Part of my challenge is that instead of knowing from the start that I wanted to tell the story of a chicken who crosses the road to get to the other side, I began with the notion of a chicken who had already crossed the road and started telling the story backwards.  Why is he on this side of the road?  How did he get there – did he walk?  Fly?  Get kicked?  If he walked, what events might have prompted the journey? Was he laughed out of Poulet Prep for not knowing the difference between sorghum and barley?  What meaningful experiences did he have at Poulet Prep?  How were those experiences shaped by previous events in his life?  As I pick my way backwards, I discover that I am not telling a story so much as discovering one.  I knew from the start how the story ended; it’s discovering how it got there that has been the most fun.

And so, as I drive back and forth to work every day, I unfold the story, prodding at the corners, smoothing out the creases, poking into crevices.  I watch the characters walk backwards through their play, knowing where they’re headed, wondering where they’ve been.  Sometimes they back into the wrong sorts of corners, into pasts that don’t make sense, or histories that I simply don’t like.  And now that the story has pretty much been laid out in my mind, I find myself rather surprised at what I’ve ended up with.  Now begins the process of folding it all up again, and if you’ve ever tried to refold a map, you know how challenging that is.

So that’s where I am.  The story has finally been decided on, and now starts the next hard part – turning it into a work of IF.  With the story written, I guess the next step is figuring out where the game is in all of it, which challenges naturally translate into puzzle elements, how to use gameplay to help the player unfold the story, and of course… how to make them want to play it in the first place.

So that’s my open question for today: what’s your approach?  Do you start with an idea of the challenges you want the player to face, and then figure out how to build a story around them?  Do you think of interesting mechanics and try to work them into puzzles?  Or do you start with your story, and figure out a way to turn them into a game?

Anyway, on to my progress…

Part of the re-introduction process involves relearning everything I have forgotten about I7, which is to say, just about everything I ever learned in the first place.  After installing the IDE, I thought it might be educational (and fun) to go back through the last project I had started.  It was an interesting experience.  Rather than simply reading through the code that I had written, I compiled the game and did a play through, and was surprised by how much I had accomplished, and by the complexity of some of the things I had achieved.  Even more surprising, though, was how quickly I was able to reacquaint myself with the way things worked; as I plugged cords into outlets and swung picture frames away from walls, familiarity started creeping in, and I was able to remember the basics of how I had done those things.  I dipped into the code, and it all started to take on a recognizable shape.  Hopefully this means the relearning process won’t be too strenuous.

Last night, I started storyboarding so that I have a good framework to build from.  It is an eye opening exercise, since it revealed a few rather large gaps between where I wanted the story to go and how it would get there.  I’ll keep plugging away at it, though.  I know the story I want to tell, so now it’s a matter of figuring out the best way to tell it.

If anyone can recommend a version of the manual that is formatted properly for the Kindle (Fire, if that matters), I’d be most grateful for the advice.  The PDF version looks nice but doesn’t scale well, and converting it with Calibre resulted in some seriously funky formatting and a non-function table of contents.  I know from my last attempt that having the manual to peruse when I am away from the IDE can be very helpful in helping me build my overall knowledge.

What am I doing differently this time around?  Well, for starters, I am taking a different approach to the overall process.  Last time, I started with a sort of half-cobbled story idea and a few puzzle ideas that I wanted to incorporate, and started with the implementation before having a clear plan.  This time, I have a fully formed plot, a very clear sense of the geography, detailed thoughts about key events and turning points, and a few set puzzles that play into it.  My plan now is to actually flesh out the plot into a narrative, and then mapping out the corresponding locations and events.  I think having a clear design will make implementation easier this time around.  Well… we’ll see, won’t we?

Wish me luck!

Fitted out a couple more rooms with scenery and objects, including a filing cabinet, which led to today’s triumph.  I wanted to have it so that only one drawer in the cabinet could be open at a time, without actually requiring the player to close one himself.  My first 15 attempts at coding it ended in run-time errors (and to think, I was so giddy when there were no compile-time errors!) so I started drafting a plea for help on raif.

It’s sort of amusing – I agonize over my  pleas for help because I’m always just slightly worried that someone will take one look at my bad code and laugh at me.  I know no one would; it’s just an irrational fear.  So in response to that fear, I kept flipping between my post and my code, trying to fix my code up in a way that at least got my intention across without looking woefully incompetent.

And wouldn’t you know it – in the process of making my code presentable, I ended up figuring it out for myself.  Ah, the sweet bliss of being able to cancel a post…

When I created this cabinet, I realized I needed to create a kind called “drawer” so that I could have 3 of them that acted in conjunction with each other.  I suppose there is some way to do it without creating the “drawer” kind, but I can’t imagine it would be more graceful than what I achieved (that’s not to say there’s not a more graceful way than the one I did use, of course).

So eventually, I made it so that any attempts to open a drawer would automatically close a drawer that was already open.  This also gave me a chance to really strengthen my understanding of “calling names”, which I think I finally really “get”.

Things are definitely getting easier and more intuitive.  Best of all, I’m really having fun.

So in the process of creating a closet, I got (happily) sidetracked by creating a light. It’s a fairly simple and straightforward construction: a cord and an outlet; plug the first into the second and voila, there’s light. Took only two minutes to realize it wasn’t as straightforward as I initially thought. How do I keep people from plugging frogs into candles, for instance? So I set about defining what can be plugged in, what can be plugged into, and how to handle any deviations from that.

And I figured it out, without needing to turn to the documentation. *insert happy dance* Now, the fact that I did it on my own means it is probably the least graceful approach, but it works. It’s also good for the confidence; I’m really starting to feel like I have the makings of a game that will at least be passable, even if it falls short of being brilliant.

Next Challenge:

My next task is to figure out how to automatically supply the right second noun if someone says “plug cord”, or how to handle attempts at things like “plug in cord” instead. The question is: if I define an action as “applying to two things” how do I handle attempts that only apply to one thing? (Mostly rhetorical; I plan on posting the question to raif shortly. [UPDATE:  Got it working thanks to the kind and knowledgeable souls at raif.]

The fun part of today’s exercise has come in thinking of new ways to expand the story. The game isn’t puzzleless, but it also isn’t going to be very hard; I guess my aim is towards something that is really mostly an interactive story; all the player’s actions are geared towards developing the story. The trick is figuring out how to do that in a way that doesn’t feel too mundane or tedious, without bringing in arbitrary puzzles just to give the player something to do.

Three day weekend ahead – if I get my way, much of it will be spent working on the game.

• Newz Crawler – Just too busy, and god help me if I can figure out how to get it to download more than the last 7 days’ worth of messages.  It does look nice though.
• Outlook Express – My main beef?  The fact that I can’t get it to use top-down (bottom-posting) formatting for my replies.  If anyone can tell me how to fix that, I guess the search can be called off.
• MAPILab NNTP Plugin in for Outlook 2003 – Nice because it integrates into Outlook, annoying because every time I leave the view, it reverts the placeholder to the very bottom of the list, forcing me to scroll all the way up to read new messages.  And I *want* my new messages at the top, dammit!

Any suggestions?  I just want a nice, easy, no-frills reader that makes reading and posting to the newsgroups comfortable and intuitive.  (I’m using Windows XP)

Inform 7, of course, was the solution to that particular problem, and while I’m certainly not all that strong in it yet, it has definitely made the lack of programming knowledge less of an obstacle.  It also, unfortunately, makes clearer the specific challenges of writing for IF.

If you’ve read even two entries of this blog, you already know what I am about to tell you:  I am extraordinarily verbose in my writing.  I tend to think that this works for me, and is just my particular style.  However, verbosity doesn’t lend itself all that well to IF – as much as I love to read, I can’t stand huge info dumps in games.  If a game requires me to read a long entry in a book *coughs politely at Anchorhead* I’ll probably just skip the reading and hope that I can acquire any necessary information by skimming, or through some other means.  (I should note that I actually quite enjoyed Anchorhead, even if I never was able to get past the well on my own.)

Because I’ve lost momentum on my game, especially as far as the puzzles are concerned, I figured I’d get back into the groove by finishing up some room and object descriptions.  The benefits are twofold – I’ll have a fuller game world to weave the story and puzzles into, and I’ll burn off some of this excess creative energy.  Yet, after staring at the screen for an hour, and idly cleaning up some of the existing game text, I still can’t figure out how to write the living room’s description.

You know those horrible math puzzles (which are second only to sliding puzzles in my list of Ways to Torture Jules) where you are given a 3×3 grid and a set of numbers, and have to put the numbers into the grid in such a way that both the columns and rows add up to the same number?   The creative portion of IF writing feels a lot like that to me.  These are my ideas of the key components of good game text (feel free to disagree or expand):

• Quality
• Succinctness
• Relevancy to gameplay
• Relevancy to plot

As you might imagine, it’s the second point with which I have the most trouble.  For instance, I am currently trying to write the description for a dining room.  I have this very clear, wonderful image in my mind of how the dining room looks.  I know exactly where it is in relation to other rooms, and I know the role it plays in the story.  I just don’t know how to tell the player without taking four paragraphs to do it.  I’m also struggling with how to add in important information, such as “The kitchen is to the west, and the living room is to the south” while maintaining the narrative flow.  In my 3×3 puzzle analogy, the columns add up to descriptive, the rows add up to practical, but I’m supposed to be striving for “natural” in both.  I’m half (OK, only quarter) tempted to just stick my tongue out at the player and say “It’s a dining room.  People eat here.  People cook to the west and watch TV to south.  Get over it.”

Or, I could keep plugging away at it and try to hit the right balance.  I probably have a better chance of getting past the well in Anchorhead, though

So after doing all the other things I try to do with my weekends, I finally loaded up the ol’ Inform 7 IDE and started working on my game.  To get me back in the swing of things, so to speak, I started reading through what I’d already written.  It was an interesting experience.

Strangely, what impressed me most was stuff I had done that I have since forgotten I learned how to do.  Silly little things, like actions I defined that actually worked, that had I tried to write them today, probably would have had me stumped for a while.  Go me!  Except, erm, I seem to have forgotten more than I’ve retained.

I also realized the importance of commenting my own code.  For instance, there’s this snippet:

A thing can be attached or unattached. A thing is usually unattached. A thing that is a part of something is attached.

The problem is, I have no idea why I put it in there – it doesn’t seem relevant to anything already in the game, so I can only imagine that I had some stroke of genius that told me I was going to need it “shortly” (I probably figured I’d be writing the code the next night).  So now, there’s that lonely little line, just waiting for its purpose.  I’m sure I’ll come across it some day; for now, I’ve stuck in a comment to remind myself to stick in a comment when I do remember.

It reminds me of all the writing I did when I was younger.  I was just bursting with creativity when I was a kid, constantly writing the first few pages of what I was sure was going to be a killer story.  And then I’d misplace the notebook or get sidetracked by something else, or do any of the million other things that my easily distracted self tends to do.  Some time later, I’d come across the notebook, read the stuff I’d written and think, “Wow, this is great stuff!  Now… where was I going with it?”  And I’d never remember, or I’d remember and re-forget.  Either way, in my mother’s attic there are piles and piles of notebooks with half-formed thoughts that teem with potential never to be fulfilled.

This situation – that of wanting to resume progress but fumbling to pick up the threads of where I left off -  has me scouring my memory for a term I read in Jack London’s Call of the Wild.  There was a part in the book where Buck’s owner (it’s late, his name has escaped me) has been challenged to some sort of competition to see if Buck can get the sled moving from a dead stop.  I seem to remember that the runners were frozen to the ground.  I thought the term was “fast break” or “break fast” or something to that effect, but diligent (does 45 seconds count as diligent?) searching has not confirmed this or provided me with the right term.  Anyway, that’s how it feels tonight – I feel as if I’m trying to heave a frozen sled free from its moorings.

The upside is, I am still pleased with what I have so far.  That’s good because it means I’m very likely to continue, rather than scrap it altogether and pretend that I’ll come up with a new idea tomorrow.  In the meantime, I’ll be looking for some SnoMelt and a trusty St. Bernard to get things moving again.

However, I did get some stuff done, which is good.  Even the tiniest bit of progress counts as momentum, which is crucial for me.  If the pendulum stops swinging, it will be very hard for me to get it moving again.

So the other day, as I was going over the blog (which really is as much a tool for me as it is a way for me to share my thoughts with others), I realized I had overlooked a very basic thing when coding the whole “automatically return the frog to the fuschia” bit…

As the code stood, if the player managed to carry the frog to another room before searching it, the frog would get magically returned to the fuschia.  This was fairly simple to resolve, in the end – I just coded it so that the game moves (and reports) the frog back to fuschia before leaving the room.  I also decided to add in a different way of getting the key out of the frog – in essence, rewarding different approaches to the same problem with success.

Which brings me to the main thrust of today’s post.  I have such exacting standards for the games I play.  I love thorough implementation.  My favorite games are those that build me a cool gameworld and let me tinker and explore, poking at the shadows and pulling on the edges to see how well it holds up.  A sign of a good game is one that I will reopen not to actually play through again, but to just wander around the world, taking in my surroundings.  I’ve long lamented the fact that relatively few games make this a rewarding experience – even in the best games, even slight digging tends to turn up empty, unimplemented spots.

What I am coming to appreciate is just how much work is involved in the kind of implementation I look for.  Every time I pass through a room’s description, or add in scenery objects, I realize just how easy it is to find things to drill down into.  Where there’s a hanging plant, there’s a pot, dirt, leaves, stems, wires to hang from, hooks to hang on, etc.  Obviously, unless I had all the time in the world, I couldn’t implement each of these separately, so I take what I believe to be the accepted approach and have all of the refer to the same thing.  Which, in my opinion, is fine.  I don’t mind if a game has the same responses for the stems as it does for the plant as a whole, as long as it has some sort of relevant response.  Even so, this takes a lot of work.  It might be the obsessive part of me, but I can’t help but think “What else would a person think of when looking at a hanging plant?”

Or, as I’ve come to think of it:  WWBTD?

What Would Beta Testers Do?

I’ve taken to looking at a “fully” implemented room and wondering what a player might reasonably (and in some cases unreasonably) be expected to do.  This is a bit of a challenging process for me – I already know how my mind works, so trying to step outside of my viewpoint and see it from a blind eye is hard.   I should stop for a second to note that I fully intend to have my game beta tested once it reaches that point, but the fewer obvious things there are for testers to trip over, the more time and energy they’ll have for really digging in and trying to expose the weaknesses I can’t think of.

I’ve found one resource that is both entertaining and highly informative to me:  ClubFloyd transcripts.  ClubFloyd, for the uninitiated (a group among which I count myself, of course) is a sort of cooperative gaming experience — if anyone who knows better reads this and cares to correct what may well be a horrible description, by all means!– where people get together on the IFMud and play through an IF title.  The transcripts are both amusing and revealing.  I recently read the Lost Pig transcript and it was quite interesting.  The things people will attempt to do are both astonishing and eye-opening.  In the case of Lost Pig (which, fortunately, I had already played before reading the transcript), what was even more amazing was the depth of the game itself.  I mean, people were doing some crazy ass stuff – eating the pole, lighting pants on fire, and so on.  And it *worked*.  Not only did it work, it was reversible.  You obviously need the pole, so there’s a way to get it back if, in a fit of orc-like passion, you decide to shove it in down Grunk’s throat.

Anyway, my point is, the transcripts gave me a unique perspective on the things people will try, whether in an effort to actually play the game, to amuse themselves, or to amuse others.  Definitely good stuff to keep in mind when trying to decide, say, the different ways people will try to interact with my little porcelain frog.

Other Stuff I Accomplished

So I coded in an alternate way to deal with the frog that didn’t conflict with the “standard” approach.  I also implemented a few more scenery objects.  Over the course of the next few days, I’m going to try to at least finish the descriptions of the remaining rooms so that I can wander around a bit and start really getting to the meat of it all.  I also want to work on revising the intro text a bit.  In an effort to avoid the infodumps that I so passionately hate, I think I went a little too far and came away with something a bit too terse and uninformative.  But that’s the really fun part of all of this – writing and re-writing, polishing the prose and making it all come together.

Whattaya know.  Midnight again.  I think I’m picking up on a trend here.

(She says to no one, since there’s been one hit on this blog since… it started.)