay, look, it's Flask. I wrote a tiny replacement for Flask. (Or Tornado, another similar framework.) I have no excuse for this except that I wanted to know how WSGI worked down in the guts.

(And the photography nerd notes...)

My camera is an iPhone SE (3rd-gen), the 2022 model, which I've been using since it shipped in early 2022. Nothing fancy. From 2017-2022 I used the original iPhone SE.

"Wait, did you really take 350 photos between May and November? That's a lot!" (My May post said I had 1800 photos; now it's 2150.)

Hm, looks like the answer is "yes and no". I took about 350. But I don't keep every photo; I immediately discard the ones that are blurry, cockeyed, or just the lesser of two similar snaps. So it's really only about 200 since May.

But my media server also contains some of collections of other people's photos. You know the thing where you go on a family trip, and afterward everybody swaps photo rolls? Like that. So when I say "2150 photos stacked up", it includes those.

(Of course you're not seeing those. I would never post someone else's photo. Unless it's specifically a photo of me and they sent it to me for that purpose.)

Friday, 08. November 2024

Renga in Blue

Critical Mass: You and Your Flimsy Keyboard Won’t Stop Me

I’ve saved the world. On my Apple II simulacrum, at least. Read my previous posts on Critical Mass here. I was stuck on multiple things, but I went for the mini-game first. This involved water skiing in Miami, while passing to the left of green buoys and to the right of red buoys. I had […]

I’ve saved the world. On my Apple II simulacrum, at least. Read my previous posts on Critical Mass here.

I was stuck on multiple things, but I went for the mini-game first. This involved water skiing in Miami, while passing to the left of green buoys and to the right of red buoys.

I had trouble with the game for a while, and had almost fully justified the game was impossible. My problem turned out to be essentially one of hitboxes. (These are the little boxes that register collision in video games, and they often don’t match graphics exactly in order to be “more forgiving” for players but also for ease of calculation.) The “front” of each buoy is only at a spot near the very start of the rectangle, and then you can pass clean through the graphic without issue.

So rather than thinking of the obstacle course as dodging to the left or right of things, I switched mentality to passing through the white-colored side of each of the buoys. I suddenly had much more success, although in some cases the turns are very tight.

The graphical settings are a bit off on this recording, but you can see what the sequence looks like, courtesy of AppleAdventures.

The whole point of the sequence was to win a beach towel. (Yes, this game has “dirt quests” just like Time Zone where you meet Julius Caesar only so you can steal his ladder. We had to carry chicken soup with us all the way from New York, and we couldn’t just obtain a towel from a store with money, we had to win it. The difference here is that the game is clearly taking a comedic bent to the whole approach.)

With the beach towel I could resolve one of my other issues, that of having the explosion at the boat. After GET GAS causes a spill, a simple CLEAN GAS and we’re able to take off at San Juan without blowing up.

This leads to an open ocean map and you can steer in the wrong direction and go forever. I knew from the tip in London that I needed to find St. Thomas, and eyeballing a real-life map it’s a bit east, so I just decided to try typing EAST multiple times, and fortunately it wasn’t long before I arrived:

St. Thomas isn’t large and consists only of one beach house. (That sort of simplification happened in Time Zone all the time, but here it’s just comedic representation of geography.) There’s a door where you can KNOCK ON DOOR and they ask who you are looking for. I tried RAND or MAJOR RAND (again, based on the London tip) with no joy.

My critical issue turned out to be this is the kind of game where learning information can open things up. Uncle Harry’s Will had a moment where you had to listen to a radio broadcast about an open route before a gate would actually be open; the causality doesn’t really make sense, but it’s trying to force a certain game-plot. Here, I’m not even 100% sure what the exact conditions are. I know on the save file I was using to get the screenshot I had not met the contact in London, so at the very least, this is a case of Major Rand not showing up until you are told Major Rand is going to be there.

I’m going to loop back to the things I missed (both London and Rome) and then return to St. Vincent shortly.

First, back to London. That Telex that stopped mid-word had more information.

I thought we were supposed to infer that this is convey that missiles are going to be used rather than bombs, and the rest is just unreadable. There are games where the player really is meant to just filling in the missing information themselves, but here you’re just supposed to SHAKE TELEX.

The message goes on to indicate the contact is at the bridge (so you don’t have to hit upon him randomly after all) and also a “CODEWORD” that is intercepted. It gives the letters SNE but then the screen goes black, and then the screen goes back on showing only the letters ED and the revelation you’ve had your (not-visible-in-inventory) money stolen.

You might recall the Krishna gave over money if we gave flowers, but I was confused why we needed to do that since the player has money from the start. This scene is why. Just make sure you get the replacement money after this scene.

Outside the telex there’s also been a “blunt instrument” left behind which turns out to be a telescope. I guess you just hit people with whatever’s handy.

With the telescope in hand, we can resolve the issue at Rome. You can’t ever go through the gate — fortunately I was catching on the vibe and didn’t waste too much more time here — but if you LOOK DOOR rather than LOOK GATE you can see a note.

Trying to look while not holding the telescope.

What happens if you are holding the telescope instead.

The bizarro thing about this sequence is we get told again shortly the exact same information. I assume this “unlocks” something in the sequence to follow, but it is nearly possible to skip Rome entirely. The only reason why not is that you pick up a flashlight at Rome (needed for a cave later), but I’m pretty sure they also sell those in airports.

With those gaps filled in — and with the key from Paris still unused in our possession — it’s time to repeat the Miami sequence, followed by the boat sequence, followed by arriving at Major Rand’s door.

We’ve found Rand, so we can ask about Stupertino:

The plot is deeply confusing. How do we know Major Rand wasn’t up to anything nefarious as opposed to Count Stupertino? Why is it that the energy company mentioned in the newspaper ties everything together in the first place? I assume the informant-shorthand conversation was meant to imply all these things, and for a bounce-from-one-place-to-another plot of Rungistan it’s fine to be brief about such things, but here the player genuinely needs to be investigating in the correct direction.

Nevermind: with this info in hand we can hunt for Martinique, again using the power of real-life geography. As far as I can tell there is absolutely no way to do this other than eyeball things, realize Martinque is southeast somewhat of St. Vincent, and do some guesswork.

I ran into Antigua first, which is north of our destination. I don’t know what other places are included, but I did run into a crash once so there’s clearly some bugs in the air.

From St. Vincent, 14 steps south with the boat, followed by going east until hitting landfall will work.

Stepping off on Martinque results in landing at a “topless beach”…

…and then eventually a cave.

Inside is where the “code word” gets used, combined with the idea from way back at New York where a door might respond to a voice command. Say SNEEZER.

This is the final area. There’s a giant gun on one floor, followed by the “evil Count Stupertino” on the next. He throws a dagger at you and you need to (in real time) type DUCK.

The Count runs away and you can approach the panel. The launch countdown is already going, but you can activate the giant gun from earlier using the key from Paris.

Then it’s just a matter of strolling back to the gun, waiting for the countdown, and playing a mini-game. You have to shoot down each one of the rockets as they launch (space bar to shoot, IJKM to move the crosshairs).

Get every single rocket and you’ll be victorious.

Yes, that’s it. No idea

1. What happened to the Count

2. Why the Count was shooting missiles

3. Why the fake-out with missiles instead of bombs

4. What connection this had with the energy company

5. Why one of the directors was dead but Major Rand was fine

6. Why the Count had no personnel manning the missile area other than himself

I still enjoyed this roughly as much as Rungistan, and it was even easier — it didn’t have anything like the safe puzzle, or the weird airplane directions, or predicting an eclipse. However, I can objectively recognize the plot doesn’t even make sense as a romp, and someone who was sincerely trying to keep notes of their investigation in the hope of putting the pieces together would be disappointed.

Rather than lingering on that, I would like to discuss a bit more the unique aspect to the game: the action sequences that happen without separation from the regular world. When the bomb arrives you need to pick it up and throw it, and there is no sense that the game mode has shifted at all; the same for responding to the thrown dagger.

When people talk about the leap made by Sierra with King’s Quest 1, the third-person view with character movement is often what gets referred to. But in essence, the real innovation is making the adventure “cinematic”, by adding real-time animations to everything and having the player respond in kind. While the scenes are limited, the Bob Blauschild games are a proto-version of that. A history of adventure games that starts with King’s Quest 1 is missing quite a lot — Sierra’s earlier text-adventure work, for instance — and I think the Blauschild games also form an essential building block, and the only reason the world isn’t animated even more is due to technical limitations. King’s Quest 1 could have worked (awkwardly) in first person, but King’s Quest 1 could never have worked at all if it was missing the connectivity between commands and dynamic animation.

Up next: our first German game of the All the Adventures project.


Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian

Grim Fandango

My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword]. No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous. — Charles Cecil of Revolution Software, speaking from the Department of Be […]

My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword]. No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.

— Charles Cecil of Revolution Software, speaking from the Department of Be Careful What You Wish For


One day in June of 1995, Tim Schafer came to work at LucasArts and realized that, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t have anything pressing to do. Full Throttle, his biker movie of an adventure game, had been released several weeks before. Now, all of the initial crush of interviews and marketing logistics was behind him. A mountain had been climbed. So, as game designers do, he started to think about what his next Everest should be.

Schafer has told in some detail how he came up with the core ideas behind Grim Fandango over the course of that summer of 1995.

The truth is, I had part of the Fandango idea before I did Full Throttle. I wanted to do a game that would feature those little papier-mâché folk-art skeletons from Mexico. I was looking at their simple shapes and how the bones were just painted on the outside, and I thought, “Texture maps! 3D! The bones will be on the outside! It’ll look cool!”

But then I was stuck. I had these skeletons walking around the Land of the Dead. So what? What did they do? Where were they going? What did they want? Who’s the main character? Who’s the villain? The mythology said that the dead walk the dark plane of the underworld known as Mictlān for four years, after which their souls arrive at the ninth plane, the land of eternal rest. Sounds pretty “questy” to me. There you have it: a game.

“Not cool enough,” said Peter Tscale, my lead artist. “A guy walking in a supernatural world? What’s he doing? Supernatural things? It just sounds boring to me.”

So, I revamped the story. Adventure games are all fantasies really, so I had to ask myself, “Who would people want to be in a game? What would people want to do?” And in the Land of the Dead, who would people rather be than Death himself? Being the Grim Reaper is just as cool as being a biker, I decided. And what does the Grim Reaper do? He picks up people who have died and carts them over from the other world. Just like a driver of a taxi or limo.

Okay, so that’s Manny Calavera, our main character. But who’s the bad guy? What’s the plot? I had just seen Chinatown, and I really liked the whole water-supply/real-estate scam that Noah Cross had going there, so of course I tried to rip that off and have Manny be a real-estate salesman who got caught up in a real-estate scandal. Then he was just like the guys in Glengarry Glen Ross, always looking for the good leads. But why would Hector Lemans, my villain, want real estate? Why would anyone? They’re dead! They’re only souls. What do souls in the Land of the Dead want?

They want to get out! They want safe passage out, just like in Casablanca! The Land of the Dead is a transitory place, and everybody’s waiting around for their travel papers. So Manny is a travel agent, selling tickets on the big train out of town, and Hector’s stealing the tickets…

The missing link between Full Throttle and Grim Fandango is Manny’s chauffeur and mechanic Glottis, a literal speed demon.

This, then, became the elevator pitch for Grim Fandango. Begin with the rich folklore surrounding Mexico’s Day of the Dead, a holiday celebrated each year just after Halloween, which combines European Christian myths about death and the afterlife with the older, indigenous ones that still haunt the Aztec ruins of Teopanzolco. Then combine it with classic film noir to wind up with Raymond Chandler in a Latino afterlife. It was nothing if not a strikingly original idea for an adventure game. But there was also one more, almost equally original part of it: to do it in 3D.

To hear Tim Schafer tell the story, the move away from LucasArts’s traditional pixel art and into the realm of points, polygons, and textures was motivated by his desire to deliver a more cinematic experience. By no means does this claim lack credibility; as you can gather by reading what he wrote above, Schafer was and is a passionate film buff, who tends to resort to talking in movie titles when other forms of communication fail him. The environments in previous LucasArts adventure games — even the self-consciously cinematic Full Throttle — could only be shown from the angle the pixel artists had chosen to drawn them from. In this sense, they were like a theatrical play, or a really old movie, from the time before Orson Welles emancipated his camera and let it begin to roam freely through his sets in Citizen Kane. By using 3D, Schafer could become the Orson Welles of adventure games; he would be able to deliver dramatic angles and closeups as the player’s avatar moved about, would be able to put the player in his world rather than forever forcing her to look down on it from on-high. This is the story he still tells today, and there’s no reason to believe it isn’t true enough, as far as it goes.

Nevertheless, it’s only half of the full story. The other half is a messier, less idealistic tale of process and practical economics.

Reckoned in their cost of production per hour of play time delivered, adventure games stood apart from any other genre in their industry, and not in a good way. Building games entirely out of bespoke, single-use puzzles and assets was expensive in contrast to the more process-intensive genres. As time went on and gamers demanded ever bigger, prettier adventures, in higher resolutions with more colors, this became more and more of a problem. Already in 1995, when adventure games were still selling very well, the production costs that were seemingly inherent to the genre were a cause for concern. And the following year, when the genre failed to produce a single million-plus-selling breakout hit for the first time in half a decade, they began to look like an existential threat. At that point, LucasArts’s decision to address the issue proactively in Grim Fandango by switching from pixel art to 3D suddenly seemed a very wise move indeed. For a handful of Silicon Graphics workstations running 3D-modelling software could churn out images far more quickly than an army of pixel artists, at a fraction of the cost per image. If the graphics that resulted lacked some of the quirky, hand-drawn, cartoon-like personality that had marked LucasArts’s earlier adventure games, they made up for that by virtue of their flexibility: a scene could be shown from a different angle just by changing a few parameters instead of having to redraw it from scratch. This really did raise the prospect of making the more immersive games that Tim Schafer desired. But from a bean counter’s point of view, the best thing about it was the cost savings.

And there was one more advantage as well, one that began to seem ever more important as time went on and the market for adventure games running on personal computers continued to soften. Immersive 3D was more or less the default setting of the Sony PlayStation, which had come roaring out of Japan in 1995 to seize the title of the most successful games console of the twentieth century just before the curtain fell on that epoch. In addition to its 3D hardware, the PlayStation sported a CD drive, memory cards for saving state, and a slightly older typical user than the likes of Nintendo and Sega. And yet, although a number of publishers ported their 2D computer-born adventure games to the PlayStation, they never felt entirely at home there, having been designed for a mouse rather than a game controller.[1]A mouse was available as an accessory for the PlayStation, but it was never very popular. A 3D adventure game with a controller-friendly interface might be a very different proposition. If it played its cards right, it would open the door to an installed base of customers five to ten times the size of the extant market for games on personal computers.

Working with 3D graphics in the late 1990s required some clever sleight of hand if they weren’t to end up looking terrible. Grim Fandango’s masterstroke was to make all of its characters — like the protagonist Manny Calavera, whom you see above — mere skeletons, whose faces are literally painted onto their skulls. (The characters are shown to speak by manipulating the texture maps that represent their faces, not by manipulating the underlying 3D models themselves.) This approach gave the game a look reminiscent of another of its cinematic inspirations, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, whilst conveniently avoiding all of the complications of trying to render pliant flesh. A win-win, as they say. Or, as Tim Schafer said: “Instead of fighting the tech limitations of 3D, you have to embrace them and turn them into a style.”

But I’m afraid I’ve gotten slightly ahead of myself. This constellation of ideas, affordances, problems, and solutions was still in a nascent form in November of 1995, when LucasArts hired a young programmer fresh out of university by the name of Bret Mogilefsky. Mogilefsky was a known quantity already, having worked at LucasArts as a tester on and off while he was earning his high-school and university diplomas. Now, he was entrusted with the far more high-profile task of making SCUMM, LucasArts’s venerable adventure engine, safe for 3D.

After struggling for a few months, he concluded that this latest paradigm shift was just too extreme for an engine that had been created on a Commodore 64 circa 1986 and ported and patched from there. He would have to tear SCUMM down so far in order to add 3D functionality that it would be easier and cleaner simply to make a new engine from scratch. He told his superiors this, and they gave him permission to do so — albeit suspecting all the while, Mogilefsky is convinced, that he would eventually realize that game engines are easier envisioned than implemented and come crawling back to SCUMM. By no means was he the first bright spark at LucasArts who thought he could reinvent the adventuring wheel.

But he did prove the first one to call his bosses’ bluff. The engine that he called GrimE (“Grim Engine,” but pronounced like the synonym for “dirt”) used a mixture of pre-rendered and real-time-rendered 3D. The sets in which Manny and his friends and enemies played out their dramas would be the former; the aforementioned actors themselves would be the latter. GrimE was a piebald beast in another sense as well: that of cheerfully appropriating whatever useful code Mogilefsky happened to find lying around the house at LucasArts, most notably from the first-person shooter Jedi Knight.

Like SCUMM before it, GrimE provided relatively non-technical designers like Tim Schafer with a high-level scripting language that they could use themselves to code all of the mechanics of plot and puzzles. Mogilefsky adapted for this task Lua, a new, still fairly obscure programming language out of Brazil. It was an inspired choice. Elegant, learnable, and yet infinitely and easily extendible, Lua has gone on to become a staple language of modern game development, to be found today in such places as the wildly popular Roblox platform.

The most frustrating aspects of GrimE from a development perspective all clustered around the spots where its two approaches to 3D graphics rubbed against one another, producing a good deal of friction in the process. If, for example, Manny was to drink a glass of whiskey, the pre-rendered version of the glass that was part of the background set had to be artfully swapped with its real-time-rendered incarnation as soon as Manny began to interact with it. Getting such actions to look seamless absorbed vastly more time and energy than anyone had expected it to.

In fact, if the bean counters had been asked to pass judgment, they would have had a hard time labeling GrimE a success at all under their metrics. Grim Fandango was in active development for almost three full years, and may have ended up costing as much as $3 million. This was at least two and a half times as much as Full Throttle had cost, and placed it in the same ballpark as The Curse of Monkey Island, LucasArts’s last and most audiovisually lavish SCUMM adventure, which was released a year before Grim Fandango. Further, despite employing a distinctly console-like control scheme in lieu of pointing and clicking with the mouse, Grim Fandango would never make it to the PlayStation; GrimE ended up being just too demanding to be made to work on such limited hardware.[2]Escape from Monkey Island, the only other game ever made using GrimE, was ported to the more capable PlayStation 2 in 2001.

All that aside, though, the new engine remained an impressive technical feat, and did succeed in realizing most of Tim Schafer’s aesthetic goals for it. Even the cost savings it apparently failed to deliver come with some mitigating factors. Making the first game with a new engine is always more expensive than making the ones that follow; there was no reason to conclude that GrimE couldn’t deliver real cost savings on LucasArts’s next adventure game. Then, too, for all that Grim Fandango wound up costing two and a half times as much as Full Throttle, it was also well over two and a half times as long as that game.

“Game production schedules are like flying jumbo jets,” says Tim Schafer. “It’s very intense at the takeoff and landing, but in the middle there’s this long lull.” The landing is the time of crunch, of course, and the crunch on Grim Fandango was protracted and brutal even by the industry’s usual standards, stretching out for months and months of sixteen- and eighteen-hour days. For by the beginning of 1998, the game was way behind schedule and way over budget, facing a marketplace that was growing more and more unkind to the adventure genre in general. This was not a combination to instill patience in the LucasArts executive suite. Schafer’s team did get the game done by the autumn of 1998, as they had been ordered to do in no uncertain terms, but only at a huge cost to their psychological and even physical health.

Bret Mogilefsky remembers coming to Schafer at one point to tell him that he just didn’t think he could go on like this, that he simply had to have a break. He was met with no sympathy whatsoever. To be fair, he probably shouldn’t have expected any. Crunch was considered par for the course in the industry during this era, and LucasArts was among the worst of its practitioners. Long hours spent toiling for ridiculously low wages — Mogilefsky was hired to be the key technical cog in this multi-million-dollar project for a salary of about $30,000 per year — were considered the price you paid for the privilege of working at The Star Wars Company.

Even setting aside the personal toll it took on the people who worked there, crunch did nothing positive for the games themselves. As we’ll see, Grim Fandango shows the scars of crunch most obviously in its dodgy puzzle design. Good puzzles result from a methodical, iterative process of testing and carefully considering the resulting feedback. Grim Fandango did not benefit from such a process, and this lack is all too plainly evident.

But before I continue making some of you very, very mad at me, let me take some time to note the strengths of Grim Fandango, which are every bit as real as its weaknesses. Indeed, if I squint just right, so that my eyes only take in its strengths, I have no problem understanding why it’s to be found on so many lists of “The Best Adventure Games Ever,” sometimes even at the very top.

There’s no denying the stuff that Grim Fandango does well. Its visual aesthetic, which I can best describe as 1930s Art Deco meets Mexican folk art meets 1940s gangster flick, is unforgettable. And it’s married to a script that positively crackles with wit and pathos. Our hero Manny is the rare adventure-game character who can be said to go through an actual character arc, who grows and evolves over the course of his story. The driving force behind the plot is his love for a woman named Meche. But his love isn’t the puppy love that Guybrush Threepwood has for Elaine in the Monkey Island games; the relationship is more nuanced, more adult, more complicated, and its ultimate resolution is all the more moving for that.

How do you create real stakes in a story where everyone is already dead? The Land of the Death’s equivalent of death is “sprouting,” in which a character is turned into a bunch of flowers and forced to live another life in that form. Why shouldn’t the dead fear life as much as the living fear death?

Tim Schafer did not grow up with the Latino traditions that are such an inextricable part of Grim Fandango. Yet the game never feels like the exercise in clueless or condescending cultural tourism it might easily have become. On the contrary, the setting feels full-bodied, lived-in, natural. The cause is greatly aided by a stellar cast of voice actors with just the right accents. The Hollywood veteran Tony Plana, who plays Manny, is particularly good, teasing out exactly the right blend of world-weary cynicism and tarnished romanticism. And Maria Canalas, who plays Meche, is equally perfect in her role. The non-verbal soundtrack by Peter McConnell is likewise superb, a mixture of mariachi music and cool jazz that shouldn’t work but does. Sometimes it soars to the forefront, but more often it tinkles away in the background, setting the mood. You’d only notice it if it was gone — but trust me, then you would really notice.

This is a big game as well as a striking and stylish one — in fact, by most reckonings the biggest adventure that LucasArts ever made. Each of its four acts, which neatly correspond to the four years that the average soul must spend wandering the underworld before going to his or her final rest, is almost big enough to be a self-contained game in its own right. Over the course of Grim Fandango, Manny goes from being a down-on-his-luck Grim Reaper cum travel agent to a nightlife impresario, from the captain of an ocean liner to a prisoner laboring in an underwater mine. The story does arguably peak too early; the second act, an extended homage to Casablanca with Manny in the role of Humphrey Bogart, is so beautifully realized that much of what follows is slightly diminished by the comparison. Be that as it may, though, it doesn’t mean any of what follows is bad.

The jump cut to Manny’s new life as a bar owner in the port city of Rubacava at the beginning of the second act is to my mind the most breathtaking moment of the game, the one where you first realize how expansive its scope and ambition really are.

All told, then, I have no real beef with anyone who chooses to label Grim Fandango an aesthetic masterpiece. If there was an annual award for style in adventure games, this game would have won it easily in 1998, just as Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle would have taken the prize for 1995. Sadly, though, it seems to me that the weaknesses of both games are also the same. In both of their cases, once I move beyond the aesthetics and the storytelling and turn to the gameplay, some of the air starts to leak out of the balloon.

The interactive aspects of Grim Fandango — you know, all that stuff that actually makes it a game — are dogged by two overarching sets of problems. The first is all too typical for the adventure genre: overly convoluted, often nonsensical puzzle design. Tim Schafer was always more intrinsically interested in the worlds, characters, and stories he dreamed up than he was in puzzles. This is fair enough on the face of it; he is very, very good at those things, after all. But it does mean that he needs a capable support network to ensure that his games play as well as they look and read. He had that support for 1993’s Day of the Tentacle, largely in the person of his co-designer Dave Grossman; the result was one of the best adventure games LucasArts ever made, a perfect combination of inspired fiction with an equally inspired puzzle framework. Unfortunately, he was left to make Full Throttle on his own, and it showed. Ditto Grim Fandango. For all that he loved movies, the auteur model was not a great fit for Tim Schafer the game designer.

Grim Fandango seldom gives you a clear idea of what it is you’re even trying to accomplish. Compare this with The Curse of Monkey Island, the LucasArts adventure just before this one, a game which seemed at the time to herald a renaissance in the studio’s puzzle designs. There, you’re always provided with an explicit set of goals, usually in the form of a literal shopping list. Thus even when the mechanics of the puzzles themselves push the boundaries of real-world logic, you at least have a pretty good sense of where you should be focusing your efforts. Here, you’re mostly left to guess what Tim Schafer would like to have happen to Manny next. You stumble around trying to shake something loose, trying to figure out what you can do and then doing it just because you can. By no means is it lost on me that this sense of confusion arises to a large extent because Grim Fandango is such a character-driven story, one which eschews the mechanistic tic-tac-toe of other adventure-game plots. But recognizing this irony doesn’t make it any less frustrating when you’re wandering around with no clue what the story wants from you.

Compounding the frustrations of the puzzles are the frustrations of the interface. You don’t use the mouse at all; everything is done with the numeric keypad, or, if you’re lucky enough to have one, a console-style controller. (At the time Grim Fandango was released, virtually no one playing games on computers did.) Grim Fandango’s mode of navigation is most reminiscent of the console-based JRPGs of its era, such as the hugely popular Final Fantasy VII, which sold over 10 million copies on the PlayStation during the late 1990s. Yet in practice it’s far more irritating, because you have to interact with the environment here on a much more granular level. LucasArts themselves referred to their method of steering Manny about as a “tank” interface, a descriptor which turns out to be all too descriptive. It really does feel like you’re driving a bulky, none too agile vehicle through an obstacle course of scenery.

Make no mistake: the 3D engine makes possible some truly striking views. But too often the designers prioritize visual aesthetics over playability.

In the final reckoning, then, an approach that is fine in a JRPG makes just about every aspect of an old-school, puzzle-solving adventure game — which is what Grim Fandango remains in form and spirit when you strip all of the details of its implementation away — more awkward and less fun. Instead of having hotspots in the environment that light up when you pass a mouse cursor over them, as you do in a SCUMM adventure, you have to watch Manny’s head carefully as you drive him around; when it turns to look in a certain direction, that means there’s something he can interact with there. Needless to say, it’s all too easy to miss a turn of his head, and thereby to miss something vital to your progress through the game.

The inventory system is also fairly excruciating. Instead of being able to bring up a screen showing all of the items Manny is carrying, you have to cycle through them one by one by punching a key or controller button over and over, listening to him drone out their descriptions over and over as you do so. This approach precludes using one inventory object on another one, cutting off a whole avenue of puzzle design.

Now, the apologists among you — and this game does have an inordinate number of them — might respond to these complaints of mine by making reference to the old cliché that, for every door that is closed in life (and presumably in games as well), another one is opened. And in theory, the new engine really does open a door to new types of puzzles that are more tactile and embodied, that make you feel more a part of the game’s world. To Tim Schafer’s credit, he does try to include these sorts of puzzles in quite a few places. To our detriment, though, they turn out to be the worst puzzles in the game, relying on finicky positioning and timing and giving no useful feedback when you get those things slightly wrong.

But even when Grim Fandango presents puzzles that could easily have been implemented in SCUMM, they’re made way more annoying than they ought to be by the engine and interface. When you’re reduced to that final adventurer’s gambit of just trying everything on everything, as you most assuredly will be from time to time here, the exercise takes many times longer than it would using SCUMM, what with having to laboriously drive Manny about from place to place.

Taken as a game rather than the movie it often seems more interested in being, Grim Fandango boils down to a lumpy stew of overthought and thoughtlessness. In the former category, there’s an unpleasant ideological quality to its approach, with its prioritization of some hazy ethic of 3D-powered “immersion” and its insistence that no visible interface elements whatsoever can appear onscreen, even when these choices actively damage the player’s experience. This is where Sid Meier can helpfully step in to remind us that it is the player who is meant to be having the fun in a game, not the designer.

The thoughtlessness comes in the lack of consideration of what kind of game Grim Fandango is meant to be. Like all big-tent gaming genres, the adventure genre subsumes a lot of different styles of game with different priorities. Some adventures are primarily about exploration and puzzle solving. And that’s fine, although one does hope that those games execute their puzzles better than this one does. But Grim Fandango is not primarily about its puzzles; it wants to take you on a ride, to sweep you along on the wings of a compelling story. And boy, does it have a compelling story to share with you. For this reason, it would be best served by streamlined puzzles that don’t get too much in the way of your progress. The ones we have, however, are not only frustrating in themselves but murder on the story’s pacing, undermining what ought to be Grim Fandango’s greatest strengths. A game like this one that is best enjoyed with a walkthrough open on the desk beside it is, in this critic’s view at least, a broken game by definition.

As with so many near-miss games, the really frustrating thing about Grim Fandango is that the worst of its problems could so easily have been fixed with just a bit more testing, a bit more time, and a few more people who were empowered to push back against Tim Schafer’s more dogmatic tendencies. For the 2015 remastered version of the game, Schafer did grudgingly agree to include an alternative point-and-click interface that is more like that of a SCUMM adventure. The results verge on the transformational. By no means does the addition of a mouse cursor remedy all of the infelicities of the puzzle design, but it does make battering your way through them considerably less painful. If my less-than-systematic investigations on YouTube are anything to go by, this so-old-it’s-new-again interface has become by far the most common way to play the game today.

The Grim Fandango remaster. Note the mouse cursor. The new interface is reportedly implemented entirely in in-engine Lua scripts rather than requiring any re-programming of the GrimE engine itself. This means that it would have been perfectly possible to include as an option in the original release.

In other places, the fixes could have been even simpler than revamping the interface. A shocking number of puzzles could have been converted from infuriating to delightful by nothing more than an extra line or two of dialog from Manny or one of the other characters. As it is, too many of the verbal nudges that do exist are too obscure by half and are given only once in passing, as part of conversations that can never be repeated. Hints for Part Four are to be found only in Part One; I defy even an elephant to remember them when the time comes to apply them. All told, Grim Fandango has the distinct odor of a game that no one other than those who were too close to it to see it clearly ever really tried to play before it was put in a box and shoved out the door. There was a time when seeking the feedback of outsiders was a standard part of LucasArts’s adventure-development loop. Alas, that era was long past by the time of Grim Fandango.

Nonetheless, Grim Fandango was accorded a fairly rapturous reception in the gaming press when it was released in the last week of October in 1998, just in time for Halloween and the Mexican Day of the Dead which follows it on November 1. Its story, characters, and setting were justifiably praised, while the deficiencies of its interface and puzzle design were more often than not relegated to a paragraph or two near the end of the review. This is surprising, but not inexplicable. There was a certain sadness in the trade press — almost a collective guilt — about the diminished prospects of the adventure game in these latter years of the decade. Meanwhile LucasArts was still the beneficiary of a tremendous amount of goodwill, thanks to the many classics they had served up during those earlier, better years for the genre as a whole. Grim Fandango was held up as a sort of standard bearer for the embattled graphic adventure, the ideal mix of tradition and innovation to serve as proof that the genre was still relevant in a post-Quake, post-Starcraft world.

For many years, the standard narrative had it that the unwashed masses of gamers utterly failed to respond to the magazines’ evangelism, that Grim Fandango became an abject failure in the marketplace. In more recent years, Tim Schafer has muddied those waters somewhat by claiming that the game actually sold close to half a million copies. I rather suspect that the truth is somewhere between these two extremes. Sales of a quarter of a million certainly don’t strike me as unreasonable once foreign markets are factored into the equation. Such a figure would have been enough to keep Grim Fandango from losing much if any money, but would have provided LucasArts with little motivation to make any more such boldly original adventure games. And indeed, LucasArts would release only one more adventure game of any stripe in their history. It would use the GrimE engine, but it would otherwise play it about as safe as it possibly could, by being yet another sequel to the venerable but beloved Secret of Monkey Island.

As I was at pains to note earlier, I do see what causes some people to rate Grim Fandango so highly, and I definitely don’t think any less of them for doing so. For my part, though, I’m something of a stickler on some points. To my mind, interactivity is the very quality that separates games from other forms of media, making it hard for me to pronounce a game “good” that botches it. I’ve learned to be deeply suspicious of games whose most committed fans want to talk about everything other than that which you the player actually do in them. The same applies when a game’s creators display the same tendency. Listening to the developers’ commentary tracks in the remastered edition of Grim Fandango (who would have imagined in 1998 that games would someday come with commentary tracks?), I was shocked by how little talk there was about the gameplay. It was all lighting and dialog beats and soundtrack stabs and Z-buffers instead — all of which is really, really important in its place, but none of which can yield a great game on its own. Tellingly, when the subject of puzzle design did come up, it always seemed to be in an off-hand, borderline dismissive way. “I don’t know how players are supposed to figure out this puzzle,” says Tim Schafer outright at one point. Such a statement from your lead designer is never a good sign.

But I won’t belabor the issue any further. Suffice to say that Grim Fandango is doomed to remain a promising might-have-been rather than a classic in my book. As a story and a world, it’s kind of amazing. It’s just a shame that the gameplay part of this game isn’t equally inspired.



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.


Sources: The book Grim Fandango: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Jo Ashburn. Retro Gamer 31 and 92; Computer Gaming World of November 1997, May 1998, and February 1999; Ultimate PC of August 1998. Plus the commentary track from the 2015 Grim Fandango remaster.

Online sources include The International House of Mojo’s pages on the game, the self-explanatory Grim Fandango Network, Gamespot’s vintage review of the game, and Daniel Albu’s YouTube conversation with Bret Mogilefsky.

And a special thank-you to reader Matt Campbell, who shared with me the audio of a talk that Bret Mogilefsky gave at the 2005 Lua Workshop, during which he explained how he used that language in GrimE.

Where to Get It: A modestly remastered version of Grim Fandango is available for digital purchase at GOG.com.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 A mouse was available as an accessory for the PlayStation, but it was never very popular.
2 Escape from Monkey Island, the only other game ever made using GrimE, was ported to the more capable PlayStation 2 in 2001.

Thursday, 07. November 2024

Renga in Blue

Critical Mass: Where in the World is Carmen Stupertino

(Continued from my previous post.) Just as a reminder, this game involves multiple cities that are going to go nuclear, and we have to go globe-trotting to stop the mad bomber. (Or evil corporation; more on that later.) The curious bit is that I made some progress in a manner that resembled one of the […]

(Continued from my previous post.)

Just as a reminder, this game involves multiple cities that are going to go nuclear, and we have to go globe-trotting to stop the mad bomber. (Or evil corporation; more on that later.)

The curious bit is that I made some progress in a manner that resembled one of the old Carmen Sandiego games, where I thought about the actual geographic location as opposed to solving a regular puzzle.

We’ll get to that, but first a quick note on the dating for this game. As I mentioned last time, I got the date from the Computer Adventure Solution Archive but didn’t know where 1982 came from. It comes from the disk label.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

I found an eBay auction with an Apple II disk that also had 1982 on it. The back on the box says 1983. While this might suggest a pure typo on the disk’s part, I suspect it was a matter of delayed production, like Kabul Spy which has some 1981 dates but was published on the 16th of February, 1982. We have that specific of a date because Sirius filed it as such with the US Copyright Office. Escape From Rungistan has a “Date of Publication” of June 2nd and The Blade of Blackpoole is listed as November 24th. The last entry was filed at the start of 1983 and there are no later filings from Sirius, suggesting they stopped bothering.

Enough lingering, we have criminal(s) to catch!

From the UN Building you land at you can go east to find a shoe store and and a deli. Between the two is an “alley” that has a thermos bottle. The shoe store says it is “closed” (I don’t know if it ever opens) and the deli says it opens at 10. Going a little further is Ajax Security Systems with a sign that mentions voice activation.

The door is locked. I don’t know if this means we are supposed to break in with a voice command, or if this is just a hint that there’s a voice activated door later that uses the system.

While the shoe store and Ajax remain unresolved (and may stay that way) the deli really does open at 10 and you can wait briefly before coming in. You then find out the store is only selling soup and you have to choose what kind of soup you want.

The thermos from the alley is required. Mm, alley soup.

I chose tomato, and the game lets you pick that (and then kicks you out of the store because the health board comes and closes it down). It turns out I chose poorly but I’ll get back to that.

To the west is a taxi, and it is always the same graphic.

I don’t know what this clue means yet.

You need to tell the driver where to go, and the prompt is open ended. Theoretically, the SUBWAY or the STATUE OF LIBERTY or the MET or YANKEE STADIUM are all possible, but you instead need to suss out where the game wants you to go. You need to think back to the envelope from the UN Building. It mentioned that the threatening message came from a pay phone at the Central Zoo, so maybe there’s a clue at the ZOO.

The music cues from Rungistan are still in, by the way. This spot plays “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. There’s also an anxiety-inducing tick-tick-tick as the time goes by when you aren’t typing anything so I was not playing with the sound on.

New York. Not complete in that I don’t know if the shoe store or the security store can be entered.

If you haven’t been able to tell yet, this game doesn’t even remotely pretend to be realistic representations of the various cities, but just have some stand-in places. So while Roberta Williams might have a lot of Zoo rooms that do nothing and are meant to simulate the feeling of being there, Bob Blauschild gets straight to business.

Just to the west of the elephant is a “junk food” stand. I tried BUY ICE CREAM and the game told me I was restricted to popcorn, potato chips, and peanuts. Attempts at buying the popcorn and chips inform you the stand is out, so only the peanuts are available, and they go straight back to the elephant.

Going east there’s the seal pond, and trying to step further results in an animated bomb bouncing on screen. You need to (in a timely manner) GET BOMB and THROW BOMB to dispose of it.

Further on is a man-eating lion cage, and a paper inside. Going in the cage is fatal, but you can GET PAPER / WITH BROOM (the lion eats the broom).

A clue! We can technically take the airport straight from New York to Paris, but our “contact” is in London so let’s do that first.

Unlike most of the airports, the London one has a few extra locations to visit.

First off is a Telex — that’s a teletype, like the old-timey stock market ticker. This drops some information that not all might be as it seems.

The specifically gives the warning that there are no bombs but rather “MISSILES TO BE LA…” (messages cuts off) Adjacent to the telex is a newsstand where the newspaper gives even more mystery.

To summarize, it mentions an industrialist (Renee Renoir) found dead, and he must have died the same day as the bomb threat. He was lead of a now-dissolved energy company, International Energy Limited, and the two other people involved (Rand and Stupertino) are missing, so it’d be useful to find them (or potentially, their dead bodies).

Finally, marking the game definitely as from the 80s, there’s a Hare Krishna. They used to be common at airports in the US before they were banned from prophesizing at terminals; there was a court case about it trying to argue for 1st amendment protection (they were decided to be “not public forums under the First Amendment”).

Their appearance is marked by the tune “We’re in the Money”. They were known for having flowers so I tried GIVE FLOWERS and and received money, which is odd, since I’ve been using money (to buy plane tickets, etc.) even though I don’t have them listed in inventory. I assume this gets used for a Serious Bribe later.

You can try KILL KRISHNA to which the game responds YOU MUST BE FROM N.Y.!

Now comes the taxi and the Carmen Sandiego part, since we were given no location for the contact. I tried BIG BEN and the driver told me the traffic was bad but how about Buckingham Palace. Sure?

The main vibe to catch onto here is that despite the fact we were given no directions to the contact, by finding some place in London to go we’ll be able to find them anyway quite quickly. Just one step is away is New London Bridge, and he’s waiting for us at the north. Here’s were the word LITHIUM (randomly on the wall at the start of the game) comes into play.

Connected to the same area we can go to Paris by train. The Chunnel wasn’t finished until 1994, unless I’m missing something this otherwise wasn’t possible in 82-83?

Here’s what likely is the entire Paris map:

The train lands us by a taxi, and this time we can either use the clue and go straight to the street with the Laundry place (on the paper we found at the lion cage) or we can just say we want to go to the EIFFEL tower and of course it is connected.

Inside, we can give our slip and find out while the pants are clean yet, they found a key inside that they hand over. I have yet to figure out what the key goes to, but it managed to form some drama anyway, as while trying to get over to the taxi (to go to Rome, the next destination) it falls into some sewers.

The sewers are easier to pre-map out before this, because when you pick up the key the sewers coincidentally decide to start dramatically filling with water. This is done in real time and you have to make your way back out in time.

Unfortunately, you aren’t out of the woods yet: you start shivering from cold and die quickly from pneumonia afterwards.

The trick is to — rather than picking up TOMATO soup earlier — pick up CHICKEN NOODLE. Because that’s what’s good for health, right? (It was a thing in the 80s, at least. As was the flowers thing. As was peanuts going to elephants. There’s a lot of “unrealistic common wisdom” puzzles going on.)

OK, Rome. This time I didn’t know exactly what to tell the Taxi. The newspaper mentioned Stupertino, but that doesn’t work for a prompt. I literally Googled “rome tourist” and started running through the list, getting a hit on FORUM.

Just to the east of the Roman Forum. Weirdly, not unrealistic for these two places to be close.

These are right next to the Stupertino Villa but it is locked up and I don’t know how to get in. The key doesn’t work.

The last threatened city is Miami, which is available flying from New York. After some noodling I was able to go to the BEACH.

There’s no clues or anything pointing to a mad bomber / missile launcher, but there is a water-skiing contest, and it uses the left and right arrow keys in order to steer through some buoys. I haven’t beaten it yet so I can’t tell you what the reward is.

Miami has one more destination: San Juan.

Going back to the informant’s message, they said Rand was at St. Thomas. So if we’re looking for Rand (or their dead body) we need to get from San Juan to St. Thomas, which is why I (successfully) tried out BOAT.

Trying to GET GAS for the boat causes some of it to spill, and disasterous consequences.

I could easily still be missing a location via Carmen Sandiego method, so I should do a screen just in case the Miami taxi also can visit the Everglades. Other than that, I’ve got the security and shoe stores I haven’t entered (New York) a villa that can’t be entered (Rome), a key I have yet to use (from Paris), a mini-game I need to beat (Miami) and the boat/gas problem (San Juan). No hints yet, please; if anyone has played this before, you’re welcome to speculate.


Choice of Games LLC

Whiskey-Four—Save the galaxy–and yourself, if you can!

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play! The corpos are after you. The cops are, too. Even your ex has crawled out of the grave to try and get you back. Meanwhile, the fate of the galaxy itself rests on a knife’s edge, and only you can bar the doors of hell. Whiskey-Four is 30% off until November 14th! Whiskey-Four is a standalone 396,000-word interactive novel by John Louis, author of I,
Whiskey-Four

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

The corpos are after you. The cops are, too. Even your ex has crawled out of the grave to try and get you back. Meanwhile, the fate of the galaxy itself rests on a knife’s edge, and only you can bar the doors of hell.

Whiskey-Four is 30% off until November 14th!

Whiskey-Four is a standalone 396,000-word interactive novel by John Louis, author of I, the Forgotten One. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You are a retired contract killer from the Anomalous Interference Unit. Injured on the line of duty, you were forced into an early retirement–only to be reactivated on a distant frontier world to address a horrific, unknowable threat.

A great sense of malaise permeates the void. Something big is stirring, something that jeopardizes the entire galaxy.

You’re the only person in position to stop it before it’s all too late.

Too bad everyone else wants you dead.

• Play as a man or woman; gay, straight, or bisexual.
• Engage in a variety of flings during your chaotic journey.
• Re-ignite an old love or snuff it out for good.
• Manage your limited supplies to keep yourself alive.
• Fight your way through corporate kill agents, SWAT teams, and your own obsessive ex-lover.
• Choose from three separate body types that influence the narrative.

Try to save the galaxy–and yourself, while you’re at it.

John developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.


Between Two Worlds—Travel with your foes to save the kingdom.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play! Join forces with a rogue smuggler to uncover the truth of a mysterious cult and foil their plans—but who can you trust in a time of uncertainty and darkness? Between Two Worlds is free to win, and paying to turn off ads is 33% off until November 14th! Liam developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice i

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Join forces with a rogue smuggler to uncover the truth of a mysterious cult and foil their plans—but who can you trust in a time of uncertainty and darkness?

Between Two Worlds is free to win, and paying to turn off ads is 33% off until November 14th!

Between Two Worlds is a 40,000-word interactive novel by Liam Parker, author of The Formorian War. Set in the fictional kingdom of Acai, it’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You have always felt different. The time to discover the truth arrives when the civil war reaches you and your family. Teaming up with a young woman with one eye, you will embark on a grand and tough journey. Sure, it sounds dangerous—and it is—but what choice do you have?

Meanwhile, a dangerous cult works in the background to unravel not just your home but possibly the world. They need to be stopped, yet you soon discover that they pale in comparison to the true evil of the realm.

  • Play as male or female, human or elf.
  • Learn about your past and shape your future.
  • Meet otherworldly beings like a ghost and tiny creatures.
  • Uncover the truth about your enemies and stop them before it’s too late.
  • Travel the country and abroad on a mission (or several) to further your knowledge and understanding of your enemies and their intentions.
  • Will you be the hero or the villain of the realm?

In these dark and uncertain times, every day is a struggle. Join forces with your enemies and deal with other hostiles to save the kingdom.

Liam developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

Tuesday, 05. November 2024

top expert

let’s make IF #16: tools for disabling and testing built-in commands

A couple of tools for disabling–and checking–commands from the standard rules. and now for our regularly-scheduled disclaimer. This is a good time to restate my purpose here: “Let’s Make IF” isn’t about making great code, let alone perfect code. It’s about making “functional code that won’t stop me from making a good game.” Repeat the [

A couple of tools for disabling–and checking–commands from the standard rules.

and now for our regularly-scheduled disclaimer.

This is a good time to restate my purpose here: “Let’s Make IF” isn’t about making great code, let alone perfect code. It’s about making “functional code that won’t stop me from making a good game.” Repeat the Ending, a game that has done pretty well (thank you if you’ve played it!), used only three extensions in its first three releases. There is one bit of Inform 6 that someone wrote for me: it hides the status bar. Two other people wrote regular expressions for me, one apiece. There are no relations, for instance, or scenes. Most of it is just basic action processing stuff: the kinds of things we talk about here all the time!

You don’t need to be a programming genius to make a good Inform game. That’s the message of this blog: it’s OK to be a beginner, and it’s OK to be messy. It’s OK to be inefficient. Don’t give up, OK? Let’s make IF.

last time, on let’s make IF…

In last week’s episode, I discussed two methods for disabling commands for a limited parser game. In the first, I showed a way to disable every command associated with a specific action. By default, players trying to use actions disabled in this way will get a parser error in return (“That’s not a verb I recognize.”).

The second and more laborious approach involves creating new, custom actions and remapping known commands to them. This allows us to give custom responses per action, as well as providing a way to separate responses to familiar commands (we’ll handle with rules) to commands that simply aren’t supported in the Standard Rules (we’ll handle with a parser error).

My thought is that a player will know the difference between typing “push rock” and “adkjsfdhkfsaj”, and so should my game.

going all the way.

I decided to push this as far as I could. Disabling most commands would be a good learning experience, I thought, and I could reuse the code in other projects. While building it, I realized that I needed a reliable way to test the changes. And so, a few workdays later, I present…

Disabling and Testing Inform 7 Commands by Drew Cook

Break it open and experiment yourself! Please note that these extensions are very much a work in progress. Over the next week, I’ll try to move these over to our own project source code. This template is very nearly complete.

Short update today, because the update is in the extensions. I hope they look useful, or at least educational. Let me know if you experiment with them!

next.

I’m hoping that I will be ready to write about a feature-complete template for my Inform 7 poetry project. Stick around!

Categories: , ,

Leave a comment

Monday, 04. November 2024

Zarf Updates

The Beyond and Leviathan – available now!

I posted all the links last week, but today is launch day so let's have 'em again! Playable right now. The Beyond, Adventuregame Comics #2, by Jason Shiga The Beyond is now available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Steam Deck! Your death was ...

I posted all the links last week, but today is launch day so let's have 'em again! Playable right now.

A cartoon drawing of a dark-skinned man holding a harpoon. Books flutter by in the background. The Beyond, Adventuregame Comics #2, by Jason Shiga

The Beyond is now available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Steam Deck!

Your death was a tragedy... your afterlife is a mystery. Unravel the secrets of death with the help of Xochitl, your guide. Can you find your way through the doors of the great library of the Beyond?

Official selection: AdventureX 2024

The Beyond has been selected as an exhibitor in the AdventureX Steam Festival for 2024!

(Among august company, to be sure. I've played part or all of Lil' Guardsman, Murder on Space Station 52, Two Falls, Your House, and of course Highland Song. Not to neglect honorable mentions Slay the Princess, Observation, Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, OPUS Starsong, Monkey Island, and Talos Principle 2. All worth a look. And, again, those are just the ones I've tried. I'll be adding many more of the AdvX selections to my to-play pile.)


A cartoon drawing of a person with a pony-tail. Tentacles writhe in the background. Leviathan, Adventuregame Comics #1, by Jason Shiga

Leviathan is now available for iPhone and iPad! (As well as all the desktop platforms.)

A seaside village – and a monstrous threat. Explore as you choose, by day or by night. Can you unravel the secrets of history and defeat the Leviathan?


Whew. That's all for now. Happy launch day, and, you know, good luck with everything else this week.


Choice of Games LLC

New Author Interview and DEMO! Harris Powell-Smith, “Honor Bound”

Protect an exclusive boarding school and rebuild your life after scandal as a military bodyguard for the children of the rich and famous! Return to the world of Crème de la Crème, this time as a military officer in the Republic of Teran. Honor Bound is an interactive novel by Harris Powell-Smith where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 550,000 words and hundreds of choi

Honor Bound

Protect an exclusive boarding school and rebuild your life after scandal as a military bodyguard for the children of the rich and famous! Return to the world of Crème de la Crème, this time as a military officer in the Republic of Teran.

Honor Bound is an interactive novel by Harris Powell-Smith where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 550,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

I sat down with Harris to discuss this latest game. You can play the first three chapters of Honor Bound today; the rest of the game will release on December 5th! Be sure to wishlist it on Steam—it really helps. 

We return to the world of Crème de la Crème in Honor Bound, but this time players will be experiencing it in a much different way. Tell me about the PC and the setting.

The Republic of Teran has been mentioned here and there in earlier games in the Crème de la Crème series, and the Royal Affairs PC went there for a whirlwind vacation, but this is our first long trip there. It’s a sprawling archipelago with one large island plus many smaller ones to the south, one of which notably seceded from the mainland a few decades ago. Landscapes range from mountainous areas to rainforest to wide open plains.

Teran considers itself more modern and advanced than some of the other countries such as Westerlin, where Crème de la Crème is set, although just as in other places, people with wealth and influence behave badly – and the meritocracy is not always as straightforward as people would like to think. Three hundred years ago the monarchy was overturned in a military coup, and it’s now ruled by a President and Parliament. Military service is embedded into the wider social culture. Almost everyone does two years of service aged eighteen, although not everyone sticks with it as a career.

Enter the Honor Bound PC. They did remain in the military – the details of which can be decided by the player – and have been working there for a variable number of years, as they’re either in their late twenties, in their thirties, or in their early forties. They’ve built up a good reputation over the years, but a recent incident left them badly injured and reassigned. There are a lot of options as to why this happened, ranging from having disobeyed orders to rescue civilians, to being wrongly blamed for an accident, to abandoning their exploration team in a cave-in, and more!

So now at the start of Honor Bound they’re in a position where they need to prove that they’re worthy of staying. Or figure out whether they want something else from their life…

At first blush I might have guessed that playing a mature adult in a school setting might be a little less captivating than the youthful PCs of Royal Affairs and Crème de la Crème. But you’ve—as ever!—taken a really fresh approach to that gameplay experience.

Thank you so much! I’ve really enjoyed taking the opportunity to embrace a fresh way of telling stories in this setting, and taking advantage of setting it in a different country to explore that. The adult Honor Bound PC has more responsibilities to consider and juggle than a younger PC, but also a lot more freedom and agency. They have the chance to stand up for themselves and for their principles against other adults in a way the Crème de la Crème and Royal Affairs can’t always do.

And it’s been fun to write an adult with more physical capabilities: you can help in emergencies and thwart – or enact – various shenanigans because of having more influence available to you.

It was also lots of fun to write teenagers from an adult perspective. At fourteen, Catarina and her friends are younger than most of the Crème de la Crème and Royal Affairs characters, but I could imagine them having a whole other game to themselves. There’s a lot going on with the kids beneath the surface and I really enjoyed giving the Honor Bound PC glimpses of their world, and the ability to interact or interfere if they want to. If they bond with Catarina over the course of the game, they can influence her in a number of directions and make a genuine connection; it’s very different to writing teenagers interacting with other teenagers, and it was fun showing this different view.

Plus it was refreshing to write friendships and romantic relationships between adults: the communication styles are different and so are the associated emotions. Some of the romantic interests have had serious relationships before; some are wary about workplace romance; some are expecting something casual and may be surprised by their depth of feeling. One knew the PC when they were younger and therefore has a different perspective. Even the younger romanceable characters have gone through some major life changes, though not all of them feel comfortable sharing about them at first, and it was lovely to explore that through the growing relationships – romantic and otherwise.

As you’ve grown and refined your writing and coding style for COG, I wonder what you’ve been able to iterate and innovate on game by game.

I’ve developed more clarity about what my goals are with the games. When writing Honor Bound, I did have moments where I needed to course-correct and figure out what exactly was going to be in the chapter I was about to write. I think that always happens! But in general I found that easier to do this time around than with some of my earlier games because I had a stronger sense of what I wanted from each part of the game.

With each game I’ve developed better responsivity for when the PC is trying to romance lots of different incompatible characters at once! In my earlier games, the characters sometimes have conversations about it but in Honor Bound it’s all a lot clearer and the romance interests feel to me more real and human in the way they talk to each other and to the PC about what’s going on.

And in general I’ve developed how skills and personality stats work together, and clarity about what stats are being tested. In Honor Bound, I’ve included an option to show what’s happening to the stats, but even without that I think the stats mesh together in an improved way. I also made the descriptive text, the PC’s dialogue, and the PC’s “inner voice” very responsive to the personality choices the player has made. There are so many different self-expressive choices as well as background options, and I really wanted the PC to feel like the player’s own. So it was really exciting when playtesters said things like “I really loved that my very callous PC had that pragmatic thought about this event, when my very Humane PC was more sympathetic”.

Do you have more stories to tell in this world? Noblesse Oblige was a great glimpse into some interesting standalone story possibilities.

For the moment, I’m taking a break from the Crème de la Crème world – I’ve been writing in it near-constantly for six years now, which blows my mind – but I have a lot of ideas! My current favourite is one about an archaeological expedition. But who knows, I’ll probably come up with many more over time…

What else are you working on for COG or otherwise?

I’ve got a couple of CoG projects in the pipeline – neither of which are from the Crème de la Crème setting – but they’re under wraps for now. Both involve magic, though, and I’m very much looking forward to writing some creepy supernatural stuff with CoG for the first time since Blood Money came out!

Wednesday, 30. October 2024

Renga in Blue

Critical Mass (1982)

One thing that’s felt unusual about the All the Adventures project compared to studying, say, short story authors, is the vast number of people in the early days “just passing through” and either writing one or two games. Even most relatively prolific authors have had their main work confined to a small span of time, […]

One thing that’s felt unusual about the All the Adventures project compared to studying, say, short story authors, is the vast number of people in the early days “just passing through” and either writing one or two games. Even most relatively prolific authors have had their main work confined to a small span of time, so we can’t look at their works like we might cinema and compare Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) to Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Other authors who have gone into games have just touched upon adventure games briefly. Yes, normal publishing (and cinema, and art, and etc.) also have one/two-hit wonders, but the nature of the genre here seems more transient. Even the Infocom veterans really produced most of their work in the 80s and the diehards like Steve Meretzky had trouble keeping the flame alight.

In the case of Bob Blauschild, before he wrote his two games for Sirius (Escape From Rungistan — which we’ve already looked at — and today’s selection) he worked in chip design, and after he was done with his games he resumed with chip design. He has other published works but they’re all things like a chapter in the 1990s book Analog Circuit Design titled Understanding Why Things Don’t Work.

In an early attempt to build an electric light, Thomas Edison used a particular construction that glowed brilliantly for a brief moment and then blew out. An assistant made a remark about the experiment being a failure, and Edison quickly corrected him. The experiment had yielded important results, for they had learned one of the ways that wouldn’t work.

Learning through our mistakes doesn’t apply only in the areas of dealing with IRS agents or meeting “interesting” people in bars — it’s also one of the most important aspects of the creative process in engineering. A “failure” that is thoroughly investigated can often be more beneficial in the long run than success on the first try.

But let’s not be wistful and just enjoy the game, eh?

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

Critical Mass maintains the animation and sense of humor of the first game, except it adds color and an extra stakes of saving the world from nuclear annihilation.

On June 1st, the United Nations received the following message: “Good morning. Just thought I’d drop a line to let you know that precisely at 8 p.m. on June 9th, I’ll be destroying the world’s five largest cities with thermal nuclear weapons. It ought to be a real blast! Sorry, but that’s about all I can tell you. Thanks for your time and have a a nice day!”

The delegates gathered quickly. How could this demented person be found and stopped? The task would require someone who could understand how the sicko thought. Well, naturally, they thought of you! Hurry now, you’ve got just nine days to prevent this heinous crime and save 50 million lives! That is, unless you’ve got something more important to do.

I’m just trusting this one on CASA in terms of the publication date, even though the manual etc. say 1983. Likely it was right at the end of the year.

The red center animates ticking down. This is slightly less elaborate than the zoom-in of Rungistan but this may have needed to be a compromise for color.

The mushroom cloud is animated rising.

After the opening graphics the game asks you to flip over to side B. (Note if you’re playing on the WOZ version, AppleWin isn’t happy with the second side WOZ file, but the package comes with a DSK version.)

The envelope on the desk notes that a message was received at 1:00 in the morning on June 1: at 8 pm on June 5th, the five largest cities in the world will be obliterated by thermo-nuclear devices.

The call “was traced to a pay phone at the Central Park Zoo” but there were no clues, and we must “find a way to neutralize this treat”. Our first destination is a contact in London.

Just to be clear, this is not a “realistic” nuclear paranoia type game, like maybe Wasteland, but more of a James Bond setup where for some reason only one person can save the world. The scenario includes a great deal of emphasis on time, and there’s a long explanation in the manual:

Each command uses 1 minute.
Taxi Rides use 30 minutes per ride.
A boat on the Sea uses 30 minutes per direction.
A boat near Land uses 1 minute per direction.
Walking uses 1 minute per direction.
Time elapsed for city to city travel varies by type of transportation.
If you are knocked unconscious a certain block of time will pass.
If you do not enter a command within 10 seconds of your previous command, the clock will advance 1 minute.

The last sentence is highly significant: the clock advances in real time. With an emulator on max speed you can watch the clock advancing quickly to doomsday.

Yes, that’s a bit anxiety-inducing. I might be doing a lot of reloading to redo sections faster, although my general suspicion is that the real-time part is more or less insignificant but city travel time might be very important.

After reading the envelope, it vaporizes, Mission Impossible style, and then we have nothing else to do but hop in an elevator.

More anxiety-inducing than the real time aspect is having commands not get accepted and having the clock tick down as a result. You can’t just GO ELEVATOR so you need to PUSH BUTTON instead first.

The elevator says there is a “special command word” but typing GO DOWN seemingly works.

As you keep riding down, the elevator “has a nervous breakdown” and the number ticks down and lets you type more commands, but all I’ve attempted so far gets me a “you can’t stop it” response.

After some fiddling around (and trying the word LITHIUM from the opening room, which also doesn’t work) I decided to invoke a page from Rungistan and try JUMP, which works to represent you going into the air by the room-picture moving down. You need to time JUMP such that you’re in the air as the elevator hits floor 1.

A grim beginning! I enjoyed the author’s prior game quite a bit so I’m willing to give some latitude here even given the ticking clock (I have the magic of save states to smooth it over) although I suspect this might be a harder game than Rungistan.