All Projects Status: January 2013
Ok, it’s time for some more status-taking and evaluation.
[W] Brickhouse — ALAN
[W] Seasons — I6/Glulx
[D] Marelithia — RenPy
[D] Dearbornistan — I6
The chart measures state and intensity of effort, with brighter colors regarded as more intense; green is working; red is blocked; brown is design; blue is maintenance; grey is stasis (no active development). My development process goes from design -> working -> maintenance. Stasis is a state for projects on the back burner or projects that I’ve decided not to update any longer.
Active project comments:
- Brickhouse — Yeah, I still need to get back to this.
- Seasons — I’m working on this on a daily basis almost. So far, spring and summer are winnable, so that’s 1/2 the seasons right there. Winter is about 80% winnable, and it should be completely winnable in a month or two. That leaves autumn, the end game, descriptions, alternate paths, music, hint guide, and the whole testing campaign.
- Marelithia — I need to get back to this.
- Dearbornistan — An elderly woman tries to survive long enough for her son to come to Dearborn, MI, and get her out. I love this concept, of playing an elderly person because the puzzles write themselves due to her physical limitations. It also folds in care, concern, and respect for elders just because you have to deal with what she deals with, and it’s gothic because your body is fighting against you. Of course I get to expose the decline and fall of yet another American city to the Islamists, too.
Completed/abandoned project comments:
- Zegrothenus was finished in 2012, so there’s no maintenance associated with that.
- I doubt I’ll ever get around to New Cat or to Burn the Koran and Die.
- I don’t think I will do Occupied either, because while it’s a target-rich environment, I can’t come up with much of a plot.
Optimization In The Fair
So what have I been up to these last two months?
I’ve spent most of my free time working on Seasons. It took me a few days to get back into it, but now I’m usually cranking out 2+ hours a night. So what progress have I made?
I started on winter first, and made puzzles work there. After tacking back and forth, I decided to finish up summer, since it was further along already. Specifically I’m in the fair area. However, in the fair, there are tickets. Tickets means handling parsing problems like ‘give 5 tickets’. That gave me a headache for a while, but it now works.
Besides that, it’s the usual stitching things together and making sure that there is a way to complete all the puzzles for that season. I’d say on that front I’m over half done.
On the horizon some is some clean-up and optimization work. I can’t afford to leave that until the game is all working, because then I will forget how certain parts work. I think this kind of program/optimize cycle is a good way to work, because when you do get done, your overall project is functional as well as lean. And leanness is important, because in a work of sufficient size, every little bit of complexity makes the entire project that much harder to understand. I’m convinced that the only way to achieve a truly complex (and engrossing) work is to have the components be as simple as they possibly can be.
Alive and Kicking
Although it may not be obvious, I’m still at work here. I just got back into Zegro after a long while of fiddling with WordPress on one of my other sites; it is due for its last update this spring — probably in April, and then I’ll be done, only a few years after the initial ill-fated release. Yeah. I’m sure I could defend myself with some high-falutin’ explanation, but I really just have too many projects going on and I’m not as efficient as I’d like to be. After that, it’s back to Seasons, and I will be migrating my project to TextMate.
All Projects Status for December 2011
It’s time to sum up where I’m at on my IF projects, mostly for my own sake so I can remind myself to get off my lazy hump.
[W] Brickhouse – ALAN
[M] Burn the Koran and Die – I7
[D] Marelithia – RenPy
[M] New Cat – I7
[D] Occupied – I6
[W] Seasons — I6/Glulx
[M] Zegrothenus – I6
The chart measures state and intensity of effort, with brighter colors regarded as more intense; green is working; red is blocked; brown is design; blue is maintenance; grey is stasis (no active development). My development process goes from design -> working -> maintenance. Stasis is a state for projects on the back burner or projects that I’ve decided not to update any longer.
Individual project comments:
- Brickhouse — Yeah, I need to get back to this.
- Burn the Koran and Die — I have some feedback I’ve been avoiding (mostly because I expect it to be obnoxious), but I doubt there’s anything left to do on this one.
- Occupied — This will be a lot of fun to write. It’s going to be a political satire of the Occupy movement. *rubbing hands together in glee* This should virtually write itself.
- Marelithia — Medieval dating sim. Ren’Py has come a long way. The big holdup for this will be the graphics, because my drawing skills are rudimentary. But I figure if I do line art and then apply a sepia filter to it, it will evoke the middle ages the way that the Avernum series does (the first four games, anyways).
- New Cat — I probably will update this again someday, but right now I don’t feel like it, due to an obnoxious review(er) on IFdb. New Cat took a good six months of my life, had no beta testers (despite several calls for them) and now the complainers show up to berate me? A hearty “screw you” to all such unhelpful people — especially when the contact info is in the game. Private emails I do a reasonably good job of responding to, but public humiliation doesn’t motivate me in the slightest.
- Zegrothenus — I have some feedback from a while back that I’m churning through. Now that I have some vacation time, I can put some effort into it.
The Frankenstein Diaries
Lately, I’ve been feeling like Dr. Frankenstein, while working on Seasons. Not to mean that I’ve been busy visiting graveyards at midnight (although that would be cool), nor that I’ve been busy stealing the dead, but rather that I’ve been hooking up all matters of distinct parts to one another. Some parts don’t match as well as I thought they would. Others must be attacked with a circular saw. Others must be finely-woven at the very depths of OR Library hackery. I’ve even found myself customizing the compiler, due to the way that I6 presents status messages (another annoyance: there’s only one way, and it includes a carriage return at the end, which prevents you from continuing status messages on the same line).
I guess that’s a common experience when you craft a large game or you craft many games, this feeling of being in an operating theatre, focused on the details. Hopefully the end result will turn out more attractive than Frankenstein, but because the effort is so gargantuan, I’ll be satisfied if it moves, talks, and can see! Along that same line, I’m up to the 21st internal revision of the code, with probably 40% more to go. And like Dr. Frankenstein, I’ve often lost heart and threw up my hands (not my lunch) in frustration. There was a period of time where I didn’t even touch the code for a year and some months.
Still, I will succeed, and it looks like probably the end of 2012, Seasons should be ready for the world. I have no idea how the beta-testing will go, but I don’t place much hope in there being many volunteers. Then there’s still the site to create, the music, the sound effects, and the hint guide (with all those lush illustrations I see in my mind’s eye). Whew. Just thinking about it all can be tiresome.
Along the way, I’ve had to heavily customize and/or create my own tools, which is more effort still, although that effort makes the remaining work easier. Hopefully some of these mods will be released when Seasons is, if not before:
- Compiler: Inform 6.3.2 patch to allow compiler messages to continue on the same line as the previous message
- Library: English.h – allow listing of just the objects on a supporter with no other verbiage
- Library: Parserm.h – allow turning off inference messages
- OR Library: Combat – a quick and dirty combat system with healing, AC, and weapons of variable damage
- OR Library: Messages_Off – ability to turn off the compilation messages for OR Lib modules
- OR Library: Physics – a harnessing of the physics extension
- Working example of Glulx game that doesn’t use Blorb
Well, back to work!
Glulx: Graphics and Sound Annoyances
It took me some time to puzzle through how exactly to create graphics and sound in Glulx for Seasons. I’m using I6 + ORLib + Gwindows which makes me insane already, right? Anyways, it turns out to my benefit that graphics and sound really aren’t touched by any of those aforementioned libraries, so there weren’t any weird conflicts to puzzle through. However, neither do any of these really cover or describe how to do sound and/or graphics (Gwindow’s optional GSound is extra-bulky and really doesn’t explain what it’s doing). So, I’m left on my own, trying to figure all this out. Long story short: I did, but not without running into five annoying things along the way.
Annoying discovery #1: MacGlulxe (for OS 8.x-9.x) does not support sound. Although that initially enraged me, I quickly accepted it as typical. I already knew that it didn’t support Unicode. I guess the designer just figured to skimp on something as unnecessary as sound, too. Sigh. This means that my design platform must be OS X, to be specific OS X 10.5, on the fastest 17″ iMac that Apple ever sold. What can I say? I <3 the screen size and the form factor.
Annoying discovery #2: How you name files is critical. Yes, I’d read Roger Firth’s Glulx page, and Doe’s Glulx for Dunces, and even Emily Short’s Glulx page (I was desperate), but it still took me a lot of trial and effort to figure this out.
In short: if you are not going to Blorb your game on the Mac, the filenames must be EXACTLY like this: PIC# and SND#, where # is a number. Also, you must start with number zero for whichever resource you use first. On Mac OS X, this means that you must do a Command-I to remove the extension from the file. On the Mac side, the resources cannot have extensions! Roger Firth’s advice was dead wrong.
As for sound, I had read that the only files supported are OGG, MOD, and 8-bit AIFF files. AIFFs definitely work, although I think that all Glulx interpreters downsample all AIFFs to 8 bits. Even if that is happening, it sounds good. You still have to do Command-I to remove the extension, though. Going forward, I’ll probably use OGG to save space.
Annoying discovery #3: Zoom doesn’t support sound. This one blew my mind. Zoom was my favorite interpreter, due to its interface and design. However, none of its Glulx interpreters support sound. Why? I don’t see any reason for Zoom to be crippled this way. That resulted in me switching over to Gargoyle for my interpreter of choice. It’s the best cross-platform interpreter out there, and it will make distro of Seasons a bit easier as well (one interpreter to rule them and all). In short, the interpreter designed for the Mac does not support Glulx sound, but the cross-platform one does. Weird.
Annoying discovery #4: No-one gives an example of a Glulx game that is not Blorbified. Yeah. Everyone assumes that your first intro to Glulx means that you will be going through all the extra steps to create a RES file and Blorb things up. Geez, people, why just not assume your intro to Calculus means that you’re playing around with Fermi’s equations, too? Talk about infuriating.
PEOPLE DO NOT LEARN by choosing the most difficult task in a new area. If you present information this way, they give up in frustration because they simply don’t have the experience or the knowledge to get anywhere. People learn by mastering smaller tasks, which gives them the confidence and understanding to master the difficult task.
What I’m going to do is to put the sample game that I created out on the Web complete with a sound/graphics resource so that you can compile it to Glulx and it will run — no questions asked. Then you can see exactly what you have to do to make it work.
Annoying discovery #5: The best Blorb tools are Windows-only. There is no tool that allows you to give your resources names other than SND# and PIC# on the Mac side. The only reasonable tool that I found for creating Blorb files was gBlorb. It does work and it is cross-platform, but your source code still can’t use identifiers like “autumn_sound”, like Doe does in Just a Dream. Sigh.
Now someone will say, “There is source code available!” Yes, and if you’ve ever tried to compile source code, then you know the nightmare that awaits you. You can spend days setting up your environment and building the thing only to have it fail due to an assumption in the code that prevents it from compiling on your platform. I’ve been there many times, which is why those words don’t work on me!
Still, I threw a few minutes at it. iBlorb needs dos.h, which is a collection of DOS functions that can’t be ported to other platforms, unless “porting” = “write equivalent OS-dependent code from scratch.” Loverly.
That leaves cBlorb, which as part of I7, is wholly undocumented. I guess I’ll see if I can deduce how it blorbifies a game with pictures and sound and go from there. Sigh.
Introcomp 2011 Reviews, In General
This experience is why I don’t care too much about reviews of my works. If I listened to these people or took what they said to heart, I shudder to think of what would become of me. Fortunately, such attacks no longer have the potency that they once had. And although I have given severe reviews of games in the past, I don’t recall ever making it a personal attack against the author.
Perhaps it is a juvenile mentality; perhaps it is just plain evil; perhaps both. In any case, I do find it interesting that this round of reviews includes full-scale profane/obscene attacks, and suggestions to kill myself. Yeah, I kid you not. Welcome to the world of IF. By the way, we seem to have a problem retaining authors — anyone know why? (I thought twice about linking to these people, but as I just posted about linking, I can at least be charitable.)
Now, if I had released a full game on the order of The Minimalist Game, such might be deserved. Of course, this was Introcomp and the game was an introduction, not a finished release. If the game was unplayable or unwinnable, again, I would expect some chagrin and angst. Or if the game was hideously offensive in some way, shape, or form, again, I would expect some hue and cry.
But haters will be haters, I suppose, and trying to intuit the reasons for such is probably futile. In any case, I haven’t found a listing for the winners/losers in the IntroComp, but even if I don’t place, my deadline starts now. I have one year to finish this.
IntroComp 2011
I don’t like contests, but I’ve always respected Jacqueline, who runs the IntroComp contests. The contest darted into my mind, and since I had heard nothing of it, I went out to the website. Turns out that the deadline for declaration is May 31st, just before midnight.
I’m going to enter.
My dilemna: which game should I enter?
Seasons? I could really put some pressure on myself and enter this one, hoping against hope that I could get it done in a year (which I strongly doubt, unless I became much more focused than I am now — it’s possible, but probably not likely). That would be a big boot in the butt in terms of motivation, though, I admit it. There’s enough done for an intro anyways, and I don’t have any desire to submit it in any other contests.
Advantages: Enough material for an intro, easily. Little work to do.
Disadvantages: May not be able to complete in a year.
Brickhouse? This would be a challenge, since it’d be my first game in ALAN. Ooh, that rhymed. I’ve always thought of this game as being split into scenes in some way, so there’d be a natural breaking point that wouldn’t feel fake or artificial.
Advantages: I think I could finish this in a year.
Disadvantages: Doing this would put Seasons behind schedule. ALAN is an unknown language and I might hit snags that would prevent me from finishing.
Lyissa? I just came up with this game a few days ago. It’d explore the uneasy relationship a growing man has with sexuality and self-control. I’ve been kicking around this idea in story-form for a long, long time, but I’m just not sure how interactive it would be. It might end up as just a textdump story with a few decision points, but I’d hate myself if I did that. The only thing lamer would be if I threw in keywords. Ugh.
Advantages: I have the intro scene in my mind, so it’ll be easy to knock out.
Disadvantages: No idea if this will make a good game, and I hate to litter the IF landscape with unfinished works. Also, I am leery of dealing with sexual content — even in a pure way — in IF. I don’t want to drag anyone down, but it will feel really good to provide a counterpoint here.
I guess I could enter all three, but that’s pretty high on the masochism scale. Seasons would be the best. Maybe I could enter two instead of three — Seasons and Lyissa. Ok, I’m going to enter Seasons and we’ll see about Lyissa.
Introcomp 2011, here I come!
Projects…
Ok, here I am again, making excuses for not working on IF. I’ve got a few things in the hopper and maybe if I write them down, that will embarrass me enough so that I don’t weasel out of them.
Already-released Projects
————
New Cat v2 (I7) – the post-release bugfix session
Zegrothenus v5 (I6) – some very detailed feedback that I’ve been working on slowly, in bits and pieces.
New Projects
———–
Edge of the Cliff (ALAN?) – Satire on keyword-driven games
Brickhouse (ALAN) – Modern corporate horror
Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan! Hahah.
Stalled Projects
————
Seasons (I6) – yeah, I know.
New Cat is Released!
At long last, after midnight, from my tired fingers, a new game escapes into the unknown larger world. Seriously, though, this is a wistful, slice-of-life, daydreamy kind of game told through the eyes of the new cat of the household. If she explores the new world, can she get a name?
Download the Zblorb file here, and enjoy!
P.S. I’m debating whether to release the source code to this game. That deliberation deserves its own post, though.
