Caltrops - Zork I: The Great Underground Empire - I'm currently watching Get Lamp and I guess you can just disregard this post.

Forum Overview :: Zork I: The Great Underground Empire

by Ice Cream Jonsey 05/30/2013, 11:03pm PDT

Gutsby wrote:

It's an IOS game by Peter Jackson. It's pretty much a CYOA-book, but it can keep track of all kinds of shit because it's on a little computer - so it's a really complex example of the form. You have a simple little combat system that makes you slide your guy around to defend or attack, gorgeous presentation drizzling goofy fantasy writing all over you, and a torrent of choices to make as you shove your little miniature around a beautifully rendered leather map.

Here is the link! It appears to be iOS-only at the moment? I don't have a modern iOS device right now, so I can't play. It looks great.

Jon Ingold is the guy behind Inkle, which I guess is most easily explained as the publisher / tech company behind this? Jon is a great guy who makes and produces high-quality stuff. With any luck they will bring it to Android because yeah, Sorcery looks fun.

As I was playing it I thought that I'd really like to play a lot of IF-games like this - then I realized that there's probably a crazy war going on about the necessity of precise text input in the genre. Tell me about it, ICJ!

Haha, yes, there is, a little. :)

Here is my take. Imagine a group of people who like jazz. They realize that there's not too many people like them these days, but that is OK. Every once in a while this group of jazz fans will have an enthusiastic new outsider come to them and say how if they liked jazz they would totally like this other thing that is sort of like jazz, but not really. (This metaphor was done much better by Magnus Olsson.)

The parser is the part that is really jazz, I think. It's an acquired taste but no more acquired then knowing how to move around in an FPS game or how to take a snap and throw a football in an NFL game. CYOA games and games with nodes and Twine games and games with clickable links are all A-OK with me. What bugs me is that the people who make those kind of games are constantly trying to glomp onto the tradition and infrastructure of parser IF. Maybe they could be separate? But equal? Ha ha, I know that got a bad rap thanks to, well, "slavery" and "racism" (scare quotes) but if we could keep CYOA and parser IF apart I'd be all for it. Ha! Ha ha!

(This is the "politics" section of the post.)

Look, I think that it's just as much extra work to do a game with 3D graphics compared to a text adventure, as it is to do a text adventure compared to a CYOA game. But really, a CYOA game does not tug on the nostalgia I have, which is pretty important to me. I am just kidding about implementing apartheid though. Writing parser IF is a million times harder than any of the other ways to do a text-based game. It is also a million times more rewarding to the player. I hate seeing someone bleed all over the page and world-build and account for everything that a player can >look at in one of the many competitions we have and then see them placed like equals to a CYOA offering. A wise man once said:

Hugo says, "Writing an IF game is like painting a painting. Writing an IF library is like painting a house. You just have to be thorough, and it takes a lot of paint."
Hugo says, "Oh, and you have to build the house."

(Thus ends the "politics" section of the post.)

But here is the thing - for mobile devices, typing is awkward. I'd much rather play a game on a tablet that required no typing.

I have one RPG using a text game engine that I am working on now, and a project with my sometimes-text game partner Mike Sousa that is a normal text adventure in TADS3. I have thought that it might be fun to create a CYOA or node game after my two current projects finish. One, because of the exposure. I don't know how accurate the numbers are, but CYOA games get downloaded thousands of times from the Google Play Store. I think I could do a good job putting something fun together.

If you were given a really simple editor that allowed you to set up visual nodes and shit, turn your parser into a staggered conversation tree - would you take it? There has to be a lot of theory behind all of this!

I think maybe, some day. One such game that I can recommend which is like parser IF but with words you can click on is also by Jon Ingold, called A Colder Light.

ICJ

I've been playing Sorcery! ICJ required. by Gutsby 05/30/2013, 10:21am PDT NEW

I'm currently watching Get Lamp and I guess you can just disregard this post. by Gutsby 05/30/2013, 10:25am PDT NEW

I'm currently watching Get Lamp and I guess you can just disregard this post. by Ice Cream Jonsey 05/30/2013, 11:03pm PDT NEW

Is that an IOS port of Steve Jackson's Socrcery? by Mischief Maker 05/30/2013, 10:30pm PDT NEW