Interactive fiction jam

We’re doing what?

While I was researching a post I’m working on (you’ll see it soon, I’m really proud of it), I took a bit of time to look into interactive fiction. This led me to a Stack Overflow question with a lot of good answers about IF tools/systems, and I realized once again how cool Inform 7 is. I’ve also been listening to episodes of a Destructoid podcast called “Sup, Holmes?” (itunes, feed with mp3s), and in a number of episodes (episodes 15-18) he has interviewed people from the Toronto indie game community. They all spoke of things they had worked on at various game jams in Toronto, and I thought that sounded pretty cool. A game jam is just a bunch of people gathering (often physically, but sometimes digitally) and working on a game for a set period of time. At the end, you have a thing that probably sucks but gosh darn it you made it and you’re going to be proud of it!

Light bulb: why not combine the two?

So here’s what I’m proposing:

Date: Monday (Labour Day)
Time/length: From 12 pm until 4 pm, Eastern Standard Time - we all have other things to do, and we don’t all get up early. Note that I originally had allocated a lot more time for this; but I didn’t want to exclude people who have, you know, adult responsibilities. Next time we’ll do five hours. Perhaps it will be a two-part event, e.g. we all work on the same story next time.
Who’s invited? I’ll get a few interested folks from Ottawa in my living room, but distant participants are welcome - I’ll set up some kind of video chat through Google Hangout/Skype/TinyChat/something so we can taunt each other and discuss stuff
What do you make? The day of, I’ll announce the theme we’re going to write on by pulling one of several candidates from a hat - I’m open to suggestions on what our criteria are for a “finished” story, as I don’t necessarily want one person to write 10,000 words and someone else to write 300
Then what? Then everyone works on their story all day, in whatever way they see fit!
What happens when I’m done? We’ll use Inform 7’s export thing to put what we’ve made online!

This is meant to be difficult, because to the best of my knowledge I don’t know anyone who writes interactive fiction. The random theme aspect is designed to make it that much more challenging. What you produce doesn’t have to be awesome; it will probably be more fun to create than to play. At any rate, it’s just meant to be a fun event for us to hang out and do something interesting. I literally have no experience with this, and haven’t written creatively in a while, so I expect this to be really difficult. But you’re up for it, because you’re awesome!

Resources

I’m going to be continually adding resources that seem useful here, if you want to do a bit of research. Just try not to show us all up by reading everything like some kind of genius, alright?

For a practical introduction to Inform 7, check out this screencast by Aaron Reed. I’d forgotten about this video, actually; this was the first thing I ever saw about Inform 7 and it’s really quite impressive. He paints the system in a more prose-based light than some of the other more programming focused resources below. So at a bare minimum, give that a watch and then grab things below that seem useful.

One programming-language-y thing that I expect to be quite useful is rulebooks. I expect he’s right that using rulebooks as much as possible is a good idea, so do give that post a look and consider making use of them. Thinking about it a little, rulebooks are kind of like quirky interfaces - you have some behaviour that you want a bunch of things to share, so you put it in a single place and have them “consult” with the rulebook on what to do. Depending on the approach you take, this will either be incredibly useful or utterly irrelevant.

For in-depth tutorials on Inform 7, there’s a section on their site. The Recipe Book seems particularly useful.

For those of us with the background, Inform 7 for Programmers is long but informative. I actually find it to terse to a fault in some ways; it’s not very good as reference material to flip through.

If you’d like to see some source code as an example, check out the bottom half of this page which implements Cloak of Darkness, which seems to be an IF “hello, world” sort of story.

One of the StackOverflow answers recommended the section on design from the old Inform Designers Manual, Fourth Edition (DM4). So I’ve extracted that into its own PDF, which I’ve uploaded here.

Inform has an extensive library of extensions (shut up I am normally better at writing than that), which you can check out here - once you’ve got an idea of what you’re going to do, you might want to look around in there.

If you’d like to write a fight-y sort of game, you can check out an extension for Inform called ATTACK.

He also has a series of posts about designing a text-based dungeon crawler in Inform 7, if that’s your jam: pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4

If you run into anything interesting that I haven’t directly linked to, please do send it around to the rest of us. We’ll probably all be doing wildly different things, but you might inspire someone to change direction with whatever wonderful extension/blog post/whatever you’ve found.

Publishers, What Are They Good For?4

This is a quick post with relatively little of my own commentary, but I just want to share the story because it’s so absolutely ridiculous. Plus, in light of the hyper-popularity of Kickstarter these days as a good way to fund video games, it highlights the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Namely, the shitty way to fund games, in which publishers have all the control.

I’ve linked to an article on Nightmare Mode, mainly because it adds some commentary to the original story from Destructoid (breaking news on an independent video game blog!) You don’t have to read it, though - here’s the basic summary:

Obsidian Entertainment made Fallout: New Vegas, which was published by Bethesda
It sold really, really well
Obsidian Entertainment received no royalty payments from the game’s sales, because their contract required they get a score of 85 on Metacritic to receive their “bonus” of an actual cut of the sales
It got a score of 84 on Metacritic

According to Nightmare Mode, the game sold five million copies. 5,000,000 copies. $60 each (well, they probably weren’t all full price, but it’s a lot of money at any price).

Obsidian Entertainment didn’t get a single cent from any of those sales. All they got was a flat rate for completing the game. Since then, they’ve had two rounds of lay-offs.

F*cking what?!

BCN Christmas Loot Mk II

BLAST FROM THE PAST

This year, my brother and I are with my dad for Christmas. My mom went home to spend Christmas with her family, but before she left we did half-a-Christmas. So my gifts from her, my grandparents, and one or two “from Santa”:

A pre-order for the limited edition of FF XIII-2 (once bitten, twice excited about the changes they’re making)
An IOU for a copy of Valkyria Chronicles 2 for PSP
How to Do Things with Videogames, by Ian Bogost (kindle)
Reality is Broken, by Jane McGonigal (kindle)
Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn (kindle)
The Googlization of Everything (and why we should worry), by Siva Vaidhyanathan (kindle)
The Blade Itself, by Joe Abercrombie (kindle, First Law #1)
Newsgames: Journalism at Play, by Ian Bogost (kindle)

Oh, and I picked out the Game of Thrones board game as a gift for my brother and we’ve had a lot of fun with it. Enough that I’d consider it partially a gift for me, which is the good thing about doing your own gift shopping. If you’ve got a group of people willing to sit down and play a really political game for 3+ hours, I’d definitely recommend it. Imagine Risk if there were no dice rolls, and manipulating people is a far better strategy than outright destroying them. You tell them you’ll guard their back as long as it suits you, and when it doesn’t…. well.

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For our second Christmas, which was on the proper date, I mainly got more books, but physical ones this time:

Valkyria Chronicles 2, for real
A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster
The Golden City, by John Twelve Hawks (Fourth Realm trilogy #3)
Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation, by Michael Zielenziger
Before They Are Hanged, by Joe Abercrombie (First Law #2)
Last Argument of Kings, by Joe Abercrombie (First Law #3)

My personal gift to my brother was Penny Arcade: Gamers vs Evil, another double-gift. We played it before going to bed, and I had fun with it. I can’t say how it compares to other deckbuilding games, but turns are very quick once you get used to it and the cards interact with each other in some pretty interesting ways. For example, I won the last game we played using the Carl hero, from the Automata strips. His ability makes the most expensive types of cards - Boss Loot - cheaper by one. There’s another card, Broodax In Disguise (not for the faint of heart - it’s an alien wearing a person’s body), that has a value of 1 when you play it, OR a value of 3 if you intend to put those points towards buying Boss Loot.

Whenever I failed to have enough to buy a Boss Loot, I bought more Broodax. Eventually, I got hands that - out of six cards - three of them are Broodax in Disguise.

Needless to say, I acquired a good chunk of phat lootz, which won me the game.

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Honourable mention goes to a couple of gifts I could only get shipped to the US, so my aunt brought them to my mother while she was visiting. So when she gets home, I’ll get two gifts that you may find very strange: a shell replacement for my DS Lite (a few hours of tinkering, which may ruin the machine!) and a bundle of empty cases for PSP games. Anyway, I’m weird like that. Both of those things were pretty cheap, and I’ll be happy to have them. I can replace the sticker-covered cases from PSP games I bought used, and if all goes well, be the owner of a non-broken red and black DS. Woo.

(also, does anyone still say woot? I have the strangest desire to start saying it, just because)

So I lost 5% on my last comp 2001 assignment for something that, to the best of my knowledge, actually works.

On the other hand, I lost nothing for all the other “features” I managed to include. So I think it’s best not to argue the point.

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I mainly wanted to post the above image, but thought I’d flesh out the post a little with a story. So here’s the deal with the above card, which will make a lot more sense if you’re familiar with the source material. The blue and green icons on the side indicate that the character can participate in Intrigue battles and Power battles, respectively. “Renown” means that a character has a lot of political clout - whenever they win political power for your faction, you get more than normal. I’m not so sure about the effect on non-unique characters, but it’s the final ability that really stands out for me.

“After Lyanna Stark is killed, stand (untap) all Lord characters in play. Those characters gain deadly until the end of the round.”

This is so perfect if you’re familiar with the source (both the books and the game), but I’m going to give you a rundown of what the mechanics are saying. After a number of fierce battles (offence and defence lead to kneeling, as well as using other abilities), the death of a well-loved (in more than one sense) Lady leads all the Lords in play to surge up and seek deadly vengeance. For the rest of the round, they shoot to kill, so to speak. The catch here is that few abilities outright murder a specific character - when a player loses a military battle (or any challenge that includes a deadly character), they get to choose who dies. So generally speaking, this will be a strategic sacrifice.

Moreover, the way the deadly keyword works is that it only comes into effect if the attacker has more deadly characters than the defender. If your opponent has two Lord characters, who are now deadly, and you initiate a battle with three Lord characters, the fact that everyone gets the benefit of the card is irrelevant. Everyone rejoins the fight, but that doesn’t mean they can win. “But this is an outrage! Lyanna’s death won’t go unavenged!” And so on.

Anyway, I know this is probably uninteresting unless you share my interest in card games and Game of Thrones. But I think it’s important to appreciate good design in any kind of game, even if you only play video games. With keyword systems to cut down on the text for individual cards, a lot of the heavy lifting is already done to sum up the mechanics and communicate with the player. If every single card simply said, “During a challenge, if the attacking player controls the most participating characters with this text, the defending player must choose and kill a defending participating character after the challenge resolves.” it would never occur to (most) players that this mechanic means the same thing as what the deadly keyword communicates.

It’s a definite strength of the format, and I don’t necessarily have ideas for how to adapt it elsewhere. I know memorizing keywords is a challenge whenever you’re learning a new CCG - we’ve always had to play AGoT with a keyword cheat sheet. So taking the benefits of the system without the negatives could be a challenge. But it’s something worth thinking about in terms of ways to communicate mechanics more effectively, and (if you’ll forgive one pretentious sentence in this whole endeavour) how to situate them in the overall narrative context of the game. Stay tuned for a post in a week or two that might make this a bit clearer.

lingllama:

ˈtiːm.wɝk
[Picture: Background: 8-piece pie-style color split with alternating shades of blue. Foreground: Linguist Llama meme, a white llama facing forward, wearing a red scarf. Top text: “There is too” Bottom text: “an /i/ in team!”]

nyoro~n

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So yeah anyway. Actually trying to work on my problems has been helping a lot. I’m sleeping better (though not quite enough), and haven’t had a whole lot of anxiety despite actually spending time with people. Still not so hot on the whole “starting conversations with strangers” thing (even when they’re cute strangers), but that’s less of a crippling issue.

But hey, if you’re that girl with the glasses from the Unexpect concert who was orbiting me for almost an hour, call me.

School’s doing alright, although I wish I could be further ahead than I am. You know how I said I should get X work done over the weekend? I did all of that before class thursday morning. But then I did practically nothing friday, had no time to even think about working saturday, and then got through MAYBE an hour of actually working on sunday. Bleh. Still, I’ve got ½ synopses done and the second just needs to be written, which shouldn’t take long (famous last words, etc.). I’ve got a written assignment to do for that class, as well - a 2 page research proposal. I’ve successfully resisted the urge to “propose” the research project I’m already working on, but again, it shouldn’t take too long. After that, I become a code monkey until December 2nd. More time would be better, but provided I have at least a week, I should be alright.

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I’ve got stuff to write about, but no time right now. Come Christmas break I’ll throw up a few posts. Mostly gaming-related. But speaking of gaming, I think it’s hilarious how everyone is off playing Skyrim and I’m like FINAL FANTASY VI ADVANCE! XENOBLADE ON THE WII! As far as the former goes, the right hinge on my old DS Lite just broke yesterday morning D: The crack has been progressing for a while. It’s still relatively playable with the screen flopped back.

As for Xenoblade, it’s exactly what I’ve been wanting since the end of the PS2. It’s really a natural extension of that era of jRPGs, the most striking influence being Rogue Galaxy - a game I absolutely cannot stand anymore, but which Xenoblade improves on in every single way. Now I’m finally playing an unarguably great “current generation” jRPG, and it’s on the Wii. It’s better than PS2 games, sure, but where has this game been for the last five years?

Anyway, I hope you guys are enjoying your games. I’ll be over here, playing single player japanese RPGs, loving every minute.

3Linguist Llama

thegreatcrate:

I remember the first time I did this in Skyrim. I was so excited when I saw I could catch a butterfly and then…well, I felt kinda bad.
—-
I play a game while I’m editing stories now, called “paragraph importance”. Each paragraph has to work like the piece of a puzzle, or a link in a chain, where the overarching idea is portrayed in the small steps. It must form a cohesive whole. As I’m reading through I ask myself, “What is this paragraph about? Is this paragraph important? Would anything change if I deleted it?” It works wonders for weeding out the unnecessary bits.

I have a similar game I play when I’m writing an essay: the first sentence of a paragraph tells you what it’s about, and when you put them all together, you should get a nice little paragraph summarizing your essay. And, of course, they should transition from the last sentence of the previous paragraph.

It doesn’t quite apply to other forms of writing, but it’s a pretty good way to make sure you’re getting your point across well.

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As for the image, panels 1 + 2 pretty much describe me now that we’re actually running the experiment I’ve spent the last two months creating. It used to be just a big block of code, and now it’s all growed up :’)

Also, KillScreen’s Things I Ate in Skyrim.

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Also, I’m playing FF VI and enjoying it a lot. At least in the GBA port, you can really see how it falls in between the other SNES era FF games and FF VII, the way they play with the point of view at times and integrate cutscenes and dialog into battle. From what I understand, at least the tutorial conversations you get in battle didn’t exist in the SNES version. But it’s a nice touch, making the “battle screen” less of an alternate dimension and more of an actual place.

Twice so far I’ve had to control three parties in a battle against a series of enemies, which is sort of neat. Except for the part where you just place your parties at the perfect positions to block off all the enemies and there’s absolutely no challenge to it at all. Aside from that, because they split you up in situations like that and due to the story, the cast is gigantic. After a couple of hours you play through three separate “scenarios,” and the size of the cast doubles (from 4 to 8) by the time you finish all three and meet up. But what’s cool about that is that all the characters have different abilities - the Super Saiyan monk (he punches laser beams) has a combo system of sorts as his special ability, while the samurai can spend time preparing ridiculously powerful abilities. A few characters unlock new abilities later on in the story, I think, because there are empty spaces on their command menus. Anyway, it’s great to see an RPG actually distinguishing its cast members from each other.

3The Great Crate

finalfantasythings:

Check it out.

I need to get working on my playthrough of FF VI Advance. Gives me something to do on the bus.

LET’S RACE

ALSO IT’S THE LAST FF GAME I NEED TO BEAT, you’d think I’d be more excited but I’m sort of thinking about assignments and exams more than video games

3Final Fantasy Things

RIP, my interest in shooters

Five years ago (minus a month and 9 days) I was sitting in front of our “big screen” 36" CRT TV with my launch day PS3 and a copy of Insomniac’s first Resistance game. I ran around, shot aliens in the face, and I probably had fun doing it. I think I tried to run around and find all the hidden documents for a little while, and even ventured online for a couple hours of multiplayer. Too long ago to remember much more though.

Roughly three years ago, Resistance 2 came out, and I liked it well enough too. Convinced a few friends to buy it so we could play co-op online… but I never played it with them. Oops. I didn’t really mind the changes from the first game (regenerating health, no weapon wheel), but I was really getting into the story. What’s up with the Cloven? What are the Chimera? I was under the impression that there were more backstory documents in the multiplayer, so I really wanted to get those, but my interest waned pretty quickly.

A month ago now, Resistance 3 came out, and I knew I didn’t really care. But hey, I’m already two games in, I have to know what comes next, right? So I bought it a couple weeks ago. Played my way up to chapter 17 (of 20) over the course of ~8 hours or so. And I didn’t enjoy it in the slightest. As far as the gameplay goes, the best ideas it has are to bring back health packs and the weapon wheel. There’s nothing to see here, folks. You’ve got scripted sequences where it seems like you might die, but you obviously won’t. You’ve got arena areas with just the right amount of ammo and health to get you through safely. You’ve got some “quirky” weapons like the one that freezes dudes, and the one that mutates dudes, but the end result is that the other dudes die and you don’t.

I kept going, looking for the fun, hoping it might be right around the corner. But there was no fun to be found anywhere in my $60 game. Trade-in value for the game is down to $25, but of course that’s in-store credit. I usually think of trading in a game along the same lines as throwing it out, and I was that frustrated with the game that I almost considered it. But not for half of what I paid for it, and conditional on the fact that I want to spend that money on another game. So I’ll just keep it, and set it aside in the Hall of Shame section of my shelf.

The thing is, I’m not sure if Resistance 3 is just an ok game, or whether I’m bored with shooters in general. Or maybe it’s not even shooters - maybe I’m just done with “Hollywood games.” I want Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, where you can actually fail the platforming sequences. I want Demon’s Souls, where rocks fall down and kill you, instead of falling around you to create the illusion of action. I want to be legitimately afraid because my character is weak and the enemies are strong, because a dark room with some scary noises isn’t going to cut it. I want a narrative that gives me just enough information to get engaged, but always has bigger mysteries to solve. I want characters that are worth caring about. And I don’t need every game to have all of these things - one or two of them, done well enough, can carry a whole game.

But I’m done throwing away sixty bucks on games with nothing to offer. I’ve got better things to do with my time and money. I can’t see any shooters coming out any time soon that I have any interest in buying, and I’m going to think a bit harder before I jump on something like the new Assassin’s Creed or FF XIII-2. In the mean time, stuff like Serious Sam: The Random Encounter is far more interesting to me than all of the big releases coming out this year.

Starting in October, PS2 games on PSN4

It’s not totally clear how this is going to work on non-backwards compatible PS3s, because they haven’t been totally specific about the details yet. Really, all I’ve found so far is that they’re starting with five games, for $10 each, which is probably at least 50% cheaper than getting them on eBay. I probably paid at least $20 for the copies I bought of, uh, every single one of these games in the past. Some (Grim Grimoire, God Hand, Maximo) I’ve sold in the intervening years because I knew I’d never play them, but don’t let that stop you from picking them up.

Maximo: Ghosts to Glory
God Hand
GrimGrimoire
Odin Sphere
Ring of Red

Ring of Red is probably the one you’ve never heard of, so here’s a gameplay video. The next five minutes of that shows you the combat - outside of the battles, it’s a strategy RPG. I really enjoy the game conceptually, though I generally fail at actually playing it.

Also, Kingdom Hearts 3D is probably going to be the game that sells me a 3DS. First, because I’m kind of a whore for Square-Enix - I kiiiiind of buy just about every game they release, and when I bought a PSP, I did it so I could play 6 Squeenix games and 2 others. Second, because I played The World Ends With You before school, during lunch, and after school every day for many months.

The demo for KH 3D at the Tokyo Game Show had Neku popping in to demand that Sora team up with him to play the Reaper’s Game.

There goes $200, basically.

I also can’t help but want a PS Vita. I mean, I have a PSP now, I know what that’s like. And the Vita does that, but it will play my PS2 games, and possibly PS3 games? And I can share that stuff between the console and the handheld and switch between them. And it’ll have the Facebooks and stuff. The moral of the story is, that’s some sexy technology for $250. I don’t know when there will be games I want to play on the system, but I still want it.

No, I can’t afford any of this. I shouldn’t have bought Resistance 3… but I did. I shouldn’t have spent $35 on Deus Ex. In fact, I shouldn’t have bought a PSP, since that’s easily like $300-400 I’ve spent over the last six months, not to mention ~150 hours of playtime over the summer. And twice that for my brother, at least.

But I DON’T regret pre-ordering Dark Souls - which comes out tomorrow! And I won’t play it until Christmas! It’s going to be great. Definitely getting my money’s worth out of it.

Card Hunter!

Ars Technica wrote a great piece you should really read about game developers leaving the AAA industry to make it on their own. Inside, they mentioned a game called Card Hunter, which is being funded by the co-founder of Irrational Games - the guys who made System Shock 2 and Bioshock. I looked it up, and found out it’s being worked on by other people you might have heard of. Farbs makes some pretty cool games, and I actually bought into the Captain Forever series when the first game was in beta. On a slightly more famous note, does the name Richard Garfield ring any bells?

There’s no definite release date yet, but it seems pretty fascinating. They’ve got a couple of developer diaries talking about deck building in the game: one here, and another here. I pretty much like everything about this game, but the deck building is particularly interesting. Rather than adding specific cards, you equip items, which give you a specific “suite” of cards. Should make for some good strategy.

I guess I probably shouldn’t post about a game that isn’t out yet. But I’m eagerly awaiting its release, and I think some of you might be interested too. After all, you probably played Magic years ago. Remember the good times? Yeah, me too. Card Hunter will probably have more good times! Play it with me when it comes out!

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