Yearly Archives: 2008

The End of December Vespers Thing (Or, Back After A December Hiatus)

By Rubes | Published: December 29, 2008

December was a pretty crazy month. The first half was consumed by a major deadline at work, so I was in “Super Cthulu Crunch” mode (again) for quite some time. This was mercifully followed by some much-needed vacation time visiting family members out of state, and while I did have my laptop with me, I wasn’t able to spend much time working on Vespers or the blog. So December basically became a short one-month hiatus essentially by default. I know this was difficult for many of you. Apologies and such.

Now that I’m back to the usual routine, it’s time to pick things back up, and there’s plenty of good stuff to talk about — including some hands-on time with a (somewhat) recently released adventure game with some eerily familiar themes. But more on that later.

For now, at least, only a few words on Vespers over the past [More...]

Posted in Vespers | 1 Comment

How Iggy Got His Groove Back

By Rubes | Published: November 30, 2008

(or, The End of November Vespers Thing)

Good grief, another month come and gone already? November was a crazy month, I have to say. A lot of business travel, including a trip to Atlanta and not one, but two trips to D.C. — at one point, I was having trouble remembering what city I was in and what day it was. But while you might think that Vespers development would slow as a result, in fact this past month turned out to be incredibly productive. One of the most productive in a long time, actually. We’re finally beginning to see the fruits of our transition to new animators and a new animation system, and I’m expecting that this will be the start of a series of very productive months on that front.

In the last update, I expressed hope that during November we would start to have some new animations [More...]

Posted in Vespers | 2 Comments

Tale of Tales Goodies

By Rubes | Published: November 27, 2008

Tale of Tales is the Belgian group led by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn that brought us the thought-provoking poetic “art game” (for lack of a better term, I suppose) The Graveyard. It was an intriguing piece that generated a lot of discussion around the tubes, much of which was unfortunately negative because many people didn’t quite get that it doesn’t fit the traditional definition of “game”. It was also created with the Unity engine, a very cool 3D game engine/development tool that runs primarily on Macs, and which I came very close to using for Vespers. In any case, I thought it was a worthwhile experiment and I have a lot of respect for what these folks are trying to do.

Of note, Gamasutra has just posted their postmortem on The Graveyard, which I think is a great read. They posted it on their web site a [More...]

Posted in games as art, indie games | Leave a comment

IFComp08: The Results Are In

By Rubes | Published: November 16, 2008

The voting ended yesterday, and the results have been tallied. The winner of this year’s IFComp is Violet, by Jeremy Freese – an excellent piece which I thought was well-constructed, well-written, and entertaining. The top ten finishers in the Comp are as follows:

  1. Violet

  2. Nightfall

  3. Everybody Dies

  4. Afflicted

  5. Piracy 2.0

  6. Snack Time!

  7. Opening Night

  8. April in Paris

  9. A Date With Death

  10. Berrost’s Challenge

Overall, I thought the competition had some good entries — some really creative ones like Violet and Buried in Shoes, and some traditional ones with good puzzles and engaging writing like Nightfall, Piracy 2.0, and April in Paris. I also enjoyed some of the more lighthearted entries such as Recess At Last and Snack Time! I think there were a reasonable number of solid entries — I would say somewhere around a quarter to a third [More...]

Posted in interactive fiction | Leave a comment

IFComp: Final Capture

By Rubes | Published: November 13, 2008

With the IFComp voting period about to end, I’ll now finish up with the last batch of entries. Here once again I present my initial impressions of each game’s opening (introduction, “About” screens, and the first location or moves), summarized by the Capture Score from 1 (intriguing; a definite play) to 4 (dreadful and forgettable). Just a reminder, no spoilers here, just early impressions.

The final games covered here include “Buried in Shoes”, “A Martian Odyssey”, and “Freedom”.

“Buried in Shoes”, by Kazuki Mishima

As far as I know, Mishima has written only one IF game prior to this Comp, the short but poetic “Somewhere.” I don’t know quite how successful it was as an “interactive poem”, particularly given how short it was, but I appreciated the novelty and the effort put into it. “Buried in Shoes,” his new piece, bears some resemblance to his previous work, and I’m intrigued [More...]

Posted in interactive fiction | Leave a comment

IFComp: Slow Capture

By Rubes | Published: November 12, 2008

Only seven games left to go, and three days left in the Comp. So time to start wrapping things up with the penultimate batch of entries, as I review my initial impressions of each game’s opening (introduction, “About” screens, and the first location), summarized by the Capture Score from 1 (intriguing; a definite play) to 4 (dreadful and forgettable). Just a reminder, no spoilers here, just early impressions.

Games covered here include “The Hall of the Fount of Artois”, “Riverside”, “Magic”, and “The Lucubrator”.

“The Hall of the Fount of Artois”, by Simon

The last of four Windows-only games in the IFComp. I’m a Mac user, so I’ll have to find out after the final Comp votes are tallied to see if this is unfortunate.

Capture Score: 4. Fortunately, only four of these this year.

“Riverside”, by Jeremy Crockett and Victor Janmey

This is another game that comes without an [More...]

Posted in interactive fiction | Leave a comment

Feedback For Better IF Parsing

By Rubes | Published: November 5, 2008

Over on Twenty Sided, Shamus Young posted a blog today on, of all things, interactive fiction. Seems he’s been playing “Phantom of the Arcade” lately, an Inform-based text adventure written recently by Susan Arendt, his editor at The Escapist, and made available online. This spurred him to ponder the familiar issues and frustrations related to the IF parser, and particularly how the parser handles unknown or unacceptable input. “Feedback itself,” he states, “is a reward” — feedback that shows that, even though the command entered is invalid, the author and/or parser has anticipated it enough to provide useful information rather than a generic “I beg your pardon?” response.

One idea he came up with for this involves modifying the IF environment (particularly one that is web-based) to create what he calls a “feedback parser”:

To do this you’d just need a bit of functionality added to the parser:

[More...]

Posted in game design, interactive fiction | 3 Comments

The End of October Vespers Thing

By Rubes | Published: November 2, 2008

Wow, October came and went in a hurry. Halloween and the ongoing IFComp took up a lot of my time toward the end of the month, which threw me off by a few days. So here, at the start of November, is an update on Vespers over the past month.

On the modelling front, N.R. and I spent much of the month improving the performance of the game with some creative workarounds for the problem we have had with portals in Torque. Portalization, for those of you unfamiliar, is a method used by people who model interior structures for Torque (such as buildings) to split up these models into “zones” in order to reduce rendering overhead. So basically, if a building has different sections or floors, for instance, you split it up into zones using portals placed over any of the visible openings into to that zone (such as a [More...]

Posted in Vespers, game design | Leave a comment

IFComp: Capture Time

By Rubes | Published: November 2, 2008

It’s November, so the deadline for judging this year’s IFComp is closing in fast. Time to move on with the next batch of entries, as I review my initial impressions of each game’s opening (introduction, “About” screens, and the first location), summarized by the Capture Score from 1 (intriguing; a definite play) to 4 (dreadful and forgettable). Just a reminder, no spoilers here, just early impressions.

Games covered here include “Project Delta”, “Escape from the Underworld”, “Opening Night”, “Afflicted”, and “Everybody Dies”.

“Project Delta”, by Emilian Kowalewski

Another Windows-only game. I can’t tell if this is a shame or not. I guess I’ll find out after the final Comp votes are tallied.

Capture Score: 4. The third of four Windows-only games in the Comp.

“Escape from the Underworld”, by Karl Beecher

This one comes with hints and walkthrough files, but without any background information or an ABOUT command. I [More...]

Posted in interactive fiction | Leave a comment

IFComp: Adventures in Capture

By Rubes | Published: October 26, 2008

Venturing ever farther with the next batch of IFComp entries, as I review my initial impressions of each game’s opening (introduction, “About” screens, and the first location), summarized by the Capture Score from 1 (intriguing; a definite play) to 4 (dreadful and forgettable). Just a reminder, no spoilers here, just early impressions.

Games covered here include “Grief”, “April in Paris”, “Ananachronist”, and “LAIR of the CyberCow”.

“Grief”, by Simon Christiansen

This game starts by asking me if I’m male or female. I like when games do this, given the extra amount of work that this typically requires, although I don’t yet know how well this is incorporated into the game or what kind of impact it might have on the narrative. Still, it’s the kind of thing that could give the game some extra replay value.

The game begins in a dream, at least so I’m told, and there [More...]

Posted in interactive fiction | Leave a comment