I decided to join on the Apollo 18 20th anniversary tribute which was posted to the text adventure forums back in December. I probably took too many games--the organizer wanted them all to be claimed by January 1 or so and so I stepped in with some ideas by January 15th, worrying nobody was going to take things. So I feel bad having taken so much, and I didn't really go after reciprocal testing, but I have to say this: it was a ton of FUN when I had the time, and despite being rather sick for 10 days, the 3-month buffer was enough.

And other people started picking things off. Some members of the Chicago-IF group took one here and there. Some other people I'd never heard of dropped in, too, some writing their first games. And if there aren't any super-big-long-time-historic traditional names writing (except Nick Montfort) I really enjoyed the opportunity to beta-test other people's games, which gave me ideas for my own.

I have a hard time finding what sort of criticism and creative trade I like, but with text adventures, I think I am really happiest at the moment. The sort of criticism where I know someone is going to fix Obvious Bug X (e.g. they say there's graffiti there and the player can't examine it) or they don't respond to a standard verb (e.g. SING in a game with a guitar, or maybe BURN PHOTOGRAPH in a game where the room is on fire.) It gives a chance to be positive and suggest a person can do more. That's when criticism's at its best.

So whom would I recommend? I had a blast playing Carl Muckenhoupt's game (My Evil Twin) before it was fixed, and I know he will--his game The Gostak will either annoy you or blow your mind or both.

I was able to provide a lot of checking for Ben Collins-Sussman and Jack Welch's Narrow Your Eyes. As they co-wrote it, and they live a thousand miles apart, they used Google Code. I enjoyed being able to report issues to the issue page and also being able to see the source--which I learned so much from.

Ryan Veeder also won IFComp 2011 (just ahead of someone else here's fine effort on HonestGamers) and his two games are almost certainly worth playing. He writes funny stuff.

Whether or not you're familiar with TMBG, it's probably a lot of fun to poke around. I have to admit, I've got a potential embarrassment if some of my games don't work (hint: Space Suit received the most testing) but I think if you're in the mood for a quick text adventure game, any of the Fingertips will do. They're all intended to be 1-movers and many have VERY different ways of looking at things.

And I just like how this collection acted as a sort of farm system for people who were maybe newer to writing text adventures to join in.

Anyway. That's what I've been up to. I'm already planning my next game, too. It may not get wide exposure, but after my 2011 IFComp entry, I finally wrote a game (as I wanted to.) Now I want to write one really well.

So I know Jason has a full-length novel. What's everyone else doing writing-wise outside of HG?

LR for WonderSwan

I wasn't aware of the WonderSwan until I went searching for new versions of Lode Runner (LR.) It was a last resort. You see, so many ports of Lode Runner contain the same levels from the original. Maybe they throw in a story with animals to rescue or something, but it that couldn't disguise the exact same levels made by kids pulled off the street long ago back in 1980. Which is annoying to see after I've poked my way through several Japanese menus. Yeah, first world problems, rom downloads aren't perfectly legal, and so on. But when so many Lode Runner games come with level editors (also part of the original) that the developers themselves never seem to use, it's hard to believe much care went into these products.

Not so with the WonderSwan port (WS.) It's not brilliant, but it doesn't have to be. It hits all the basic LR puzzles and adds a few more. As in other LR games, you basically climb ladders, walk on ropes, and dig holes to the left and right for enemies to fall in. The holes can fill up, trapping the enemies, who reappear at the top, or even you. Get all the gold, and you will get a ladder or door to the next level, often positioned awkwardly. You die if enemies touch you, but it's also common to get stuck with no way out, which is awfully frustating but also the source of some of the best puzzles. You may have to dig through a whole structure for that one last gold piece without getting trapped, or you may need to make an educated guess about which blocks are fall-through--they look the same as the regular ones. It's part logic and experimentation, and often after thinking I knew what a square had to be, or thinking the game was vague, the solution tipped off other things. LR: WS is really good at forcing this educated guesswork or giving these a-ha moments.

And here the game changes more than just enemy speed or how fast the holes fill in--those have been enough to create vastly different puzzles. The biggest is the crumbling block--it, like the fall-through block, is indistinguishable from the regular sort you walk over. However, it disappears after a second once you step over it, often making a one-way passage or ruining an obvious digging sequence.

The other new feature is water. It's an amusing one, where a small pool can spill out to the whole level. If you dig a bounding block, it pours out to that side and below. Water slows you down, unless you chose the scuba suit at the level's start--and then, you aren't able to outrun monsters until you're in the water. There're also lobsters that scuttle back and forth in some pools. They're often guarding gold, but if you're clever, you can get the lobsters to block enemy. You can also walk on top of the lobsters for some tough-to-get gold pieces if you're very careful. And if all of this doesn't sound like much, it doesn't need to be. LR is very basic without ever approaching the total dryness of, for instance, Sokoban, and also unlike Sokoban, the action and interaction allow for believable added enemies and challenges like this.

LR also makes challenges optional, so you don't get stuck as easily. Non-gold items you can get in WS compromise between die-hard fans and people new to the game and a great way to get around the usual "gee, you're stuck" in a puzzle game. For instance, cake slices just get you points, and getting 90% of feathers unlocks the sort of bonus round Lode Runner fans love. Often you need to do something like jump and run on a falling enemy, or futz with a certain area at the start, to get these. Sometimes you just need to pray that the ladders that pop up after you get the gold will let you grab everything.

All this gets more demanding and nastier, and I mean this in the most complimentary way, as you reach the end of the 125 levels. Sometimes you need to freeze the screen to see the whole board--the WonderSwan screen not being very big--and that leaves the game feeling like busy work at times, because you have to scroll up to see where the enemies you just killed are about to reincarnate. This doesn't ruin the game, of course, but often feeling like the WonderSwan is asking you to check your work can get in the way of basking in a nice solution.

This is about the biggest nuisance, though. LR is a good game for black-and-white systems, and here the lobster and your squid-like opponents are more than acceptable. The scuba suit you wear is also very cute, with little bubbles coming from your guy either way (no, he won't drown if he stays underwater.) And if there are no especially wild puzzles, the game never seems to be mailing it in.

All this left me with a very favorable impression of the WonderSwan. Not that I found another game to play. But it's good to find a port of my favorite series on an obscure system that upholds the tradition and does something new. It'sabout the right balance of challenging and inviting, and if every port had thrown in a tweak like water or crumbling blocks, it'd have been quite exciting. It's too late to hope that Lode Runner will ever make a comeback, and I think I've exhausted all the old-school systems that might have new levels, so I'm grateful to be able to find games on the Nintendo 64, TurboGrafx and, yes, the WonderSwan which at least reminded me that other people enjoy the challenges in Lode Runner and were able to pass them on.

I've tried other text editors but can't believe I didn't discover Notepad++ until recently. I really like NoteTab Standard for organizing things that need chapters, but Notepad++ is great for typing one-off stuff like reviews I don't need/want to take too many notes on--it even tracks the # of bytes a file is, and so forth, which is nice when I don't want to bloat a piece of writing too much.

I'd actually heard of Notepad++ before but assumed it was too much like Notepad for some reason. But it's not. After trying a pile of other text editors geared towards HTML coding and such (which I bet some people here might find useful) it took me about fifteen minutes to realize that I'd found something I wanted and probably should've done so years ago.

So what finally made me take the plunge? I got sick of Windows 7's Wordpad asking if I wanted to save a text file as text, because it might lose all the formatting I never put in anyway. I could kill this in XP or even Vista by closing and reopening.

Can't give any non-windows recommendations, but it's great to find a freeware that -works-.

I'd planned to write one. But I didn't. Still, I've been going through my writing notes. I have lots of other things to do, but sometimes I get hung up on something I always wanted to do and figure I might as well just have done with it.

Quite bluntly if I'm more interested in what people have to say about other games than they are about this, I can't blame them. I'm glad to be able to express something and to have that forum for it, even if I don't have nearly as much to say on this as I used to. And I'm glad to see several reviews already out there competing for RotW. And to see old names I know and new names I don't.

But with this sort of review (assuming it gets accepted) I always hope to act as a sort of pace car, e.g. if ASchultz writes about this--surely I shouldn't be worried about the sort of game I want to write about?

I don't know if anyone else read any of the Brown Paper Schoolbooks series. It's held up well--I read my favorites in the library a few months ago and still enjoyed them. Lots of good titles, like I Hate Mathematics and I am not a Short Adult!

The content inside lived up to the titles, too. (Yes, yes, remember to tip your waitress, but don't push her over.) There was one puzzle that I remembered off-and-on, but it seemed so unsolvable at the time. It was this:

The "product" of a word is as follows: let A=1, B=2, ..., Z=26. Multiply all the values together. Duplicates count twice, so BEE=2*5*5=50, not 2*5.

Now what is the closest you can get to 100000000 without going over? Or without getting to 100000000? The book mentioned WYOMING as a good one. That got 98894250. The book was a second edition, though, and it mentioned a reader sent in "LIZZARDS." 99874944. Oops, extra Z.

So I wondered if you could do better than WYOMING, or even LIZZARDs. I wondered if the words would be obvious.

Without a high-powered computer, this sort of thing was impossible--but I finally say down, turned around and figured it out. It was maybe 70 lines of code, 30 of which were parsing input...and the results were interesting. Well, to me.

Somehow an online conversation got to the discussion of the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. Tower, towers. We discussed other annoying introductory computer science puzzles. The one that always had me baffled was Nim, well, until I learned mathematical induction, anyway.

And any rite of passage from the bad old days included the film Sorting out Sorting. I had the dubious privilege of watching this twice. I remember being baffled by heap sort, but it seems simple now.

It's about the closest thing computer science has to Reefer Madness.

http://www.despair.com/loseyourownadventure.html

Someone was bound to do it, and this looks like a pretty good spoof. The problem is, it can be too easy, so you might get slaphappy satire...

Man, I remember when these books were $2 apiece. Yeah, inflation blah blah. But the pictures and story ideas look really promising. I like the "Saving Oswald" picture especially.

I'd seen X's name on various test documents we had. A satire on Bridges of Madison County entitled Bath-Houses of Madison County (gay man introduces woman to fashion--X was gay himself) Another document read, in 30 point font, "X is annoying! X does not shut up! X is the Rush Limbaugh of Software Testing!" There was a good reason for the font. I forget what.

X left years before I started working here, and I think many of his test documents got purged a few years after in a general "let's keep it neutral" kick that , but today I saw someone walk in and ask everyone what their titles were. It wasn't until I saw the nametag that I knew: this was the guy. He didn't seem particularly volatile, but then again, it HAD been 10+ years since he worked here.

He held even more mystery for me than the people who worked remotely. I'd heard about a lot of people that worked before I came in--though I'm not sure, strictly, if I ever met the person I replaced. Most of them, I'd seen. Not that I cared what they looked like, but it was nice to put a face to the name.

After he left, I noticed that the pictures on the front page of the newspaper all had handlebar mustaches. The women too. He probably didn't have time to do much more. When I mentioned X as a suspect to a coworker, the coworker looked blank and said "Uh--yeah. He was a real character." Point taken.

I had nothing to say to him, so I googled some of the odder words from his stories, just in case. Nothing. Well, I remember the actual details were sort of obnoxious and boring anyway. But I'm glad I remembered about Bathhouses today.

These notes are more the final pickings, trying to avoid what was in the DVD or what was already discussed.

After the talk, Jason Scott answered some questions which the documentary probably won't in detail. The most amusing to me was after I thanked him. At one place where he apparently had a decent crowd, but they turned against him. You see, he did not discuss D&D, which, of course, was not really in the scope of the film. So the person who'd invited him apparently wrote a "WHAT IS JASON SCOTT HIDING" email to the people in his local group, cc:'ing Jason Scott. No, really.

Most importantly, he mentioned that there would be a torrent of it, for those who just did not want physical DVDs. He mentioned it might be so impractical to have physical DVDs in five years anyway. His rough views on copyrights etc. are here. He also mentioned that people could upgrade to BluRay or whatever for cost if they just give a picture of themselves with the small coin that came with the DVD. (Each has a unique number.)

He noted he had to get physically in shape to explore the Mammoth Caves, which is where Mark Crowther's Adventure took place. This took a few months. He also noted that IF may have a big audience among players from 50 to 60 years who don't want the constant action. And I think a lot of retro gaming has that appeal--that you don't have to do anything, or shoot anything, or drive fast. When you're old, you want to slow down.

IF/text adventures also have low barriers to entrance--theoretically--but the community can be somewhat insular. (From my own experience, I think twice before asking questions about coding, and even though I understand where the more critical types are coming from--I'd just be glad anyone's trying!) The problem is that the best stuff for learning to write/program interactive fiction is what people do the most, and so it becomes "not another maze/etc" puzzle. And there are a lot of these. Enough so that new players don't know where to start. And it's tough to identify which games should be at the top of such a list.

However, he agreed some things were clearly bad. Old two word parsers leave little room for error. For instance, Scott Adams's games are a Nice Thing, but they seem to be pretty much exhausted--and any modern language does things a lot easier. And of course, writing what you know may help you get familiar with the language, but everyone's seen a "Look! My House/High School/Workplace!" game. These theoretical low barriers to entrance are there for any group of people who don't want the quality of what they do to go down the drain. HG has it, in a way. It--and retro gaming overall--also has the relatively stable core that IF has. It also is about as profitable for the writers involved, but people are there because they want to be.

He noted the big names were similar to entrepeneurs who were there during the dot-com boom. No, they didn't make and lose enough money, but they know it's an era in their lives that will never be recaptured. Also, only three women were featured in the film. A question came up about if it is more balanced now, and Scott said he thought it was. Like engineering or other computer disciplines, it's not 50/50 now, but women aren't unusual.

I don't know if this was talking to him or talking afterwards, but it seems that there's real ground in text adventures for a 2-person team: one programmer, one idea person. The Textfyre Times seems to have these cooperative efforts.

He also mentioned he wanted to finish his documentary on gamebooks, the pen-and-paper version of computer text adventures. In particular, he has talked with one guy who has about 4000. He felt the computer side would be more interesting to more people, though. The gamebook documentary won't happen unless he gets enough kickstarter donations, and even then, he has some other products he doesn't want to tip his hand with. I suspect they'll be interesting. Also, I was interested to find that Jason Scott had run textfiles.com, which I'd found useful for documents about old games.

Also, Infocom authors Marc Blank and (one of Michael Berlyn/Dave Lebling) were apparently hard to get. Apparently a few more said that they weren't really actively looking to talk about it, but they probably should, and if someone was persistent enough...

One interview, I forget which, had to break off and continue later because it was just too hot.

The whole documentary was originally 40hrs or so & so cutting that down was very hard, but it was better to have too much than too little.

Today, there was a screening of the documentary GET LAMP at Google Chicago, which happens to be a very short distance away from where I work.

We watched the main feature for an hour and a half, with thirty minutes of questions afterwards. The movie was just great. I was worried I ate too much pizza and drank too much pop (it's free at Google) and would miss part of the show by going to the bathroom, but I didn't.

It's occurred to me that though I knew a lot of names, I'd never seen the people behind the Infocom text adventures and so on. The movie has nearly everyone except Mark Crowther, who created the original Adventure. There's Scott Adams, who had the two-word parser games, and yes, he mentions how he and the Dilbert creator STILL get each other's mail. Many of the Infocom big-shots were there, and Jason Scott mentioned people said he couldn't get them for interviews. But he did.

During the Q&A Jason Scott also mentioned a lot of the extra DVD features, and there are a ton of them. He had a lot of extra footage which couldn't fit into the main bits, and it seemed really tempting to buy. I also enjoyed the glimpses of notes from files (especially Steve Meretzky's files for Zork Zero) where I recognized what puzzle they were for. The chessboard, Double Fanucci, and the 24 Flathead treasures. Made me want to reevaluate the game, which I was originally lukewarm on.

Being able to put faces to the names in the IF community--Stephen Granade, Aaron Reed, Dan Shiovitz, Nick Montfort, Andrew Plotkin--was awesome, but a lot of their views on what was new and what shouldn't be done ("NO MAZES! NO PUZZLE WITH THE 5 LITER BEAKER AND THE 3 LITER BEAKER!") were interesting as were their acknowledgement that there was a core of people who kept the IF flame going, but in doing so, they may've gotten a bit resistant to new people who think that the already-tried stuff is REALLY, REALLY neat (e.g. setting an IF in your home or your high school.)

I brought along a notebook just in case I wanted to take notes and walked away with about 3 pages of stuff to research Google or search on wikipedia/ifwiki.org, whether it was names, games or terminology.

I was pleasantly surprised when they expressed thoughts I had, though it was at least as common that they had new takes on IF and how to make a good text adventure that seemed immediately sensible. And given I want to write my own text adventure, the discussions in the movie and afterwards immediately helped me focus on the stuff I wanted to try. There've been a lot of exercises I've done for myself that aren't publishable, but I think they're important.

Jason Scott also mentioned some other projects he had and how he put them on kickstarter and also donated to other artists there. It seems like an interesting idea for his specific projects and also in general. I could see myself donating--and I definitely want to see his BBS documentary, which is apparently a lot longer. It'll be neat, that time around, to watch a subject I'm not that well acquainted with.

Google Chicago was awesome. I sort of got lost accidentally on purpose going to the bathroom just so I could look inside the Ferris Bueller and Risky Business meeting rooms. The host, no mean IF writer himself (won IFComp2009 as cowriter) said one visitor described it as "day care for 20 year olds."
Oh yeah. I got two boxes of pizza to take home, too, because the hosts ordered too many.

So I've been judging IFComp 10. The games have been interesting--even the bad ones seem to have a spark, or somthing I wish I'd thought of, or something I think I could add my own twist to.

The one that made me think the most, though, is decidedly mediocre: "Ninja's Fate" by Hannes Schueller. It's a memorial game for an IF writer. We're not very good at the concept yet, because the Internet was largely developed by younguns. Even the original IF writers from the 80s--were young. About the only IF writer who died is Douglas Adams, who was more than an IF writer.

Paul Allen Panks, the IF writer memorialized, was apparently not a very good writer--the "about" section mentions this. He apparently had mental troubles, and he clashed with a lot of IF personalities. He stayed with BASIC and a two-word parser for his games, often submitting only slightly updated versions of old games to new yearly competitions. His magnum opus, Westmont, apparently spanned 1700 rooms. 400 were too many in Sir-Tech's stinkbomb, Mines of Qyntarr.

So the game about him is, well, purposely stilted. And it's difficult to see if this is making fun or not. All sorts of silly copouts and room paddings are on display. Maximum score=1000 points. You can lose after one move. One puzzle gives 10000 points, then takes them away. A whole complete area has random rooms and a random map. You get points for the same activity done three times in a row. You get 203 points for examining a bust.

Yet there are several different endings--each a bit sad and a bit silly. It's not hard to figure out because there's not that much to do. It's not a perfect tribute to bad IF, but it made me laugh at my own. And made me scared of what a tribute to me might be--or if anyone would bother.

And the games in general have made me want to enter for '11--the good and bad, for different reasons.

The resources out there are free and wonderful:

http://www.musicwords.net/if/InformHandbook.pdf
http://inform7.textories.com/sand-dancer/

So I wrote my first review in a while. It's nice to have tourneys to motivate this, and I was able to put aside the usual worries, like

1) did I write this before?
2) did I fall into the same traps I usually do?
3) did I remember all the fun stuff from this cool game?

There's a problem here with writing: too little, and you don't wring out the mistakes with experience. Too much, and you can get bored, if that's not what you really want. Unfortunately this creeps into my reading others' reviews. It's too easy to recognize "oh this again" and shut off the writing-enjoyment sub-lobe in my brain. Yet at the same time, I do enjoy even making minor changes in my review, whether from others' suggestions or my own observations.

Having said that, I'd like to discuss a new area of creativity I discovered. Someone recommended this book to me. It's about the wonderful IF language Inform 7.

You can look at pages in the book if you're so inclined, More wonderfully, the author has a webpage of examples from the game so readers don't have to type much out.

In fact, he's gone so far as to put the examples in the code, commented out. So you have everything but the narrative of the book on the pages where online viewing is disabled.

Now that's pretty damn generous. And I've learned a lot just comparing the sources from chapter to chapter, de-commenting examples to see how the game changes.

Oh yeah. I read about a competition where you had a 1 room game. I wrote such a game myself. It's juvenile and sophomoric and self-righteous and the most fun I've had writing anything in over a year. I'd always wanted to write a real text adventure, and this is closer than ever before.

At the moment I'm slowly learning how to do stuff to write a text adventure based on my high school. It's just neat to know how things work. I've had a lot of moments where I've seen a way to do something but had a feeling I could do it better--and I've been right. Feels good to have instincts work right & also feels good to have a sort of writing that allows stuff you can't get away with in essays or fiction.

PS if anyone wants to write a text adventure, why not give I7 a shot. The in-program docs are really incredible and I'd also love someone to share ideas with.

I've been looking into Inform 7 to write a text adventure and came across a few samples. The most amusing was here, and it takes place in just one room!

In case you feel like wasting a bit of time.

Warning: it kind of sucks if you get stuck on 19 points out of 20, since you have to go examine everything again. But it reminds me of my old efforts at IF where I only used basic verbs and even once created duplicate rooms where you got 10 points for taking ammunition from each one.

I miss not knowing how bad a programmer I was.

Hi everyone. Here are my results as fed into the Big Perl File That Does The Stats. Tiebreakers may be a concern, so I want to make sure they are right. Here's what I got.

This is more important than ELO stuff cuz if it's wrong, the ELO is. So speak up or forever be a societally-repressed writer not getting the attention they deserve.

====================================

Team Janus vs Team Leroux 2-1

Bluberry vs Leroux 2-1
Janus vs Venter 2-1
Asherdeus vs Jerec 1-2

-----------------------------

Team WQ vs Team OD 1-2

Suskie vs Overdrive 2-1
Wolfqueen vs True 1-2
Genj vs Zipp 1-2

-----------------------------

Team WQ vs Team Leroux 0-3

Suskie vs Leroux 1-2
Wolfqueen vs Jerec 0-3
Genj vs Venter 1-2

-----------------------------

Team Janus vs Team OD 3-0

Bluberry vs Overdrive 2-1
Janus vs Zipp 3-0
Asherdeus vs True 3-0

-----------------------------

Team OD vs Team Leroux 2-1

Overdrive vs Jerec 2-1
Zipp vs Venter 1-2
True vs Leroux 2-1

Team WQ vs Team Janus 2-1

Suskie vs Bluberry 2-1
Genj vs Janus 1-2
Wolfqueen vs Asherdeus 2-1

-----------------------------

Team Janus vs Team Leroux 1-2

Janus vs Jerec 3-0
Bluberry vs Venter 1-2
Asherdeus vs Leroux 0-3

Team WQ vs Team OD 3-0

Suskie vs Overdrive 3-0
Wolfqueen vs True 2-1
Genj vs Zipp 3-0

-----------------------------

Team WQ vs Team Leroux 2-1

Genj vs Leroux 1-2
Wolfqueen vs Venter 3-0
Suskie vs Jerec 2-1

Team Janus vs Team OD 0-3

Janus vs True 1-2
Bluberry vs Overdrive 0-3
Asherdeus vs Zipp 0-3

Here are the ELO ratings after 4 rounds. Zipp is in last place in the voting, but he's had some tough matchups. For entertainment/hg point gambling purposes only.

1 Janus 2403
2 Venter 2199
3 Leroux 2173
4 Bluberry 2122
5 Suskie 2102
6 Jerec 2052
7 Genj 1996
8 Asherdeus 1931
9 Overdrive 1878
10 Zipp 1850
11 Wolfqueen 1653
12 True 1641