JayIsGames Contest: I am So In
Yeah, I had posted earlier that I would be participating in the JayIsGames IF contest (over here), but it’s taken all that time for me to come up with a good idea. Yeah, a one-room contest with the theme of escape is not as easy to do as I thought, but I prevailed and will unleash my game! Mhu hah hah! I also came up with some other cool ideas that had a small number of rooms but didn’t really fit the theme, and at least one really cool idea that fit the number of rooms requirement, but wouldn’t hit the T rating. Think lots of blood, not perviness.
And oh, the name of the game? Zegrothenus. Repeat the word slowly over and over, as in sentences like this one: Zegrothenus will totally destroy in ‘10! Zegrothenus owns your free time. Zegrothenus…well, you get the idea.
And why did I decide to enter a contest, given my feelings on contests? Two answers: this contest features real prizes and it’s not held by the insular IF community. The latter makes all the difference in the world and the latter is nice to have.
I am SO in.
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Collapsing Complexity
I’ve been pondering something lately, as to how complex designs tend to resolve into simpler forms over time. While the human mind does have an upper limit on the amount of complexity it can accept, it’s not that I’m getting stupider as I work on Seasons. It’s not that I’m getting lazier, either; it’s that looking at the code, I can see not only that some functionality just is not necessary (see here), but that what needs to be done can be done in a less convoluted fashion.
The complexity of any coding project generally follows the life-cycle of a star. As a star is born, grows into a red giant, and then collapses into a dwarf star, so a project’s complexity starts low, rises to high, and then abates to some degree or another. I think many programmers do not spend enough time on their projects, and release them before the final stage is reached. As a result bugs and worldview inconsistencies abound.
If you look at many commercial projects, you’ll find the programmers figuratively out of breath and celebrating as they cross the finish line: the code has been delivered by the deadline! Yes, the project works (mostly), the date has been hit (so management gets their bonuses), but the application is simply not as good as it could be; it is still a red giant. When you have to patch or extend the code, or support the project, you end up spending an inordinate amount of time making it work or explaining it because it is still overly complex.
In IF, the support staff is usually the author, so what happens? Either the game is a buggy junk pile and further releases must be created to fix problems, or the author abandons the game and decides not to fix the problems at all. The end result is a game that’s not as good as it could be.
The only thing that allows us to reach that final stage is the passage of time. Apparently the mind needs enough time to analyze the deeper patterns in something fashioned, or repeated exposure yields up the glaring complexities; most likely it is both. Both writing and IF design must be “edited cold” or otherwise they are not mature. I think of the stage of maturation as an aged wine; you can drink wines before their time, but you miss the experience of a good wine. Incidentally, this is why Speed IF almost always produces a horrible game.
So in short, a good motto for IF designers (and programmers as a whole) would be to release no project before its time. Let it reach full bloom and then unfold that beauty to the world.
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Failing By Over-design
I’ve since forgotten where, but I read an article about designing electronic gadgets that plumbed Apple’s design methodology. What they concluded was profound: most electronic gadgets are over-designed. They have too many features and as a result instead of doing one thing (or a few) things well, they do many things with brilliant mediocrity. This state of woe is not exclusive to such gear, of course; for years, mid-fi has suffered from what my dad once termed “buttonitis” — a superabundance of buttons, whose nature tried to convince potential buyers of its functionality, instead of playing music well. With overdesigned products, quality suffers, complexity increases, customer satisfaction goes out the window, and customer loyalty is nonexistent.
IF is the same way. You can create a huge stinking mess of fail by over-designing your game. Take for instance, Seasons. In one of the seasons, there is a barn populated by barn cats. These cats are not critical to the plot, but are just present to add to the realism of the game. Despite that, I was determined to create a class Cat that could automatically create cats as needed, make each cat have a unique description (well, uniquely-selected from an array of descriptions), have the cats do different things every so often, move them around, and so forth. I was even working on a way to have the cats referred to as “a/an” if more than one cat was in a room at the same time; otherwise, the cat would be referred to as “the” cat. Overdesigned? Whoo yeah.
It’s more important to have minor things do their job well as minor things than to spend days of work making them nearly simulationist. Audiences will appreciate nice accents of color (which is what the cats really are supposed to be) but won’t be impressed if scenery can do interesting things when the rest of the game works half-well. When you think about it, you only have so much time to make a game, create the help, distribute it, and gin up interest in it. Do you really want your game to be years late to the market because you had to code an imp statue that could act out lines from every play of Shakespeare’s?
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The Cathedral Builders (IF Wiki finis)
I got the folks over at the IF Wiki to remove my real name. There are a lot of reasons this brings me angst, but at the core of it, it’s because I really don’t want the attention. I don’t want the spotlight. I have no desire for fame, even the droplets of fame that being on a wiki in interactive fiction can bring.
I have had the constant waking dream of being a builder of cathedrals — great men who did great things, but who never signed their names to their creations. That has always struck a deep chord with me, and that is what I want to be online. Their rewards were eternal and their names are known to the Great Architect. They were rewarded in secret for what they did without names. In a similar way, the private praise of those whom I have helped or whom I help is more than enough; if that were not present, just knowing that I helped would be enough.
I won’t fight a public listing of my works and contributions because I think that is “fair use” to borrow a journalistic term. I think there is a limit to what you can ask for without looking like a real tool, and that’s it right there. In any case, this skirmish is over.
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Return of the Stalinists (IFWiki Sux Redux)
Privacy-stealers annoy me to no end; they are vile human beings, like little miniature dwarves, chipping away at your sanity and hauling away pieces of it until you are nothing more than a bunch of raw nerve endings. Paparazzi and many journalists form these ranks. Oh, and also, keepers of the IF Wiki.
Looks like the little Stalinists are at it again. They not only deleted the work I did under my other ID, but purged the ID completely from the system, and put my real name up there instead of my pseudonym. Who did this? I could nail down the individual person, hiding behind their own anonymous ID, but what would it matter? It makes no difference to know the name of the dwarf that did this or that; they are all have the same worldview and share the the mindset of the rapist.
In the blogosphere, there is something of a code of honor. One of its tenants is that you never expose someone who wishes to remain anonymous, for you never know what their situation is. Could they be hiding from someone? Could they be located in an repressive country? Do they want to keep their professional life and personal life separated? Do they just like their privacy? In that world, you don’t reveal the real name of even someone who taunts you and defecates on your blog. I’ve been there and revealing their names, where they worked, and so forth was something I would never do. It crossed my mind only a handful of times, if that.
Yet here, the sanctimonious, and freaking holier-than-thou Stalinists have decreed “no respect but for the Politburo”. Very well. I’ve logged in to their system and will blank my page over and over again until it stays down, or they figure out how to stop Tor (in case they try banning my IP), or I get them taken off the Net. I’m taking this fight straight into the dragon’s maw.
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Patted On the Head Again (Inform 7 Docs)
While working on New Cat, I was curious how to do a one-time room description; in Inform 6, I used the visited attribute. How could I do it in Inform 7?
As it turns out, I’m still not sure. I searched through the documentation provided by the IDE, and the results returned by the search were completely unhelpful. The closest thing I got was a page that talked about how to set the initial descriptions of items, but which (horribly unhelpfully) noted that you can’t do that with a room because a room doesn’t have an initial attribute. And how was this noted? You guessed it — with the usual pat on the head, the “good dog” kind of insulting, demeaning language. Yes, the personality of the writer (whom we all know) is shining though. Freaking thanks. So what are the properties of a room? Are they the same as in I6? If so, how do I manipulate them in I7?
Fifteen minutes of looking didn’t turn up an answer to any of these questions. Ok, fine, whatever. I went out there to find other manuals and apparently no-one else has addressed this issue either, which I find nothing short of amazing.
I guess it’s up to me to write an Inform 6 -> Inform 7 technical guide which explains how to do the things in I7 that you used to do in I6.
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The August Doldrums
Seasons is still going, although not as quickly as I would like. Right now I’m stitching together summer, which as far as bare-bones plot goes is roughly at 60%. I know what the other puzzles are, I just have to complete them and make it winnable. I’m not sure what to do about thirst in this season. I’ll probably take it out. I might take it out of the game completely. Although it’s realistic, it’s one of those things that might be too real in that it distracts from the enjoyment of playing a game.
New Cat I haven’t touched since I started it a few weeks back. The ideas are still in my mind, but I’ve been distracted by my angsty social/political life, I guess.
Brickhouse is moving forward in starts and fits. I’ve got the atmosphere down cold. I just figured out how to do timers in ALAN last night, so the first scene should be done tonight. Then I’m on to objects in the first few rooms. It’s fun learning a new language and wrapping your brain around a different perception of the world.
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The Hands of the Chloroform Crowd
The status quo is often worshiped as something to maintain at all costs by the residents of small communities online; reality can also descend into this unthinking stasis, but it has the advantage of multi-channel communication and the fact that it is real and thus inescapable, to pull against such tendencies. Not so online where involvement, duty, and responsibility in any community are abstract first and usually wholly absent. Woe be to any who challenge the maddening wisdom of the crowd! It does not have to be this way, but in an immoral world, the only virtue is tranquility. Not utility; not freedom; not creativity; only the saccharine milk of false peace. Anyone who thus ripples the waters is the enemy.
The hands of the chloroform crowd will reach out for you and choke off your air. They will trash your house if you let them; they will hijack your threads; they will bury your reviews; they will wage a long, steady war against you like insane ducks, nibbling a little day by day, month by month, and year by year. The inferior spirits whose battle cries are “sameness!” and whom stand for nothing more than feeding the various cults of personality, inhabit every crevice in small communities. Like trolls, they may have once been thinking, once had the ability to discern moral truths, but have blinded themselves to history and have degenerated into lesser beings through endless repetitions of their empty slogans.
Most cannot withstand this Chinese water torture, and my mercies go out to them. It takes some kind of determination to press on through the sea of assailants, and I think it wholly impossible unless directed by the Divine. The lure of the warm earth-lair, the easy hemlock of “go along, get along” has seduced many to their deaths, allowing the reign of the imperfect to crush the rest underfoot. What reward awaits an endless resistance?
There are several, but chief among them is the sweet reward of integrity — of sticking to your guns and never giving up.
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