Planet Interactive Fiction

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Continuing to build our framework for a variable IF text.

last time, on let’s make IF…

Last week, I added support for “fake” endings, as well as a clear screen functionality to present eight individual “poems” in a recognizable IF format. The techniques should be largely familiar at this point: text substitutions using tables. You can get a refresher here.

more of the same.

As promised last time, I’m not going to write about the same techniques over and over again. This post will consist mostly of updates based on things we’ve done before. We can start by adding an opening “blurb,” or preamble, to our texts. We already have a “before looking” rule that we can hitch our new text to.

before looking:
	say the fake banner;
	say the preamble.

I’ll follow through with a “to say” definition that references a table, and make the relevant table. You can check it out in the updated source code I’ve shared below.

We’ll also need to change the room description to match our current model. That will work the same way: a definition and a table.

the description of ABR is "[a variable room description]".

to say a variable room description:
	choose row with an index of the magic number from the table of room descriptions;
	say the text entry.

Likewise, a text for the table (the actual thing in the game world, not a code table in our program) printed during the room description (this is a “paragraph about” and not a “description of” the table). We already had something for this, but let’s update it to work the way our other texts do.

rule for writing a paragraph about the table:
	if something is held by the table:
		say "[a table text]";
		say line break;
		list the contents of table, with newlines, indented, with extra indentation;
	otherwise:
		say "This is an error condition. Something should always be on the table.";
	now the table is mentioned.
	
to say a table text:
	choose row with an index of the magic number in the table of actual table information;
	say text entry.

Note that I’ve included an error message. I don’t intend for the cards to be actually takeable, but I haven’t done anything to prevent taking them yet. I’ll leave something in the code as a reminder and/or warning.

Room names:

the printed name of ABR is "[ABR]".

to say ABR:
	choose row with an index of the magic number from the table of room names;
	say the text entry.

Zooming along! The last item on our list is a means for printing multiple card names. Since this is part of a complicated process for listing the table’s contents, things are a bit trickier. Not much, though! We’ve done this all before. Here’s our list-printing customization as it is right now:

rule for printing the name of a tarot (called the current card) while listing contents:
	say "[printed name of the current card][if the clicker of the current card is not zero] (times drawn: [clicker of the current card])".

Since we already have a known noun (the current card), we can use that to look up the right information. First, a short table of contents.

table of card references
tarot	table
redc	table of red cards
bluec	table of blue cards
yellowc	table of green cards
orangec	table of orange cards

Since we have tied individual tables to each card, it becomes a matter of checking the right table against the magic number–familiar territory by now. Here’s the final rule:

rule for printing the name of a tarot (called the current card) while listing contents:
	choose row with a tarot of the current card from the table of card references;
	let t be the table entry;
	choose row with an index of the magic number from t;
	say "[card entry][if the clicker of the current card is not zero] (times drawn: [clicker of the current card])".

There! Since this is only happening during listing, we can leave the “real” printed name alone in case we need it for something.

I mentioned needing to sync up magic number across all outputs, so I moved the “increment the magic number” phrase to the very end of the turn. I also added numbers to our tables, just so we can see that everything is lined up. Here’s what turn 4 of our “game” looks like:

Portrait With Wolf ^_^ 
An absolute delight 
Release 4 / Serial number 241007 / Inform 7 v10.1.2 / F 

Preamble 4.
Room name 4.
Room description 4.

Table paragraph 4.
  a red 4
  a blue 4
  a green 4 (times drawn: 1)
  an orange 4 (times drawn: 2)

>
a placeholder for randomness.

green. 4

This is a fake tombstone entry from the table of fake assertions. 4


   *** fake epitaph 4 ***




Press any key to *RESTART*! 4

There we are! Everything’s pulling from the right tables, at the right time. As always, you can check the updated source code for more details. You can copy and paste it directly into your own IDE and run it for yourself!

This week’s source.

next.

The to-do list is getting shorter! We need to restrict the parser so that players don’t run off with our cards. Similarly, I’ll have to customize parser errors and default messages for our game. That’s an important aspect of any polished game!

I’d like to cap things off with an essay about playtesting… within two weeks, I hope. Stay tuned.

(Continued from my last post.)

The essential vibe that Uncle Harry’s Will had that felt “original” wasn’t necessarily the car aspect as much as deciphering a riddle while applying it to a large landscape. Many adventures have had cryptic instructions as part of their gameplay, but they usually don’t involve what might happen in a realistic “puzzle hunt” where there’s an enormous amount of extra space, and you have to apply the riddles/poems/clues in a way that whittles down the possibilities. The MIT Puzzle Hunt — the in-person component, at least — has an entire college campus as fair game, but only a small percentage is used.

I’ve hit this moment in Whembly Castle, and I’m not sure yet how to decipher the clues. While the game doesn’t start you with a poem there are some hidden within the castle itself.

Cover of one of the Dynacomp catalogs, from Jason Scott.

But first: last time I had stopped right before getting down to the bottom of a ladder under a manhole. At the very bottom is a compass, which can be used at the foggy lake.

YOU ARE IN A SMALL CHAMBER AT THE END OF A TUNNEL. THERE IS A LADDER FASTENED TO THE SIDE OF THE WALL. A LARGE SHAFT RISES ABOVE YOU. A TUNNEL LEADS WEST.

YOU SEE HERE, A SMALL COMPASS

Going west from here leads to darkness. It may simply be a red herring or it may be the tunnel gets entered via the opposite direction later. I don’t have any obvious light sources; while I have a can of gasoline, there’s no method of lighting it. The rusty key, the iron bar, and the oars aren’t helpful; I’ve got the deck of cards, but my character isn’t Gambit.

YOU ARE IN AN EAST-WEST TUNNEL THE TUNNEL SLOPES UPWARD TO THE EAST.

NOW WHAT? >W

IT IS PITCH BLACK HERE. TO CONTINUE WITHOUT LIGHT COULD BE DANGEROUS.

Leaving this be for the moment, I went to take the compass to the lake and got hit horribly by the boat bug again: while in the boat, the game claims you can’t go west (even though you should be able to). Rob suggested dropping the oars but I found it made no difference. I went as far as restarting my game altogether in case I had some corruption. Being able to go WEST ended up just working sometimes at random. I can’t guarantee this isn’t an emulator bug.

Here’s what my playing setup looks like. North Star is being played as an emulator inside an emulator, which works better than you might expect, but there’s still the open possibility of some obscure command being performed wrong.

Finally breaking out into the lake, though, the game uses a grid of rooms:

The Castle is marked by a berm that you can row around.

YOU ARE ON THE LAKE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE CASTLE. A 5 FOOT BERM RUN EAST AND SOUTH HERE. A HUGE TOWER RISES INTO THE FOG HERE.

YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.

NOW WHAT? >S

YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEAR THE BERM BY THE WEST WALL.

YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.

Hopping out of the boat causes the boat to float away (I think this is meant to be a one-way trip). The south side of the berm has a drawbridge (not openable from the outside) and on the southwest side there’s a tower with vines that indicates you can climb.

YOU ARE ON THE BERM AT THE BASE OF THE SW TOWER.

THERE IS A THICK VINE GROWING UP THE SIDE OF THE SW TOWER. IT LOOKS LIKE YOU COULD CLIMB IT IF YOU ARE CAREFULL.

I had quite a lot of frustration here as CLIMB VINE simply told me YOU’RE UNABLE TO DO THAT with no explanation why. I finally realized this was not a “your command is not being parsed properly” scenario but rather “something is preventing the action but we’re not going to tell you what it is because transparency in error messages is for weaklings”. I tried dropping everything and the climbing finally worked:

YOU ARE HALF WAY UP THE TOWER. THE VINE HERE IS THINNER AND SEEMS TO BE A BIT LOOSE. BETTER HURRY UP.

NOW WHAT? >CLIMB VINE

YOU SCRAMBLE UP THE VINE. NEAR THE TOP THE VINE IS THINNER. YOU CAN FEEL IT BEGIN TO COME AWAY FROM THE TOWER WALL. AS YOU GRAB THE EDGE OF THE PARAPET, THE VINE TEARS AWAY AND FALLS TO THE GROUND. YOU PULL YOURSELF OVER THE TOP.

YOU ARE ON THE TOP OF THE TOWER. THERE IS A HATCH HERE.

(On a repeat test, I was able to climb holding one item. I don’t know what the limit is.)

Going through this lands the player on the second floor of the castle, so let me give the map of that first:

It’s hard to know what to focus on; there’s a lot of places that are clearly just functional but it may be we are supposed to do something vital in a nondescript room just because one of the clues (which I promise I’ll show off soon) signals it.

YOU ARE IN AN EMPTY STOREROOM. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND WEST.

NOW WHAT? >N

YOU ARE AT THE JUNCTION OF THE WEST AND SOUTH HALLWAYS. THERE ARE DOORS SOUTH AND WEST.

The northwest corner has a ornate bedroom with a button next to a mirror.

YOU ARE IN A VERY ORNATE BEDROOM. THIS IS THE MASTER BEDROOM. THERE IS A FOURPOSTER BED AND AND LARGE DRESSER HERE. ON THE NORTH WALL IS A FULL-LENGTH MIRROR. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND EAST.

NOW WHAT? >EXAMINE MIRROR

THERE IS A BUTTON ON THE EDGE OF THE MIRROR.

(PUSH isn’t normally recognized as a verb; it seems the game has PUSH BUTTON hardcoded as a thing that works.)

Going in you can find a tower with a brass key, but also a corpse and some warning about blocking the entrance. The mirror once closed can’t be opened the other way.

YOU FORGOT TO BLOCK THE DOOR WITH SOMETHING! YOU SLOWLY STARVE TO DEATH! TOO BAD!

WELL, YOU MANAGED TO GET YOURSELF KILLED! BETTER LUCK WITH YOUR NEXT TRY. HOPE YOU REMEMBERED TO SAVE THE GAME BEFORE TRYING SOMETHING NEW!

The random leather boot can be used to invoke the command BLOCK MIRROR after opening it, allowing the player to grab the key safely.

A similar “trap room” can be invoked by visiting the first floor…

…finding the power room and pulling the switch (which does not need extra gas to run, although I assume we’ll still need to fill it up later)…

NOW WHAT? >N

YOU ARE AT THE JUNCTION OF THE EAST AND NORTH HALLWAYS. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND EAST.

NOW WHAT? >N

YOU ARE IN THE POWER ROOM. THERE IS A LARGE GASOLINE GENERATOR HERE. AT ONE END IS A SMALL GAS TANK. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A SWITCH. THERE IS AN EXIT SOUTH.

NOW WHAT? >PULL SWITCH

THE GENERATOR STARTS WITH A ROAR!

…then going back to the second floor (southeast corner) with an “office” that has a button that can be pushed.

THE DOOR SLIDES CLOSED BEHIND YOU

YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM. THERE IS A TABLE AND CHAIR HERE. SEATED AT THE TABLE IS A SKELETON. SCRATCHED IN THE SURFACE OF THE TABLE IS THE FOLLOWING: LAST WILL OF SILAS FRUMP. GOT LOCKED IN THIS ROOM. HOPE THE PERSON THAT FINDS ME THINKS TO BLOCK THE DOOR WITH A CHAIR. I AM STARVING. I WILL LEAVE A CLUE I DISCOVERED. DIG 1800 GOLDPIECES………

You can block again, this time with a chair, but there’s no item as far as I can tell? This means there’s something essential in the text but it’s a fairly vague clue.

Other clues include a note randomly in one of the side rooms…

THE NOTE READS:
GOOD LUCK FRIEND, WITH YOUR ONGOING SEARCH FOR MY GOLD. LEAVE NOT A STONE UNTURNED DURING YOUR WANDERINGS AND IN TIME YOU SHALL FIND MANY NEW CLUES. SOME OF THEM WILL GUIDE YOU STRAIGHT, SOME NOT. ROAM EACH HALL, SEARCH IN ALL PLACES. SOME THINGS WILL VERY LIKELY PASS UNNOTICED, EVEN IF YOU LOOK AT THEM!

…and a secret inscription off the northeast corner, this time found by pulling a hook.

YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE NE TOWER. THERE IS A BRONZE TABLET FASTENED TO THE WALL HERE. IT READS:
I HAVE HIDDEN IT WELL.
TO FIND MY GOLD WILL
BE DIFFICULT. THE KEY
CLUE SHALL BE NAMED.
YOU SHALL SEE FOR YOURSELF
THE GOLD IF THE SCRATCHES
PLACED ON THIS TABLET
ARE READ AND MADE NOTE
OF. SIR JOHN WHEMBLY

The southwest tower similarly has a clue but is not blocked off:

YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE SW TOWER. THERE IS METAL PLAQUE FASTENED TO THE WALL HERE. THE PLAQUE READS:
“PUT FIVE TOGETHER. SHE KNOWS WAYS.”
STAIRS LEAD DOWN.

The “five together” might be referring to letters that are scattered randomly through rooms on the first floor. Samples:

YOU ARE IN THE STEWARDS OFFICE. THERE IS A DESK HERE. ON THE WALL IS PAINTED THE LETTER “I”. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH,EAST AND SW.

YOU ARE AT THE SOUTH END OF THE “GREAT HALL”. A LONG, HIGH ROOM USED FOR EATING. THERE IS A LONG TABLE DOWN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM. ON THE WEST WALL IS A MASSIVE FIREPLACE. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS PAINTED THE LETTER “L”. THERE IS A DOOR EAST.

Put all together, there are the letters, I, L, C, E, and A. They anagram to ALICE. This is clearly referring to a picture found at the note I mentioned earlier (the one that mentions “SOME THINGS WILL VERY LIKELY PASS UNNOTICED”).

YOU ARE IN THE STUDY. THERE IS A DESK AGAINST THE EAST WALL. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A PAINTING OF A YOUNG GIRL HOLDING A RABBIT. THE RABBIT IS WEARING A WRISTWATCH. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND SOUTH.

YOU SEE HERE, A NOTE

I haven’t gotten any significance out of this room otherwise and I suspect I’m missing a parser command. Doing EXAMINE or MOVE give me nothing on any noun other than the note (MOVE isn’t even recognized as a verb).

There’s still other new items lying around to play with (a sword, a rope, a horseshoe, a crank, a silver key in addition to the brass one I mentioned earlier) and there’s one more straightforward concrete puzzle: how to open the drawbridge. With a key (I’m not sure which one, they work passively!) you can get at the drawbridge controls, but I can’t get them to work.

YOU ARE IN THE DRAWBRIDGE EQUIPMENT ROOM. THERE IS A LARGE WINDLASS HERE WITH ROPES LEADING TO THE TOP OF THE DRAWBRIDGE. IN ONE CORNER IS A LARGE PULLY WITH WIRES LEADING DOWN TO THE PORTCULLIS. THERE IS A SQUARE HOLE IN THE PULLY WHEEL. ON THE FLOOR HERE ARE SOME SMALL HOLES LOOKING INTO A PASSAGE BELOW.

TURN WINDLASS is recognized but it is described as rusty. The crank is suggestive but I have not been able to get the parser to recognize any use of it. Other than bespoke commands (which includes turning the windlass) the only ones I have are CUT, DIG, CLIMB, READ, OPEN, LIGHT, UNLOCK, TIE, JUMP, EXAMINE, ENTER, and CHOP — not suggestive for fixing anything, and I’m pretty sure TIE is meant solely for tying the boat at the docks.

I will take speculation at this point on anything (although my one reader, hello Rob, who has solved it already — please hold off on hints for now).

From Daves Old Computers, a very early Dynacomp disk for the Altair.

Recently, the Internet Archive went down, and unfortunately, my next several posts were dependent in some way or another on references there. Hence, I scrapped my schedule and picked something I didn’t need extra research for: the sequel to Uncle Harry’s Will, by R. L. Turner, as written for the North Star Horizon.

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE PERSERVERED TO THE END OF THE SEARCH! THE MONEY YOU HAVE FOUND IN MY CHEST WILL PAY YOUR WAY TO ENGLAND THERE, YOU’LL FIND YOUR NEXT ADVENTURE. SOMEWHERE IN WHEMBLY CASTLE LIES HIDDEN A HUGE TREASURE OF JEWELS AND GOLD. HIDDEN THERE BY YOUR GREAT, GREAT, GRANDFATHER ALMOST TWOHUNDRED YEARS AGO. MANY HAVE SEARCHED, BUT NO ONE HAS FOUND IT. WITH YOUR LOGIC AND INTELIGENCE I KNOW YOU WILL BE ABLE TO FIND IT! GOOD LUCK!

The previous game involved a gigantic map which tried to re-create the roadmap of an entire country, and the player had to follow the instructions of a poem in the manner similar to a gimmick road rally. It was, if nothing else, unique.

Whembly Castle is much more traditional: we’re on foot, we’ve arrived at a castle, we’re looking for treasure with no poem to guide us.

North Star Horizon brochure, from Bitsavers.

We even start adjacent to a forest! Very unexpected, I know.

YOU ARE AT THE END OF A ROAD LEADING NORTH. THERE ARE DENSE, UNPENATRABLE WOODS ON EACH SIDE. TO THE WEST IS A SMALL GATEHOUSE.

NOW WHAT? >W

YOU ARE IN A SMALL EMPTY ROOM. THERE IS A SIGN PAINTED ON THE WALL HERE. IT READS: BEWARE THE ICY WATER!

The start area is meant generally just to stall the player from trying a direct approach.

Entering a gate over a bridge leads to a lake which is a dead end.

YOU ARE AT THE SOUTH END OF A BRIDGE EXTENDING NORTH OVER A VERY FOGGY LAKE. SMALL TOWERS FLANK THE PASSAGE. THERE IS A DOOR INTO THE WEST TOWER.

NOW WHAT? >N

YOU ARE AT THE NORTH END OF A BRIDGE WHICH ENDS ABRUPLY HERE. TO THE NORTH LIES THE LAKE. MISTY WHITE FOG COVERS THE WATER. YOU CAN SEE A DARK MASS IN THE FOG TO THE NORTH.

Trying to enter the lake results in the icy doom warned about in the sign. The proper way to go is the previously mentioned west tower, which has a deck of cards. After picking up the deck of cards, the game rather unusually gives the player ACE OF DIAMONDS through KING OF DIAMONDS as individual objects.

YOU ARE IN THE WEST TOWER OF THE BARBICAN.
THERE IS A BENCH AND A TABLE HERE.

NOW WHAT? >INVENTORY

YOU ARE CARRYING:
AN ACE OF DIAMONDS
A TWO OF DIAMONDS
A THREE OF DIAMONDS
A FOUR OF DIAMONDS
A FIVE OF DIAMONDS
A SIX OF DIAMONDS
A SEVEN OF DIAMONDS
AN EIGHT OF DIAMONDS
A NINE OF DIAMONDS
A TEN OF DIAMONDS
A JACK OF DIAMONDS
A QUEEN OF DIAMONDS
A KING OF DIAMONDS

This is quite unusual and ominous, and I immediately knew this signaled a maze coming, and the objects were intended to map things out. Indeed, heading back to enter the forest, one step in reveals “YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS”.

Topologically, you can consider the map above to be in three sections.

The “main” group is an interconnected set of 11 rooms, with many of them having a “Dead End” branch room. (The idea of random dead ends scattered about dates back to Crowther’s Adventure, even pre-Woods.) In a narrative sense, if someone is stumbling around they’ll essentially go in circles although there’s no special tendencies to force the player back to the start (unlike some mazes, which include special one-way “trap” exits; see the ending maze of Sphinx Adventure for the most extreme example). This is essentially forced by the author’s insistance that if room A goes to room B, there is a path that also lets you go back from B to A. In the context of a cave, one way exits can make sense (you come from above using gravity somehow) but in a forest it doesn’t, so I appreciate the decision.

The “branch” I have marked is miss-able by someone not thorough enough: it leads to a key.

YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS

NOW WHAT? >E

YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS

YOU SEE HERE, A RUSTY IRON KEY

The “ending” section is separated from the main set, making it less likely someone will wander to the end of the maze by accident.

YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS

NOW WHAT? >NE

YOU ARE AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS. TO THE NORTH IS A CLEARING. THE LAKE LIES ALONG THE WEST EDGE OF THE CLEARING. THERE ARE WOODS SURROUNDING THE CLEARING. THERE IS A TRAIL INTO THE WOODS TO THE SOUTH. YOU CAN SEE A BUILDING TO THE NORTH.

This leads to a shack next to a dock and a boat. Just for simplicity of explanation, I’ll assume a player who has already poked ahead to the next outdoor area (a cabin) and returned with a metal prybar lying out in the open.

With the prybar you can bust through a rusty padlock into the shack and find some oars.

YOU ARE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE SHACK. THERE IS A HAND-OPERATED GASOLINE PUMP HERE. THERE IS GAS IN THE PUMP.

NOW WHAT? >S

YOU ARE AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE WOODEN SHACK. ON THE DOOR THERE IS A RUSTY HASP AND PADLOCK. TO THE WEST IS A BOAT DOCK. TO THE NORTH A GAS PUMP.

NOW WHAT? >OPEN DOOR

OK!

NOW WHAT? >E

YOU ARE IN A SMALL OFFICE. THERE IS A DUSTY COUNTER HERE.
THERE ARE DOORS EAST AND WEST.

NOW WHAT? >E

YOU ARE IN A DIRTY STORAGE ROOM.

YOU SEE HERE, A PAIR OF OARS

The oars let you jump in the boat and row around, although I found it quite finicky; the game insisted I not use ROW WEST but instead just type the direction, but at first just typing the direction failed. I am unclear the source of the bug.

Even after getting to the lake, it turns out to be too foggy to move around.

YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEAR THE EAST SHORE. THERE ARE ROCKS EAST.

YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.

NOW WHAT? >W

THE LAKE IS VERY FOGGY! YOU’LL NEVER FIND YOUR WAY WITHOUT A COMPASS!

There’s another bug with the boat I’ll get to in a second, but let’s check out the final area first.

This is straightforwardly a cabin with another locked door, but rather than forcing it this time, you can use the key from the forest maze.

YOU ARE IN A LARGE ROOM. THERE ARE CHAIRS AND A TABLE HERE. A LARGE DESK SITS IN ONE CORNER NEXT TO A FIREPLACE. THERE IS A BED ALONG ONE WALL. NEXT TO THE BED IS A SMALL DRESSER.

YOU SEE HERE, A GAS CAN

(The desk, dresser, table, etc. don’t seem to be hiding anything.)

The gas can can be filled up back at the shack; I haven’t used the filled can for anything yet, but I do wonder if we get to hit the road somewhere just like the last game. There’s also off to the side a manhole that goes underground.

YOU ARE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE CLEARING.
THERE IS A MANHOLE COVER IN THE GROUND HERE.

NOW WHAT? >OPEN HATCH

THERE IS A LADDER HERE LEADING DOWN TO A CHAMBER BELOW.

NOW WHAT? >D

YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE LADDER.
THERE IS A TRAPDOOR ABOVE YOUR HEAD

(Notice how it is referred to as a “manhole cover” but you need to call it a “hatch” to get anywhere. Yes, this game retains the guess-the-noun from the previous one.)

I’ve gotten a little farther, but this seems like a good place to cut off. I did promise I’d return to the boat.

While I was able to enter the boat, I have yet to discern a good syntax for leaving the boat. Out of desparation I just tried leaving east at the docks, thinking it might have my avatar hop out of the boat automatically. Instead, the boat stayed with me.

YOU ARE AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE WOODEN SHACK. ON THE DOOR THERE IS A RUSTY HASP AND PADLOCK. TO THE WEST IS A BOAT DOCK. TO THE NORTH A GAS PUMP.

YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.

Land boat! You can “ride” the boat all the way to the underground, but if you do that, you hit the “fog” condition and end up getting warped back to the docks.

YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE LADDER. THERE IS A TRAPDOOR ABOVE YOUR HEAD

YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.

NOW WHAT? >D

THE LAKE IS VERY FOGGY! YOU’LL NEVER FIND YOUR WAY WITHOUT A COMPASS!

YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEXT TO THE DOCK. THE LAKE IS COVERED WITH A DENSE FOG.

YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.

The last game went up to roughly 200 rooms and I’ve only got 71 so far, so I expect quite a bit to go. I do find it interesting the same room-to-object ratio is still fairly large. In a road trip, it’s understandable you wouldn’t see much by the side of the road worth picking up; here, in a “classic” style adventure, the ratio feels a little more uneasy, but it is possible the game will change things up later.

Source.

I guess I'm going to have to change my mystery game tagline. I'm playing more of these and getting better at them. Or maybe more designers are picking up the Obra-Dinn-ish static deduction model, which is the format I'm most simpatico with.

(Speaking of that model, the next Golden Idol game will be November 12th. And the revamped Roottrees is coming on January 15th! With new material and new puzzles. I probably won't write a full review post, since I wrote up the original last March, but I'll definitely play it.)

But right now...

• No Case Should Remain Unsolved
• Thalassa: Edge of the Abyss

No Case Should Remain Unsolved

• by Somi -- game site

A twisty suburban drama about a missing girl, told in flashback to/by a retired police detective. As the intro notes, everybody is lying about something -- but what?

The classic fill-in-the-blanks static deduction model; but instead of "who/where/how" as the blanks, it's "who said it / in what order?" You have a disorganized heap of police transcript fragments. You have to put each fragment in the correct column (which suspect is being questioned?) and then get them into the correct chronological sequence. When two fragments are correctly adjacent in the correct column, they fuse. Link enough fragments and you get a key to unlock further fragments.

There's also some puzzle-based gating. You may need to select a piece of evidence to support (or contradict) a particular claim, or fill in a date based on available evidence.

The UI is very polished; it feels great; it's completely opaque. I'm sorry, but even after I finished the game I didn't understand what I had been doing. It's all organized by hashtags in the transcripts. You click on a hashtag, and the game either shows you a new piece of text or it locks up the script and blinks the map at you. At random. The more you play, the worse your odds.

Okay, not really random. Here's my best understanding: every piece of text is gated by one or more hashtags. To unlock it, you have to select a matching hashtag in an already-open piece of text. But each hashtag can only be used once; then it's crossed out. Thus, a constantly expanding "frontier" of available tags and unlocks. When you select a locked fragment, the game blinks all the open fragments that have available matching tags.

This is a pretty neat model. It combines the Her Story association web with a limited-resource mechanic. It lets the author gate some parts of the story tightly (a key hashtag becomes available in one spot) while leaving other sections as free exploration (generous common tags). I can absolutely imagine a Portal remake using this system.

But the tutorial fails to communicate what's going on. To me at least. I don't even know if I've described the thing correctly! If I've hallucinated this model, dibs on the idea.

Okay. UI aside, did I like the game? Yep! It's character drama and the characters are all immediately readable through the lens of their police transcripts. The story does a great job of subverting and then yanking out your assumptions as you move through the space of deduction and revelation.

(Make sure your brain is set for Korean family names, as that's where the story is set.)

I might quibble about the double ending. You can trigger the finale any time after you have all the critical clues, but fully completing the transcript grid gives you access to the "best" ending. But: the "best" ending and the "okay" ending are different and contradictory revelations. This is always a difficult landing to stick; even more so in a deduction game where you're trying to collect everything into a coherent whole.

But, as I said, a quibble. Unsolved is deft, clever, and -- best of all -- short. Set aside an evening and dig in.

Thalassa: Edge of the Abyss

• by Sarepta Studio -- game site

You're a deep-sea diver in 1905. The liner-turned-research-ship Thalassa is out searching the sea floor for a lost 16th-century galleon. But you lose first a crewmate, and then your entire ship. Next thing you know, you're diving for the wreck of the Thalassa itself, hoping for answers.

The fill-in-the-blanks setup here is a tree of individual mini-mysteries. Who was the captain talking to in this (wax cylinder) recording? Supply name and evidence tidbit. Who is the captain upset with? Name, evidence, supporting document. And so on. You scour the ship for evidence bits, collect, and fill in the chart. Each mystery unlocks further mysteries, and when you've resolved everything, that's the game.

But wait, doesn't this mode sound familiar? It's exactly the "mind-palace" interface of Frogwares' recent Sherlock Holmes titles. (Crimes and Punishments, Devil's Daughter, and Chapter One.) Has the Obra Dinn model has wrapped around to become identical to the old-style detective game?

Not entirely identical. You're still investigating purely static evidence; no live interactions with anybody. (The "suspects" are all drowned -- that's the whole point.) Everything you find is perfectly preserved at the bottom of the sea. It's not Obra Dinn's magic stopwatch but it might as well be.

But this does point out the similarities. Detective games love interrogating suspects, but most recent ones send you to the evidence board (or mind-map, or crazy-string-wall) at the end of the day. Obra Dinn was unique only in discarding everything but the evidence board.

Thalassa also takes the mind palace to its logical conclusion. The Holmes games put four or six questions on each chapter wrap-up board. Thalassa has almost sixty; the grid spans the entire game, from initial nibbles to the final grand conclusion.

It does its best to not overwhelm you, though. The game works hard to keep you on track. Large areas are gated on solving key puzzles, either by letting you find important tools (keys, a bolt-cutter, etc) or by outright telling you to solve the damn puzzle before you move on. The mind-map highlights puzzles you have sufficient evidence to solve; the terrain-map highlights rooms where there's evidence still to collect. And, as in all Obra-Dinners, brute-forcing the puzzle blanks is always an option. So you get a pretty smooth course through the game. There's basically no way to get seriously stuck.

I'm describing the dry (ha ha) bones of the mystery, which is unfair, really. This mystery is a psychological drama. (Not "psychological horror", but you go through some intense hallucinatory sequences.) The story is about grief, error, and trauma. As in Unsolved, everybody is concealing something -- and you know that it ended badly.

I thought the game missed a bet in not giving you a voice. You are "Cam", gender not specified, portrayed only in a blank-faced diving helmet. It makes sense that they didn't want to pin that down with a voice actor. But all the other characters are fully voiced (in recording, flashback, or your live buddy on the surface). So it feels strange to Gordon Freeman you.

Cam really is the protagonist of the story. It's their specific grief that inflects everything. To make them literally faceless and voiceless undercuts that. They wind up the ghost at the drowned banquet.

But then, this is a first-person game (from inside the diving helmet!) and that does a lot to ground things again.

I found myself regretting the last shreds of evidence because they meant I'd have to leave Thalassa. I rooted for everybody, even knowing that they would not survive. And I rooted for Cam to make it through to the end.

Good show; definitely worth playing.

More on building a “page” or screen that looks like an Inform 7 game (as is an Inform 7 game)

last time, on let’s make IF…

In the previous episode, I revealed my sinister plan to build a short (anti-?)narrative out of eight “pages” of Inform 7 content. That is, I hope to build screens with highly variable texts that have the familiar features of a parser game. In hopes of explaining, I used this image with arrows pointing to texts that could vary based on player choice and turn count.

To this end, I built a “to say” definition that would print a fake “banner” at the top of every screen, using a table to store the texts. Refresh your memory here:

we need more.

Considering our current source code, there are a few outstanding texts to implement (musts):

• an opening “blurb” that prints between banner and room description
• the “epitaph”
• a prompt to “restart” (not actually a restart in the Inform sense of “clear all progress and begin from scratch”
• room description is currently fixed; need to switch to variable text
• room name is not sufficiently variable; need to convert to table lookup by magic number
• table description is currently fixed
• card names are currently fixed

Other musts (in my opinion):

• handling responses for parser errors
• handling responses for standard rules verbs
• limiting the parser to keep focus on the main four commands

It’s always something, isn’t it? There are different ways of considering an Inform 7 project “finished.” One model is that a game is finished when the competition or jam deadline hits. Some people thrive while working in that way. Perhaps one can get it out now and fix it later. Another option: competition be damned, this is done when it’s done. I prefer this second approach, but even if it limits the number of games I can release.

I would not publish a game without accounting for every parser error, for instance, but many people do not go that far. The real question is what will make you happy, or satisfied, or proud? That’s going to vary from person to person, so give things a thought and approach releases on your own terms.

Full disclosure: I have my own personal “Project With Wolf” that I am not sharing here. It has missed two release deadlines, and I am fine with that. That’s why I get to talk about it here with you.

keep moving.

I’m almost ready to test my own project, and I’d like our work here at Top Expert to keep pace. That means we have a lot to build out! I’ll try to do two updates a week until we get close to my goal. A lot of what’s coming will be old hat by now: substitutions based on table entries. I won’t make you watch me reinvent the wheel each time. Instead, I’ll mention what I’ve added and update the source code I share with every post.

We still have some unique substitutions to build out, though. The fake endings, with epitaphs and final “questions,” will have a couple of flourishes beyond a basic substitution.

We have a couple of ways we could handle the text, but a rule with substitutions is the first step. This should all look pretty familiar.

after card-picking when the magic number is not 9:
	say the the concluding assertion;
	say paragraph break;
	say "[bold type][tab][bold type]*** [the fake epitaph] ***[roman type]".

The [tab] substitution has been part of the project for a while, but we’ve never actually used it. There’s not much to it. I use it to print a set number of fixed-width spaces. This will give a uniform look to indented texts. In this, it’s only three, but some fiddling might be needed before everything looks right.

To say tab:
	say "[fixed letter spacing]   [variable letter spacing]"

We have our substitution variables now, “the fake epitaph” and “the concluding assertion. I’ll set up some “to say” definitions, just as we have on many occasions.

to say the concluding assertion:
	choose row with an index of the magic number from the table of fake assertions;
	say the fake tombstone entry.
	
to say the fake epitaph:
	choose row with an index of the magic number from the table of fake endings;
	say the fake epitaph entry.

I had some choices to make. I could have used one table, for one thing. I also could have made one large “to say” phrase that handled everything. I chose not to do either of these things, because I want to keep everything as modular as possible. What if I want the epitaph to change based on different clicker counts? Instead of breaking open everything, I can just tweak the “to say” for the epitaph. Besides, the overall format and shape (blurb, epitaph, final question) is a fixed thing. It’s best (in my opinion) to get it right once and for all, then focus on the content.

Tables will follow, of course. The next task is to ask the fake final question (with a supporting table). I’ll just keep adding to our “after” rule. Afterward, I’ll do a “wait for any key response” before clearing the screen and, hopefully, printing a believable fake banner. I might need to make some adjustments but let’s see how things go. Here’s the updated rule:

after card-picking when the magic number is not 9:
	say the concluding assertion;
	say paragraph break;
	say "[bold type][tab][bold type]*** [the fake epitaph] ***[roman type]
[fake final question]"
	say line break;
	wait for any key;
	clear the screen;
	try looking.

As a reminder, Inform does not recognize line breaks in printed text, but it does honor white space (as above between [roman type] and [fake final question]. What does it all look like?

Some of the spacing isn’t working. When I bring up another test project, I see that there should be two empty lines before the epitaph, and four empty lines afterward. I also see that, after clearing the screen, I should set four blank lines before our fake banner. Here’s how I’m leaving things for now:

after card-picking when the magic number is not 9:
	say the concluding assertion;
	say "
[bold type][tab][bold type]*** [the fake epitaph] ***[roman type]
[the fake final question]";
	say line break;
	wait for any key;
	clear the screen;
	say paragraph break;
	say paragraph break;
	try looking.

Note that paragraph break and line break substitutions would work just as well as white space, but I like being able to visualize the breaks in code.

Note: since we don’t have unique text written for our tables, this isn’t obvious yet, but the “magic number” is currently incrementing before any of this happens. That means we currently have a potential mismatch between tables. We’ll move the increment somewhere else next time. Better yet, experiment with it yourself and find a better place for it!

We still haven’t done any real text generation, but I hope you can see how we could build something by filling in the tables. If you were to fill something like this in, what would you do?

Speaking of testing: I’ll be writing about playtesting (both testing your game and testing somebody else’s). I might also be looking for a couple of testers for my own. Stay tuned!

If it isn’t clear what this project is doing, you can always put the current source in your IDE and play it yourself!

As part of the World of Darkness “Month of Darkness,” we’re excited to announce new content for Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names!  “Those Who Refuse to Die” is the latest DLC addition to the sprawling epic.

“Those Who Refuse to Die” is on sale, along with the Book of Hungry Names base game, and the “Wardens and Furies” DLC until October 17th!

“Those Who Refuse to Die” unlocks the options to play as a member of the Galestalkers tribe or the Ghost Council tribe. Experience Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names as one of the relentless hunters of the Galestalkers or as a member of the secretive and ruthless Ghost Council.

It also unlocks ten entirely new Gifts accessible to other tribes. Steal magic from your enemies with the Crow’s Gift. Shatter bonds of all kinds, both physical and mental, with the Hummingbird Prince. Or call down lightning with the Stormcat’s Gift.

Finally, at no additional charge, we’ve added six gorgeous new character portraits to the game, including art for Scarper, Udolpho, Pembe, the drone, and Black Tarn (in both Homid and Lupus form).

Special thanks to Amy Wilkins for creating all of the character portraits in Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names!

Spoofing a banner text.

last time, of let’s write IF…

Remember that “clicker” number we assigned to every card? We finally found a use for it, using a “to decide” definition to choose an ending for our game based the clicker values. From there, I created tables that we can use to print the texts for the different endings.

what goes in a banner, anyway?

I haven’t really tipped my hand yet: what is this thing supposed to look like? I’d like every card draw to look like a new “game,” with its own banner text, room description, action feedback, ending, and so forth. Once this has happened eight times, the “real” ending will happen according to the code we wrote in the last episode of let’s make IF.

What does the text of a banner look like? A reminder:

Portrait With Wolf ^_^
A fun activity by Drew Cook
Release 0 / Serial number 241007 / Inform 7 v10.1.2 / D

We’ve been at this a while, and probably guess what happens next. We can mockup our own text using substitutions and line breaks.

to say the fake banner:
	choose row with an index of the magic number from the table of banner information;
	say "[fake title entry]
[lb][subtitle entry]
[lb]Release [RN entry] / Serial number [SN entry] / Inform 7 v10.1.2 / [compiler entry]"

As a reminder from previous posts, I use substitutions for common (tedious) texts like “line break” ([lb]).

This is a lot of substitution. We can hold it all in one table, I think. A row for each “magic number” and columns for each of these instances. We’ll store everything as text. If we preferred, we could make [RN] match the release number to help people keep track, but we are already showing players a tally of card chosen (see last post).

table of banner information
index	fake title	subtitle	RN	SN	compiler
1	"Portrait With Wolf ^_^"	"An absolute delight"	"1"	"241007"	"F"

This is probably going to be hard to look at in your IDE. Resize the pane for best results. You can also place a comment “spacer” between rows with a pair of brackets if it makes things easier to read.

table of banner information
index	fake title	subtitle	RN	SN	compiler
1	"Portrait With Wolf ^_^"	"An absolute delight"	"1"	"241007"	"F"
[]
table of banner information
index	fake title	subtitle	RN	SN	compiler
2	"Portrait With Wolf ^_^"	"An absolute delight"	"1"	"241007"	"F"

As in every other case, empty rows will throw a run-time error, so I’ll fill the table with duplicate rows. The current goal is to build a template that we can fill in later.

When should we print it? How about “before looking”? We’ll need to handle what happens when a player types “look” or “l”, since reprinting the banner doesn’t make sense in those cases. But let’s roll with it for now.

As a final move, we delayed the real banner in a previous episode. Let’s put it back at the very beginning: it seems like a good idea to print the real banner first. The result doesn’t look great; we need bolt text for our title and a paragraph break between the fake banner and the room name. Final version:

to say the fake banner:
	choose row with an index of the magic number from the table of banner information;
	say "[bt][fake title entry][rt]
[lb][subtitle entry]
[lb]Release [RN entry] / Serial number [SN entry] / Inform 7 v10.1.2 / [compiler entry]
[pb]"

output:

Portrait With Wolf ^_^ 
An absolute delight 
Release 1 / Serial number 241007 / Inform 7 v10.1.2 / F 

A Brightly Lit Room!
A bare place. A bright light emerges from an unknown source above.

A small metal table stands under the light. It is covered in gray, chipped paint. The following items rest atop it:
  a red card
  a blue card
  a yellow card
  an orange card

>

Pretty convincing, right?

I think this is enough for today. How would you tackle creating nine of these screens, in terms of the text? There’s the possibility of progression (magic number) and different conclusions. My ultimate goal is to make something that anyone could use simply by filling in the tables, no new code required.

today’s source

next

We’ll continue building our “screen” with an opening blurb and some fake endings, printing at the beginning and ending of every turn.

In a Persian steampunk empire, will you use your arcane alchemy to repair a spaceship or pilot a mech? Ignite a revolution, snuff it out, or play both sides against each other?

Heavens’ Revolution: A Lion Among the Cypress is an interactive retrofuturistic fantasy novel by Peter Adrian Behravesh, inspired by eighteenth-century Iran. Choice of Games editor Mary Duffy sat down with Peter to talk about his writing process. Heavens’ Revolution: A Lion Among the Cypress will be available on Thursday, October 24th. You can wishlist it on Steam in advance of its release—it really helps!

You’re a prolific podcaster, writer, editor, and narrator in the fantasy and science fiction/fantasy space, with an impressive list of awards and nominations for your work, but I think this is more or less your first foray into interactive fiction, correct?

That’s correct! While I’d read interactive fiction prior to this, I’d never tried my hand at writing it. It was a huge learning curve, but I saw it as an opportunity to stretch my creative muscles and explore a new medium. I don’t know how successful I was! But hopefully players will enjoy the ride regardless.

What should our players know about the world of Heavens’ Revolution?

The world of Heavens’ Revolution is heavily inspired by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Iran, particularly during the Qajar era. Alchemy is the impetus for interplanetary travel, as well as a host of other technological advances. But of course, as in the real world, those advances mostly benefit people in power. The game takes place almost entirely within the city of Seyj, which is on the brink of a conflict that’s equal parts the Rashidun conquest of Iran, the Iranian Revolution, and my own invention. I tried hard not to make the world feel like every other SFF empire/colony setting or the conflict feel black and white. I really wanted players to be able to explore the nuances of this world and forge their own path.

What did you find compelling about telling that story in ChoiceScript, in an interactive novel, as opposed to some other medium?

The aspect I found the most compelling was also the most challenging. When drafting prose, I’m used to writing characters into a corner and then coming up with a unique and cool solution for them to get out of it. But in Choicescript, I had to think of at least three unique and cool solutions for players to escape each sticky situation. It wasn’t always easy! But if I did it well, it will make for a more rewarding experience, and ideally make the game more replayable.

What surprised you most about the writing/coding process?

How difficult it is to code deception! So much of this game is about hiding your true intentions or playing one side against the other. But the more choices I created where a player could lie, the harder it was to track all of the possible branches (much like lying in real life, I suppose). If I were to do it again, I would certainly simplify this aspect, if only for my own sanity!

Do you have favorite interactive or text-based games you want to shout out?

Can I shout out a WIP game? I’m loving what I’ve read of Dragon Butcher by Summer Fletcher. I’m biased, since Summer and I worked together at PodCastle, but their prose packs such a wallop, and the world feels deliciously gritty and lived-in. I can’t wait to play the whole thing!

What else are you working on?

Too many things! I’ve written a traditional novel set in the same world as Heavens’ Revolution, so my first priority is revising that. I’m also co-editing an anthology of Iranian speculative fiction (with fellow CoG author Rebecca Zahabi) that will be out in 2025. And I’m (slowly) working on a new album of original and cover songs. On top of that, I have narrations forthcoming from Cast of Wonders, PseudoPod, and PodCastle, and I’ve written two academic essays on Persian monsters that will be published in anthologies from Oxford University Press and Bloomsbury in the near future.

I’ve finished the game; this is continued from my last post.

Via the Centre of Computing History. ftb on Discord pointed me to one of these mega-shareware discs having a copy of Raspion, but compiled for DOS.

First off, RavenWorks cleared something up for me: that SLIT message was referring to the acronym that goes with the “say Lymbar in tomb” in the book; I hadn’t been paying attention to the acronyms and I additionally had already mentally “used up” the book so had thought SLIT was referring to some other thing. Figuring out to use that phrase is honestly easier than the GIVE REGARDS puzzle so I would expect most people playing to hit the two moments out of order.

The desert was the real obstacle. I was frustrated trying to figure out something clever so I went into “brute force mode”, doing things like dropping an item and testing one exit before dying, then repeating. I thought I was honestly “spinning my wheels” a bit, like when I solved for a dark maze in Savage Island 1 too early via brute force. It turns out the game really does intend brute force:

Now, at first visual glance — and probably to the author’s eyes — this doesn’t look too bad. It’s just a grid where you’re supposed to find the right location. However, in context, with the loops there, this comes across as a maze, and I had to treat it as such. I only realized the author intended a grid (with us starting at the southwest corner) at the very end of the process. Once you look at a finalized map with a loop it can seem straightforward but from my experience it can double the mapping time.

Another case shows up right after falling into the underground river:

Heading north from the river drops the player not only in an endless loop but a softlock. I wasn’t expecting a double-loop there so it took me a while to realize what was going on. The right way to go is south to a shore.

Going west leads to a dead end, but the spade — which I had been testing absolutely everywhere — finally pays off.

The exit you dig leads back to the park near the house, so I had no new treasures to speak of, meaning I had missed something (rather, two somethings). The first is a “platinum nugget” that just washes up on the shore when you visit it the second time (I guess saying things wash up is a hint to be checking back, but a player with a different sequence of events might get very frustrated because it doesn’t feel like solving a puzzle). The second is found by going back to the water and using DIVE, which I knew to do because it was on my verb list.

The chest is described as “locked” but the keys don’t work.

The “sign” is the subway sign I had been carrying around in order to do mapping. It was genuinely useful to bump up my item count in the Caverns of Syl.

It immediately occurred to me the hammer was now useful, but I couldn’t SMASH CHEST either, and it took me some fiddling to realize the chest’s description mentions a lock, so you’re supposed to SMASH LOCK.

And that’s everything! The coins and nugget get dragged back to the start, the end, horray.

Rob in the comments compared the setting to 70s sci-fi shows like Ark II and Morpheus Kitami mentioned the concept being like a Lovecraft story.

From the third episode of the only season of Ark II. Yes, the chimpanzee is a crew member.

I personally was hoping for something like the Twilight Zone episode Time Enough at Last where there’d be a twist ending.

From Vivarium (2019), an A24 movie about a couple trapped in a mysterious labyrinth of houses. It hit most theaters right before the pandemic lockdown.

Look, this was a TRS-80 game in 10,500 bytes, I knew there wouldn’t be much, but a two-sentence twist ending which reflects on the state of the player would have been possible. Nothing about being trapped in the city is explained, nor what happens after. In a way this is like Strange Adventure which lands you trapped on a tiny island with your treasures; the “winning” is almost abstracted from the practicality of the narrative. The sarcastic narrative voice of Strange Adventure made it clear the author had awareness of the bizarre ending point, but here I’m not sure if the author intended anything more with Raspion than a straight treasure hunt.

(Here’s a related question: when the player shoots the nosy neighbor in It Takes a Thief, does the author realizes this shifts the narrative tone entirely, or is it just another puzzle?)

BONUS:

A bit of history deleted from my last post but the picture is too good not to include.

When the General Electric OARAC computer started working, they invited 6 humans in a computation contest, trying to find the square of 8,645,392,175 by hand vs. the computer. The computer time was 0.004 seconds, the average human time was 8 minutes. All six humans failed to get the correct answer. Connie Hodgson of Syracuse, New York, is shown here pointing at where she forgot to carry the one.

Popular Mechanics, June 1953.

In spite of being the buggiest game I've played this IFComp – though admittedly I have not played many – The Triskelion Affair still held my interest and/or pulled me through. This parser adventure posits the player as a "medieval detective" (quoth the blurb) tasked with finding a magical item hidden in a church. Perhaps, in retrospect, the key piece of information to take from the blurb is this description: "Inspired by the classic dungeon-crawl adventures of yore." And not this other one that says, "Sword & sorcery", which feels wrong. And also not the paradoxical thrust of the whole blurb, which is that you will only get into deeper trouble if you don't explore diligently. I think it's actually the opposite, that by exploring diligently, you will advance in the game and thus unavoidably get into deeper trouble, the nature of adventures in general. That first note about the dungeon-crawl adventures of yore reins in a range of the game's content and approaches, which could otherwise be described as being all over the place. They still coalesce into a setting of some atmosphere and focus in the last third of the game, which takes place in an eerie abandoned chapel.

The parser voice is a mixture of straight reverent description, replete with details of the different architectural features of churches such as the apse and narthex, and personalised snark of the kind parser games have refined over the years but which is going out of style unless you label your game Old School. A rewrite of core parser cues, like asking the player 'What do you do?' every turn, and the inclusion of numerous gags, like wacky doggerel for tombstone epitaphs, or erecting mausoleums to Crowther and Woods of Adventure fame, give the sense of the author's presence. I don't know that the two voices are at war with each other, but they certainly comprise a tonal switch that is thrown rapidly and repeatedly between settings A and B during the course of the game. There's also the odd personal exhortation; typing GET ALL produces: "That’s too much burden for one person, and there’s stuff you don’t want to deal with. Try examining the thing first. Explore! Otherwise, what’s the fun?"

This particular message was a handy cue for me to poke at things for poking's enjoyment and sake, which was the correct attitude to take in retrospect. Much of the game's contents and geographical presentation remind me of a MUD's, which aren't usually designed for single players or for puzzle-solving. The room description of each of a large graveyard's sections consists of a brief note about which sector the player is in, followed by the same general graveyard description. A game warden's hut is chock-full of takeable described stuff that is ultimately of no use on the player's quest. Having taken it all, I ended up leaving it strewn all over the donjon because there's also an inventory limit, albeit a generous one.

I found the chapel part of the game particularly involving. I've found it hard to put my finger on exactly why. I certainly find abandoned church settings inherently creepy and fascinating. There's a sense in this game that there's no overt threat, and that the environment shouldn't be hostile, but it is, anyway. Everyone's left or died. Broken furniture barricades hint at scary troubles. The church is full of ritualistic paraphernalia, the volume of it suggesting numerous stressful prop-based puzzles are ahead (What am I going to do with an explodable canister? With the northern lantern? The southern lantern? The third lantern whose direction I forget? The stack of parchment? The highly suspicious blank parchment? The multiple candleholders? etc.) yet that's not the case. Somehow all of these elements apply an overhead weight, an idea of a past and of a world and kingdom outside, all the better to make you feel stuck in this weird holy place picking at some minor mystery like it's a cog in something bigger. 

There's also a lone RPG fight with a zombie, easily won, but just make sure you pick up and wear again anything the zombie tore off you during the melee!

As my opening declared, I found the game to be really buggy. Increasingly so towards its conclusion, where even room names degenerate into exposed Inform code. All the way through, there's almost always just one way to do a thing that's frictionless. Every other way is troubled, missing, leads in disambiguation circles, or suffers from spelling errors or no synonyms. Most alternate obvious uses for objects are not catered to. I've experienced hundreds of games in this state by now in my gaming and reviewing career. These games just needed testing. How this one's state will sit with each player is unknown to me. It's easy to imagine players tossing in the towel due to a lack of trust. Once I'd established the level of bugginess, I didn't hesitate to turn to the walkthrough when needed, or just break out saved games to repeat actions that I had no faith the game would let me repeat without cutting off future success.

Triskelion also opens with a tutorial. It feels funny and friendly, but already shows many of the implementation omissions. The second command demanded in the whole game seems to be SALUTE. This immediately returns, "What do you want to salute?" Come on, game. The guy who just saluted me. It's also off-target in emphasising a lot of eating, which is unimportant for this game, and a decent amount of communication by the dreaded ASK/TELL system, which is also, mercifully, completely unimportant for this game beyond the tutorial.

The Triskelion Affair feels like a lot of buggy, parser-loving parser games I've played before, but it comes on friendly, even if the tutorial's off piste, and the church section ultimately pulls together to menace with atmosphere. Whether you will get that far in spite of all the bugginess is not a prediction I can make in general.

While General Electric (the company originating with Edison in 1878) is not much remembered for computers now, they were involved quite early. They started a relationship with the Air Force in 1948 manufacturing jet engines (only a year after that branch of the military was founded); this relationship let to the OARAC (Office of Air Research Automatic Computer) being built by GE and installed in 1953.

Via Radio & Television News, October 1953.

The military computer’s success led some in GE to push for going into computers more generally, but it didn’t happen until 1955. Bank of America did a call for bids to develop an electronic accounting method; while GE put in a bid, they fully expected to lose to IBM, but instead came out with the win at $32 million (in 1955 dollars). This led to the development of the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition system, and at the same time, GE established a computer department in Phoenix, focused on business mainframes.

Through the 1950s and 1960s they producing a long line of machines: the GE-100, 225, 312/412, 635, and 645. Mainframe manufactures, with IBM being the “old man” of the industry, were dubbed Snow White (IBM) and the Seven Dwarves (Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, General Electric and RCA). I’m going to guess GE was Grumpy. RCA was a spinoff from GE in 30s, so they were competing against their own spinoff.

GE was heavily involved in operating system development (notably the GECOS for their GE-600) and time sharing (allowing many people to use alternating cycles of mainframes). The ground zero of timesharing, Dartmouth, used GE hardware and was a joint project between the college and the company; this was the same system where Dartmouth developed the first version of BASIC.

From a 1968 GE brochure.

GE eventually started losing ground to competitors and sold their computer assets to Honeywell; however, they still kept their time-sharing services, and after a number of changes, they were dubbed the General Electric Information Services (GEIS).

This remained a business-only service, but the number of unused computer cycles led GE to make a commercial spin-off in 1985 that would serve as a competitor to the dial-in services of the time, CompuServe and The Source. GE’s long-standing time-sharing infrastructure — dating back to the very invention of the concept — enabled them to charge less than their competitors.

While CompuServe had Forums, where people of common interests would gather, GEnie had RoundTables. For our story today, the important RoundTable is the Tandy RoundTable; the TRS-80 community there became the big hub for online enthusiasts. One of the sysops, Tim Sewell, uploaded his public domain and shareware library of software (keep in mind “public domain” was a vague notion in the 80s); as a second outlet he created a disk distribution group known as the File Cabinet, so that people who weren’t on GEnie could get the same access. In a survey from 1989 he found only 10 percent of the people who answered even had a modem and only a small fraction of that group even used one. (To be fair, even with GEnie’s lower prices being online via dial-in was quite expensive at the time. Note the launch article touting $35 an hour primetime — essentially, day hours. Even by the 90s when things were slightly cheaper primetime use went for $18 an hour. That’s about $41 an hour in 2024 money.)

This all leads to my recent thread about lost adventure games from 1982 and before. The proprietor of El Explorador de RPG had mentioned in a comment that the entirety of the File Cabinet was online. A catalog of the files as of 1991 is up here.

Whilst browsing, Raspion Adventure caught my as something I had never seen before and was not in any of my references. That File Cabinet link seems to be the only reason the game survives today. The BASIC source was entirely devoid of an author name or year, but the distinctive name led me to find an ad in 80 Microcomputing (May 1981).

This is the only reference to RanDob (P.O. Box 1662 out of Boca Raton, Florida) I’ve been able to pull up. It lists a second adventure game (It Takes a Thief) and it is one I’ve played before! Not only that, that game gives an author name: Randy Dobkin. Previously, it was a game I only knew about via mysterious index card, and I had thought it might just have been someone’s unpublished side project, but apparently the author tried to sell it at least a little. (There must have been some cross-reference with Scott Adams, also out of Florida, as Adventure International was another publisher of Pro-Pix, American football prediction software written by James Talley.)

While it is not guaranteed Raspion has the same author as Thief, by source code similarity I’m marking it as essentially certain. It Takes a Thief placed you as a criminal robbing a home, with no preface: you just start in your getaway vehicle and get to work. It didn’t really need any explanation. Raspion, on the other hand, is cryptic even after it starts progressing:

We’re supposed to “visit the deserted city and find Syl and its treasures”. This is a treasure hunt with asterisks around the names of treasures; so far, normal. The game even has a “your house” opening (the only useful item is a spade) and there’s a storage room where the treasures go.

Going out to the door, however, leads straight to the aforementioned city.

Is this …. a horror premise? Has our house been mystically tossed into a future city? The adventure-collection aspect suggests not, but the “no escape” is striking. I haven’t finished yet so I don’t know if there’s some plot turn.

Here’s a meta-map of what I have so far:

The city part has a park where you can find a keys and a book hidden in bushes. The book requires unlocking with the keys. The book gives various “key phrases” if you TURN PAGE but only one of them is useful.

Say Lymbar in tomb is the useful one. The “stop reading books” warning is literal and if you TURN PAGE again you will die.

Also near the park is a moving walkway (WAIT will cause the player to change rooms) and there’s a computer off the side; I’ll get back to that later. Let’s check out the Tower of Lorgon next.

The tower starts with a ground floor that has spinning mirrors, and if you are in the room for more than two turns, you get dizzy and die. This means you can safely pass through and safely pass back but can’t linger (otherwise you’ll die on the way back).

The tower leads up to a roof with a vent, which you can climb to find a stair described as “mile-long”. Again I get cryptic vibes, although the path down only lets you go a hundred yards before getting stopped.

The “impassable” stone has an inscription

There is a better way. Give my regards to the keeper of the records. — Ranon of Lymbar

which will come up later. I have yet to find a use for the hammer (even though SMASH is a verb).

Moving back to the park, on the far east side is the Tomb, which is where the clue from the book gets used.

This opens a route down to a subway that has a “Yttrium capsule” you can ride.

At the end of the line there are two branches. One leads to a desert where, so far, all I’ve managed to do is get thirsty and die.

The second branch goes to the “Caverns of Syl” which is a maze, at the end of which is a *synthetic ruby*.

This is the absolutely standard “drop items to map” maze, no gimmicks.

That’s the end of the line for my exploring, except I said I’d come back to the computer. This is if you ride the walkway at the park, where there is a side room described as a “computer archive” with a “computer keyboard/screen”. I tried very hard to locate a verb that would work for interaction.

This included using LOAD which tried to load a saved game I hadn’t made, causing everything to crash. Oops.

This is meant more as a riddle: there is no “normal” verb here. I did my standard verb search and found

DIG, READ, OPEN, WAIT, UNLOCK, SMASH, TURN, SAY, CLOSE, EXAMINE, GIVE, ENTER, DIVE

and the right command is off one of those. Specifically, the message back at the tower told us to give our regards to the keeper of records. This indicate we should type GIVE REGARDS, and I have no idea what that would look like physically (“press F to pay respects”?) but it works, and I’ll provide the full animation:

“SLIT”, blinking. Is that supposed to be a reference to the double-slit experiment from quantum physics? It is not possible to repeat the action.

To summarize, I have a a hammer (not yet used), spade (not yet used, I’ve tested everywhere), the book and keys, and a synthetic ruby which counts as a treasure. My only obvious obstacle is a desert where I die of thirst and the only unused clue is a mysterious flashing SLIT message; I have not tried SAY SLIT everywhere but that’s the only thing I can think of. My point score is 100 out of 450, but the entirety of those 100 points comes from dropping the ruby at the storage room.

Regarding if this is “horror” or “science fantasy” or something else, I get the vibe this aligns with the 90s Myst-clone games like Obsidian filled with bizarre future devices (and no people because that would be too hard to handle technically). The ultra-minimalist style gives it a unique flavor and the game will just throw a “control room” out with no description and you’re just supposed to imagine.

This could be a scene out of L-Zone or Rhem. If this was a real 90s game that message from Ranon of Lymbar would have been rendered as a blurry QuickTime video.

The IFTF Grant Admin Committee is pleased to announce that the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s microgrant program is returning (after a successful pilot last year). Do you have a project in the works that would benefit an interactive fiction community and could use a bit of funds to get it over the finish line? We would love to hear from you: applications for this year’s program are now open.

In our first year, we provided funding to support four great projects:

• Improve accessibility features for Parchment on iOS (Dannii Willis)
• An IF Workshop for writers in Indonesia (Felicity Banks)
• Audiobook Documentation for Inform (Ryan Veeder)
• Chronicling the history of annual IF awards (Brian Rushton)

As the list of last year’s awardees might suggest, the goal of the grant program is to support projects that benefit the interactive fiction community at large (rather than funding the commission of new games, for instance). We especially love projects that provide tangible benefits to a community of IF players or makers in their work to preserve, maintain, and inspire the continued growth of this medium. Proposals are evaluated by an independent committee of advisors (distinct from the grant admin committee) for merit, feasibility, and potential impact.

Our budget for the grants program remains small: we have $3,000 of funds in total to split between awardees, with a maximum award per application of $1,000. (Requesting a smaller amount is okay and helps us support more projects.) To preserve our volunteer bandwidth, we will not consider funding projects needing less than $150. We will ask you to submit a simple budget to back up the amount you are asking for, as well as a few details about your project and its scope, but we try to keep the application process as simple as possible.

Some fine print: Grant awardees will be asked to submit a report nine months after receiving funds, meaning our funding is best-suited for projects that will be accomplished in under one year. Please note that those directly involved in the grant process (i.e. Grant Admin Committee members, Grant Advisors, IFTF Board Members) cannot apply. Those who have been banned from IFTF activities are not welcome to apply. If you are connected to someone involved in the process, please disclose that in your application so we can make appropriate plans to avoid conflicts of interest.

If you’re interested in applying or learning more about the process, please check out our grant guidelines. Applications will be open until October 31, 2024, and we except to announce accepted projects by January 31, 2025.

If you have any questions, please reach out to [email protected]. We can’t wait to see the ideas the community comes up with!

Using tracked variables to customize the ending of a game.

last time, on let’s make IF…

You might be thinking: “Another episode already? Slow down!” I have another project to get to after this one, so I’m feeling some time pressures. You can read at your own pace, of course. These posts will be here when you’re ready.

In the last post, I talked about a number of player conveniences related to command abbreviations before moving on to a very basic means for ending the game with two empty text substitutions. It’s time to revisit the subject of endings, adding complexity and yet another table that authors can fill in with text to make the experience their own. You can catch up here:

the clicker.

If we look back at our action rules for card-picking, we can see that we added a mechanism for tracking which cards are picked:

a tarot has a number called clicker.
a clicker is usually zero.

carry out card-picking (this is the basic card-picking rule):
	say "[a default fortune]";
	increment the clicker of the noun;
	increment the magic number;
	now cnoun is the noun.

Every time the player chooses a card, its clicker will go up by one. We can use this value to decide outcomes in the game. Perhaps drawing a yellowc (“yellow card”) three times will have a specific effect. Perhaps specific mixtures of cards will lead to unique outcomes. It isn’t yet time to decide that, but, as the title suggests, the clickers do give us a way to decide on ways to end games. Before doing that, though, let’s add some tweaks to let player’s see how many cards have been drawn. First, let’s revisit the way the cards are printed as part of the room description.

A small metal table stands under the light. It is covered in gray, chipped paint. The following items rest atop it:
  a red card 
  a blue card 
  a yellow card  
  an orange card 

The cards are printed, as they would in any default project, in a list according to their printed names (‘the printed name of redc is “red card”). I think it would be best to display the clicker of each card here as part of the table description. We could change the printed name of the card to do this easily, since printed names are normal texts that we can vary and substitute as we wish. This is fine, for instance:

the printed name of redc is "red card [if the clicker of redc is not zero](times drawn: [clicker of redc])".

Whenever the name of rec prints, it will provide count information if it has been chosen before.

A challenge here is that printed names can appear unexpectedly in error messages or default responses, and seeing the count information might be jarring for players. Here’s an silly and unlikely possibility:

>red, hello
You can't talk to the red card (times drawn: 1).

There is another option: we could change the way the description of the table (and its contents) prints as part of the room description. We can start by making a very simple list using Inform 7’s built-in listmaking feature. Some day, when we’re all feeling brave, maybe I’ll write about customizing the way player inventories print! But we have a much simpler task before us, so I’ll try to keep things brief. Inform 7 will print the contents of the table automatically, but how can we manipulate that process?

Fortunately, “listing contents” is what Inform 7 calls an “activity,” and we have ways to determine when activities are and aren’t happening. We start by making a new rule.

rule for printing the name of a tarot (called the current card) while listing contents:

We need a clear way to reference the card in question while the activity is occurring. I chose “current card” because it makes sense to me. You can call it anything you like. By using the “while listing contents” designation, we’re telling Inform that this rule only applies while printing lists (like the contents of our table). We can now add the detail we need.

rule for printing the name of a tarot (called the current card) while listing contents:
	say "[printed name of the current card][if the clicker of the current card is not zero] (times drawn: [clicker of the current card])".

This is very powerful! Using the [current card] designation, we can refer to any property or value associated with it. In this case, we use the clicker and printed name. This single rule will apply to every card, though we have to make sure we have printed names defined.

Note that Inform 7’s default behavior will print the [printed name] alone in all other cases, so there is no need to define a second case. However, if we did, the correct way to ask Inform 7 to determine the status of an activity is “going on” and “not going on”:

rule for printing the name of a tarot (called the current card) while listing contents is not going on:

Finally: this isn’t a game where players are scanning room descriptions for things to do, so let’s just reprint the room description after every card draw.

after card-picking when the magic number is not 9:
	try looking.

deciding on endings.

I’m not ready to commit to how these endings will play out yet, but let’s frame something in. My idea is that if the player chooses six or more of one card, they will get a specific card-themed ending. Otherwise, they will get a generic “default” ending. We’ll use values for our endings.

an outcome is a kind of value.

In earlier posts, I defined values by listing them “the outcomes are good, bad, [etc]”. Let’s work out of a table instead. Our ending texts will be there, so shouldn’t we put everything in one place? Getting started is as simple as this:

the outcomes are defined by the table of concluding texts.

When we make this kind of declaration, we are committing to making a row for every possible “outcome.” The first entry in each row will be the specific outcome. We can store information related to each outcome in the same row. What should be there? Thinking of our last post, we will need an epitaph and a final blurb. That’s two columns. If a specific card is related to an ending, I want to store that as well. Here’s an idea:

table of concluding texts
outcome	tarot	tombstone	epitaph
default	--	"Default Blurb"	"A default ending."
redE	redc	"Red Blurb"	"A red ending."
blueE	bluec	"Blue Blurb"	"A blue ending."
yellowE	yellowc	"Yellow Blurb"	"A Yellow ending."
orangeE	orangec	"Orange Blurb"	"An orange ending."

How can we pick an ending? I’ve already said that I want to choose endings based on the number of cards picked. Let’s try something simple, using a “to decide” definition.

to decide which outcome is the ending:

Note that I haven’t declared what an “ending” is elsewhere in the code. This definition is that declaration.

This should never come up unless we are messy and refer to endings mid-game, but let’s get something out of the way:

	unless the magic number is nine:
		decide on default;

As a reminder: the magic number increments when the player draws a card, and the game ends when the magic number is nine. There is no real need to set an “incomplete” ending value, as [if magic number is less than nine] already accounts for that. I’m only setting this because nature abhors a vacuum. If strange cases arise, we may have to be more diligent or set up some error-catching values.

In the meantime, we should ask Inform to check the clicker of every card. If one of them is above, let’s say… six, we’ll assign an ending based on that card. The magic phrase here is “repeat with x running through y“. In this construction, x is any nickname we choose to represent a single instance in the group or kind y. If we wanted to run through every thing in the game, we could say “repeat with item running through things”. “Item” is a term I picked. It has no built-in significance to Inform. “Things,” on the other hand, is meaningful. We use this phrase to evaluate all members of a group, one at a time.

Note that some things don’t work, like numbers. We can’t “running through numbers.” Many finite groupings will do: things, scenes, kinds thereof, and so forth (11.11 “Repeat Running Through”). In our case, we have previously made “tarot,” a kind of thing, that will serve our purposes. I’ll set a temporary placeholder value, [EC], where we can store our results.

		let EC be nothing;
		repeat with card running through tarots:

For each card, we simply need to check its clicker and, if it is greater than six, make a decision.

			if the clicker of card is greater than six:
				let EC be card;
				choose row with a tarot of card from the table of concluding texts;
				decide on outcome entry;

Here, one we find a number over six, we update the value of EC, then find our card in the table of concluding texts. The “outcome” we’ve defined there will be the ending. What if no match is found? We’ll include a fallback.

		if EC is nothing:
			decide on default;

Important: “to decide” phrases end immediately once a “decide on” phrase is reached. If it were possible to have multiple clickers over six, Inform would stop deciding after finding the first match. Be sure that your conditions are exclusive!

With that, we’ve decided on an ending. Let’s revisit our code from last time, incorporating our new table and logic.

after card-picking when the magic number is 9:
	end the story finally saying "[the final blurb]".
	
to say the final blurb:
	choose row with an outcome of the ending in the table of concluding texts;
	say the tombstone entry.
		
when play ends:
	choose row with an outcome of the ending in the table of concluding texts;
	say the epitaph entry.

Here’s today’s source.

bonus!

I’ve been working on a template for customizing every built-in response within Inform 7’s standard rules. If you want to write your own, this is a good place to start! Other examples exist (Nathanael Nerode’s Neutral Standard Reponses is quite good), but this one explains how and why parser errors print, which can be very confusing for new authors (and experienced one’s, too!). I’ve made a new itch.io page for it. Have a look and let me know what you think! It’s a draft, so feedback is welcome.

https://kamin3ko.itch.io/default-reponses-template

next

As promised some posts ago, we are making our way to a design for a highly variable text. We currently have a basic framework for an eight-turn “game” involving four unique printable texts per turn as well as five unique endings. What else is there? Quite a bit, believe it or not. Next time, let’s take things in a surprising (I hope) direction.

If traditional film is a river, the viewer of that film sits on the bank and watches the water flow by. We wanted to take that viewer and turn them into a fish and put them down into that river.

— Greg Roach, Director of The X-Files Game

Given the demographics of X-Files fandom, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that the show’s parent network Fox started to think about making a computer game that was officially based on it quite quickly. Already early in the second season, before the big breakthrough at the Golden Globe Awards, Fox began making inquiries on the subject with game developers. This was the peak of the interactive-movie era, when games that blended interactivity with video clips starring real human actors were widely believed to be the necessary future of the medium. Fox’s search thus led it to HyperBole Studios, a company whose name positively screams 1990s — note the sticky capital “B” in the middle of it — every bit as much as The X-Files itself. With a name like that, how could the studio be anything but a loud and proud advocate of the so-called “Siliwood” approach to game making?

HyperBole had actually been around for half a decade by that point, evolving alongside the hype over multimedia computing. It was the brainchild of one Greg Roach, who had gotten his first Apple IIc home computer in 1985, when he was still a university student majoring in theater and philosophy in Houston, Texas. He had tried to play the text adventures of the era, but found that they didn’t agree with him. What should have been “portals to a different world” struck him as balky, pedantic, and dull.

A few years later, when he was employed as an associate director at the Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston, he got his first glimpse of HyperCard on the Apple Macintosh. It was a revelation. “Here was the answer I’d been looking for,” he says. Like a lot of other starstruck HyperCard zealots from unusual, often non-technical backgrounds, he founded a company to bring his hypertext experiments to the world. Initially, he did not envision HyperBole as anything so gauche as a games studio: it was rather to be the publisher of a bimonthly multimedia magazine on two floppy disks. The magazine never quite met that bimonthly schedule, but Roach and his friends did manage to put out nine issues between 1990 and 1992. Each was an eclectic mix of hypertext narratives, comics, visual art, video clips, poetry, and opinion pieces. “The writing can sometimes be a little idiosyncratic,” wrote MacUser of the endeavor, “but it’s never boring.” The magazine’s most ambitious project was The Madness of Roland, an “interactive novel” by Roach himself that ran in installments in the first six issues. Sprouting from The Song of Roland, the towering Medieval epic about a chivalrous knight-errant in the time of Charlemagne, it quickly evolved — or devolved, depending on your point of view — into a stream-of-consciousness postmodern pastiche of the sort that was very popular among academic hypertext theorists at the time. It was eventually released in an enhanced version as a standalone product.

The hard truth was, however, that work like this was more interesting to the literary theorists than it was to ordinary computer owners; you certainly weren’t going to be able to sustain a software company of any real size on it, not even one that catered to the artsy, well-heeled Mac user base. Being a man with commercial as well as intellectual aspirations, Roach decided to add the revolutionary new storage medium of CD-ROM to his technological stack and replace interactive books with interactive movies. He ended the magazine and moved to Seattle, both to be closer to the West Coast tech titans and to take advantage of the city’s underrated theater and film- and video-production communities. No shrinking violet, he branded himself “the Spielberg of multimedia” and “a theorist of virtual cinema,” and commenced cold-calling anyone who would pick up the telephone. For example, he talked his way into sharing a stage with Sid Meier for a debate over “Multimedia versus Game Design” at the 1994 Computer Game Developers Conference, where he discussed the importance of things like “a geometric understanding of the spatial possibilities of what the media represents.” (Such tangled phraseology left Meier scratching his head; he kept trying to bring the conversation back around to the best ways of making games that were, you know, fun.)

Roach charmed enough venture capitalists to hire some programmers, who helped him to create a system for making interactive movies called, naturally enough, VirtualCinema. In another tribute to his energy and persuasiveness, HyperBole became the first games studio to be signed by Hollywood’s Agency for the Performing Arts — the most prestigious talent agency in Tinseltown — as a client.

The first of HyperBole’s VirtualCinema games was one of the last to be published by a shady outfit called Media Vision, which had gotten its start in sound cards and was now attempting to build a larger empire on boxed games of its own and, wherever and whenever these failed to deliver the goods, lots and lots of accounting fraud. According to Roach — admittedly, not always the most reliable witness — Media Vision yanked a half-completed interactive movie out of his hands and rushed it onto store shelves when the financial house of cards began to show signs of instability. Be that as it may, the game called Quantum Gate was followed just nine months later by one called The Vortex: Quantum Gate II that picked up right where it had left off. By that time, however, the house of cards at Media Vision had collapsed, so the sequel was published by HyperBole themselves. As a result, it had little retail presence and sold hardly any copies at all.

If nothing else, these games served to prove the wisdom of the move to Seattle; in terms of their acting performances and overall production values, they really did stand out from most of the sub-B-movie competition in their space. Unfortunately, Roach’s scripts were less impressive, being a nearly incomprehensible mishmash of science-fiction clichés and New Age malarkey. The interactivity wasn’t up to much either: just some deserted corridors to wander from a Myst-style first-person perspective, some menus that popped up in conversations but made minimal difference to the larger arc of the story, and, most lamentably and inexplicably of all, a thoroughly botched attempt to re-implement the old arcade classic Battlezone.

Despite their shortcomings, the Quantum Gate games wound up serving HyperBole well after a fashion. For when Fox started looking around for someone to make an X-Files game, HyperBole’s Hollywood talent agency could submit them as demo reels. Roach claimed in 1998 that, upon being formally invited to submit a bid for the project, he almost turned the opportunity down: “I’d never seen The X-Files at that point. But then I watched the show. The creative possibilities were intriguing, so we went back to Fox and affirmed our interest.”

It soon became clear that the idea of an X-Files game was being driven by the suits at Fox, not by the team that was in the trenches making the television show from week to week. Chris Carter was at best ambivalent. “What can you do that I can’t?” he asked Roach at their first meeting. Slowly, Roach talked him around, at the same time that he convinced his bosses at Fox that the VirtualCinema engine was just the tool for the job. Eventually, Carter agreed to provide a story outline which HyperBole would then turn into a game. By the end of 1995, when the show was in the midst of its third season, the deal was done. Barely three years removed from making an underground multimedia magazine in his basement for a few hundred subscribers, Roach was now to be entrusted with one of the hottest properties on television, watched by tens of millions of people every week. Truly these were strange times in gaming.

That said, it wasn’t going to be practical to build the entire game around Mulder and Scully; David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were busy enough as it was. At the same time, though, any alleged X-Files game from which they were completely absent would surely be pilloried. Carter’s story outline rather cleverly solved the problem by giving the player control of another, newly introduced FBI agent by the name of Craig Willmore, who would be set on the trail of the usual twosome after they mysteriously disappeared in the middle of an investigation. Duchovny and Anderson would appear only near the end of the game, as the player’s reward for getting that far. All things considered, it seemed like a reasonable compromise.

After much fraught negotiations with the two stars’ representatives, it was agreed that they would come to Seattle for about a week to film their scenes. Mitch Pileggi, who played Assistant Director Walter Skinner, Mulder and Scully’s immediate superior at the FBI, signed on as well. Ditto the actors who played The Lone Gunmen, a trio of eccentric computer hackers who helped Mulder and Scully out from time to time on the show. Even William B. Davis, otherwise known as Cancer Man, agreed to a cameo appearance.

Greg Roach (right) on the set with William B. Davis.

Getting all of this arranged took months and months. “Working with a company like Fox is a lot like talking to a person with multiple-personality disorder or Alzheimer’s,” says Roach. “They never remember from one minute to the next what they’ve agreed to. We had to deal with the legal division, marketing department, Fox Interactive, the TV division, and Chris Carter. Each of them has their own fiefdom and their own veto capacity that only extends so far in certain areas.” Most creative decisions required the approval of Carter, but it was made all too clear by his average response time to queries that the X-Files game was not high on his priority list. In all, another year and a half went by before the design document, script, and all of the assorted acting contracts were far enough along that shooting could begin.

This milestone coincided with the end of the show’s fourth season, when it was nearing the absolute pinnacle of its popularity and cultural cachet. A typical 24-episode season was shot at a pace of roughly one episode every ten days, meaning that Duchovny and Anderson could expect to spend a good two-thirds of each year playing Mulder and Scully. This year they were even busier, however, because an X-Files feature film was to be shot between the fourth and fifth seasons, to premiere in movie theaters right after the latter had finished airing. And on top of all this, the two were now expected to come to Seattle during the two-week gap between the fourth-season wrap party and the beginning of work on the film in order to help Greg Roach get his computer game done. Understandably enough under the circumstances, they arrived tired and decidedly unenthusiastic. Because of the scheduling issues, Mulder and Scully’s scenes were to be filmed first — a true baptism by fire for the cast and crew. “After that, the rest of the shoot seemed relatively easy,” says Roach.

Duchovny, who had aspirations of becoming a Hollywood leading man of the sort who could carry a major non-X-Files film on his own, had been growing restless on the television show of late. It isn’t hard to imagine what he thought of the notion of appearing in a videogame, a still less respected medium than television. HyperBole did their best to make him happy, even going so far as to place a private yoga instructor at his beck and call throughout his stay in Seattle. Nonetheless, he did the bare minimum required of him during the time he was contractually obligated to make himself available, then jetted off without a backward glance to enjoy what was left of his holiday.

Greg Roach directs David Duchovny.

Gillian Anderson, on the other hand, went above and beyond the call of duty. Once the concept of the game was explained to her, she became genuinely interested in what HyperBole was trying to do, and put in a lot more effort than she needed to. She even agreed to stay on a few extra days after Duchovny left, to shoot some extra scenes that Greg Roach hastily wrote to take advantage of her unexpected graciousness. “I like the Four Seasons hotel in Seattle,” she said as a way of deflecting everyone’s gratitude. If you’ve played the game, you probably noticed that you see a lot more of Scully in it than Mulder. Now you know why.

The entirety of the filming took seven weeks, all of them spent at locations in and around Seattle. A goodly chunk of the crew’s time was spent at the old Naval Station Puget Sound at Sand Point, a Navy base and airfield — the first airborne circumnavigation of the Earth had ended there in 1924 — that had recently been decommissioned as part of the peace dividend for winning the Cold War. It was in every way a classic X-Files set. “It had to be big, it had to be scary, it had to be a Byzantine maze with corridors and machinery,” says Roach. “At Sand Point, they’d built a new brig, and then a year later the base was shut down. So we had this huge, brand spanking new, governmental, high-tech facility that provided the perfect shell for the secret base.” The local maritime training academy and its primary training ship, formerly an ocean-going icebreaker and tug, were more thoroughly X-Files-looking places. All were shown to maximum advantage, thanks not least to Director of Photography Jon Joffin, who had held the same title for eleven episodes of the television show during its fourth season. He became known as “the smoke Nazi” around HyperBole for his ability to conjure up that trademark X-Files murk.

Once the filming wrapped, it was back to the office for the HyperBole principals. There they used the VirtualCinema system to turn the video footage that had been shot, along with still photographs of the various locations, into a game. As this work proceeded and the likely timeline for its completion firmed up, Fox decided how to incorporate the game into its marketing plans for The X-Files in general. The summer of 1998 was already to be The Summer of The X-Files; a shocking, bravura finale to the fifth season on May 17 would lead right into the movie hitting theaters on June 19. The game seemed a nice adjunct to these plans; indeed, it was decided that it should be released on the very same day as the movie’s premiere. To emphasize its kinship with what most people were calling “the X-Files movie” — its official name was just The X-Files — Fox Interactive branded HyperBole’s effort simply The X-Files Game, which was certainly descriptive if not very original.

Gillian Anderson further endeared herself to Fox Interactive and HyperBole by agreeing to come to the E3 trade show in May of 1998 to sign autographs and promote the soon-to-be-released game.

When June 19 arrived, those eager fans who stopped by a software store on their way to or from their friendly local movieplex got, alongside more X-Files than was probably good for anyone in such a compressed span of time, a game that was exceptional in some ways but ultimately unable to overcome the limitations of its format. By 1998, those limitations were already causing the games industry to move sharply away from the interactive-movie conceit and all it entailed. The appearance of The X-Files Game this late in the day was more a tribute to its long gestation time and the power of licensing than any strong demand for more games of this type in the marketplace. In fact, The X-Files Game was the very last splashy production of its kind to hit store shelves, the last gasp of a confused but earnest movement in game development that really had once seemed like the future of the medium writ large. (Three other stragglers of the same breed — The Journeyman Project 3, Black Dahlia, and Tex Murphy: Overseer — had shown up earlier in 1998.) Game developers like Greg Roach and HyperBole, who had irrevocably married themselves to the idea of a grand alliance between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, would find themselves out of a job going forward. One can only hope that it was fun for them while it lasted.

As the last of its kind, The X-Files Game ought to be an exceptional example, the highest iteration of the interactive-movie conception. And in some ways at least, it really is. It sprawls across no fewer than seven CDs. That space is used for video that looks far better than the norm — almost, dare I say it, of DVD quality. (It’s a mystery why this game was never released on DVD; it could have benefited greatly from that then-new technology, if only to cut down on the disc swapping.)

The live-action segments also impress in ways that transcend mere audiovisual fidelity. Their production values are superb by comparison with almost any other interactive movie. They make no use of green-screening: the practice of painting pixel-arts “sets” in behind human actors who have said their lines on empty sound stages, an approach which was used in the vast majority of other games of this type because it was much, much cheaper than filming on proper sets. Roach claims that it cost $6 million in the final reckoning to make The X-Files Game. A good chunk of the budget was doubtless swallowed up by the complicated corporate logistics of the project; David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson would soon be signing contract extensions on the television show that paid them six-digit sums for every single episode they appeared in, and one has to assume the salaries they were paid to appear here were comparable if not even more excessive. Still, there’s no denying that this game looks as good as any typical episode of the show. It genuinely feels like The X-Files. Of course, it helped to shoot in Seattle, a city whose climate is much the same as that of gray-and-rainy Vancouver, its neighbor just on the other side of the border to its north.

The acting here acquits itself reasonably well too. Yes, Duchovny looks a little bored and irritated, but Anderson is fine in a role whose tics and mannerisms she has down flat, as is Mitch Pileggi. The unfamiliar actors who are expected to carry the balance of the game don’t do much if any worse than your typical guest star on the show. Jordan Lee Williams, who plays Agent Craig Willmore, carries out his ersatz Mulder assignment about as well as one can ask. Ditto Paige Witte, who plays the Seattle police detective who becomes Willmore’s partner in investigation, his equivalent of Scully.

Alas, the part of The X-Files Game that is supposed to put the “interactive” in an interactive movie is less impressive and more problematic. Before I get to that, though, I do need to note that one accusation which has been repeatedly leveled against this game from just after its release right up until the present day actually isn’t fair at all. When you first arrive at the Seattle FBI office as Agent Willmore, you need to log into your computer, which in turns requires a password. Lackadaisical reviewers have been writing for decades now that you’re expected to guess this password from Willmore’s enthusiasm for the history of the American Civil War and a whole lot of lateral thinking. This would indeed be an awful puzzle to start (or end) any game with, not to mention nonsensical in terms of verisimilitude. (You’re supposed to be Willmore, after all. Why would he need to puzzle out his own password?) But it’s not a puzzle: the password you need is written in the manual. The fact that this caused such confusion is itself a sign of changing times in gaming. Just a few years before The X-Files Game, gamers were poring over manuals as a matter of course; by a few years after, manuals had all but disappeared. This game found itself caught in the middle, making assumptions about its player base that no longer held true.

In reality, the problems here don’t come down to nonsensical puzzles. Greg Roach never had much interest in puzzles anyway, and, even if he would have, Fox had made it clear that this product must be accessible to people who had never played a computer game before, who were attracted strictly by the name of the television show on the box. All of which means that, although The X-Files Game plays superficially like a Myst clone when you aren’t watching video clips or clicking through dialog trees, it can’t offer up the usual array of arbitrary set-piece puzzles to gate your progress. And that’s a fine, even welcome development in itself; Lord knows, we had all seen enough slider puzzles to last a lifetime by this point. Yet it gradually becomes clear that neither Roach nor anyone else at HyperBole has anything to hand with which to replace arbitrary puzzles. This investigation turns out to require shockingly little thought on your part. Go where the game wants you to go and click on everything there. Rinse and repeat, and in due course you win.

Now, even this isn’t awful in itself. There is plenty of room in my heart for a game that’s not really interested in challenging me, that just wants to sweep me away on the wings of an exciting story. But there are two more downfalls here. One has a remedy; sadly, the other does not.

The first is the “clicking on everything” part of the equation. The X-Files Game may have decided to abandon arbitrary puzzles and to replace pre-rendered 3D scenes with carefully shot photographs, but it still has all the other infelicities of the Myst-style first-person, node-based approach to navigation. You never know quite where all you can look, and your degree of rotation when you turn is wildly inconsistent from node to node. It’s disarmingly easy to get confused just trying to weave your way through the FBI office. And when the game sends you off to a sprawling warehouse with darkened nooks and crannies everywhere… oh, my. Here you have to scour every single node and viewpoint for the tiny pieces of evidence that you need to collect to jog the plot wheels back into motion. There’s nothing fun about this. It makes the game hard in the most annoying of all possible ways; I’ll take slider puzzles any day over fake mazes and pixel hunts.

Thankfully, the game does give you a way of avoiding most of these stumbling blocks. You can turn on something called “Artificial Intuition” to gain access to a hint system and, most importantly, activate an icon that will swirl suggestively whenever you’re “in close proximity to information vital to the investigation.” I advise you to spare yourself a world of frustration by taking advantage of it.

But my other overarching complaint has no similar remedy. It goes to the story itself, which is… well, it’s just not that good, certainly not good enough to maintain the player’s interest in the absence of compelling gameplay. Greg Roach’s script from Chris Carter’s story outline is most kindly described as workmanlike — X-Files by the numbers, without the flashes of subversive wit and human warmth that marked the television series’s best episodes.

There are linchpins of the plot that just don’t make much sense. When you finally locate Scully, you learn that she’s been cooling her heels for several days in a sanitarium — a perfectly innocent one, that is, not the type you can’t check out of — without bothering to tell anyone at the FBI where she is. Meanwhile Mulder has gone charging off on the trail of yet another government conspiracy involving aliens without ever bothering to tell his partner what he’s up to, much less the agency that employs him. Even by the usual standards of these two, that’s some terrible communication.

Other weaknesses are inherent to the very nature of the project. The X-Files Game was always destined to be a bit player in the larger X-Files saga. The “Mulder and Scully have been kidnapped!” plot tries its best to get you invested, but these are, after all, the two most incompetent agents at the FBI, who rush heedlessly into danger and nearly get themselves killed every single week. We know perfectly well the game isn’t going to let them die, as we also know that nothing all that important to the larger mythology of the show is going to be revealed by this ancillary production. The stakes never feel very high because we’ve seen all of this so many times before. In the X-Files movie, Scully is kidnapped and Mulder must effect a rescue; once you find Scully here, it becomes a mirror image of that scenario. And so, as Joni Mitchell sang, it’s “round and round and round in the circle game.”

The date which appears onscreen at the opening of the game places it in the past of the current X-Files chronology at the time the game was released: all the way back in the third season, which was, not coincidentally, the season during which Chris Carter wrote the story outline. At that time, the mythology episodes were revolving around the “black oil,” a kind of parasitic alien consciousness that could infect human hosts and take them over, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style. But that plot line had long since been put to bed by the time the fifth season rolled around, the better to make way for the latest existential threat to humanity. Here, however, we’re mired in the stuff once again, in a way that must have felt painfully anticlimactic to those hardcore X-Files fans who rushed out to pick up the game upon its release.

In lieu of a plot that goes anywhere particularly interesting, the script dangles the promise of meeting Mulder and Scully in the flesh as the most tangible reward for slogging through the mazes and pixel hunts. From a certain perspective, this was clever. But it doesn’t do anything to make The X-Files Game a game that can stand on its own, divorced from the television show that spawned it. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The game begins with the iconic opening-credits sequence from the show, which serves as a fine demonstration of the exceptional video fidelity. The cast credits are not updated; David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are still listed as the only stars. “What are we?” demand Jordan Lee Williams and Paige Witte. “Chopped liver?” Well, kind of, yeah…

Agent Craig Willmore, who, we learn from perusing his office and his apartment, is a recently divorced father of one with a fondness for the American Civil War and the Ramones. His name is lifted from the third-season episode “Syzygy,” where it’s mentioned unfavorably by two telekinetic teenage girls who are terrorizing a small town: “Hate him, hate him, wouldn’t want to date him.” (Sheesh… as if it wasn’t hard enough already to step into Fox Mulder’s shoes.) The script is littered with little in-jokes and callbacks like this.

In another example of the game’s fan service, you find a copy of Jose Chung’s book from the much-admired third-season episode of the same name. The dilemma to be pondered, I suppose, is where you draw the line between fan service and identity crisis.

Navigation is of the node-based first-person stripe that was popularized by Myst, but the scenes are all built from photographs of real sets rather than being the output of a 3D modeller. Just look at how this scene and the one below are lit. The game absolutely nails the X-Files visual aesthetic.

Ken Starr had nothing on this guy. Informed by Assistant Director Skinner of Mulder and Scully’s disappearance, the question that Agent Willmore most emphatically wants an answer to is whether they are now knocking boots or have ever done so. To be fair, the same question obsessed a substantial chunk of the X-Files fan base.

In a clear sign of this game’s long gestation time, Agent Willmore keeps tabs on events in the field with an Apple Newton. Apple discontinued its innovative but flawed “personal digital assistant” a few months before The X-Files Game was released.

Hunting a pixel in the dark back room of a warehouse means that we have to squint at the world through the narrow beam of a flashlight. This sort of thing is the source of the game’s only real challenge. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is really no fun at all.

Scully in da house! And it only took until the sixth disc out of seven to meet her.

Remind you of anything? The shadow of the alien-autopsy film still looms large.

Canned video clips may have seemed inherently more “dramatic” than conventional computer graphics to people like Greg Roach, but they’re a horribly blunt instrument to try to build a game around, leaving no room for emergent behavior whatsoever. The last disc of of The X-Files Game is a fine example of this. It ought to be a series of heart-pounding action sequences, but, because the only things the game can show you are things that have been filmed, it turns instead into a tedious exercise in figuring out what sequence of events were written down beforehand in the script. Doing anything else leads to a summary judgment of instant death for the crime of failing to read the scriptwriter’s mind.

As if the anachronistic quality of its interactive-movie conceit hadn’t been problem enough, the commercial prospects of The X-Files Game were badly damaged by yet another factor. It had been Fox Interactive and HyperBole’s intention all along to release the game in June of 1998 not only for Windows and the Mac, but also in a version for the Sony PlayStation. Doing so would have broadened its potential customer base almost exponentially. But, lacking expertise on the more constrained, finicky console, HyperBole made the fateful decision to outsource the port to a third party, who rewarded their faith by dropping the ball entirely. There was no alternative but to release on computers only and then try to do the PlayStation port in-house. Thanks to heroic efforts on the part of their programmers, HyperBole did get it done, delivering a port that doesn’t look or play all that much worse than the computer versions — a remarkable feat indeed, considering the disparities of hardware involved. Yet it took them until well into 1999 to get it ready, by which time the game only seemed like that much more of an anachronism.

Despite it all, Greg Roach claims that The X-Files Game sold “in the region of” 1 million copies when all was said and done. I suppose that such a figure isn’t completely out of the bounds of possibility when the console version and bargain bins are taken into account; the PlayStation had such mass popularity and market penetration at this time that a turd in a box with the Sony logo on it would probably have shifted a few hundred thousand units. Whatever the real numbers, though, there was never any serious talk during the remainder of the television show’s run of funding another X-Files game, of the interactive-movie or any other style, made by HyperBole or anyone else. This alone is ample evidence that the first game wasn’t a rip-roaring success.

The cultural moment that could spawn studios like HyperBole was well and truly past by 1998; the company never won another contract of anywhere close to this one’s prominence and size, in fact never made another boxed computer game of any sort. A downsized HyperBole subsisted on small Web-development contracts and the like for a while, before closing up shop for good in 2005.

By that time, Greg Roach was well on the way to his next big thing. He says that he experienced a “tremendously powerful spiritual awakening” in 1998, when he celebrated shipping The X-Files Game with a trip to Egypt to see the Pyramids of Giza. There he was contacted by a group of trans-dimensional beings of pure energy whom he has come to call the Council of Light. (He adopted this appellation after his first name for them, the White Brotherhood, proved to have all the wrong connotations.) The shuttering of HyperBole coincided with his founding of Spirit Quest Tours, offering “life-changing spiritual travel” to those who, like Fox Mulder, really, really Want to Believe. As of this writing, you can find enlightenment for twelve days in Peru for just $7950, not including airfare, meals, single supplement, or “personal expenses.” Nobody ever said that The Truth Out There would come cheap.

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 books The X-Files Game: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba and Writing for Interactive Media: The Complete Guide by Jon Samsel and Darryl Wimberley. Computer Gaming World of June 1994, July 1994, February 1995, August 1998, and September 1998; Edge of January 2011; MacUser of December 1992; CD-ROM Today of August/September 1994; InCider of September 1991; PC Games of September 1998; Extreme PlayStation of August 1999 and September 1999. My thanks to reader Busca for digging up a few of these magazine sources for me!

Online sources include GameSpot’s vintage review of the game, the old HyperBole site, Greg Roach’s personal site, his Spirit Quest Tours site, “Greg Roach Wants You to Make a Spiritual Pilgrimage” by Christine Desadeleer at Matador Network, Roach being interviewed by Dr. Sarah Larsen, and an old “making of” reel for the game.

Where to Get It: The X-Files Game has never been re-released for digital purchase, doubtless due to the complications of licensing deals. The easiest way to play it today is to download the pre-packaged version at The Collection Chamber.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Called stupid brutes, orcs are hated and looked down upon by all! If only an orc could unify the clans and turn the hordes against their enemies. Harness your might, and the power of gods and demons, to remake the world in the visage of an orc!

An Unexpectedly Green Journey is 33% off until October 10th!

An Unexpectedly Green Journey is a 1.5 million-word interactive novel by James Isaac. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Born in the baked, dusty plains, you emerge into a world of stagnation and decline. Orcs simmer in this backwater, a hopeless people dismissed as culturally stunted and irrelevant barbarians. Once, an age ago, orcs had the briefest glint of a place in the sun and held the continent of Behatland by the throat, only to fall before the united forces of the world. What hope have you to make something of your life beyond scrabbling for meagre survival?

But the fates have conspired and presented you with an opportunity. The elves are in perpetual retreat to match their ever-diminishing forests. The time of dwarven glory has long passed. The great human empire totters on the edge of decadence and the unravelling of the traditions of their ancestors. Demons tempt those of wayward faith. Worse, there are whispers and sightings of something far more sinister stirring in the Ashland to the west…

The world slumbers fitfully before the tantalizing tendrils of an encroaching nightmare. Someone needs to kick this world awake, wring its neck, roar in its face and hack at it with an axe before eating it! IT IS TIME FOR THE ORCS TO RISE AGAIN!

From the moment you first open your eyes to the instance of your last croaking breath, you will take the role of a mighty orc. Become anything from a bone idle glutton, fit only to be forgotten, to the ruler of the greatest empire the world has ever seen. Wield your influence and connections to build great armies or a holy city. Usher in an age of peace or demonic devastation. Make a mess and eat a load of halfling offal!

• Explore an open world full of danger, opportunity and adventure.
• Grow your orc through every stage of their life, from the moment of birth, through childhood to adolescence, from youth to maturity and, finally, into old age.
• With the knowledge of Krog-blessed resurrection, explore and die to your heart’s content using the new checkpoint system.
• Rise to become the chief of your tribe, the king of all orcs or the emperor of an entire continent. Then face off against a final threat powerful enough to challenge even an emperor.
• Command vast armies, with a diversity of units, and crush dwarves, elves, humans and halflings too!
• Raid rival warbands riding atop your ferocious boar.
• Master the arts of a shaman. Wield the will and magic of the orc god to build and manage a Holy City and breach the realm of divinity.
• Succumb to temptation and devote your soul to the Powers Beyond and Below. Weave demonic taint across the world and burn it to a cinder as you become the Dark Lord itself.
• Devote your life to gluttony and join the fabled Big Bellies in epic feats of gut-busting consumption.
• Fight in arenas across the land to earn wealth and glory. Perhaps, one day, you will claim the title of Grand Champion.
• Join an adventuring guild and go questing with a party of brave heroes across the land.
• Or live a life of simple mediocrity and leave all the fighting to the stupid gits who want to die young.

20% Grub. 30% Glory. 50% Slaughter. 100% Orc.

James 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.

(Previous posts here.)

I’ve finished the game. Just like Dungeon Adventure was an anti-Zork of sorts, this can be thought of as an anti-Starcross, both in a negative and a positive way.

A design from Kyoto University and the Kajima Corporation for artificial gravity on the moon, allowing babies to be born in 1G.

Voltgloss and Rob helpfully drop some hints in the comments. The big piece I missed was the shortage of oxygen, but before getting into that, some small pieces to wrap up:

1.) the silver wire is … simply there as silver, and counts as a treasure

2.) the box which a knob gave the messages BEAM ON and BEAM OFF allowed me to mess with the main tractor beam for the ship; I was originally quite confused because it seems like there’s a literal beam coming out of the box, but no, that’s supposed to be a voice message or psychic impression or something; it also is a source of a bug at the end

3.) the oven is ignorable (Rob’s hint indicated a “fish”)

4.) the flashlight is also ignorable

5.) the shielding is safe to get before you’ve started the power, and as predicted, it does turn into gold with the lead-to-gold machine

6.) as mentioned by The Larch in the comments, the color code is just the official resistor code; there are some transistors that otherwise are a “red herring” but they’re intended as a hint; this also really puts even more into question the “alien ship” thing

With all that taken care of, I technically had found all my treasures, but couldn’t get them back to the ship in time, even with strategic teleports. The cutting torch comes with a tank (and it needs the tank to work, and the tank will eventually run out of gas if you leave it on).

Gas for welding/cutting uses a small amount of oxygen but is generally other gases, and I already knew it was being actively used in the cutter, so it never occurred to me it’d be safe to hook up to a spacesuit. However, Voltgloss’s first two hints…

You already have another oxygen source available already.

But didn’t recognize it as such.

…led me to go…. wait….

The metallic spacesuit can hook up to the tank and it works as oxygen. I think I may have audibly yelled at the screen. Look, you can buy oxygen canisters as separate things, and apply them in the mix, but it’s not oxygen alone, it’s called oxy-acetylene for a reason!

(As KarbonKitty points out in the comments, it’s technically different gas for cutters and welders, even though the canister is labeled as for welding but gets used on a cutter; also, you’d have different composition for a helium environment.)

And yes, some future-spacesuit-thing could just extract the oxygen and filter out the rest somehow, but that’s getting into the realm of fantasy-physics. This is part of why I said it’s sort of an anti-Starcross; it sets up as if science helps (even tossing in the resistor code, which I didn’t know) yet undermines the science at a crucial moment. It’s not terrible but — you know Lebling would never put a puzzle like that.

There’s another reason why this is the anti-Starcross (the “positive” way I alluded to). In that story, originally titled The Gift from the Stars, the aliens set up a task as a way of intentionally giving away advanced technology. Here, we are just wholesale swiping stuff, up to sabotaging the engine room just for some lead. It could have the same title with quote marks applied: The “Gift” from the Stars. I don’t normally think of the fate of our protagonists after their stories, but I can’t imagine our unhinged protagonist with an immortality serum ready to sell is going to land at a healthy ending.

While I have a full score, I was undermined by a final bug. There’s a message along the lines of “BUT YOU’RE STILL STUCK HERE” if you haven’t turned off the tractor beam (using the knob) but somehow my game got confused and even with the tractor beam off it still thinks it is on. I confirmed with checking Dale Dobson’s final screen that I had done everything correctly, the game just decided to collapse in a pile of bad parity settings.

Yet again, Aardvark tries some astounding ideas in a crumbling technical framework. They still stuck around through at through 1984, when higher-memory-capacity computers were becoming commonplace; I wish they had taken the opportunity to revamp some of their games to be slightly less reliant on super-tight programming (like Bruce Robinson did). Of course, Rodger Olson wasn’t even willing to fix regular bugs, so it isn’t a surprise we’re stuck with what we have. For Bob Retelle, who I quoted earlier, this behavior caused him to leave and make his own company entirely.

The “sloppiness” was another reason I spun off and started up my own software company. I had a real problem with releasing buggy games, which meant my own productivity was far lower than a lot of what was available from Aardvark. After 15 revisions of my “Time Trek” game, Rodger took to tossing the cassettes with the new revisions in the trash, rather than fix the production “masters” to quash the bugs.

As far as Bob Anderson (the co-author of today’s game with Olson) goes, I’m not sure what happened. We have one more game of his to play (another Haunted House) and his Mobygames credits cut off.

From the July 1983 Aardvark catalog, via the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

We’ll have to save that for another time, as coming up next: two utterly obscure TRS-80 games, including one resulting from the recent “missing adventures” thread. Part 2 of the missing adventures list will likely show up next week, and then we’ll finally be getting back to Apple II, as Bob Blauschild tries his hand at a game in color.

On Monday, September 30, 2024, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi.

Never Gives Up Her Dead (2023) by Mathbrush

In this huge sci-fi game, you play as Emrys Tisserand, a Storyweaver on the seedship Tragwyddol. Shortly after your first vision — a masked woman at your own grave — the ship collides with something! In the ensuing chaos, monkeys steal small objects and enter red rifts, but only you, with your Storyweaver gift, see them. Save the ship, Emrys, but know that this is also the story of your death.

At the 2023 IFDB Awards, it won two awards: Outstanding Game over 2 hours in 2023 and Outstanding Science Fiction Game of 2023.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

The Bureau of Strange Happenings (2024) by Phil Riley

In this occult game, you play as Agent Larch Faraji of the Bureau of Strange Happenings, recently relocated to a strip mall in Maryland due to budget cuts. Your efforts to answer the phone locked inside your desk lead you through hyperspace and to a new mission: rescue another agent trapped in Enigma Lake, New York by lizard people in 1954.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2024, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Why Pout? (2024) by Andrew Schultz (writing as “Mick Stupp”)

In this surreal wordplay game about sound-alike phrases, you play as someone trapped in a mental and physical fog. First, find A NAME and a purpose. From a high plane, explore. Gain companions. Talk to them for their insights. Get a weapon. Make plans. And then, as a team, why pout your opposition. Do you hear what I’m saying?

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2024, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Awakened Deeply (2024) by R.A. Cooper (as “Lamp Shade Light Games”)

In this short sci-fi game, you play as Captain Pitker of the Crusade. The ship’s computer awakens you from cryosleep to deal with a “disturbance”. You soon learn the ship was attacked; your crew is dead or fled. Find out what happened and decide what to do about it.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2024, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Bad Beer (2024) by Vivienne Dunstan

In this short supernatural mystery, you play as a regular at The Dog and Duck. Jack, the barman and owner, wants you to find out why his beer is tasting rotten. He can’t find anything wrongly set up.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2024, placement to be determined.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Conveniences and conclusions. Ending the story. More abbreviations and substitutions.

last time, on let’s make IF.

Last week, I shared methods for including prefatory text, controlling when the banner text prints, and using an extension. Hopefully you found it useful! As always, new source code was made available. You can get caught up here:

authorial conveniences: formatting substitutions

As we’ve seen, we can make minor formatting adjustments to text by using built-in substitutions. For instance, including “[italic type]” in a text will cause the output that follows to print in italics. Likewise, “[roman type]” will cause output to revert to unformatted text.

How many times to we want to type that, though? Text substitutions can make our lives easier (and our fingers happier).

to say it:
	say italic type.
	
to say rt:
	say roman type.

In practice, our code would look like this:

instead of jumping:
	say "It's [it]undignified[rt], jumping like that."

“[it]” and “[rt]” are my choices, you can call them whatever you want. I’ve added some others to the project, you can check the source (shared below) for more examples. As a reminder, Inform reads these “to say” substitutions in a rather strict way. They are case sensitive, so “[IT]” and “[it]” are understood as different things.

If you find yourself typing the same thing over and over again, consider making a substitution as a time saver.

player conveniences: abbreviated commands

The primary mechanic of our project is picking cards. Here’s are the relevant declarations and rules:

card-picking is an action applying to one thing.
understand "pick [something]" as card-picking.

check card-picking (this is the must pick a tarot rule):
	if the noun is not a tarot:
		say "That's not a card, silly!" instead.
		
carry out card-picking (this is the basic card-picking rule):
	say "[a default fortune]";
	increment the clicker of the noun;
	increment the magic number;
	now cnoun is the noun.

The player is not going to want to type “pick blue” again and again, let alone “pick blue card.” Let’s work up some abbreviations. There are a lot of ways to approach this, but I’m going to handle this with individual rules for each card. By now, this should be familiar territory.

choosing a red card is an action applying to nothing.
understand "r" as choosing a red card.
understand "red" as choosing a red card.

instead of choosing a red card:
	try card-picking an redc.

There isn’t much to the action. It just allows us to add some abbreviated commands (“red” and “r”) for the player.

There are a couple of hitches, though. Whenever making one-letter abbreviations, double-check to make sure they aren’t already used for something else. In our case, “o” (for orange) is already an abbreviation for “oops.” The “oops” command has mostly fallen out of practice for modern interpreters, since the arrow keys can be used to cycle through and edit previous commands. I’m comfortable remapping “o” for our own usage. There’s not a lot to that. Before creating our own action, we just need to code to remove the current mapping:

understand the command "o" as something new.

With that, we can do what we want. That’s not all, though. “g” on the other hand, is used often, so we should leave it alone.

With that being so, I will change my “green card” (greenc) to a “yellow card” (yellowc), updating my code and tables to reflect this. You may have noticed that even “y” is a built-in abbreviation for “yes,” but by default that is blocked in the standard rules. It should be safe for us to remap.

Important: be sure to think things through before changing commonly used commands. A lot of parser gameplay is based on conventions, and players may resent changes. As always, playtesting is the best way to confirm your decisions.

player conveniences: choosing a random card.

As a last way to abbreviate input, let’s add support for choosing a card at random. We can make another action easily, but how is the card randomized. The beginning is easy enough, and using a local variable is the best way to get started. Since we have a kind (“tarot”) that characterizes our cards, we can say things like

let rc be a random tarot in the location.

There’s a problem, though. “In the location” means a very specific thing: something on the floor, basically. The tarot can’t be held by the player, for instance, or in a container. In our project, the cards are on a table, which means they aren’t technically in the location, even though the table is. There are two routes we can take. One is all encompassing, meaning that the card can be in the room, or in something else in the room, or in something that is in the room (inside a bag held by the player, for instance). The magic word is “enclosed.”

let rc be a random tarot enclosed by the location.

We may wish to be more specific.

let rc be a random tarot on the table.

Sometimes these distinctions are meaningful. Keep an eye on them, as they can afford a comfortable home for bugs! Here, we are relatively safe because we will prevent players from taking cards in code, and there is only one location in our project. INSTEAD rules are perfect for this kind of thing, since we are, quite literally, instructing Inform to do one thing instead of another.

The whole construction looks like this:

r-picking is an action applying to nothing.
understand "pick card" as r-picking.
instead of r-picking:
	let rt be a random tarot on the table;
	say "[the random remark]";
	try card-picking rt.

to say the random remark:
	say "a placeholder for randomness."

This will print some text, “[the random remark]”, before choosing a card. I’m using substitutions whenever possible for output, because we may well want something complex or variable in our final project.

Let’s say we want to go further. What if we want our program to interpret a blank line (simply pressing the Enter key) as picking a random card? We’ll need another extension for that, “Undo Output Control” by Nathanael Nerode (with some help from others). We’ll have to download it first. Currently, the best place to find extensions for Inform 10 (the current version) is the “Friends of Inform” repository (https://github.com/i7/extensions). These are organized by name, so we can find it by scrolling down to the author’s name. If you aren’t familiar with github: you want to download the extension rather than opening it, since opening it will present a version for reading (i.e., non-working).

After downloading it, you can install it. Within the programming environment (IDE), simply select “install extension” from the “file” dropdown menu at top left.

The extension does a lot (as always, you can scroll to the bottom to read the documentation), but right now all we want to do is set up our project to redirect a blank to command to the “pick card” command:

include undo output control by nathanael nerode.

rule for repairing an empty command:
	change the text of the player's command to "pick card".

There. That’s it! That’s the last of our conveniences for today.

ending things.

As we discussed last time, we need to end our story after the player has chosen eight cards. Since our counter (the magic number) increments after the card is drawn, that would mean that the magic number would be nine. Right now, all of our tables are numbered one through eight. Would it be confusing to handle a nine in our code? This will ultimately be a straightforward work, so probably not. We have other options, though. We could increase the magic number with an every turn rule, for instance, since those occur at the very end of action processing.

Let’s keep all of that in mind, while sticking to the most straightforward path. I think an AFTER or REPORT rule would make the most sense. Let’s go with AFTER for now, since by default it will shut down any loose REPORT rules floating around.

after card-picking when the magic number is 9:
	end the story finally saying "[the final blurb]"
	
to say the final blurb:
	say "A Placeholder"

As always, I am using substitutions to leave room for future variations. A story can be ended, or it can be ended “finally”. Some post-game options are only available to players when a story ends “finally”. For us, it won’t matter, as there is only a final ending, but sometimes a person beating a game ought to have more options than someone dying in the middle would.

That’s not all. Just as we can say “WHEN PLAY BEGINS,” so can we say “WHEN PLAY ENDS.” Such rules are processed immediately before the story-ending blurb and menu print.

when play ends:
	say the epitaph.
	
to say the epitaph:
	say "Wow! You got the [italic type]xxx[roman type] ending!"

Out game isn’t yet saying a lot, but it is filled with potential for saying things. I’ll do a quick playthrough using only the ENTER key (sorry I can’t collapse this, plugins are a paid feature–“business-tier”–on WordPress).

Portrait With Wolf ^_^
A fun activity by Drew Cook
Release 0 / Serial number 240930 / Inform 7 v10.1.2 / D

A Brightly Lit Room!
A bare place. A bright light emerges from an unknown source above.

A small metal table stands under the light. It is covered in gray, chipped paint. The following items rest atop it:
  a red card
  a blue card
  a yellow card
  an orange card

>
a placeholder for randomness.

green.

>
a placeholder for randomness.

blue.

>
a placeholder for randomness.

red 3.

>
a placeholder for randomness.

orange.

>
a placeholder for randomness.

green.

>
a placeholder for randomness.

green.

>
a placeholder for randomness.

blue.

>
a placeholder for randomness.

orange.

Wow! You got the xxx ending!



    *** A Placeholder ***




Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, QUIT or UNDO the last command?
> 

Not bad. Note that I’ve added line breaks after the color prints to preserve Inform’s standard spacing.

We aren’t done yet. In fact, there’s tons to do:

• Implementing multiple endings.
• Building out tables for everything that varies.
• Make some other things variable (card names, room description, and so forth).
• Helping the player track which cards have been chosen.
• Dealing with all of the default parser stuff (77 standard rules verbs, parser errors, handling ambiguity).
• Considering the “form” of the printed page or interface.

If you are following along, you may wish to experiment adding your own text to the fortune tables (“table of red fortunes” and the like), just to get a feel for how things will go.

This week’s source.

next.

Card-counting, and a framework for multiple endings.

Heed magic’s call! Find love on a lush tropical island among immortal warrior-mages as you explore ancient mysteries, craft dragon-rune tattoos, and discover your true loyalties. What passions shape your path?

Ink and Intrigue is an interactive erotic fantasy novel by Leia Talon, author of Their Majesties’ Pleasure. We sat down with Leia to discuss her upcoming game. Ink and Intrigue will be out on October 17th, 2024; you can wishlist it on Steam in advance of release—it really helps!

We’re so excited to have another game from you! Tell me all about this follow up to Their Majesties’ Pleasure. What can players expect in Ink and Intrigue?

Ink and Intrigue is set in the same world as Their Majesties’ Pleasure, but on a lush island far to the west where magic flows through dragon ink and portals connect the multiverse.

There are lots of fun new elements in Ink and Intrigue! You can bond with a dragon, griffin, or phoenix, and will explore a series of initiations to become a warrior-mage as you infiltrate the island as a spy. The world building is extensive and there are countless gems to discover, from a hidden library to otherworldly realms. You can engage in blackmail or worse, decide the fate of a treasonous mage, leave a trail of destruction in your wake on a mission to another world, dance around a bonfire as the ocean crashes on the shore, and go surfing with friends who treat you like family.

Though there are many similarities, the tone in this story is quite different. Their Majesties’ Pleasure was a romp and a riot, while Ink and Intrigue is more intimate and soulful, and perhaps more intense, depending on your choices.

What changed in the way you approach crafting an interactive romance from your first and second game?

After Their Majesties’ Pleasure I told myself I was never writing another game. It was so much work! My brain protested all the different paths and seemingly-endless details. And then it was finished, and people played it, and lo and behold players seemed to actually like it, and before I knew what was happening I was coming up with concepts for another game.

The process was easier in general this time, though it was still a challenge toward the end. At least I knew how to work with ChoiceScript and had practice wrestling with the necessary complexity of an interactive novel. I also tapped into the community on the Choice of Games forum, which was helpful for camaraderie and to pick up coding tips. The longer I write this style of interactive fiction the more respect I gain for other authors out there doing the same. It’s a major endeavor, but having the experience of another game under my belt did wonders to help me write Ink and Intrigue faster.

One major difference is that Their Majesties’ Pleasure had several polyamorous routes while all the romances in Ink and Intrigue are monogamous. I had planned for a poly option, but the characters told me they didn’t want to share and the farther along my writing progressed the more I realized that was the right call for this particular game. The one-on-one relationships deepen the intimate feel of the story.

You can develop rich relationships with all of the romance characters in Ink and Intrigue, and I’m hoping players will find satisfaction in the depth of those friendships and the closeness of a chosen lover. There is also the dragon/griffin/phoenix storyline so there’s another key relationship in play.

What were you most surprised by in the writing of this one and from player feedback during the beta process?

The characters surprised me, but they always do. My favorite part of writing is the discovery as things unfold. Even with a detailed outline my characters take control and come up with much better ideas than I did at the start.

I realize that might sound a bit ridiculous. I’m the writer, after all. Aren’t I supposed to be in charge of things? But, no. My process is very much about getting out of the way of my characters and letting them do their thing. If I trust them, the words flow. That’s just how it works for me.

I want to extend a special thank you to everyone who provided feedback for Ink and Intrigue! Also, thanks to everyone who played the demo and commented on the forum or shared it with a friend! Your thoughts and encouragement are most appreciated.

I ended up writing an entire extra chapter during the beta process so players can accompany Kai and Teo on a mission to Kai’s world. It adds lots of action and emotion to the game. I’m really happy with that last-minute addition and I hope you like it, too!

Was there a character you enjoyed writing most for Ink and Intrigue?

I love them all! I adore Teo’s soft-spoken strength and the brotherhood between him and Kai. Rae is super fun, all sass and tenacity, and Thea is mysterious, revealing her playful side once she’s had a bit of moonshine. Artanian the hermit librarian wasn’t planned but he turned out to be a lovely character, and La’rast the alchemist prince became a bigger influence than I’d anticipated.

It’s hard to choose a favorite, but Kai has a special place in my heart. This story started as a manuscript I’d shelved. The game is quite different, but Kai was one of the original main characters and he helped me translate various ideas from the manuscript to the interactive novel.

Kai is utterly determined to make things right in the world he’s from, which involves vengeance, violence, and blowing things up. He’s fierce and masterfully skilled and pretty much unstoppable as a warrior and mage, but he also has this sweet, patient, tender side to him that I absolutely love.

What else are you working on/what’s next for you?

I have several other concepts for games set in the same world as Their Majesties’ Pleasure and Ink and Intrigue, including one fully outlined. I couldn’t stop the ideas as I was writing this game. They all wanted to be written at once!

That said, time is precious and my kids are growing fast! I pushed hard to write Ink and Intrigue in less than a year and am needing to slow way down now to focus on self-care and family. While I do hope to write the other games I have planned, I’m going to take a break for a bit and explore other creative outlets like sewing and making music. When I return to writing I’ll be seeking a work-life balance that’s more sustainable.

If I could wave a magic wand I’d have three more games set in this world ready to go! Alas, they take an incredible amount of work to bring to completion. However, when they’re finally ready you’ll be able to return to Ink and Intrigue and discover all kinds of Easter eggs scattered throughout that tie into the future games. Maybe you’ll pick up on some of them in subtle foreshadowing as you play. If you do, please pop into the forum and share your guesses with me!

My sincere gratitude goes out to everyone who has played Their Majesties’ Pleasure and expressed interest in Ink and Intrigue! I hope you enjoy it!

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I’ve now utilized the teleportation booths, visiting both an asteroid and an alien city. I haven’t found any way to extend my oxygen (or swap the helium that’s currently in the ship’s air with oxygen); with teleportation it may just be possible to go fast enough, but given I still have some puzzles to go I have my doubts.

All amidst a flurry of bugs, alas.

A preliminary NASA design for a 12-man module from ’69-’70. It normally is in zero-G but allows for rotation to test artificial gravity. This is smaller than the Derelict ship but with the same concept, connecting floors via a central shaft.

My first breakthrough was simply figuring out how to work the glass booths everywhere on the map. Saying both LOOK GLASS and LOOK BOOTH let to the game declaring they weren’t there, but for whatever reason GO BOOTH is special-cased to allow entering. Please note that this is different from every other object in the game; MAGNETIC BOOTS must be referred to as MAGNETIC (or just MA), not BOOTS; it’s using the initial part of the string, with no notion of which part is the verb and what’s the adjective.

Leaving is just a matter of GO OUT, but that’s not safe with the droid (who seems to always miss their first shot, but shots later have a random chance to hit). Trying to PUSH KEYBOARD leads to the game asking for a number from 1 to 99. Trying out “1” since there seemed to be no logical way to do better, as “YOU MOLECULES ARE SCATTERED”:

2 and 3 similarly lead to inadvertent exploration of the known universe; locations start at 4. I ended up just brute forcing all 99 options, although most led to death.

There’s a way to avoid at least some of the brute force (kind of, I’ll get back to that) and three of the locations — as marked in boldface — go to new areas, which I’ll also get back to. I originally didn’t have the colors on my chart but I teleported myself to SECURITY (23) to try to pop open the safe, now that the power was on. Remember, I had determined the safe was

SAFE: BLACK/PURPLE – BLACK/YELLOW – BLACK/PURPLE

but typing in PURPLE-YELLOW-PURPLE didn’t work, and I realized quickly the safe really wanted a numeric code. I realized I could triangulate the room colors with the teleport locations, leading me to find the base-10-using aliens had the code

black = 0
brown = 1
red = 2
orange = 3
yellow = 4
green = 5
blue = 6
purple = 7
gray = 8
white = 9

that is, the same order that’s on the chart from the communications room. So BLACK/PURPLE is 07 or just 7, BLACK/YELLOW is 04 or just 4, and BLACK/PURPLE is 7 again. The combination for the safe is 747.

Popping open the safe reveals a ring of keys, a phaser, and some coins. The coins are just a treasure, the keys go to the locked cabinet in the sick bay (which you’ll see shortly), and the phaser can be used to smite droids, specifically with the verb BLAST.

The two-letter parser means there’s a lot of nonsense here: the green verbs are real, blue verbs map elsewhere. I found out from the response to PLAY that PLACE has to be a verb, not on my standard list (but I added it), and BLAST (not listed) I figured out while playing around with the phaser.

Blasting droids is quite satisfying and since they seem to always miss their first shot the droid rooms are now completely safe.

Above, I’ve used the keys on the cabinet, with the debris of a destroyed droid close by. This reveals

a gray box with a knob (this creates a beam, I haven’t done anything useful with it)

a silver wire (I also haven’t done anything useful with it)

and immortality serum (!!). I tried every verb I had extracted to see if it was possible to take the serum and thus survive the oncoming lack of oxygen, but had no luck. I tested out DRINK with a response of O.K. but that just mapped to DROP.

I finally realized (by testing it at back at the ship) the serum is simply intended as a treasure and we can’t use it. I admit I was looking forward to some even-more-terrible ending message by testing out the teleport-your-molecules device whilst immortal, but alas the technical requirements of this game remain extreme (it uses 12k rather than 8k, at least) and I don’t think the authors would have wanted to custom handle that.

Returning to those new locations: one is supposed to be clued by the projector in the library, which shows a brown and black alien city so the teleportation code 10 matches.

I suspect most people who played got this already by brute force. The thing is: at least some death-testing is required to understand the code, the asteroid has no similar clue, and there’s no reason why the authors couldn’t have dropped yet another hidden teleport somewhere in the 80s or whatnot.

The puzzle is rescued by the fact that the safe really needs the player to have understood the code. I’m not sure if changing the puzzle to remove the brute force (by adding more digits, say) would have made it stronger.

The new locations are above; I marked the teleport destinations. The shaft is the buggy one, as there’s no glass booth in the room, and when you leave the booth to enter the room the booth disappears. There’s also no corresponding color (it’d be black/yellow, 04). That buggy room — which a player is most likely to come across first — is another reason why the brute force can only sort-of be avoided — even if someone spots the pattern early they get dealt a room that breaks the pattern! But it’s the only one.

The asteroid just has a titanium pickax (treasure) and some lumps of coal (not treasure, yet).

The city is more interesting; it has a “press” that you can PLACE the lumps in (…thanks goodness I randomly learned about that verb…) and convert them into diamonds, as long the power is going.

While I now can easily open the bay doors and drop the tractor beam for escape, there’s still the matter of getting the treasures. Things I have yet to puzzle out are:

• The box that shoots a beam
• The silver wire
• A flashlight near where the diamond press is (you can turn it on, but why? there’s no darkness)
• An oven with a bottle of cooking oil
• A metallic suit, which can’t be worn at the same time as the oxygen is attached
• Some “shielding” near the radiation sign

More details on the last point: the shielding is at the hyperspace drive, and I’ve successfully lit up a welding torch and managed to CUT SHIELDING. Unfortunately this simply kills the player.

(By the way, CUT on anything else has the game claim you don’t have a torch, even when you do. I have to keep alert with any parser message to determine if it’s saying something real or if it’s just a bug.)

The reason why you’d want the shielding is back at the lab: there’s a machine that indicates (via cryptogram) it is for turning lead into gold. So I imagine you can get gold shielding if you can just survive ripping it off from the engine.

I suspect I’m closing in on the ending, and I also even suspect I have all the verbs. I’m still probably getting stuck via some cryptic parser response without realizing it. If someone wants to check Dale Dobson’s playthrough, I’d appreciate any ROT13 hints (especially if it turns out I’m missing something outrageous).

(Continued from my previous post.)

I’ve got the layout now, and this is very similar to Starcross in that a complete layout of the ship is really needed before puzzle-solving can begin in earnest.

Just like Starcross, Derelict is set in a rotating cylinder with artificial gravity (given the same author made a Rimworld game the same year, this is not a shock). The directions are up, down, forward, aft, spinward, and antispinward. There’s a central shaft that links to multiple layers of the cylinder, and when inside the cylinder, travel “wraps around” going spinward or antispinward.

Although smaller than this; in two of the layers only two GO SPINWARD or GO ANTISPINWARD actions are enough to loop, and in the middle layer, only three steps are needed.

I’ve divided the central shaft into four layers…

…and I’ll give the map in four parts. My coloring is arbitrary and most rooms have a unique color combo that I’m sure is important (they also all have the mysterious glass booth). In the landing bay, the floor is red and the walls are green; all combos are unique.

That’s everything for the start. Note on the map I have a corner marked; I’m using that to indicate where all the droids are (there are droids #1 through #6). I also have north mapped to forward, south mapped to aft, east mapped to spinward, and west mapped to counterspinward.

(As simple as the above looks, it took me a little while to figure out because I didn’t have an item and the loop going down at the Central Shaft was counterintuitive. Dropping the magnetic boots gets you stuck in zero gravity, and of course dropping your suit or oxygen are similarly fatal. I eventually found out that the sign at the start of the game which tells you DROP TREASURE HERE is takeable so I used it for mapping purposes.)

Moving on to the next floor, the one I’m calling “Technical”:

Past the starting floor all names of rooms are given in cryptograms. I suppose this is meant to represent an alien language but if it’s just a cryptogram, doesn’t it mean they use English? If I keep the thought process going I’d imagine we’re looking at a human ship that’s been tossed back in time, but in all honesty this is almost certainly meant like “Hollywood English” in a movie set in a non-English country; we’re just supposed to get the feeling of translating an alien language without having to do it.

The yellow sign says IZWRZGRLM, or RADIATION. I have a feeling I’m going to need the “metallic suit” that’s in the storage room on the same level, although just passing through isn’t fatal. Also noteworthy is a CUTTING TORCH with a TANK (with a cryptogram on it that says WELDING GAS) as well as a transmitter with a ruby crystal in it (my first treasure) and a chart with more cryptograms.

(That’s BLACK, BROWN, RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, PURPLE, GRAY, and WHITE.)

Going up to the next floor…

…let’s just ignore the two bathrooms (is this really an alien ship?) and note the locked cabinet in the sick bay…

…a “library” next to a “rec room” where there’s some playing cards (aliens?!), some jeweled gaming pieces (treasure number 2), a platinum globe (treasure 3), a projector that needs power…

…and in the XZKGRZMH XZYRM (CAPTAINS CABIN) there’s a log book giving an encoded safe combination.

Using the crypto-translated chart from the communications room, that comes out to be

BLACK/PURPLE – BLACK/YELLOW – BLACK/PURPLE

or maybe just PURPLE-YELLOW-PURPLE if we’re ignoring the initial #.

(I should also highlight, referring back to the screenshot, one of the major annoyances of the game. Aardvark games always have had a tendency to give no response at all to particular commands, and this is true for many of the things you want to look at or read. In this case, READing a log book shows nothing, and you have to LOOK!)

Moving to the top:

The safe is right there (HVXFIRGB, or SECURITY) but it needs power; an oven has cooking gas, and a lab has a “large machine” which needs power as well.

Finally the very top is the control deck, where a CRT indicates there is no power, and there are three colored buttons.

That’s POWER, TRACTOR BEAM, AND BAY DOORS. Rather like Dog Star Adventure, it’s clear the beam and doors need to be operated before we get out. Pressing either one indicates there is no power, so that must be the right press?

The exit down gets cut off, and the droid (and I assume all the other droids) wake up.

Other than running out of oxygen (the oxygen is really tight but I don’t know yet if we get a refill) there hasn’t been any hazards in the game yet. The ship is waiting for us! This might end up being a “preparation puzzle”, one of my favorite kinds, where we have to pre-create a safe route before lighting things up. It’s too bad the Aardvark parser makes everything three times harder to deal with.

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Thursday Sept 26, 2024 over Zoom. Hugh,, anjchang,  Stephen , Zarf, Andrew, Matt, Josh, Keltana, and Mike Stage attended. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

Welcome to Autumn! Walking in the rain will not hurt you. Drinking Tea. Thai Tea. What is Builders tea? It’s a blend drunk by laborers. Yorkshire Gold Tea is the best of the non-special teas. PGTips isn’t too bad. Typhoo tea, not quite as good. Quality and how we measure it. In Britain, McDougall Flour is good. Expensive flour is often finer milled and bleached more. Cheaper flour is heavier with more moisture or “bloated.”

Is there a weight analog for IF, perhaps some texts have more “words” analogous to flour, perhaps some have more plot twists. Sometimes publishers look at the number of words as the marker of quality, although we know that is not necessarily the case. Choice of games readers may want to value other metrics, as a reader, the choices/branches or different structures.

Angela was part of a collab called “Revenge of the Castle Freak” with Generative IF where people were asked to submit their logs as they navigated a virtual castle full of gemerative IF rooms. 500,000 words of logs were submitted, and the worthy bits are being compiled into a book. https://x.com/incastellated/status/1818667626337325510

Shade, which has the a short amount of text is very enjoyable.

Lost words game. Angela initially liked the word manipulation mechanic, but the story dragged on longer and she hasn’t finished. Zarf did finish it. Animations were beautiful. Novelty of the mechanic with interactive words was interesting.

What’s up the trope of carergivers in these stories dying? The early version of the Grimms fairy tales. Key component of the relationships were different, e.g. it was the mother and not the step-mother that was mean. Disney eliminating backstory and “orphaning” characters with a newfound family. The original stories Grimm were really quite dark and then are rewritten and derivated until you get the happier versions we know today. Early stories had unpredictable arcs, unexpected things happened. Moralistic, powerful ideas from the past got watered down. Not all of the original stories are that good. A few are weird ones that don’t jell. Mixed-up stories that were written down by the oral historian.

Some amazing English translations of Japanese ghost stories — and they aren’t that far off the slice of life stories, just more death:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8128

African folk talkes (The Eggplant Girl and other tales) where the ending is not so happy. Moralistic. Angela loves Slice of Life. Angela resonated issue 13 of Yotsuba&! about the girl and her grandmother. The Walking Man by Jiro Taniguchi. Just a series of walks the author takes in his district of Tokyo.

Stith Thompson’s Motif Index is a reference for navigating stories. The full selection of volumes here: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001276245

Angela shared her recent “slice of life” digital poem called “cakepops” based on her confusion as a child. She read about the “bakers dozen” and was confused by the bad superstition of 13 with the good (yet unrealized) hope of a bakers dozen. In the poem, she dreams of having a baker’s dozen of mini-cake bites. All you need is a little.

IFCOMP discussion. People are playing and voting will end Oct 15. Did you know you can search the entries in ifdb for the entries using the IFComp 2024 tag? The intfiction forum “life judging” can easily sorta be browsed here: https://intfiction.org/c/competitions/7

Ectocomp starts Oct 1 and ends Oct 31st.

How long does it take to write IF stories? For a 2 hour game, maybe takes us a few months. Talked about CS Forrester (knows the whole plot and writes it in one go) vs Stephen King ( a concept and pursuing a plot and changing it as he writes). How much editing do you have to do, and then the challenge of balancing interactivity. Imagine writing Nanowrimo in one day! Editing and dealing with plot holes is more complicated with IF, and if there is more text.

We also talked about published books one might read that need further editing. Which version do you want to see? One can sign up for netgalley.com and give feedback on books in preprint. Tidbits about editing….Myla Goldberg (author of Bee Season, Wickett’s Remedy) raced to prepare a paperback version after the hardback was published. She realized that the original didn’t take the route she wanted. Apparently, you can only change 30% of text between hardback and paperback. House of Cards was changed to match the TV show. Financial reason for that, since the British TV version allowed for sequels. Gilbert Sorrentino would take the same plot of the novel but then rewrite it ten years later(e.g. Steelwork and Crystal Vision). Someone self-publishes erotica book series rewritten from other characters perspectives. Orson Scott Card did it with Enders Game series. Games are often reworked over time.

Head canon phenomena in Choice of Games based games. Some part of the completed structure becomes the “cannon” and is difficult to take a different route. The emphasis on making the story your own vs different views of the same puzzle (more traditional IF). Delayed branching and fallback, “recommended style” and then later you test those choices. Different approach to end states. Making sure that every reader has a satisfying experience.

How stats are used in ChoiceScript games — Emily Short has a good rundown of it here: https://emshort.blog/2016/02/15/set-check-or-gate-a-problem-in-personality-stats/

Aardvark is a company I’d never heard of before starting the project, but we’ve spent an awful lot of time with now. They originally wrote their games targeted at the ludicrously small-memory requirements of the Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P computer, and made some odd parser sacrifices to get there (like only understanding the first two letters of each word). Despite this they’ve been rather clever in terms of geography, with (for example) Bob Anderson’s Circle World having a fair number of locations only reachable by teleport, but having all areas united together by the end. Earthquake, the game we most recently looked at, had an almost completely wide-open map, but led to puzzles where the thought process sometimes went “what store would have a solution to this” and not simply thinking about items.

Via Worthpoint.

Derelict is another Bob Anderson game from 1982, where he is again listed as co-author with Rodger Olson (founder of Aardvark). I’d be cautious about saying this was an equal collaboration; quoting Bob Retelle (of Trek Adventure):

Credits often resulted from “Hey why don’t you write an adventure based on xxxx” and it became “By Rodger Olsen and (whoever)”. At least I got paid (sometimes).

(Regarding getting paid, Retelle points out how ports were considered “owned by the company” so the original author did not make money off them. In one case a store told him about how the TI-99 port of his RPG Quest II was popular, except this was the first he even heard of a TI-99 port existing. Also, there is no Quest I and calling it II was a marketing stunt.)

Our goal is to raid a 1000-year old alien vessel for treasures. This is kind of like Queen of Phobos if we were one of the thieves. The catalog says it is “the new winner in the ‘Toughest Adventure at Aardvark sweepstakes'” and notes there are “no irrational traps and suddenly senseless deaths”.

This ship was designed to be perfectly safe for its builders. It just happens to be deadly to alien invaders like you!

This description made me hesitant. Earthquake was genuinely good (almost recommendable) but still had the miserable Aardvark parser. Any game designed as “easy” can get away with a less robust parser, not just because the player will have less moments of stuck-ness in order to test the boundaries, but because easy games tend to ask the player to communicate fairly straightforward actions.

The two versions of Derelict I’ve been able to find are for the Commodore PET and C64. I went with the Commodore PET this time. There’s a short series of messages about being pulled in a ship by an alien tractor beam, and then:

My first problem was just trying to pick anything up: GET BOOTS says “IT’S NOT IN SIGHT”. This is another instance of a parser’s try-not-to-reveal-too-much attitude is hurting, those boots are clearly right there! The default message is trying to avoid noun-hunting but it ends up leading to a bit of nonsense right at the start.

You’re instead supposed to TAKE MAGNETIC (or TA MA, this is a two letter parser) and you can do that for the other items. The sign indicates the treasures go in the room for points; yes, it’s one of those games. (Oddly enough, not common for Aardvark! They’ve been cranking out escape games, not Treasure Hunts.) Moving on with all three things (boots, spacesuit, oxygen):

Here is the usual airlock setup where you close one door to open the other one, go outside, and then:

I… what? Didn’t you say I was wearing the oxygen, game?

READ OXYGEN gives the message ATTACH/DETACH OXYGEN. Ok, fine, but it seems weird to make this essentially a puzzle. (And give the oxygen a response to reading! The magnetic boots give a blank message when you try to read them.)

Finally, through with that, I went outside again, did LOOK #1 DROID, and got the response

WHAT?

(EXAMINE doesn’t work at all, READ gives a blank prompt.)

Hmm, maybe try the booth instead? LOOK BOOTH:

THAT’S NOT HERE

Oh that’s right, it needs the noun from the start, it needs to be called “glass” instead. LOOK GLASS:

THAT’S NOT HERE

Game. Excuse me. You literally have the text “THERE IS A GLASS BOOTH HERE”.

Ye flask indeed. I don’t remember having anywhere near this trouble with Earthquake, but keep in mind this game has already tried to having both items being worn and things attached, and I have no doubt there’s something weird and complicated going on in the landing bay, but I’m still unclear what that thing is. Maybe it is best to just move on and explore.

This one’s going to be a headache to map out, isn’t it? And likely buggy.

I remember discovering some of the bugs of other games in early testing (it was pretty common for Rodger to hand out tapes of new games before they were put in the catalog), but it was like pulling teeth to get him to fix any of them.

In “Mars Adventure” (or was it “Pyramid”.. hmm.. I forget exactly), there was a stairway with exits that didn’t line up with the next locations. That is, you’d exit to the East, say, and end up in a room with exits to the North and South. Going south would take you back to the first room (it should have said West). Made it really tough on people who liked to map the advanture. Rodger’s response was something like “tough”.

Another one let you eat the key that was absolutely essential for escaping (maybe that was the Pyramid bug). Again the answer was “well, then don’t eat the key”.

Let me get a bit farther and report back next time. Aardvark games always stayed in tight constraints so there’s no way this goes out long, but if the parser difficulties stay this could still require multiple parts.