Can I make money by writing IF?
Julian Arnold
Now I know some of you have done a bit of research and have maybe some
experience of this (For instance, at least two David's). Could anyone who
has please e-mail me with a bit of information (is/isn't it possible? why?).
You don't have to be called Dave. This also applies to authors of shareware
games.
--
Jools Arnold jo...@arnod.demon.co.uk
C.A. McCarthy
Can you make money by writing IF? Hahahaha! That's an interesting
concept.
"Elvis people are nicer people than the people who laugh at Elvis People."
David Thomas - "Media Priests Of The Big Lie"
Gareth Rees
> I'm revamping the FAQ. A new section is "Can I make money by writing
> IF?".
The person to talk to is Graham Cluly, who produced a couple of
adventure games under the name "Humbug Software" and apparantly managed
to sell several thousand shareware registrations.
If you grep the rec.arts.int-fiction archives for him, you'll find some
posts from him describing how he did it.
However, the market has changed. When companies like Sierra can
allocate a $4 million budget to games like the recent "Phantasmagoria",
with more than 50 people working full time on the project, what hope do
amateurs have?
--
Gareth Rees
Casper Kvan Clausen
>However, the market has changed. When companies like Sierra can
>allocate a $4 million budget to games like the recent "Phantasmagoria",
>with more than 50 people working full time on the project, what hope do
>amateurs have?
That they are not bound by having to come up with state-of-the-art
technology, so they can in fact concentrate on making a decent storyline.
Most 'professional' adventuregames today completely suck at being
adventures. Some of them are good movies/cartoons (i.e. Full Throttle), but
adventures they are not. What the big companies don't understand - or simply
son't care about - is that a textual NPC which acts and reacts naturally is
much more believable (and enjoyable) than digitized bad actors who reuse
the same replies and sequences after their lives have been fundamentally
changed.
Of course there is the 'minor' problem of convincing the public of this
fact. The sad truth is that more and more people don't know the joy of
reading a good book, but watch ever more tv. And then it's only natural that
they opt for big, shiny 'interactive' movie-type things - often with a bad
storyline, bad actors and no actual control - instead of much more enjoyable
IF.
And I don't think anyone can do anything about this (d)evolution. I'm
continually shocked when speaking with people just 3 or 4 years younger than
me (that would be 17-18 yrs old) who have never read ANYthing outside of a
classroom. I even see some of this tendency among friends of mine who are my
age or older.
So my conclusion must be that IF-writers have one hope: That 'people' will
tire of glitzy stuff with little or no interaction and story.
Fat chance :(
Mnarf,
Kvan.
--
kv...@diku.dk (Casper Kvan Clausen) | What do you call 200 Americans blown up
| in a Federal building?
|
http://www.diku.dk/students/kvan/ | - A start.
David Baggett
Gareth Rees <gd...@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>The person to talk to is Graham Cluly, who produced a couple of
>adventure games under the name "Humbug Software" and apparantly managed
>to sell several thousand shareware registrations.
I think it would be a huge mistake to assume that model is still valid
today. We (Adventions) based a lot of our optimism about the market for IF
on Graham's experiences, and found that with a comparable product in a more
portable form and at a lower price, we couldn't get even a fraction of the
interest he did.
There is no commercial market for all-text IF now. And the rapid
evaporation of the text IF market doesn't seem so strange when you take
into account the incredible growth of the web, and the public's infatuation
with so-called "virtual reality". Regardless of whether people know what
"hypermedia" really are, they sure do think they're cool.
>When companies like Sierra can allocate a $4 million budget to games like
>the recent "Phantasmagoria", with more than 50 people working full time on
>the project, what hope do amateurs have?
Financially, none. But I think that single-author forms will always have a
place in the arts. "Art by committee" has a lot working against it.
Dave Baggett
__
d...@ai.mit.edu
"Mr. Price: Please don't try to make things nice! The wrong notes are *right*."
--- Charles Ives (note to copyist on the autograph score of The Fourth of July)
Branko Collin
gd...@cl.cam.ac.uk (Gareth Rees) writes:
>
>Julian Arnold <jo...@arnod.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> I'm revamping the FAQ. A new section is "Can I make money by writing
>> IF?".
>
>adventure games under the name "Humbug Software" and apparantly managed
>to sell several thousand shareware registrations.
>
>posts from him describing how he did it.
>
>allocate a $4 million budget to games like the recent "Phantasmagoria",
>with more than 50 people working full time on the project, what hope do
>amateurs have?
we don't have to pay 50 employees, we don't have to worry about deadlines,
we don't have to worry about loss of consistency due to a more than
manageable number of authors for one game, we don't have to shun
niche markets, we don't have to put thousands of dollars in marketing,
we don't have to care for every machine in every configuration.
I guess there's more things that work in our advantage.
Mind you, I have never sold a single game in my life (never produced
one either), but I do know that working on a small scale does have
its advantages.
.......................................................................
. Branko Collin . Error unknown occurred. .
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james reese
>>When companies like Sierra can allocate a $4 million budget to games like
>>the recent "Phantasmagoria", with more than 50 people working full time on
>>the project, what hope do amateurs have?
To which David Baggett <d...@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu> replied:
>Financially, none. But I think that single-author forms will always have a
>place in the arts. "Art by committee" has a lot working against it.
I agree completely that IF is no longer (if it ever was) a financially-
viable business. For all of the reasons previously mentioned (rising
illiteracy, the proliferation of graphically-oriented quick fixes that pass
as entertainment these days, the Web, etc), IF remains confined to a narrow
niche market, and very likely will remain there. The financial gains for
an IF shareware author are abysmal, usually not even sufficient to cover
the costs of an inexpensive shareware platform/language such as TADS. The
labor that goes into one of these games is phenomenal, and, frankly, the
returns are just not there.
The only reason I can see for further IF being produced is a love of the
genre and a tremendous desire to produce a game of one's own. However, without
sufficient compensation (monetary and otherwise), this will soon die out too.
I wrote VERITAS for the love of producing my own piece of IF; with so little
feedback, and certainly no significant financial recompense, I have given up
on a sequel, and have decided to channel my efforts into something that
might be more worthwhile.
It's an unfortunate state of affairs, but nonetheless reality as I see
it.
Richard Thieme
plastic, compared with even the best pictorial image games. I hope too I
am not mired in an archaic way of structuring reality, text-based to the
core, but I believe the great IF application will still be written (not
that there haven't been some good ones). In July's Wired I had a short
piece called "in search of the grail," how my sense of possibilities was
changed forever during an epiphany while playing Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy. My insight was that how we frame reality, how we frame
ourselves, how we hold ourselves as a possibility for action in the
world, is structured by the multiple horizons disclosed by interactive
text. The WWW is a graphical representation of that reality.
It's impossible to make money writing poetry too (in the main) but some
great poetry is still being written. I think IF is still evolving and the
best is yet to come.
Magnus Olsson
>In article <GDR11.95N...@stint.cl.cam.ac.uk>,
>Gareth Rees <gd...@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>>adventure games under the name "Humbug Software" and apparantly managed
>>to sell several thousand shareware registrations.
>
>today.
Indeed the market has changed a lot. An important factor is that the
LTOI releases had the unfortunate side effect of devaluing IF games
greatly. "If I can buy real Infocom games for a couple of dollars
each, why should I pay $20 for a (supposedly inferior) shareware
product?".
Also it should be noted that (at least according to my sources :-))
Graham Cluley's games are crippleware. Some puzzles are impossible to
solve without he hints, which you can only getby registering. Today,
such a scheme would be far less effective, since pople would just ask
for hints on rec.games.int-fiction.
Magnus
Brendon Wyber
james reese (jre...@leland.Stanford.EDU) wrote:
: The only reason I can see for further IF being produced is a
: love of the genre and a tremendous desire to produce a game of one's
: own. However, without sufficient compensation (monetary and otherwise),
: this will soon die out too.
I agree, self gratification really is the only rewards for IF now. Money
is out of the question. There are too many good "free" games out there.
It's neat to get feed-back about your game. I get a big kick seeing THEATRE
in the top 40 download charts. Thanks guys for voting for it.
: I wrote VERITAS for the love of producing my own piece of IF; with so little
: feedback, and certainly no significant financial recompense, I have given up
: on a sequel, and have decided to channel my efforts into something that
: might be more worthwhile.
: It's an unfortunate state of affairs, but nonetheless reality as I see
: it.
I have to disagree with this. VERITAS may have been considerably more
popular if you had downloaded some instructions. Instead when you get the
game and run it, it has no introduction whatsoever and you find yourself
in the somewhat cliche college dorm.
My advice would be add some introductionary text and re-release the game.
But what a while until the Jigsaw rush has died down otherwise it will be
buried. Marketing and timing of release date are just as important to IF
and it is to the movies.
--
Be seeing you,
Brendon Wyber Computer Services Centre,
b.w...@csc.canterbury.ac.nz University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
"Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."
C.A. McCarthy
>Howdy,
>james reese (jre...@leland.Stanford.EDU) wrote:
>: The only reason I can see for further IF being produced is a
>: love of the genre and a tremendous desire to produce a game of one's
>: own. However, without sufficient compensation (monetary and otherwise),
>: this will soon die out too.
I disagree. Love of the genre is obviously the primary driving force
behind producing these games. The financial aspect, or lack thereof
(which better suits the subject) is at least frustrating to most IF
authors (shareware - not freeware). A good case in point are the two
Dave's over at Adventions. Between them they have produced some of
the finest games in recent years, on a par with and often better than
anything Infocom ever gave us, and from a recent thread on this group
it is quite evident that they are making no money at all (which is a
damn shame, though I am guilty of not registering their games). This
doesn't seem to deter them in the slightest. I don't think anyone
really expects to be compensated anymore. Rather they would LIKE to
be compensated.
>I agree, self gratification really is the only rewards for IF now. Money
>is out of the question. There are too many good "free" games out there.
>It's neat to get feed-back about your game. I get a big kick seeing THEATRE
>in the top 40 download charts. Thanks guys for voting for it.
It's even neater to get money AND good feedback, but I fear the golden
days of the early 80's (where I made several thousand pounds for my
efforts) are gone, so we will have to make do with the "legions of
slathering female groupies" as Dave Leary so eloquently put it.
>: I wrote VERITAS for the love of producing my own piece of IF; with so little
>: feedback, and certainly no significant financial recompense, I have given up
>: on a sequel, and have decided to channel my efforts into something that
>: might be more worthwhile.
>: It's an unfortunate state of affairs, but nonetheless reality as I see
>: it.
I enjoyed VERITAS. I don't think the feedback should matter. If you
are an IF author and have a tale to tell, then tell it and let the
begrudgers be damned.
Richard Thieme
we're talking about IF as played on a monitor, which limits the audience
to those who don't mind hours in front of the screen. We're habituated
to it. IF is also puzzle-oriented, i.e. often logical (giving a lot of
leeway here) rather than deeply evocative. It's clever. Thoughtful.
imagine the genre though a few years hence on a portable unit that the
casual user can enjoy as much as a paperback book - something with the
appeal of paper, the feel of it perhaps, but an easily held, easily
manipulated folding screen that's voice activated so no keyboard. In
short, let's not limit our imaginations to the current (passing)
structures of symbol manipulation.
now imagine a "game" that proceeds intuitively through dialog and
interaction of complex characters, deepening as it progresses,
striking the right balance between length of scene and enticement to the
next scene, the implicit complexity of the game lending itself to the
maze-like complexity of human beings and their interaction.
don't sell the genre short, even if it's being kept alive for the moment
in a quiet corner of cyberspace. The potential of the form is explosive.
just as movie attendence is greater, not less, with VCRs, and book
publishing is more rather than less alive after PCs, the VR machines will
produce one kind of art, IF another. Radio was written off as dead a long
time ago and look at it go ...
Gerry Kevin Wilson
Richard Thieme <rth...@mixcom.com> wrote:
>don't sell the genre short, even if it's being kept alive for the moment
>in a quiet corner of cyberspace. The potential of the form is explosive.
I don't mean to come down too hard. But having just erased a 6 page
rant/bitch/moan, I figure I'm entitled to a paragraph long one. Don't
hold your breath. Look around you. This is it, dude. There are a few
hundred hardcore fans left. Text adventures are going exactly nowhere.
Ask Dave Baggett. Two years ago I was arguing your viewpoint. Text
adventures, like the Mexican peso, have been devalued. They are no
longer economically feasible in any form. I hope to just recoup my
investment on Avalon and flee the genre, skin intact. 2 years. 2 lousy
stinking years I been writing that game. And I'll be THRILLED, ECSTATIC
to sell 15 frigging copies. That's a sum profit of jack nothing. Sure,
the hobby aspect (SPAG, the IF Contest) is fun, but the game writing is a
waste of time unless you feel it too is a hobby. As for writing
book-length texts about writing text adventures, well, let's just say I'd
rather have the time back that I spent writing that IF Authorship Guide.
Basically, the well of enthusiasm within me on the topic of text
adventures has nothing but dirt in it anymore. My current ambition is to
move to New Zealand and herd sheep. At least that way I'll never have to
see another one of those godforsaken DOOM/SF2 clones. No more Ultima
8s. No more nothing.
--
<~~~~~E~~~G~~~SIGHT~UNSEEN~~~LOST~IN~THE~FOG~~~CYBER~CHESS~~~SPAG~~~|~~~~~~~>
< V R I O Software. We bring words to life! | ~~\ >
< T "We at Vertigo apologize for the delay. Sorry." | /~\ | >
<_WATCH for Avalon in Oct. 1995!______w...@uclink.berkeley.edu__|_\__/__>
Adam J. Thornton
Graham Nelson is giving away his development system and his games.
_Curses_ was easily the equal of _Sorceror_. I do believe, having played
it top to bottom twice, that _Jigsaw_ may very well be as fine as
_Trinity_. I paid $45 for _Trinity_ when it appeared and never regretted a
cent of it.
If Graham charged money--which at this point, he could--maybe other authors
could too. But as it is, few people are going to pay for a game when they
can get one that is very probably better (Graham has more talent than
anyone I know of currently writing IF; and that's not to slight anyone
else--GKW's _Avalon_, when it's done, *if* it's done, ahem, is going to be
a terrific game; _John's Firewitch_ was really neat; _UU0_ and _Rylvania_
are fine games as well; but Nelson has a gift not just for plotting and
prose, but for knowing when to quote the classics) for free.
Adam
--
ad...@phoenix.princeton.edu | Viva HEGGA! | Save the choad! | 64,928 | Fnord
"Double integral is also the shape of lovers curled asleep":Pynchon | Linux
Thanks for letting me rearrange the chemicals in your head. | Team OS/2
You can have my PGP passphrase when you pry it from my cold, dead brain.
David Baggett
post in the world. Apologies in advance if it bores you!]
I confess that I've been of two minds about IF lately. On the one hand,
we've seen more new, good games released in the past year than in the
previous two or three. And there's been a noticeable improvement in the
quality and quantity of IF criticism.
But there have been other changes too. I've been reading this group since
1990. I get the sense that the readership of the group has narrowed since
then, and that this group (collectively -- at least the minority who post)
has become fairly insular. I'm sensing a lot more definitions of IF
in opposition to the mainstream, like this one:
In article <49ht2q$23...@thor.cmp.ilstu.edu>,
Christopher E. Forman <cef...@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu> wrote:
>Most of the gaming community is stupid, allowing themselves to be coerced
>with pretty-looking pictures that they're too damn lazy to imagine
>themselves. We've got something better here. Text games are genuine art.
Graphical IF is very relevant to text IF. (So is static fiction, which
isn't discussed much here either.)
In my opinion, there are many excellent graphics games out there. I've
cited Full Throttle before. I think it's a step in the right direction for
graphical IF. No, the puzzles aren't that hard. The setting is not
extreme. The characters are not wonderfully novel. But it's a solid work
of interactive fiction, and it makes good use both of a graphical interface
and of pretty pictures and good voice acting.
Why can't IF just be good because it's good? Not because it *doesn't* have
graphics (which therefore must suck), or because it's not *too easy*, or
because it *doesn't require a Pentium to run*.
Text IF is just a different way of using words to tell a story. I don't
think you need puzzles, and I'm sure that though most of our games are
almost structurally indistinguishable (!) we've barely scratched the
surface.
Chris, I hope I am not misremembering here, but didn't you write the MST3K
game? I thought that was a brilliant little work. It captured the essence
of the show, but it did something much more significant as well: it showed
that you can have more than one voice in an IF work. You've got the game
telling you what's going on (which raises a somewhat interesting point:
what's that voice coming from -- a program, Matt Barringer's digital ghost,
an entity you must imagine is inside your computer, or your computer
itself?), and then you've got these robots yattering all the time, giving
you a completely different POV --- and it works!
I found it somewhat disheartening that no one touted these aspects of your
work. (Did I miss the relevant messages?) It's one reason I say that
perhaps we've gotten a bit narrowly focused of late. A game does not have
to be novella-sized or especially puzzling to be a fine piece of IF. Works
that break these traditions should (IMHO) prompt discussion just because
they do so!
Since there is no commercial potential for text IF, it should have no rules
authors must strictly adhere to. What is the point of limiting yourself
when so few people will reade your work anyway?!
>Keep the art form going. Someday it'll get the recognition it's deserved
>for years. Remember, genius is never understood in its own time.
I don't have such high hopes, but even if this stuff is all totally
ignored in 20 years, we can enjoy it now, right?
My own random thoughts:
I'd like to see more IF experiments like yours. My advice to authors is:
write whatever weird thing comes to mind. Work hard to make it conform to
your vision, but don't worry about what the typical IF fan will think.
Reviewers: there's merit in new forms, even if they aren't ultimately very
successful. Many people here have mentioned this in the context of
_Suspended_, so it's hardly a foreign concept.
Alison Scott
>Indeed the market has changed a lot. An important factor is that the
>LTOI releases had the unfortunate side effect of devaluing IF games
>greatly. "If I can buy real Infocom games for a couple of dollars
>each, why should I pay $20 for a (supposedly inferior) shareware
>product?".
>
>Also it should be noted that (at least according to my sources :-))
>Graham Cluley's games are crippleware. Some puzzles are impossible to
>solve without he hints, which you can only getby registering. Today,
>such a scheme would be far less effective, since pople would just ask
>for hints on rec.games.int-fiction.
I'm truly a lurker on this group - I didn't ought to be here because I
don't ever plan to actually write if. [If anyone's interested, I lurk
because I find the process of designing games fascinating, and it's
something that I'd do if only I had infinitely more time.] However,
I'd point out that I'd have registered Curses if it had been shareware
rather than freeware, and I know I'm not alone in this. Maybe I should
send Graham a tenner?
Although a crippled game isn't really an option, I would have thought
that a viable approach would be to release about half the game as
shareware - "if you're enjoying this, then register and get the
remaining puzzles and the endgame." Certainly not as a viable strategy
for making a million, but sufficient (I would have thought) for a
useful hobby income.
Also, I keep harping on about this, but infocom-compatible games *are*
state of the art on the Psion 3a; simply the best-designed games of
any type available. I suspect this is true for a number of other odd
platforms as well. I simply don't have the option of playing modern
games that are all style and no substance on the Tube, and until I do,
games for the z machine represent the best available option.
--
Alison Scott ali...@fuggles.demon.co.uk
Christopher E. Forman
: I don't mean to come down too hard. But having just erased a 6 page
: rant/bitch/moan, I figure I'm entitled to a paragraph long one. Don't
: hold your breath. Look around you. This is it, dude. There are a few
: hundred hardcore fans left. Text adventures are going exactly nowhere.
Is that so? Look at the attention garnered by great games like "Curses"
and "Jigsaw." The former has already surpassed the popularity of the average
Infocom game, and I expect the latter to do the same. True, such games
tend to be the exception rather than the rule, but your complete refusal to
even acknowledge them is a great disservice to the entire I-F community.
Look around us. We've got newsgroups, 'zines, I-F programming, an archive,
and a lot of hard-working fans who are doing everything they can to get
people back. Doesn't that mean anything at all to you? Have you honestly
come to despise this form of gaming that much?
: Ask Dave Baggett. Two years ago I was arguing your viewpoint. Text
: adventures, like the Mexican peso, have been devalued. They are no
: longer economically feasible in any form. I hope to just recoup my
: investment on Avalon and flee the genre, skin intact. 2 years. 2 lousy
: stinking years I been writing that game. And I'll be THRILLED, ECSTATIC
: to sell 15 frigging copies. That's a sum profit of jack nothing. Sure,
: the hobby aspect (SPAG, the IF Contest) is fun, but the game writing is a
: waste of time unless you feel it too is a hobby. As for writing
: book-length texts about writing text adventures, well, let's just say I'd
: rather have the time back that I spent writing that IF Authorship Guide.
It's truly sad that you consider the time you've spent on I-F to have been
wasted. Personally, I've enjoyed every moment I've spent on these groups.
All the discussions, texts, criticisms, etc. have really helped me learn
something, and I've been able to talk with a lot of very cool people here
about a topic that I happen to greatly enjoy. Who cares that it doesn't
represent 90% of the computer gaming community, or even 10% for that matter?
Most of the gaming community is stupid, allowing themselves to be coerced
with pretty-looking pictures that they're too damn lazy to imagine
themselves. We've got something better here. Text games are genuine art.
Why do you think they still exist? Look at the LTOIs and Activision's
recent collections -- these games are 10-15 years old, and they're _still_
being sold and played. How many 10-15 year old graphics games have you seen
on store shelves? For that matter, how many 3-5 year old graphics games are
still out there? Very few. And why? Because graphics become obsolete.
They get old and outdated, and look clunky. The written word has been
around for centuries. It'll _never_ become outdated.
From your post, I gather that you _expected_ massive sales from "Avalon."
That's probably a large part of the reason you're so frustrated right now.
I've never expected to make a large profit off "The Windhall Chronicles,"
just perhaps a small sum, a return on the time invested in my hobby. I-F
_has_ to be a hobby. It's an art form. True art is rarely profitable
nowadays. I don't like it any more than you do, but it's the truth and
there's nothing you can do to change it, so stop trying to fight it every
inch of the way. Look at Graham Nelson. He created an I-F compiler and
some of the finest I-F ever written. You think people wouldn't pay good
money for these things if he asked them? But Graham, and every other sane
I-F author, doesn't ask for huge profits. Again, it's a hobby that one can
have a small return on. Nothing more. It's not a get-rich-quick scheme,
or even a get-rich-slow scheme, for that matter. Anyone who sees it as
such doesn't belong here.
: Basically, the well of enthusiasm within me on the topic of text
: adventures has nothing but dirt in it anymore. My current ambition is to
: move to New Zealand and herd sheep. At least that way I'll never have to
: see another one of those godforsaken DOOM/SF2 clones. No more Ultima
: 8s. No more nothing.
C'mon, don't be that way. To simply walk away from I-F is to give in to
those DOOM/SF2s and Ultima 8s, to admit that all along you were wrong and
they were right. We need people like you, with the determination, skill,
and willingness to invest their time in I-F. I see it as a form that'll
make a serious comeback, someday. Think about it. What's going to happen
in 5 or 10 years, when programmers can create graphics so real they actually
simulate real life? When that happens, a small degree of interactivity will
be the only real distinction between entertainment media such as computer
games and film or television. You think people are going to settle for
being able to click a button here and there and let the multimillion dollar
entertainment industry do the rest? Of course not! There are millions of
intelligent people out there who will become disgusted with the whole mess
that is visual entertainment.
So what'll be left? I-F. Be patient. Keep the art form going. Someday
it'll get the recognition it's deserved for years. Remember, genius is
never understood in its own time.
--
C.E. Forman cef...@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu
Read the I-F e-zine XYZZYnews, at ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/magazines/xyzzynews,
or on the Web at http://www.interport.net/~eileen!
* Interactive Fiction * Beavis and Butt-Head * The X-Files * MST3K * C/C++ *
Greg Alt
> I agree completely that IF is no longer (if it ever was) a financially-
>viable business. For all of the reasons previously mentioned (rising
>illiteracy, the proliferation of graphically-oriented quick fixes that pass
>as entertainment these days, the Web, etc), IF remains confined to a narrow
>niche market, and very likely will remain there. The financial gains for
>an IF shareware author are abysmal, usually not even sufficient to cover
>the costs of an inexpensive shareware platform/language such as TADS. The
>labor that goes into one of these games is phenomenal, and, frankly, the
>returns are just not there.
Just thought I'd mention an idea I had, since I have no time to do it
myself... With WWW being the hip cool thing these days, I bet someone
could make some money by doing IF on the web. Here's the basic idea:
The engine is written as a CGI script. Each command you give generates a
new page with the new description and a box for entering a new line of
text. After the user has entered a given number of commands, they are
required to 'register' which lets them have unlimited time in the game.
The registration could be done the same way many places are starting to
sell things using www pages. Of course, there would be a big notice at
the beginning so that users wouldn't be angry at being caught unaware.
You could charge $4 or $5 bucks or whatever. When the user came back,
they would have some sort of account that would let them play as much as
they wanted and have save files, etc.
I was just thinking, instead of a fixed number of moves, it should be
more like visiting a room. For example, if it were Zork I, it could be
entering the caves under the house. If you were clever, you could even
work it into the game somehow... Something like a door in the game with
a card slot, that requires a special $5 card. When you register, it
puts the card in your inventory.
The nice thing about putting it on the web (if you do it REAL SOON) is
that it would be seen as whiz-bang innovative, and you would get tons
of free advertising by way of the "best of the web" sites. Who knows,
you might get 1000-10,000 people world-wide to play the game.
(or you might get 25 people :)
If someone uses this idea and makes a million bucks, I hope you will be
kind enough to at least let me play for free.
Greg
--
Videogames, Unicycling, and Anarchism: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~galt/
David Baggett
Alison Scott <ali...@fuggles.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>However, I'd point out that I'd have registered Curses if it had been
>shareware rather than freeware, and I know I'm not alone in this.
If I had a dollar for every promise to register software I'd written...
(Not saying *you* wouldn't register Curses, just that this line of
discussion is terribly unfair to shareware authors, because it deceives
them into believing they can actually make some money. Some can, but
writing shareware is like buying a lottery ticket. Generally, your
return is what the scrap of paper is worth.)
>Maybe I should send Graham a tenner?
Couldn't hurt!
>Although a crippled game isn't really an option, I would have thought
>that a viable approach would be to release about half the game as
>shareware - "if you're enjoying this, then register and get the
>remaining puzzles and the endgame." Certainly not as a viable strategy
>for making a million, but sufficient (I would have thought) for a
>useful hobby income.
I guess that depends on how you define "useful hobby income". It may pay
for a sandwich now and then.
>I simply don't have the option of playing modern games that are all style
>and no substance on the Tube, and until I do, games for the z machine
>represent the best available option.
Ugh. More "non-text games are all fluff" rhetoric. I don't mean to be
harsh, but have you played enough non-text games to make such a sweeping
statement?
Neil K. Guy
: Just thought I'd mention an idea I had, since I have no time to do it
: myself... With WWW being the hip cool thing these days, I bet someone
: could make some money by doing IF on the web. Here's the basic idea:
Heh. I thought of this a while back. I toyed with the notion of hooking
the TADS UNIX runtime up to a Web page. Of course, it'd be a lot of work
because without the source to the runtime it'd be difficult to hack it
in well with a CGI. The biggest stumbling block would be remembering
states - how would the game engine keep track of who's playing and where
they happened to be? You'd have to have some sort of sign-in mechanism,
because with dynamic IP addressing used by most SLIP and PPP connections
these days you can't track a person by their IP address and user ID
like you used to be able to. And if multiple people were playing at
the same time you'd need multiple invocations of the runtime, which
could be expensive CPU-wise.
Anyway, I decided it was a nifty concept but far far beyond my meagre
powers of implementation and went off to find some new way to procrastinate
on my thesis.
- Neil K.
--
Neil K. Guy * ne...@sfu.ca * te...@tela.bc.ca
49N 16' 123W 7' * Vancouver, BC, Canada
Laurel Halbany
> I don't mean to come down too hard. But having just erased a 6 page
> rant/bitch/moan, I figure I'm entitled to a paragraph long one. Don't
> hold your breath. Look around you. This is it, dude. There are a few
> hundred hardcore fans left. Text adventures are going exactly nowhere.
Really? Ask Graham Nelson (don't tell him I sent you, anyway) about
the thousands of people playing _Curses_. Talk to Graham Cluly about
_Humbug_.
> Ask Dave Baggett. Two years ago I was arguing your viewpoint. Text
> adventures, like the Mexican peso, have been devalued. They are no
> longer economically feasible in any form.
You seem to be confusing the _economic_ viability of text adventures
with their popularity. As someone else pointed out, poetry is no
way to make money either, but poetry is hardly dead.
> I hope to just recoup my
> investment on Avalon and flee the genre, skin intact. 2 years. 2 lousy
> stinking years I been writing that game. And I'll be THRILLED, ECSTATIC
> to sell 15 frigging copies. That's a sum profit of jack nothing.
If that's your total interest in IF, please flee. And don't let the
door hit you in the butt on the way out.
> Sure,
> the hobby aspect (SPAG, the IF Contest) is fun, but the game writing is a
> waste of time unless you feel it too is a hobby. As for writing
> book-length texts about writing text adventures, well, let's just say I'd
> rather have the time back that I spent writing that IF Authorship Guide.
IF is something that you have to expect to do for love, not money. If
it's not a hobby for you, why did you bother "wasting" the time? Did
you really expect to make a retirement nest egg?
--
we would rather be rowdy and gaunt and free Laurel Halbany
and dine on a diet of roach and rat myt...@agora.rdrop.com
than slave to a tame society Unwed mother
ours is the zest of the alley cat --don marquis
Chris Thomas
> In article <GDR11.95N...@stint.cl.cam.ac.uk>,
> Gareth Rees <gd...@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> >The person to talk to is Graham Cluly, who produced a couple of
> >adventure games under the name "Humbug Software" and apparantly managed
> >to sell several thousand shareware registrations.
>
> I think it would be a huge mistake to assume that model is still valid
> today. We (Adventions) based a lot of our optimism about the market for IF
> on Graham's experiences, and found that with a comparable product in a more
> portable form and at a lower price, we couldn't get even a fraction of the
> interest he did.
Well, I bitched about this before, but it doesn't necessarily depend
on the game or the market: it may just be that the interpreter sucks
on many platforms. In the case of TADS, I seem to recall being limited
by a less-than-wonderful parser as well. Or it could be that the
pricing structure is out of whack; what'd you pay for your last paperback?
> There is no commercial market for all-text IF now. And the rapid
> evaporation of the text IF market doesn't seem so strange when you take
> into account the incredible growth of the web, and the public's infatuation
> with so-called "virtual reality". Regardless of whether people know what
> "hypermedia" really are, they sure do think they're cool.
>
> >When companies like Sierra can allocate a $4 million budget to games like
> >the recent "Phantasmagoria", with more than 50 people working full time on
> >the project, what hope do amateurs have?
>
> Financially, none. But I think that single-author forms will always have a
> place in the arts. "Art by committee" has a lot working against it.
Somehow, I don't think it has to be Financially None, as long as
Barnes & Noble is in business, there must be a way to make money
from interactive fiction, if not a *conventional* method.
Not that I have any experience in it, but have you really tried
everything possible?
--
Chris Thomas, c...@best.com
David Baggett
Chris Thomas <c...@best.com> wrote:
>Well, I bitched about this before, but it doesn't necessarily depend on the
>game or the market: it may just be that the interpreter sucks on many
>platforms. In the case of TADS, I seem to recall being limited by a
>less-than-wonderful parser as well.
Do you realize how frustrating these kinds of comments are? We spend 5
years writing IF and improving the tools, and you just step in and write it
off in a single paragraph. I know it's become fashionable to bash TADS,
but really: give me specific examples of parser problems. I've played lots
of text games, and the TADS games have historically had margainally
*better* parsing than their Infocom/Inform equivalents. (Carl Muckenhoupt
comments in his review page that a four-star rating is typical of TADS
games, and specifically praises the parsing, so I don't think I'm deluding
myself here.)
The one really serious TADS parsing glitch (which X do you mean: the X, or
the X) got fixed ages ago.
Personally, I think the TADS DOS run-time is much nicer than the Infocom
format readers, and it's as professional as the Humbug interface. (We were
talking about Adventions games as compared to Humbug, which made lots of
money.)
>Or it could be that the pricing structure is out of whack; what'd you pay
>for your last paperback?
$10 is so vastly different from $6?
Sanjay S Vakil
*snip*
|> imagine the genre though a few years hence on a portable unit that the
|> casual user can enjoy as much as a paperback book - something with the
|> appeal of paper, the feel of it perhaps, but an easily held, easily
|> manipulated folding screen that's voice activated so no keyboard. In
|> short, let's not limit our imaginations to the current (passing)
|> structures of symbol manipulation.
I think I mentioned this already, but this sounds a *lot* like what I feel like
playing with the (very alpha) zmachine on the newton. There is no typing - the
UI is written so you tap on any word you want in the input line (or you can fight
the handwriting recoginition for odd words), and the portability is self evident.
The folding screen and voice activation will be saved for rev 2.0 (:
Actually, maybe a folding screen would reduce the screen glare problem!
What I'm really ranting about here is that the playing IF on a newtoneque device
is a very different experience that I expected. I just wanted to replay some of
the games I loved in my youth, but the effect of being able to carry them around,
pop them out, and play a few moves in your spare time is exhilirating. Much more
fun than anything else you can do with these types of technologies.
sanj
ps. ok, you guys have sucked me in... welcome to my (very short) list of
newsgroups I read with any regularity (:
Randall Stukey
c...@best.com (Chris Thomas) wrote:
>Well, I bitched about this before, but it doesn't necessarily depend
>on the game or the market: it may just be that the interpreter sucks
>on many platforms. In the case of TADS, I seem to recall being limited
>by a less-than-wonderful parser as well. Or it could be that the
>pricing structure is out of whack; what'd you pay for your last paperback?
While the folks trying to sell IF will probably not like it, I suspect that
the pricing structure is way out of whack -- at least for mass sales. Most
commercial IF is short story or novella length, but sells for $10+. Full
length paperback novels are about $6 and you get a nice pile of expensive
paper. Commercial IF is currently priced like the small press hardcover
chapbooks of short stories (very high), and probably sells to about the same
percentage of the IF market and said chapbooks do (very low). IF might do
much better at $2-4 a pop. I'm sure most of the commercial IF authors will
say that it would not be worth their time to deal with such small sums of
money, but many businesses do think such sales are worth their time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Randall S. Stukey | Internet: len...@crl.com OR gray-l...@genie.com
San Antonio, TX | GEnie: GRAY-LENSMAN
Computer Consultant | Assistant Sysop, GEnie's SF Fandom RoundTable
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Links of Interest to Fandom [Index]: http://www.sfrt.com/sfrt3/sflinks.htm
GEnie's SF-Fandom RoundTable Home Page: http://www.sfrt.com/sfrt3/
Matthew Amster
David Baggett <d...@lf.ai.mit.edu> wrote:
>In my opinion, there are many excellent graphics games out there. I've
>cited Full Throttle before. I think it's a step in the right direction for
>graphical IF. No, the puzzles aren't that hard. The setting is not
>extreme. The characters are not wonderfully novel. But it's a solid work
>of interactive fiction, and it makes good use both of a graphical interface
>and of pretty pictures and good voice acting.
I'd throw in Day of the Tentacle and Sam n' Max. Both had good
characterization, good voices, and were just damn fun to play. The puzzles
were generally simple and satisfying, and the stories held together
overall. It's not the same experience as playing Jigsaw, but worth
enjoying for what it is. Not all graphic IF has to be at the level of
Return to Zork.
And there are elements in graphic games that are more satisfying
(heresy!). It's hard to imagine the giant fish sequence from Sam n' Max
being executed well in a text game--it was too fun to watch. Naturally,
text games do some things better than graphical ones, too.
>Text IF is just a different way of using words to tell a story. I don't
>think you need puzzles, and I'm sure that though most of our games are
>almost structurally indistinguishable (!) we've barely scratched the
>surface.
I'm still undecided on the importance of puzzles. I find it satisfying to
solve puzzles, but after playing puzzle games for years, I'm still not much
better at solving them and tend to get stuck and turn to the hints
quickly.
"A Change in the Weather" is what really got me rethinking the role of
puzzles. As Andrew freely admitted, the game was unfair, time-dependent,
and locked the player into an unforgiving sequence of tasks. It was also
tremendously well-written and worth playing again and again to try to get
closer to the answer. (I finished it using the walkthrough, but only after
restarting at least thirty times.) Because the game was small, the author
was able to pay excruciating attention to detail: the moment of light, the
ability to experience the tree in many different ways, etc.
I'm not suggesting that we see more games just like Weather, as this might
put Andrew Plotkin's life in danger. You can't get more traditional than
John's Fire Witch, and that was one of my favorites, too. But I agree with
Dave that we need to see more experimentation along the lines of MST3K
Detective and Weather.
Currently I'm at work on a project that's a long way from completion but
incorporates more obvious political overtones than any game I've played.
If you don't agree with my views, you may very well dislike the game
(although I try not to beat the player over the head). This doesn't bother
me. Just as I wouldn't try to write a novel that reaches the widest
possible audience, I don't feel like putting out another Zork clone just so
everyone on the newsgroup will play it.
Having said that, I do hope you'll play my game, which will appear sometime
next year. I'm not even go to try to pin down a date.
Wow, that was rambling. Aside to Kevin Wilson: despite its reputed
machismo, I will certainly buy a copy of Avalon. If it's good, I might
even try to convince you to write another game.
Matthew
John Holder
> Basically, the well of enthusiasm within me on the topic of text
> adventures has nothing but dirt in it anymore. My current ambition is to
> move to New Zealand and herd sheep.
(buck-up camper mode on)
Aw, c'mon Whizzard... I bet a bunch more of us than you think will register
it - it seems like it couldn't suck after all the time it's been. Besides,
I wanna get the feel of having some "real" goodies like Infocom used to,
all over again!
(buck-up camper mode off)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Holder (jho...@nmsu.edu) "Verbing weirds language." - Calvin
Homepage: http://speedracer.nmsu.edu/~jholder
Topics: Homebrewing | Raytracing | Interactive Fiction | Fractals
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Baggett
C.A. McCarthy <mlk...@students.wisc.edu> wrote:
>A good case in point are the two Dave's over at Adventions [...] [I]t is
>quite evident that they are making no money at all [...] This doesn't seem
>to deter them in the slightest.
I always viewed making money from IF as a bonus, not a requirement. On the
other hand, if I could make a living writing IF, I might consider doing
that instead of working a "real job." (At the moment, my real job is very
interesting anyway, so this is totally hypothetical.)
In the long run, I doubt I'll be able to keep writing ambitious IF works.
I don't see myself able to make the time; there is a significant
opportunity cost. So in that sense, the fact that there is basically no
financial reward for IF authorship *will* deter authors like me, whether we
like it or not.
I've got half a dozen good IF ideas that will probably languish for lack of
spare time. They certainly wouldn't if I could write IF all day, every
day.
>I don't think anyone really expects to be compensated anymore. Rather they
>would LIKE to be compensated.
This is like saying, "I don't expect anyone to compete with Microsoft, but
I would LIKE to see a better PC OS standard." Doesn't mean it's a happy
(or, really, even acceptable) status quo.
bonni mierzejewska
>Just thought I'd mention an idea I had, since I have no time to do it
>myself... With WWW being the hip cool thing these days, I bet someone
>could make some money by doing IF on the web. Here's the basic idea:
Someone's already beat you to the punch on this one. It's being done. I
don't have any URL's to give you (I don't bookmark them since I'm not
interested in tying up our single phone line for hours at a time), but they're
out there all right.
You gave some nice development of the ideas, though.
:)
bonni
__ __
IC | XC | bonni mierzejewska "The Lone Quilter"
---+--- | u6...@wvnvm.wvnet.edu
NI | KA | Kelly's Creek Homestead, Maidsville, WV
Matthew Amster
Randall Stukey <len...@crl.com> wrote:
>Commercial IF is currently priced like the small press hardcover
>chapbooks of short stories (very high), and probably sells to about the same
>percentage of the IF market and said chapbooks do (very low). IF might do
>much better at $2-4 a pop. I'm sure most of the commercial IF authors will
>say that it would not be worth their time to deal with such small sums of
>money, but many businesses do think such sales are worth their time.
On the other hand, we're not talking about point-of-sale purchases here.
If I'm in the bookstore, I'll be more likely to plunk down $5 for a
paperback than $10. But if I'm going to write a check, get an envelope,
write a little note, stamp it, seal it, find a mailbox, etc., that five
buck difference doesn't seem like such a big deal any more.
(Amazing how e-mail changes one's perspective, isn't it?)
Even a paperback that fails commercially will sell more copies than any
text game released today. Economies of scale allow large publishers to
recoup their losses on the poor sellers with the profits on the few books
that do well. IF authors don't have the same luxury. I'm certainly
willing to pay a bit extra to support the genre. Though John Baker's $4.50
(I think) "lunchware" fee for John's Fire Witch was refreshing and I paid
it. I would have paid $10. I probably would have paid $25 for Legend, but
don't tell Dave I said so.
Now, if you could get text games into snazzy packages and put them at the
counter in bookstores, there might be something in that. Hell, there
really might: I guarantee there are many avid readers who own computers
but aren't on the net and either have never heard of IF or didn't know it
was still being written. Some would eat it up, especially "literary" IF
like Jigsaw, Christminster, or Legend.
Matthew
Stephen van Egmond
> Heh. I thought of this a while back. I toyed with the notion of hooking
>the TADS UNIX runtime up to a Web page. Of course, it'd be a lot of work
>because without the source to the runtime it'd be difficult to hack it
>in well with a CGI. The biggest stumbling block would be remembering
>states - how would the game engine keep track of who's playing and where
>they happened to be? You'd have to have some sort of sign-in mechanism,
>because with dynamic IP addressing used by most SLIP and PPP connections
>these days you can't track a person by their IP address and user ID
>like you used to be able to. And if multiple people were playing at
>the same time you'd need multiple invocations of the runtime, which
>could be expensive CPU-wise.
Me too. Only, I wanted to do it with a zmachine, since hey, there's the
source for it. I bumped into the same damn problem as you did, and
couldn't find any way of adequately managing multiple callers (especially
since many httpd's don't send the user ID!)
One approach is to hand each person a particular id# that makes up part
of the URLs they access the pages with. Like
IDs would persist for perhaps an hour in case you had to walk away for
some reason, and the CGI (should) be able to handle multiple instances
without having to launch multiple interpreters.
However, with the advent of Java, all this is irrelevant. The client
machine can keep the state, and run the Zip, and... hey, it just hit me
where Sun got the idea for a platform-independent system for doing very
cool stuff.
Tim Middleton
DE= Work hard to make it conform to your vision, but don't worry about what
DE= the typical IF fan will think.
I like this part...
---
with love and squalor. <as...@torfree.net>
Andrew C. Plotkin
> In article <49gm0e$o...@daily-planet.execpc.com>,
>
> >don't sell the genre short, even if it's being kept alive for the moment
> >in a quiet corner of cyberspace. The potential of the form is explosive.
>
> rant/bitch/moan, I figure I'm entitled to a paragraph long one. Don't
> hold your breath. Look around you. This is it, dude. There are a few
> hundred hardcore fans left. Text adventures are going exactly nowhere.
I am going to take the liberty of saying that both of these viewpoints
are silly.
The potential for text IF is not explosive. Neither is it dying. (I'll
get back to non-text IF later.)
I agree that there are a few hundred hard-core fans left that we are
in contact with here -- that will hear of a new TADS or Inform game
and grab it from ftp.gmd.de. Probably there are thousands more --
tens of thousands -- which have bought the LTOI collections, or will
buy the Infocom genre collections. They all think the genre is dead.
(This thought actually revitalizes my interest in a text IF CD.
Activision thinks there's a market, right?)
On the other hand, we're not going away. There are more games now than
there were two years ago. I'm more interested in finding and playing
them than I was two years ago. I wrote one. I intend to write another.
> Ask Dave Baggett. Two years ago I was arguing your viewpoint. Text
> adventures, like the Mexican peso, have been devalued. They are no
> longer economically feasible in any form.
The guy sitting next to me in the office does live-action role-playing
as a hobby. He spends much time, money, and effort on it. Hobbies are
like that.
I think it's been pretty much a hobbyist field for much more than two
years. It will not make a significant amount of money for anyone. It
may make you a little something. That's *gravy*. I agree that doing it
for money no longer is sensible. Do you have no enthusiasm at all for
*communicating* with people? If not, why did you pick a hobby which
was art, rather than selling drugs or going to law school?
> I hope to just recoup my
> investment on Avalon and flee the genre, skin intact. 2 years. 2 lousy
> stinking years I been writing that game. And I'll be THRILLED, ECSTATIC
> to sell 15 frigging copies.
I suspect you'll be surprised. I don't expect you'll be able to quit
your day job.
I shall now trot out my own shareware experience. I spent a year
writing a Mac puzzle game. I even tried to make it IF, although not
text-based. That's a year, of perhaps two to three hours a day. Call
it a thousand hours of work. This is, mind you, nothing fancy.
Graphical, but no 3D; no fancy ray-traced sprites; no music; all the
sound effects were done by me making funky mouth-sounds into a
microphone.
I have made, to date, perhaps $5000. That's a hell of a lot, for
shareware. I was lucky. And it works out to, what? Five bucks an hour.
I've barely broken minimum wage.
But it keeps me in paperbacks.
(Footnote: It would have been considerably less if I hadn't made a
deal with a company that accepts credit-card orders via a 1-800
number.)
> That's a sum profit of jack nothing.
The net profit may suck, but the gross will at least lift your
spirits. Trust me.
> Basically, the well of enthusiasm within me on the topic of text
> adventures has nothing but dirt in it anymore. My current ambition is to
> move to New Zealand and herd sheep. At least that way I'll never have to
> see another one of those godforsaken DOOM/SF2 clones. No more Ultima
> 8s. No more nothing.
This I can do nothing about.
But I dislike the cliche that "Doom killed text adventures." Many game
genres have carved themselves out vast gaping cathedrals of public
interest and hot hard cash. That doesn't mean Infocom's little niche
has been paved over. Property values are down, but we're still sitting
here. (Here's the footnote I promised earlier. Some of the new game
genres are IF. There have been some good CD-ROM based adventure games.
End footnote.)
Anyway, self-pity is pretty indulgent. Some of my friends write
*poetry* for a hobby. Talk about being marginalized!
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
Ivan Cockrum
>
>> IF might do much better at $2-4 a pop. I'm sure most of the
>> commercial IF authors will say that it would not be worth their time
>> to deal with such small sums of money, but many businesses do think
>> such sales are worth their time.
Randall,
Not that I consider myself any kind of businessman or marketer, but I
think IF could be very successful at around $5-6 a pop, if it were
marketed properly, and could be very profitable at that price if sold in
very large quantities.
I've been thinking a bit about this recently, and it seems to me that
many business travelers and other people who carry laptops would pay $5
for something to keep them entertained while traveling. The trick is in
the product positioning and marketing - these people have to be made
aware of the product, and the product needs to be made available at
point-of-purchase for impulse buyers. For instance, a display rack at
the checkout of bookstores & supermarkets, just like they're doing with
shareware action games such as Doom. As for positioning, I believe the
phrases "interactive fiction", "hyper novel", etc. need to be stressed
over "game", to help attract the more mature crowd who are likely to
enjoy IF, and who already accept reading as a form of recreation.
-- Ivan
Andrew C. Plotkin
> but really: give me specific examples of parser problems.
With Mac TADS 2.2, I've often had trouble setting dials to numbers.
It's too late at night to generate actual examples, but I recall
having to go through circumlocutions like
SET DIAL TO 5
[which dial?]
LEFT
because I couldn't do it all on one line.
This happened in Legend and, I think, John's Fire Witch.
> I've played lots
> of text games, and the TADS games have historically had margainally
> *better* parsing than their Infocom/Inform equivalents.
I marginally prefer the Inform parser. I'm sure it's a matter of what
you're used to. The two parser libraries *do* diverge in places, and
it's easy to get annoyed when a game doesn't do what you expect.
> Personally, I think the TADS DOS run-time is much nicer than the Infocom
> format readers
Oh, I agree. You think I wrote my fancy Infocom interpreters out of
boredom? :)
--Z
(Well, boredom too.)
Tim Middleton
= longer economically feasible in any form.
Oh someone's thinking far too limittedly, me thinks... for example, is it
being taken into consideration all the spin off products... such as the
series of pulp fantasy paperbacks based on your IF, and then eventually of
course you can put some GIF's together as a slide show and release it on
CD-Rom and really rake in the dough...
These are just the more mundane expanded visions... of course one should
always be preparing for the day time travel is developed too. Imagine with
what you know about IF now if you can take the knowledge back to the early
80's ... you'd clean up! It could happen!
You have to expand your vision! Don't limit yourself!! (-;
---
...with love and squalor. <as...@torfree.net>
Richard Thieme
games) I meant. I've never used the Newton but I'm sure this
kind of experience will be widely available soon.
Add Java and wireless to the mix and the other things that we could only
dimly imagine last month or last year -- now being marketed -- make the
possibilities very tangible and concrete.
The real problem here as in so many "good ideas" will be content. The
content is what will matter over all. "Content providers" are not all
that easy to come by. I.e. creation of profound imaginative games that
do justice to the complexity of the worlds we're living in.
A problem to be solved: I'm a professional speaker, writer, and business
consultant. I've worked with words my whole life long (taught English
lit in my 20s, an Episcopal priest in 3 cultures in 30s, and 40s, now a
speaker/writer/consultant). I've been playing and thinking about IF for
years. I am not a programmer. I don't know what shells or game builders
really are easiest for someone like myself who is bright enough but has
never been trained in programming. That's a real barrier through which I
simply have to push. It's like someone who wants to write stories but
doesn't know how to use a pen or a keyboard. I read about the various
tools here but have no first hand experience.
Is there an obviously best and most accessible game creator now
available?
Tim Middleton
= is that a textual NPC which acts and reacts naturally is much more
= believable (and enjoyable) than digitized bad actors who reuse the same
= replies and sequences after their lives have been fundamentally
= changed.
Hey have you folks heard of an up and coming adventure game for OS/2 called
"Avarice" from Stardock software? (graphical, but static graphics it seems).
It sounds very impressive, but i'm personally skeptical if they can pull off
what they claim.... you can check out their claims at
http://oeonline.com/~stardock/avarice.html
They are trying to develop a "conversation" engine for the game so that
NPC's can create conversation with you dynamically to a certain extent
(eliza?!). Also the NPC's are claimed to talk to each other in the
background (the game is multi-threaded), sharing info about things, and
about you-- not sure how that will work. They say they are trying to do
something completely new and not have dialog "trees" like adventure games
have had up to this point...
It could be interesting if they can pull off this "dynamic" conversation
thing... the thing that confuses me is that by looking at the (not so
amazing) screen shots (who cares about the stupid orange!!) is it seems to
be menu based... so ... that seems amazingly limiting to me?!
Anyhow... could be interesting... there are a lot of interesting ideas in
their quite long HTML file about it anyhow-- whether this particular game
lives up to it's claims has yet to be seen...
Here's a few excerpts to see what you think....
(sorry i quoted a bit more than intended... but it's a very intersting text,
worth reading I think... )
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
About ten years ago, adventure games such as Infocom's Planetfall and
Zork allowed us to enter a virtual world. Admittedly, in those days,
you could only interact with the game through a text interface. You
would type "Pick up the orange" and it would get an orange that was in
a room. You could, to a limited degree, interact with that world. I
remember playing Planetfall for weeks and imagining what the world
looked like and feeling like I was really there.
As time went on, game companies abandoned the text adventure as
graphical games became the vogue. But something got lost -- the
feeling that you were there. That you could taste, touch, and *really*
manipulate objects in that world. To me, virtual reality meant I was
in a "virtual" world where I could do things as if I was there. While
this concept may seem like common sense, the label "virtual reality"
seems to be spread pretty easily. In an age where games have
increasingly become a bunch of nice artwork and videos being thrown
onto the screen with little interaction with the world, it might seem
that game companies have forgotten about true adventure and true
virtual reality.
However, with the introduction of Avarice, a return to true virtual
reality exists. Early beta testers of Avarice have labled it "A Myst
Killer". But Avarice's scope goes well beyond Myst. In Avarice, you
are in a real 3D world. You can pick up objects, manipulate objects in
ways the authors may not have considered, and truly interact with the
world.
For example, in Avarice you could pick up an orange, peel the orange,
break the orange into pieces, step on the pieces and squeeze other
pieces into orange juice or whatever. The beauty of this is that
Avarice is a 100% visual game. You actually see the orange (in true
24bit photographic color detail). You actually see the crushed orange
or the pieces of it. You can put those pieces on a table and see the
pieces in their actual size on the table and its size will depend on
how far away you are from the table.
Perhaps you read this and say "No way! No one's ever done that
before!" or "That's impossible! PC technology isn't there yet!" I
include with this file snapshots of the upcoming Avarice Preview in
which you see what I am talking about.
But it gets better than that. There are people in the Avarice world
and you can talk to them -- have real conversations from that. The
people in Avarice will talk to each other and how you talk to them may
affect those conversations. In other words, they are dynamically
controlled people. And like the orange, they are in full 24bit color
detail.
You can manipulate objects such as this oranage in the Avarice world.
Almost like "Myst meets Infocom".
Of course, Avarice takes place in a fully rendered 24bit color world
with an advanced AI so that its graphics are stunning. It offers a
full digitized musical score with mood changes depending on the
situation you are in.
The trick to this is partly the improvement in computer gaming
technology and partly because of the availability of advanced
operating systems such as OS/2 Warp which allows us to create a
dynamic virtual world and still have good performance.
I think you'll find that Avarice may perhaps be the first adventure
game where you feel like you're really there in a way that you can
visually see, touch, and interact with its world.
Bradley Wardell [author?]
Specifications
Full Multimedia support (sound, music, etc.)
24bit graphics support
Multithreaded artificial intelligence engine
Multithreaded dynamic world engine
Super-High Resolution Available.
Requirements
OS/2 Warp 3.0 or later
SVGA 256 color support (hi-color even better)
Double Speed CD ROM
486DX
Supports 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, and higher...
8 Megabytes of ram
Mouse
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
---
...with love and tomato sandwiches. <as...@torfree.net>
Tim Middleton
EE= Activision thinks there's a market, right?)
This and...
EE= (Footnote: It would have been considerably less if I hadn't made a deal
EE= with a company that accepts credit-card orders via a 1-800 number.)
This are interesting...
So what are you thinking...? Perhaps you could reach some sort of profit
sharing agreement with various IF authors and slap together a "lost
treasures of GMD" CD and market it through a software company like above?
Seems like a great idea to me... if there is ANY market at all.. and i think
there is... you know there *IS* still computer life *outside* of the
internet... I know several people that are not net-aware and wouldn't have a
clue about GMD if i didn't get stuff off there for them... besides GMD ftp
site and the infocom CD's ... that's pretty well the only source to satisfy
die-hard text adventurists (although i bit a LOT of whatever Activision
sales there are are for the sake of nostalgia...
that and the small flood of AGT adventures (which i wonder sometimes if
didn't HURT the IF market more than help (some were so bad <G>)-- though,
regardless of quality, it did show there was some interest out there) that
hit the BBS scene a few years ago, or whatever...
It is a fairly common practice for marginal markets to band together and
pool resources to try and make a bigger splash in the pond... if there is
any splash to be made at all...
.. interesting ideas... I'll say no more.
Okay one more thing... lesson of Microsoft: marketing is everything.. (-;
---
...with love and cries among angelic orders.
ErsatzPogo
> It's too late at night to generate actual examples, but I recall
> having to go through circumlocutions like
> SET DIAL TO 5
> [which dial?]
> LEFT
> because I couldn't do it all on one line.
I think this can usually be gotten around by better coding. TADS'
differentiation schemes seem to require a good bit of mucking around with
the verDo[Verb] settings, which I'm only just beginning to grasp.
Anyway, on the topic of making money, we're about to have another case
study to examine, since I plan on releasing my next game in two forms: a
fully-playable freeware version, and a registered version with hints
(which *won't* be necessary to finish the game by any means, but which
some people might find convenient). I'm doing this for two reasons:
* I've spent a lot of time this year designing this game instead of
working for pay, and it would be nice to get something back for it, even
if it's only lunch money.
* I want to include some Infocom-style goodies with the registered version
of the game, which means somebody's going to have to pay printing and
mailing costs.
With any luck, this will keep everyone happy: People who don't want to (or
can't) pay can play the freeware version, and ask for hints on r.g.i-f if
necessary, and those of you who *would* pay for the game will have the
opportunity to do so.
I can wishful-think with the best of them, don't you think?
Neil deMause
ErsatzPogo
> > DE= Work hard to make it conform to your vision, but don't worry about
what
> > DE= the typical IF fan will think.
>I like this part...
Me, too. Every i-f author (or regular author, for that matter) should post
it by their desk and read it at least once a day.
ND
Joe Mason
AS>that a viable approach would be to release about half the game as
AS>shareware - "if you're enjoying this, then register and get the
AS>remaining puzzles and the endgame." Certainly not as a viable
AS>strategy for making a million, but sufficient (I would have thought)
AS>for a useful hobby income.
The "Apogee model" of releasing games in three episodes, with the first
one being shareware and the next two available on registration, is the
standard for graphical games right now. Anybody making IF could follow
this or a similar format without two much trouble. The real problem, I
think, is the there aren't many people that would be interested in even
the shareware episode. But I really don't know how many people are
interested at all. I didn't think there was *anyone* interested until a
couple months ago, when I lucked into Gareth's home page. I wonder how
many others are out there who remember these games and just don't
realize anybody still makes them?
Maybe getting a game (say, Jigsaw) onto a compilation CD alongside Doom
or something would help. With a text file pointing people to either of
these newsgroups or the Web resources and XYZZYNews, we might pull in
more people. (I wonder if we can get Jigsaw on the next PC-Gamer CD-
ROM?)
Joe
---
þ CMPQwk #1.42þ UNREGISTERED EVALUATION COPY
Joe Mason
GA>generates a new page with the new description and a box for entering
GA>a new line of text. After the user has entered a given number of
GA>commands, they are required to 'register' which lets them have
GA>unlimited time in the game. The registration could be done the same
GA>way many places are starting to sell things using www pages. Of
GA>course, there would be a big notice at the beginning so that users
GA>wouldn't be angry at being caught unaware.
Sounds like a good idea. Any volunteers at making a CGI Z-machine
interpreter? Then we could put any number of games up there...
Julian Arnold
right.
I wonder, would it be terribly rude of me to ask shareware authors to mail me
a few specific details? Two or three people have done so already, and it's
interesting to note that, although their respective games have different
pricetags attached, the total profit for each one is nearly the same. I'd
quite like to see if this phenomenon occurs on a large scale (if not, is
there a "price which gives the best returns"? Popular opinion seems to put
this at around the $10-$15 mark, but perhaps it's elsewhere), and then
perhaps include the results in the FAQ as a guide for future shareware
authors. This might also allow me to check out the theory that prices under
$n are considered "not worth the bother of paying".
Anyway, bearing in mind that I would be completely discreet, not mentioning
any names or anything, could shareware authors send me a few details?
What is the pricetag on your game?
How many registrations have you had?
What is the total profit from your game?
For how long has your game been released?
Could you give an idea of the frequency of registrations vs. age of your
game? (i.e., what is the shelf-life of shareware IF?)
If this is an invasion of privacy or whatever, I never asked. 8)
--
Jools Arnold jo...@arnod.demon.co.uk
Jim Menard
The real problem here as in so many "good ideas" will be content. The
content is what will matter over all. "Content providers" are not all
that easy to come by. I.e. creation of profound imaginative games that
do justice to the complexity of the worlds we're living in.
A problem to be solved: I'm a professional speaker, writer, and business
consultant.
[stuff deleted]
Is there an obviously best and most accessible game creator now
available?
There is a way, but it involves cooperation. The "movie studio" model of idea
makers, writers, special effects people, musicians, and distributors may work
quite well in different content- and programming-heavy areas. IF, CD-ROM games,
VR, and Web pages could all be created using this model.
In the IF realm, "special effects" people are those who know Inform or TADS
and code the action. Writers create (and spellcheck) the words and
descriptions. Specialists could bring NPC's to life or implement a bag of
jelly babies.
Of course, just try to make a profit in IF using such a work model. Oh, well.
Jim
--
Jim Menard ji...@io.com | "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in
| their home." - Ken Olson, president, chairman and
http://www.io.com/~jimm/ | founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
Branko Collin
jo...@arnod.demon.co.uk (Julian Arnold) writes:
[snip]
>authors. This might also allow me to check out the theory that prices under
>$n are considered "not worth the bother of paying".
the registration fee would be less than the cost of paying it safely (for
instance by using international money orders). In those cases I try to send
cash. Using an International Money Order will cost me about 17 guilders
(say US$10). On the other hand, if the price is too steep, I won't buy
the product. I usually try and compare a piece of software with a real
life product and its price.
.......................................................................
. Branko Collin . Error unknown occurred. .
. . Sig-Anim does not work on your .
. // u24...@vm.uci.kun.nl . system unknown . .
. \X/ bco...@mpi.nl . Please call our helpdesk. .
.......................................................................
Brian J. Swetland
: [...] But I really don't know how many people are
: couple months ago, when I lucked into Gareth's home page. I wonder how
: many others are out there who remember these games and just don't
: realize anybody still makes them?
I had no idea anyone cared about Interactive Fiction anymore either.
Until about a month ago, I was happy with having found the Lost
Treasures collection (my original Infocom stuff is all on 5.25" disks
for the now long-dead C64). It's nice to know that there are still
people interested in (and writing) IF.
I personally would consider purchasing IF, but it looks like most of the
shareware varients are only usable under MS-DOS. I find z5 based games
much more appealing in that they'll run on the DEC Alpha, Linux Boxen,
whatever. But I'm probably a small market segment.
Brian
--
Brian J. Swetland NCSA Software Development Group, Mosaic/X Developer
swet...@uiuc.edu http://hagbard.ncsa.uiuc.edu/swetland/
"Give a skeptic an inch -- and he'll measure it."
Branko Collin
joe....@tabb.com (Joe Mason) writes:
>
>AS>Although a crippled game isn't really an option, I would have thought
>AS>that a viable approach would be to release about half the game as
>AS>shareware - "if you're enjoying this, then register and get the
>AS>remaining puzzles and the endgame." Certainly not as a viable
>AS>strategy for making a million, but sufficient (I would have thought)
>AS>for a useful hobby income.
>
>The "Apogee model" of releasing games in three episodes, with the first
>one being shareware and the next two available on registration, is the
>standard for graphical games right now. Anybody making IF could follow
>this or a similar format without two much trouble. The real problem, I
>think, is the there aren't many people that would be interested in even
>interested at all. I didn't think there was *anyone* interested until a
>couple months ago, when I lucked into Gareth's home page. I wonder how
>many others are out there who remember these games and just don't
>realize anybody still makes them?
remember that even in the Golden Age, adventurers were usually thought
to be the more mature, intelligent, well to do computerers. I don't
know if this is true, but if it is, you might expect a larger
average return. Although less people would play text adventures,
relatively more players would be paying.
Of course, I am just guessing here.
Julian Arnold
address, so that replies would go there, but I stupidly forgot. If you've
already replied to jools@, don't worry, I'll still read your reply. Anyhow,
the message:
Thanks for all the responses. This is also a damn fine discussion in its own
right.
I wonder, would it be terribly rude of me to ask shareware authors to mail me
a few specific details? Two or three people have done so already, and it's
interesting to note that, although their respective games have different
pricetags attached, the total profit for each one is nearly the same. I'd
quite like to see if this phenomenon occurs on a large scale (if not, is
there a "price which gives the best returns"? Popular opinion seems to put
this at around the $10-$15 mark, but perhaps it's elsewhere), and then
perhaps include the results in the FAQ as a guide for future shareware
authors. This might also allow me to check out the theory that prices under
$n are considered "not worth the bother of paying".
Anyway, bearing in mind that I would be completely discreet, not mentioning
any names or anything, could shareware authors send me a few details?
What is the pricetag on your game?
How many registrations have you had?
What is the total profit from your game?
For how long has your game been released?
Could you give an idea of the frequency of registrations vs. age of your
game? (i.e., what is the shelf-life of shareware IF?)
If this is an invasion of privacy or whatever, I never asked. 8)
--
;;;; _ _ _ _____ _ _ ;;;;
;;;;;;__________ ______|_|___ (_) _____| |_ / __)) __| |(_)______;;;;;;
)(;| __) \ __) / _ \ __)_)_) | |/ __ \ _)_ | |_| |/ __) _)| _ \__ \;)(
() | ||(_)_/(__ |(_) ||| |_ \ | || || || |(__)| _) | (_| || |(_)||| | ()
)( |_|\____)___)o\__\_||\__)__/o\__)_||_|\__) | | \__)___)_)__)__/||_| )(
------------Frequently-Asked Questions-----------\_/-------------------------
** Get yours today! <ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/rec.arts.int-fiction/faq> **
Ivan Cockrum
>> if there is ANY market at all.. and i think there is... you know
>> there *IS* still computer life *outside* of the internet...
> Okay one more thing... lesson of Microsoft: marketing is everything.. (-;
Tim,
I suspect you were joking with the line about Microsoft, but both of
your above comments taken together are absolutely true. I thinkthat
part of the reason why we're such a small group is because of our
relative anonymity on the internet, and a BIG part of why text
adventures aren't being sold in large numbers is due to the way they
were/are marketed (ok, currently, they're hardly marketed at all).
I think the main reason Infocom died out was because they couldn't
keep up with the flashy graphical adventure games entering the
market. However, I think Infocom MIGHT have survived if they have
radically shifted their market focus. They continued to compete in
the computer game market, even though the computer game market was
continually advancing the state of the art.
What they COULD have tried, and what I think would work even better
today today with all of the laptops out there, would be to have
shifted their market focus to a more mature, less game oriented
audience, people who already think of reading as a form of
relaxation/entertainment, and who aren't predominantly interested in
playing games.
The first necessary step would have been/is to downplay the "game"
aspects of IF, and broadly advertise the "literature" aspects. The
second step (this is more applicable today, because of course
Infocom already had national distribution) would have been/is to get
these "interactive novels" or "hyperliterature" or whatever
marketing term people agree on, into book stores, supermarkets, etc.
at a low price (not more than the price of a paperback novel), and
in an obvious, accessible format (a hybrid Mac/PC floppy disk placed
in racks by the checkout with no additional packaging).
I really, strongly believe that IF could be made into a thriving
market with the right marketing and the strength of a good national
distributor.
-- Ivan
Magnus Olsson
Chris Thomas <c...@best.com> wrote:
>Well, I bitched about this before, but it doesn't necessarily depend on the
>game or the market: it may just be that the interpreter sucks on many
>platforms.
If the interpreter sucks, then the game usually isn't very fun to play.
Unfortunately.
>In the case of TADS, I seem to recall being limited by a
>less-than-wonderful parser as well.
You "seem to recall"? Please substantiate!
IMO, TADS has the best parser available right now. Inform's parser is
potentially better, since the user can extend it in any way he likes, but
the one included in the Inform Library is (IMO, of course) slightly less
good than that of TADS.
Of course, there are bad TADS games. What you perceived as a bad
parser could be a sloppily programmed game. If the author provides too
few synonyms, or chooses his vocabulary in a suboptimal way, or
doesn't think through things like ambiguities sufficiently, or (in the
case of TADS) fails to provide the needed verification methods, no
parser in the world can make up for the deficiencies in the game.
Both the TADS parser and the Inform parser are extremely good (better
than Infocom's) *provided* the programmer of the game does a good job. What is
a good job? Well, it depends on what you're trying to do. For a plain vanilla
game where every object has a unique name, and things like that, the
programmer merely has to provide the objets and the vocabulary. In other
cases, the programmer has to make sure his code will work together with
the parser. This is true for *all* parsers; at least until somebody
invents a DoWhatIMean command.
Magnus
Jason Dyer
Ivan Cockrum (iv...@cis.compuserve.com) wrote:
: Richard Thieme wrote:
: > The real problem here as in so many "good ideas" will be content. The
: > content is what will matter over all. "Content providers" are not all
: > that easy to come by. I.e. creation of profound imaginative games that
: > do justice to the complexity of the worlds we're living in.
: > I am not a programmer. I don't know what shells or game builders
: > really are easiest for someone like myself who is bright enough but has
: > never been trained in programming. That's a real barrier through which I
: > simply have to push. It's like someone who wants to write stories but
: > doesn't know how to use a pen or a keyboard. I read about the various
: > tools here but have no first hand experience.
: >
: > Is there an obviously best and most accessible game creator now
: > available?
: In your particular circumstances, with your strength as a writer, it
: shouldn't be necessary for you to learn a programming language.
: Perhaps you could find someone with whom to work, who is already
: proficient with programming IF, but hasn't got your experience or
: ability with writing?
: I think a large part of why the IF community has become so
: cloistered is because so many people involved in it are working on
: their own. Notable exceptions are the guys at Adventions, who work
: as a team, and turn out reliably consistent games. And of course
: the same was true for Infocom.
Isn't "The Windhall Chronicles" being written as a team?
I really should get cracking on doing a tutorial or two for ALAN, once
you know how to do daemons and metaverbs it isn't that difficult for
non-programmers.
I also extend an offer to any non-programmers who, if they write
a _complete_ script, that I will take a crack at programming it.
['Course, they will have to have my approval first, and I might
want to edit abit, but. . .]
(Good format for script: there is an article in XYZZY 5 that has a
fairly good one.)
Once you actually finish with the script, though, you may decide
it isn't that hard after all to program it.
--
Jason Dyer - jd...@indirect.com
ler...@classic45.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de
Trevor Barrie (tba...@cycor.ca) wrote:
: Without question. And as an aside, I seriously doubt the platform
: support issue is any real impediment to sales. Supporting lots of
: systems might be a nice touch, but one suspects that anything besides
: DOS and MacIntosh is demographically irrelevant.
With ''normal'' game (and other) software I would agree, but as the
IF-community isn't that big at all, it may matter whether us Amiga-owners
(or anyone else with one of the smaller systems) are able to play your
game, too.
Ad Astra!
JuL
We are the forces of chaos and anarchy | At least, AMIGA makes it better !
Everything they say we are we are |------------------------------------
And we're very proud of ourselves... | IMPORT StdDisclaimer; (... Modula,
Jefferson Airplane | NOT C ! :):)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Flameproof .sig? Bah, dragons are fireproof anyway! | - Frei f"ur Notizen -
Richard Thieme
alone, even in the midst of a virtual communtiy, that I can forget that a
team is essential to a successful venture. maybe we do tend to be loners
in some ways.
Ivan Cockrum
> The real problem here as in so many "good ideas" will be content. The
> content is what will matter over all. "Content providers" are not all
> that easy to come by. I.e. creation of profound imaginative games that
> do justice to the complexity of the worlds we're living in.
> I am not a programmer. I don't know what shells or game builders
> really are easiest for someone like myself who is bright enough but has
> never been trained in programming. That's a real barrier through which I
> simply have to push. It's like someone who wants to write stories but
> doesn't know how to use a pen or a keyboard. I read about the various
> tools here but have no first hand experience.
>
> Is there an obviously best and most accessible game creator now
> available?
Richard,
Your remark about content is dead on, and it applies to the entire
computing industry. That's why so many software publishers are
relocating to New York, which is the seat of traditional publishing,
and therefore the best place to find existing content.
However, another important aspect of the software industry to
consider is the need for diversified talents. Not everyone need be
both a creator and a programmer, and in professional circles,
usually a game designer works with a programmer to help create the
designer's vision.
In your particular circumstances, with your strength as a writer, it
shouldn't be necessary for you to learn a programming language.
Perhaps you could find someone with whom to work, who is already
proficient with programming IF, but hasn't got your experience or
ability with writing?
I think a large part of why the IF community has become so
cloistered is because so many people involved in it are working on
their own. Notable exceptions are the guys at Adventions, who work
as a team, and turn out reliably consistent games. And of course
the same was true for Infocom.
-- Ivan
Julian Arnold
> However, another important aspect of the software industry to
> consider is the need for diversified talents. Not everyone need be
> both a creator and a programmer, and in professional circles,
> usually a game designer works with a programmer to help create the
> designer's vision.
>
> In your particular circumstances, with your strength as a writer, it
> shouldn't be necessary for you to learn a programming language.
> Perhaps you could find someone with whom to work, who is already
> proficient with programming IF, but hasn't got your experience or
> ability with writing?
>
> I think a large part of why the IF community has become so
> cloistered is because so many people involved in it are working on
> their own. Notable exceptions are the guys at Adventions, who work
> as a team, and turn out reliably consistent games. And of course
> the same was true for Infocom.
Well, again this is a point I'd like to address in the FAQ, so any comments
are welcome.
I think much of the problem that we face with such specialisation and
multiple-authors is the fact that, with some exceptions undoubtedly, the IF
community (i.e., the membership of raif) never actually physically meet.
Even when two authors are trying to collaborate on a game and both can write
and code, the creative process is stifled somewhat by this lack of personal
contact (no rude jokes please 8). It is in fact quite difficult to bounce
ideas off each other via e-mail -- the Internet's fast, but not fast enough.
Mind you, I have been/am doing this for a game, so it's not impossible.
Perhaps due to the current authoring systems, perhaps not, the processes of
writing and programming IF are closely linked and, I'd imagine, not easily
separable. I'm not saying it's impossible to collaborate on IF. If it was,
we wouldn't have "Shades of Gray" or "Path to Fortune". I've not played PtF
yet, but SoG was, IMO, identifiable by its origins -- the game felt very
episodic, though this is not always a bad thing.
The Adventions games are indeed up there with the best of 'em, but I think
(and I may be wrong here) that each game was written by one Dave (although I
suspect with heavy input from the other). Also, the Adventions team have
real life contact (again I may be wrong).
Anyone else?
Tim Middleton
me!! (-; Lets talk about... um... what a ... um.... well i guess there is
nothing else to talk about is there... er... uh... no, must be! Can't
think... the joy of creating if being it's own reward or.... um.. some
thing........ i.... oh... need that... m..m...m... yie... ah...
--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Tim Middleton =-= when sense makes no sense =-= as...@torfree.net
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
ErsatzPogo
>I agree, self gratification really is the only rewards for IF now.
I, of course, read this immediately after the one about "passion &
romance," and got *very* confused...
Greg Alt
>The first necessary step would have been/is to downplay the "game"
>aspects of IF, and broadly advertise the "literature" aspects. The
>second step (this is more applicable today, because of course
>Infocom already had national distribution) would have been/is to get
>these "interactive novels" or "hyperliterature" or whatever
>marketing term people agree on, into book stores, supermarkets, etc.
>at a low price (not more than the price of a paperback novel), and
>in an obvious, accessible format (a hybrid Mac/PC floppy disk placed
>in racks by the checkout with no additional packaging).
How about this idea... With all of these cheapo spell-checkers,
computerized bibles, organizers, etc. selling for under $50, what about
making a dedicated thing using the same hardware but different ROMs?
I'm sure some of those things have more powerful computers in them than
some of the old 8-bit machines that ran infocom games. You could
probably charge $40 or so and include 5 games. I seem to remember
someone saying that some of those spell-checkers/etc have 6502 CPUs
and a system similar to the old Apple II, with the only difference
between the different models is the ROMs. You might even be able to
do something like a spell-checker, a scrabble dictionary, and a
few IF games.
Greg
--
Videogames, Unicycling, and Anarchism: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~galt/
Christopher E. Forman
: I think much of the problem that we face with such specialisation and
: multiple-authors is the fact that, with some exceptions undoubtedly, the IF
: community (i.e., the membership of raif) never actually physically meet.
For the most part, this can lead to setbacks, but in the case of PTF, I
already knew my co-author well enough to make a lot of decisions on my own.
Although we didn't get together to work on it much, we've always had similar
tastes and ideas regarding what to put into the game. Jeff was quite
agreeable to any suggestions or alterations I had, and I did my best to work
his ideas into the code as closely as I could.
: SoG was, IMO, identifiable by its origins -- the game felt very
: episodic, though this is not always a bad thing.
I believe the reason for this was (and correct me if I'm wrong) that SoG
was not only written by 2 authors, but _programmed_ that way as well, which
would inevitably lead to an episodic layout when 2 programmers are involved.
("Here, you can take this scene, and I'll take this one, and you can have
that one...") Again, this is not to say that SoG is a bad game. In fact,
I liked the episodic structure to it -- along with Klaustrophobia and
CosmoServe, it's one of my favorite AGT games of all time.
With PTF, though, Jeff and I split up roles from the start. The game layout
has changed very little from the original design he approached me with long
ago. I felt that, since Jeff had designed the game, he had a better idea of
what he wanted, so I let him do most of the writing (although I did look it
over and make changes later -- but I always asked if that was okay first).
Likewise, since Jeff is not a programmer (not yet, anyway), he left the
Informing up to me.
In a way, Jeff's lack of an e-mail address slowed us down even more than
the SoG authors. I had to gather as much info on the game as I could while
we were together (and because of schedule conflicts, there weren't a lot of
those times). When I had a huge list of questions, I'd call him or snail-
mail him, and I did my best to send alpha versions out periodically so he
could make sure the game was turning out the way he'd envisioned it.
In the end, though, all the trouble was worth it. PTF turned out far
better than either of us had dared hope, largely due to our combined input.
It may be a cliche, but "Two heads are better than one" still rings true.
(That doesn't mean that _all_ I-F should be written in teams; far from it.
If you can get a co-author that you work well with, who can understand the
game as well as you do, then I'd say go for it. But remember, I-F is the
absolute last holdout for the lone programmer/author -- all other forms of
computer and video entertainment require the combined efforts of large
teams. But I-F directly discourages it. That's what I like about it.)
--
C.E. Forman cef...@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu
Read the I-F e-zine XYZZYnews, at ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/magazines/xyzzynews,
or on the Web at http://www.interport.net/~eileen!
* Interactive Fiction * Beavis and Butt-Head * The X-Files * MST3K * C/C++ *
Ivan Cockrum
>> How about this idea... With all of these cheapo spell-checkers,
>> computerized bibles, organizers, etc. selling for under $50, what
>> about making a dedicated thing using the same hardware but different
>> ROMs? I'm sure some of those things have more powerful computers in
>> them than some of the old 8-bit machines that ran infocom games. You
>> could probably charge $40 or so and include 5 games. I seem to
>> remember someone saying that some of those spell-checkers/etc have
>> 6502 CPUs and a system similar to the old Apple II, with the only
>> difference between the different models is the ROMs. You might even
>> be able to do something like a spell-checker, a scrabble dictionary,
>> and a few IF games.
Greg,
An excellent suggestion! That ties in closely with what someone else (sorry,
can't remember who) recently said about porting Inform to the Newton. PDAs
are an IDEAL platform for IF, and I think that people who routinely use PDAs
and recognize their inherent limitations would be thrilled at having a library
of IF available to them.
Your point about making an IF-specific PDA is neat, because of course you
could sell additional games on flash cards - which don't require much shelf
space and can probably be made & sold cheaply.
-- Ivan
Tim Middleton
IC= aspects of IF, and broadly advertise the "literature" aspects. The
IC= second step (this is more applicable today, because of course Infocom
IC= already had national distribution) would have been/is to get these
IC= "interactive novels" or "hyperliterature" or whatever marketing term
IC= people agree on, into book stores,
Let me inject a little cynicism (again?)... and comment about HyperFiction
vs. I-F as we know it. It seems to me that HyperFiction really goes nicely
along the same stream of one reason graphical games took over... the reason
TV took over books (and radio?)... poeple like to see, and people (as a
generalisation) don't like to exert much effort (in general). HyperFiction
is a realtively passive activity. Sure, make a "choice" every once in a
while... this way or that.
Of course it would be interesting to see I-F, hypothetically, try to target
a new market as described... readers. Might be a step in the right direction
in this pipe dream of reviving Text Adventure on a mass scale...
So where are our marketers? We need rec.arts.int-fiction.marketing... (-:
Good grief, i just wrote this eminently stupid message and I could have used
the time to work on... ah... um... nevermind. (-;
---
with love and squalor. <as...@torfree.net>
Jack Bell
|How about this idea... With all of these cheapo
|spell-checkers, computerized bibles, organizers,
|etc. selling for under $50, what about making a
|dedicated thing using the same hardware but different ROMs?
>>>I Say:
ROM chips are very expensive. Plus many people would have to buy the
devices who already own computers. Better to stick with PC's and
cheap floppys. Or sell CD/ROM's with a compilation of games (20 or
30). Group them by theme...
Greg Alt
>>>>ga...@lal.cs.utah.edu (Greg Alt) Says:
>|How about this idea... With all of these cheapo
>|spell-checkers, computerized bibles, organizers,
>|etc. selling for under $50, what about making a
>|dedicated thing using the same hardware but different ROMs?
>
>>>>I Say:
>ROM chips are very expensive.
They can't be too terribly expensive, because I've seen handheld
bible searchers for not very much money.
>Plus many people would have to buy the
>devices who already own computers. Better to stick with PC's and
>cheap floppys. Or sell CD/ROM's with a compilation of games (20 or
>30). Group them by theme...
But the problem with that is that when you market for PCs, you are
directly competing with very flashy games. As people have pointed
out, there is almost no market there. By putting it in one of those
organizers, you wouldn't be competing with PC software, you would be
competing with other handheld gadgets, most of which are less flashy.
For example, I saw some little video poker handheld LCD games for
$10. Nobody would ever pay that much for such a non-flashy version
of video-poker for a PC, but they will pay it for the handheld.
One of the big advantages of a handheld thing is that they are low
power and don't suck batteries as bad as palmtop PCs, they can be
instant on, so that you can turn it on and have it be where you
left it. They are small and can be easily carried around. They can
have additional features built in, like a calculator, scrabble
dictionary, whatever. They require zero technical sophistication to
operate. They are a much smaller investment than a PC. Then there
is the fact that lots of people like to get new gee-whiz gadgets.
It probably wouldn't be a huge success, but I bet it would work.
Andrew C. Plotkin
> No need to be private. I like to air my grudges publicly. :)
>
> In 1990 I wrote a shareware X-windows game, Xasteroids, which has been very
> successful. I've received hundreds of email letters thanking me or requesting
> help compiling it. I've had it republished on 2 CD-ROMs, with the shareware
> notice. One of these, in Japan, was a run of around 80,000 copies.
> A descendant of my game (reworked by someone else) is in the Slackware Linux
> release, and my version is (I'm told) in the Debian Linux release. It was goi\
> ng
> to be in the Sun Book of Games on CD-ROM, but was dropped for legal reasons.
> (Imagine that. :) *
>
> I asked $5 for the game. I've had 2 or 3 people pay the $5, plus one guy
> who gave me around $40 to put it on a CD. Prentice-Hall was going to pay
> $100 to reprint it before they dropped it.
Keep in mind that in the world of X software, just about everything is
free. (Unix tools, X Windows itself, and Unix is either free or came
bundled with the computer.) All the games I've seen for X (including
the several I've written) were free. Besides, software is usually
distributed in the form of source code, so crippling shareware isn't
possible.
This is different from the Mac/PC world, where there is a strong
shareware tradition.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
bonni mierzejewska
wrote:
>contact (no rude jokes please 8). It is in fact quite difficult to bounce
>ideas off each other via e-mail -- the Internet's fast, but not fast enough.
>Mind you, I have been/am doing this for a game, so it's not impossible.
At the risk of incurring loud raspberries...there is IRC, which is *almost*
realtime, for bouncing ideas off one another. Definitely not as good as real
life, but perhaps better than email.
bonni
<ducking>
Ivan Cockrum
TM> to target a new market as described... readers. Might be a step in
TM> the right direction in this pipe dream of reviving Text Adventure
TM> on a mass scale...
TM> So where are our marketers? We need
TM> rec.arts.int-fiction.marketing... (-:
Tim,
I think the first step would be to put a product together - for example, someone in a
recent message suggested putting the entire IF archives at GMD on a CD-ROM, which is
a good idea. It would have to be cleaned up substantially and everything made clean and
simple to use, but it could be done.
The next step would be to find a national distributor looking for content to distribute.
As it happens, there's a lot of this going on right now, especially in the CD-ROM
market. I actually know of and have spoken with a couple of companies that are looking
for material to distribute, and while there are certainly no guarantees, a good
distributor can get these titles into thousands of stores nationwide. This is all based on
the fact that, while A-list CD-ROMS priced at $40 and up are not selling well, CDs
priced below $15 and below $10, with minimal packaging, and placed near checkout,
are doing quite well. There are a lot of CD-ROM drives out there, and people are
constantly looking for new toys to plug into their expensive new devices.
-- Ivan
Phil Goetz
Julian Arnold <rai...@arnod.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>I wonder, would it be terribly rude of me to ask shareware authors to mail me
>a few specific details? Two or three people have done so already, and it's
>interesting to note that, although their respective games have different
>pricetags attached, the total profit for each one is nearly the same. I'd
>quite like to see if this phenomenon occurs on a large scale (if not, is
>there a "price which gives the best returns"? Popular opinion seems to put
>this at around the $10-$15 mark, but perhaps it's elsewhere), and then
>perhaps include the results in the FAQ as a guide for future shareware
>authors. This might also allow me to check out the theory that prices under
>$n are considered "not worth the bother of paying".
>
>Anyway, bearing in mind that I would be completely discreet, not mentioning
>any names or anything, could shareware authors send me a few details?
>
>What is the pricetag on your game?
>How many registrations have you had?
>What is the total profit from your game?
>For how long has your game been released?
>Could you give an idea of the frequency of registrations vs. age of your
>game? (i.e., what is the shelf-life of shareware IF?)
No need to be private. I like to air my grudges publicly. :)
In 1990 I wrote a shareware X-windows game, Xasteroids, which has been very
successful. I've received hundreds of email letters thanking me or requesting
help compiling it. I've had it republished on 2 CD-ROMs, with the shareware
notice. One of these, in Japan, was a run of around 80,000 copies.
A descendant of my game (reworked by someone else) is in the Slackware Linux
release, and my version is (I'm told) in the Debian Linux release. It was going
to be in the Sun Book of Games on CD-ROM, but was dropped for legal reasons.
(Imagine that. :) *
I asked $5 for the game. I've had 2 or 3 people pay the $5, plus one guy
who gave me around $40 to put it on a CD. Prentice-Hall was going to pay
$100 to reprint it before they dropped it.
Interest peaks when it finds its way to a new major site, like
export.lcs.mit.edu or the X games source newsgroup, but letters keep
trickling in now. The registrations, I think, came within about a year
of distributing it, but the requests to redistribute it bundled with other
software did not begin until around 1993.
I didn't provide any incentive to register -- no goodies, hints, or secrets.
Phil Go...@cs.buffalo.edu
* (I don't think the Sun Book of Games is going to come out.
They dropped a lot of games for legal reasons, and then they asked
more of the authors to change the name of the games for legal reasons.
Some of these authors (2 out of 2, as far as I know) answered that it wasn't
worth $100 to rework their games to change the name -- something I find hard
to imagine, but, hey.)
Phil Goetz
Ivan Cockrum <iv...@cis.compuserve.com> wrote:
>I think the main reason Infocom died out was because they couldn't
>keep up with the flashy graphical adventure games entering the
>market. However, I think Infocom MIGHT have survived if they have
>radically shifted their market focus. They continued to compete in
>the computer game market, even though the computer game market was
>continually advancing the state of the art.
I think Infocom died because they sunk all their money into Cornerstone,
a database. I think the rest of the industry attributed Infocom's demise
to nonviability of text adventures.
I have a collection of letters from many software publishers, circa 1986-1988,
who all believed text adventures were dead and would not venture to publish
one, but none of whom presented any market research numbers or other
justification for their position.
I believe there is a niche for text adventures. A small niche. It is only
*because* it is a small niche that it may be profitable for small operators
like us. More likely it will be taken over by one company like Infocom.
But I think there might be a profitable niche for somebody, in the
not-too-distant future.
Phil Go...@cs.buffalo.edu
David & Sally Parsley
>Of course it would be interesting to see I-F, hypothetically, try to target
>a new market as described... readers. Might be a step in the right direction
>in this pipe dream of reviving Text Adventure on a mass scale...
>
>So where are our marketers? We need rec.arts.int-fiction.marketing... (-:
This is a pipe dream that I, perhaps naively, share. I agree that the market
to pursue is readers, with IF on the shelves by SF. I disagree in packaging
gobs of them on a $10 CDROM; myself, I think of that sort of CDROM generally
packed with junk (please no flames! I know this untrue, but it's just the
gut feeling I get when I see these on the shelves at Wal-mart). I would
shudder to think of Graham's 'Curses' or 'Jigsaw' packaged that way.
I agree also that we could use some good thoughts on
rec.arts.int-fiction.marketing; but my own thoughts are somewhat un-polished,
and, well, it's a tough problem! Could we really flesh-out a whole new
newsgroup? What we need to tackle are the questions of: if Curses is such a
great adventure (I enjoyed it when last I read it) why hasn't it caught fire?
Are any of the adventures we're writing really on a level with Infocom's?
No story I've downloaded yet has absorbed me the way 'Planetfall' did. How
did Infocom do it?
Anyway, here's my first posting in a couple of years. Why do I feel like I'm
handing a side of beef to a pack of wolves?
Sanjay S Vakil
> How about this idea... With all of these cheapo spell-checkers,
> computerized bibles, organizers, etc. selling for under $50, what about
> making a dedicated thing using the same hardware but different ROMs?
> some of the old 8-bit machines that ran infocom games. You could
> probably charge $40 or so and include 5 games. I seem to remember
> someone saying that some of those spell-checkers/etc have 6502 CPUs
> and a system similar to the old Apple II, with the only difference
> between the different models is the ROMs. You might even be able to
> do something like a spell-checker, a scrabble dictionary, and a
> few IF games.
>
Hey there. I was the voice a while back that was trumpetting IF on the
newton. It rocks. I mean it is *very* cool. The cost of the old MP100s
is about $150 now, which is significantly more than the $40 you mention.
However, having a touch screen and never having to type is *wonderful*.
Basically, the UI I've worked up lets the user tap on any word in the
'output area' and have it appear as the next word in their 'input area'.
This prevents giving away clues by having a popup list of words or some
other cheat, and allows the user to avoid fighting the dictionary and
having
Throw axe at dwarf
change to
Tree ash at burn
(:
sanj
jesse montrose
> I think I mentioned this already, but this sounds a *lot* like what I feel like
> playing with the (very alpha) zmachine on the newton. There is no typing - the
> UI is written so you tap on any word you want in the input line (or you can fight
> the handwriting recoginition for odd words), and the portability is self evident.
> The folding screen and voice activation will be saved for rev 2.0 (:
I was wondering if someone had thought of that, can you point the
rest of us newton owners to the very alpha newton zmachine?
I'd love to give it a whirl..
I've been thinking about writing an IF, and was going to make it
specifically for the newton.
--
____________________________________________________________________
jesse montrose <je...@spine.com> http://www.hooked.net/bin/jesse.home
After seven years, I was sent home to my family. Little man, I give
the watch to you.
Sanjay S Vakil
non-networked mac that is sitting on my desk at home. It is also
currently very (read: almost unplayably) slow.
A friend and I are still working on the code (:
Tentative release is late January '96, after I pass my qualifying exams.
sanj
ps. I just realized that I never mentioned that I was the one writing
it!
Erik Max Francis
> Hey there. I was the voice a while back that was trumpetting IF on the
> newton. It rocks. I mean it is *very* cool. The cost of the old MP100s
> is about $150 now, which is significantly more than the $40 you mention.
>
> However, having a touch screen and never having to type is *wonderful*.
You still have to poke at the screen with a stylus? How is this more
advantageous than a keyboard?
Not that I dislike Newtons (although they're still too slow); but I
don't think that this is one of the Newton's advantages.
Erik Max Francis, &tSftDotIotE && uuwest!alcyone!max, m...@alcyone.darkside.com
San Jose, California, U.S.A. && 37 20 07 N 121 53 38 W && the 4th R is respect
H.3`S,3,P,3$S,#$Q,C`Q,3,P,3$S,#$Q,3`Q,3,P,C$Q,#(Q.#`-"C`- && 1love && folasade
_Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt._ && GIGO Omega Psi && http://www.spies.com/max/
"The Creator Raven looked at Man and was . . . surprised to find that this
strange new being was so much like himself." -- Eskimo creation myth
Andrew C. Plotkin
> > Are any of the adventures we're writing really on a level with Infocom's?
> >No story I've downloaded yet has absorbed me the way 'Planetfall' did. How
> >did Infocom do it?
>
> it or not. While it's probably a waste of effort for people to try and
> produce IF adventures that are "just like" Infocom (knock-off, more or
> less), it is a great idea to try and identify what made Infocom's games
> so good.
>
[..]
>
> At any rate, identifying what made Infocom's games so popular, so
> lasting, and so outstanding is the first step towards resuscitating IF as
> a serious commercial enterprise.
To be completely honest, I think a lot of it is Golden Age Syndrome.
Anything ten years old is terrific. We remember _Beyond Zork_. Anyone
look back fondly on _Moonmist_? (If you do, substitute some other game
you didn't like.) The good stuff sticks in memory.
Plus, they did a lot of things first, which made them terrific, but
repeating the same thing today would be terrible. (You may recall that
one of my comments about "Zebulon" was that it had lots of
brightly-colored magical items sort of arbitrarily scattered around.
In fact, it reminded me of _Starcross_. I *loved* _Starcross_. But
that was not a point in favor of "Zebulon"; it was a point against.
(Not that it didn't have many other points in favor of it.))
I think that YES there are games on gmd.de which are the equal of
Infocom's. (And not just Graham's, either. :-)
Advantages that Infocom had that we currently lack:
1) Much more beta-testing. No game I've seen here has been really
polished until the second or third *public* release.
2) Much more internal design support. By which I mean, Infocom people
(being in a company of full-time people) obviously spent some amount
of time looking over each other's shoulders, chatting at lunch about
programming points, etc, etc. We talk a lot about design in general,
but we're very secretive about specifics. This makes sense; the only
people we can discuss them with are the audience who're going to play
the final product! But the difference shows up in a sort of raggedness
*between* games. There's less consistency.
Example (no spoilers): In _Shelby_, "garage" and "garage door" are
separate things. "unlock door" works, but "unlock garage" gets you a
befuddled message. In "Weather", I took it for granted that "unlock
shed" and "unlock door" must do the same thing. Regardless of which
custom you like, you're going to be confused by the other.
That's the sort of raggedness I mean. Different games make very
different assumptions about level of detail of action, level of detail
of description, amount of hand-holding, etc, etc. These are not just
deliberate differences of difficulty; they're different assumptions
about how games should go.
What we can do about it:
There is nothing we can do about it.
jesse montrose
> In article <4afpqu$p...@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> sa...@mit.edu (Sanjay S Vakil) writes:
> >Hey there. I was the voice a while back that was trumpetting IF on the
> >newton. It rocks. I mean it is *very* cool. The cost of the old MP100s
> >is about $150 now, which is significantly more than the $40 you mention.
>
> the newton, as I know little.
I haven't seen the newton zengine yet, but I can answer some of these other
questions, I bought a newton about six weeks ago and I love it.
> Like, how do you get the data onto it,
It has a PCMCIA slot that can hold a modem, an IR port (though I don't
think many people use this for anything but newton->newton comm, and a
serial port.
I use the serial port to send software, syncronize my data with my desktop,
etc.
> how much data can it hold,
The current version has 2meg of internal storage, I think about 1.3 of that
is available to the user. I also have an 8meg PCMCIA card that I keep big
stuff on.
> how long can it run on a set of batteries,
On rechargables I get a couple days, on alkalines you can get an amazing (to
me) week or two.
> how much info can you see on the screen,
It's 240x320 pixels, can hold a good sized chunk of text.
> can you scroll back to see past
> moves, etc? Also, if someone wanted to tweak the code, how tricky would
> that be? Would you need to buy a development package for the newton?
Can't answer the first two, but there is a $50 shareware compiler for newton
development, as well as the $300 commercial version (that I would try, but
it's only available on the mac thus far).
> >However, having a touch screen and never having to type is *wonderful*.
> >
> >Basically, the UI I've worked up lets the user tap on any word in the
> >'output area' and have it appear as the next word in their 'input area'.
>
> But don't you still have to write most verbs? How about something that
> keeps track of all the words that have been used previously. That way,
> you would only have to write out each verb once (and the obvious ones
> could be given already, like 'north,' 'south,' etc.).
That'd be how I'd like to see it, space permitting..
Greg Alt
>Hey there. I was the voice a while back that was trumpetting IF on the
>newton. It rocks. I mean it is *very* cool. The cost of the old MP100s
>is about $150 now, which is significantly more than the $40 you mention.
Could you give some more info about the newton engine? And also about
the newton, as I know little. Like, how do you get the data onto it,
how much data can it hold, how long can it run on a set of batteries,
how much info can you see on the screen, can you scroll back to see past
moves, etc? Also, if someone wanted to tweak the code, how tricky would
that be? Would you need to buy a development package for the newton?
>However, having a touch screen and never having to type is *wonderful*.
>
>Basically, the UI I've worked up lets the user tap on any word in the
>'output area' and have it appear as the next word in their 'input area'.
But don't you still have to write most verbs? How about something that
keeps track of all the words that have been used previously. That way,
you would only have to write out each verb once (and the obvious ones
could be given already, like 'north,' 'south,' etc.).
Greg
jesse montrose
> On the other hand, we're not talking about point-of-sale purchases here.
> If I'm in the bookstore, I'll be more likely to plunk down $5 for a
> paperback than $10. But if I'm going to write a check, get an envelope,
> write a little note, stamp it, seal it, find a mailbox, etc., that five
> buck difference doesn't seem like such a big deal any more.
>
> (Amazing how e-mail changes one's perspective, isn't it?)
Agreed, I buy quite a bit of shareware through compuserve's SWREG
service (the author pays a cut to compuserve, and compuserve adds
it to my bill). With the several digital cash schemes coming into
existance, this could be a happy way for authors to get paid.
I've just rediscovered IF, and haven't even played any again (yet),
but I would be delighted to pay an author $5-$15 for a few hours of
entertainment, I spend as much on a movie, and I have to sit in an
uncomfortable theater chair for those few hours instead of my comfy
chair at home :)
John F. Winkler
David & Sally Parsley <par...@roanoke.infi.net> wrote:
>I agree also that we could use some good thoughts on
>rec.arts.int-fiction.marketing; but my own thoughts are somewhat un-polished,
>and, well, it's a tough problem! Could we really flesh-out a whole new
>newsgroup? What we need to tackle are the questions of: if Curses is such a
>great adventure (I enjoyed it when last I read it) why hasn't it caught fire?
> Are any of the adventures we're writing really on a level with Infocom's?
>No story I've downloaded yet has absorbed me the way 'Planetfall' did. How
>did Infocom do it?
That's an excellent question! Infocom is the de facto IF standard, like
it or not. While it's probably a waste of effort for people to try and
produce IF adventures that are "just like" Infocom (knock-off, more or
less), it is a great idea to try and identify what made Infocom's games
so good.
For instance: my two favorite Infocom games ever were Beyond Zork and
Plundered Hearts. PH had a great plot: well-structured, yet flexible,
well-fleshed out. Losing was not necessarily "Whoops, you fell in the
trash compactor. ***You have died.***" immediate. The puzzles were not
so much set pieces as figuring out a strategy to organize your efforts.
The plot was superb.
Beyond Zork had style, which is hard to define. The Zork series were all
quirky and half-serious, but there's a lot of leeway in that range.
IMHO, Zork Zero showed how NOT to do that. It was more or less a series
of puzzles, with some cheap gags. BZ has a sort of dignified zaniness.
Well, perhaps it's both too difficult to identify and subject to personal
taste.
At any rate, identifying what made Infocom's games so popular, so
lasting, and so outstanding is the first step towards resuscitating IF as
a serious commercial enterprise.
John Holder
> At the risk of incurring loud raspberries...there is IRC, which is *almost*
> realtime, for bouncing ideas off one another. Definitely not as good as real
> life, but perhaps better than email.
For others like me, (and a friend of mine whom I program all sorts of things
with) we primarily use UNIX talk (ytalk in specific) to bounce ideas off of
each other. ytalk allows us to log our typing to files, so we _know_ what
we've said. He lives in Illinois, I live in New Mexico. We are both Internet-
aholics, tho, so it is easy for us to get ahold of each other when we want to.
John
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Holder (jho...@nmsu.edu) "Verbing weirds language." - Calvin
Homepage: http://speedracer.nmsu.edu/~jholder
Topics: Homebrewing | Raytracing | Interactive Fiction | Fractals
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Thieme
to the Galaxy. The writing - content, intelligence, evocative poetic
prose of the first and incredibly witty and clever prose of the second
(with a quality novel behind it, admittedly) -- made them great. But then
there's a lot of the "invisible qualities" that you don't notice because
they don't call attention to themselves - pacing, puzzles well-integrated
with the story and not "tacked on," all around integrity of the "modules"
and how they relate to the whole. Then maybe too there's a quality of
"strangeness," similar to the way Hynek used the term to describe aspects
of many UFO encounters - the sense of taking you to the edge of the known
universe (in the context of the story) and showing you doors into the
next domain, a dimension of story you hadn't seen or imagined previously.
There are visual images in Trinity and feelings of wide wind-swept
places, lonely and yet hopeful, that remain with me yet.
Ivan Cockrum
>> IF, although not text-based.
Andrew,
Are you the author of System's Twilight? I know your name well
from the IF archives, but it's been awhile since I last looked at ST,
and I never made the connection. 'Cause ST was and is an amazing
game.
-- Ivan
Ivan Cockrum
>> different assumptions about level of detail of action, level of
>> detail of description, amount of hand-holding, etc, etc. These are
>> not just deliberate differences of difficulty; they're different
>> assumptions about how games should go.
>>
>> What we can do about it:
>>
>> There is nothing we can do about it.
I disagree. You pointed out that Infocom were able to settle on group
wide standards because they were all working together, 9 to 5. Now,
it's going to be a lot tougher for our current crop of IF people to get
together and agree on a set of standards, but I believe it is possible.
What is needed is some kind of workshop: either a real life gathering,
or an online real-time meeting, or even just a week when everyone
agrees to contribute to an ongoing discussion in the newsgroup.
However it's done, the basic need must be to focus on identifying a set
of fairly universal IF standards. Obviously, we're not all going to
agree on a complete set of standards, nor adhere to them rigidly, but
it would be a huge step in the right direction.
-- Ivan
Sanjay S Vakil
|> In article <4afpqu$p...@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> sa...@mit.edu (Sanjay S Vakil) writes:
|> >Hey there. I was the voice a while back that was trumpetting IF on the
|> >newton. It rocks. I mean it is *very* cool. The cost of the old MP100s
|> >is about $150 now, which is significantly more than the $40 you mention.
|>
|> Could you give some more info about the newton engine? And also about
|> the newton, as I know little. Like, how do you get the data onto it,
|> how much data can it hold, how long can it run on a set of batteries,
|> how much info can you see on the screen, can you scroll back to see past
|> moves, etc? Also, if someone wanted to tweak the code, how tricky would
|> that be? Would you need to buy a development package for the newton?
Not a lot to really tell at this point. It currently runs rather slowly -
newtonscript (NS) is the only language available to work on the newton, and
it isn't well suited to becoming a bytecode interpretter. It's based
on ZIP, with huge mods as required by a full language change (for example,
NS has *no* pointer math! argh!). In addition, the actual RAM is about
50-60k, the rest is functionally ROM.
The data is loaded by a helper program on a mac/unix/pc that loads the
datafile into a 'wrapper' package that can be loaded onto the newt, so
you still require a regular desktop machine. The newt itself, depending
on configuration, has 150k - 1.5M onboard user memory. You can get
RAM cards to up it by 2/4/8M chunks. My current machine has 150k of
onboard and a 2M flashRAM card. It runs on AAA batteries for about a
week (I use rechargeables). Newer machines run on AA batteries for about
a month. If you want to see a screen shot I took recently (for info that
can fit on the screen), look at:
http://web.mit.edu/sanj/www/home.html
I've already built in a 'ten screen' scrollback; that might be user settable
in the actual release.
Code tweaking will be a nightmare. I can barely keep up with it now, since
most of the speed hacks we're using make the code more complicated to
keep running. I don't think I'll bother making the source public, because
it won't help anyone, since you *will* still need the Newton Toolkit ($300)
to recompile it.
|>
|> >However, having a touch screen and never having to type is *wonderful*.
|> >
|> >Basically, the UI I've worked up lets the user tap on any word in the
|> >'output area' and have it appear as the next word in their 'input area'.
|>
|> But don't you still have to write most verbs? How about something that
|> keeps track of all the words that have been used previously. That way,
|> you would only have to write out each verb once (and the obvious ones
|> could be given already, like 'north,' 'south,' etc.).
Verbs are located on a 'picker diamond' that pops up a list of user settable
verbs. You can put stuff that you use often on that list, and can access
any verb in two taps. The directions are on a compass rose (the web page
snapshot makes this all very clear), with a few touch buttons for other
directions like "up", "down", "enter" and "exit".
|>
|> Greg
|> --
|> Videogames, Unicycling, and Anarchism: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~galt/
I feel like I'm creating all of this interest for a product that I won't
have time to finish until late January (I'm studying for qualifying exams).
I hope y'all will bear with me until then...
sanj
David & Sally Parsley
>
>To be completely honest, I think a lot of it is Golden Age Syndrome.
>Anything ten years old is terrific. We remember _Beyond Zork_. Anyone
That's a good point, but I don't believe entirely true. I certainly had favorite
authors - anything Steve Meretzky (sp?) touched was gold as far as I'm concerned. But
no, Moonmist and several dozen others are pretty lousy. The last story I read,
Plundered Hearts (as mentioned by J Winkler) isn't all that old, but probably one of
the best IF stories written, as far as I'm concerned.
>I think that YES there are games on gmd.de which are the equal of
>Infocom's. (And not just Graham's, either. :-)
>
>Advantages that Infocom had that we currently lack:
>
>1) Much more beta-testing. No game I've seen here has been really
>polished until the second or third *public* release.
I agree that there are games on a level with Infocom's available; but most of them
aren't polished enough (even, ahem... Graham's (IMHO)); the problem being that yes,
they were a company working full-time at this stuff. (although I'm made to wonder
just how many hours a week Graham puts in?) We could certainly use more beta-testing;
Graham relies (I believe) on Gareth and others to beta-test his stuff; that could be
expanded.
Also, what about the tools we use? What sorts of fundamental improvements could we
make? I've considered modifying an interpreter so that I could edit the messages in
my story file, then UNDO to see how it looks and sounds. (even if I made
modifications to save the whole story file, I would still lose my interactive edits on
the next compile) What about being able to edit CODE during test-play?
>What we can do about it:
>
>There is nothing we can do about it.
>
YIKES! That's a little stiff. How about some more thoughts from the peanut gallery
before we live with a dictum like that?
-Parse
Stephen van Egmond
>Agreed, I buy quite a bit of shareware through compuserve's SWREG
>service (the author pays a cut to compuserve, and compuserve adds
>it to my bill). With the several digital cash schemes coming into
>existance, this could be a happy way for authors to get paid.
A similar affair is being set up by Be, Inc., the producers of a very
very interesting little device called the BeBox. In theory, since an IF
work would work in a BeBox, they would be willing to support it on their
Web site.
(Details: Be, Inc. will market and collect payment for your registerable
shareware as well as dispense unlocked versions of the product, if I
recall, through their Website, on your behalf. -- www.be.com for more.)
/Steve
Sanjay S Vakil
|> You still have to poke at the screen with a stylus? How is this more
|> advantageous than a keyboard?
|>
|> Not that I dislike Newtons (although they're still too slow); but I
|> don't think that this is one of the Newton's advantages.
|>
|> Erik Max Francis
Actually, I consider keyboards big and clunky. While they are fast,
how much time do you spend actually typing in an IF game? If the input
mechanism is a bit slower, I don't think it will detract significantly
from the experience.
In any case, if you don't have to write anything out, you are very fast
tapping at words you need.
In any case, the 2.0 newton has a keyboard option.
sanj
Matthew Amster
>Also, what about the tools we use? What sorts of fundamental improvements
>could we make? I've considered modifying an interpreter so that I could
>edit the messages in my story file, then UNDO to see how it looks and
>sounds. (even if I made modifications to save the whole story file, I
>would still lose my interactive edits on the next compile) What about
>being able to edit CODE during test-play?
This can almost be done now--close enough, in fact, that it's not worth
rewiring the interpreter or compiler code. Most people are doing their
game development on a Mac or PC running MacOS or DOS (maybe Windows),
respectively. Moving your development to a Unix system offers the
following advantages:
* Speed. If you've got a Pentium Pro or a PowerMac 6 Kajillion, this is
not an issue. If you're stuck with something old, like most of us, it's a
major consideration. My TADS game, in its current state, takes about 40
seconds to compile on my 486/25, and about four seconds on the Unix shell
account I'm using (a decent machine, but hardly the latest and greatest).
* Programmer-friendliness. Using Emacs on the Unix box, I can hit two
keystrokes to start the code compiling, and keep editing while the
compilation proceeds (not that this is strictly necessary, for the
moment). If there are errors, one keystroke automatically parses the
output from the compiler and takes me to where the errors are. Another
keystroke suspends the editor and starts the game. With a playtesting
command, I can be in the proper place with the right objects in no time.
Emacs even has a "mode" for TADS code--it does the proper indenting
automatically. I can think about what I'm writing instead of making sure
my braces line up. (There may be an Inform mode, too--I don't know.)
The productivity gain from using a powerful editor on a powerful computer
offsets any speed lost by having to dial up over modem. If you happen to
be connected through a LAN, like I am, all the better.
If you read the group, you may very well have access to a Unix shell right
now and just never thought about using it for IF development before. I was
in that situation for months until one day it clicked. If you don't have a
shell account, you can get one cheap--probably $10-$20 per month.
The ultimate development platform is an X terminal. I'm lucky to go to
school within walking distance of an engineering college. They've got a
room full of X terms with 21-inch monitors. I can have the game running in
one window and be editing it in another, and have enough screen real estate
left over for a Netscape window.
Given what can be done easily and cheaply now, I find no compelling
justification for making tricky interpreter changes in order to test new
code. One thing I would like to see is separate-independent compilation
for TADS, but that's another rant.
In short: If you've got the means, try TADS or Inform on Unix.
>>There is nothing we can do about it. [The unsaleable state of IF]
>YIKES! That's a little stiff. How about some more thoughts from the
>peanut gallery before we live with a dictum like that?
I find myself caught somewhere in the middle on this. I agree with those
who say that no IF author today is going to release a game and strike it
rich, or even strike it middle-class. One the other hand, I do believe the
enormous group of people who read books, own computers, but don't play
games is a heretofore untapped audience that might help us usher in a new
era of IF for sale.
Probably not, though. And really, what's wrong with the way things are
now? Currently, enough games are being published to keep me busy. I'm
still working on Christminster, and would like to get to Shelby and PTF.
By the time I do, Lost New York and...uh, Avalon will probably be out. And
I'll be plugging away at my own game for a while yet.
Everyone writing games today is doing it because he loves to. This has
resulted in some great-quality games (the best in recent years, IMHO, being
Legend, by Dave Baggett, who claims he doesn't even particularly care
whether people play his games) as well as an exciting IF culture here on
the group. I'm having fun writing my adventure, and I certainly hope it
gets played and lauded or panned. I don't give a damn whether anyone sends
me any money for it, or whether a thousand people solve it. I'd love to
hear commentary on it from Gareth Rees, Andrew Plotkin, Dave Baggett, and
everyone else who makes r.a.i-f the best place on Usenet to hang out.
(Having said that, don't hold your breath--it'll be a while before I'm
done, and hey, then it'll probably be time to start readying a competition
entry.)
So how, I wonder, would another "Golden Age of [Commercial] IF" make for
more personal enjoyment for most of us?
Okay, it's time to put my laundry in the dryer. If you've gotten this far,
bless you.
Matthew
Joe Mason
GA>>Plus many people would have to buy the
GA>>devices who already own computers. Better to stick with PC's and
GA>>cheap floppys. Or sell CD/ROM's with a compilation of games (20 or
GA>>30). Group them by theme...
There's no reason you would have to sell them on the device *or* the
computer. Why couldn't you do both? Better yet, let the device read
IBM and Mac formatted diskettes? That way you could transfer your games
from the computer to the device with no problems...
Joe
---
þ CMPQwk #1.42þ UNREGISTERED EVALUATION COPY
Mike Phillips
>
>To be completely honest, I think a lot of it is Golden Age Syndrome.
>Anything ten years old is terrific. We remember _Beyond Zork_. Anyone
>you didn't like.) The good stuff sticks in memory.
Well, *I* look back fondly on Moonmist. I played Zork I (briefly)
shortly after it came out, but it never floated my boat, so to speak.
As a result, I didn't touch IF again, even though the same friend who
made me play it on his computer (we didn't have one yet) loved it, and
Zork II, and who knows what else.
Then, some time later, I played Moonmist, and enjoyed it tremendously.
Maybe it was the atmosphere, maybe it was the secret passages, maybe it
was because I'm *not* a clever person at all, and the puzzles didn't
kill me (and, in fact, to *me* never seemed to get in the way). Then
again, that was quite a while ago, and I don't remember much about it
other than the satisfaction at getting through a secret door, the
curiosity to explore, and the fact that there were four games (sort of)
in the one. I will probably be re-playing Moonmist this week, so my
opinion is subject to change :-)
There isn't a point buried above, really, other than yeah, the good
stuff sticks in memory, but tastes vary.
>Advantages that Infocom had that we currently lack:
>
>1) Much more beta-testing. No game I've seen here has been really
>polished until the second or third *public* release.
Well, they were more organized ;-)
I think that if authors swapped thoughts on what good/bad things people
thought they did (say feature 'A' seemd to draw a positive response, but
feature 'B' received no comments or only negative ones), it would be
a start. A good place to start: XYZZYNews articles ;-)
>2) Much more internal design support. By which I mean, Infocom people
>(being in a company of full-time people) obviously spent some amount
>of time looking over each other's shoulders, chatting at lunch about
>programming points, etc, etc. We talk a lot about design in general,
>but we're very secretive about specifics. This makes sense; the only
>people we can discuss them with are the audience who're going to play
>the final product! But the difference shows up in a sort of raggedness
>*between* games. There's less consistency.
Two points to make in response:
(a) Someone has already proposed hashing out a sort of 'standard of
interface' document, not at all a bad idea, even if only useful
as a rule of thumb sort of thing.
(b) It spoils some of the pleasantries and surprises in the current
crop of games to have a wide-open discussion forum such as r.a.i-f
in which to discuss *specifics*. However, some are able to
surmount that (anywhere from IRC, talk, or MUD sessions to bounce
ideas in real-time, to phone conversations, to e-mail, to having
a housemate who enjoys this stuff to just chat with).
Why not create a *small* e-mail roundtable in which authors of a
particular system (say, Inform or TADS) can chat up their
experiences? And warn non-authors signing up that major spoilers
and lots of disappointment could accrue from listening in on
conversations before the games are released?
It could also result in a large/consistent pool of beta-testers.
Of course, then one realizes that the last thing that's needed is
Yet Another IF Forum..... I know I'd be more comfortable talking
about/asking for input on the largish game I'm working on if I
don't feel like half the potential audience is listening in (which
I do on r.a.i-f, and I'd like to not spoil what pleasure may come
from it long before it gets into a beta-testing form, much less
a <gasp> release).
>That's the sort of raggedness I mean. Different games make very
>different assumptions about level of detail of action, level of detail
>of description, amount of hand-holding, etc, etc. These are not just
>deliberate differences of difficulty; they're different assumptions
>about how games should go.
Well, I like simple-to-medium with some hand-holding, and I think a
new, free beginner-level game would be a good idea :-)
>What we can do about it:
>
>There is nothing we can do about it.
Not so sure about this (see above), although I'm sure we all disagree
over exactly what to do about it :-)
Mike Phillips, mi...@lawlib.wm.edu
Andrew C. Plotkin
> >> That's the sort of raggedness I mean. Different games make very
> >> different assumptions about level of detail of action, level of
> >> detail of description, amount of hand-holding, etc, etc. These are
> >> not just deliberate differences of difficulty; they're different
> >> assumptions about how games should go.
> >>
> >>
> >> There is nothing we can do about it.
Would everybody believe that I was late for lunch, had to finish the
post in a hurry, and that's why I was so abrupt?
No? :-)
(In part, I was quoting the end of Larry Niven's essay "How to Stop
War". It was even more depressing there.)
> I disagree. You pointed out that Infocom were able to settle on group
> wide standards because they were all working together, 9 to 5. Now,
> it's going to be a lot tougher for our current crop of IF people to get
> together and agree on a set of standards, but I believe it is possible.
> What is needed is some kind of workshop: either a real life gathering,
> or an online real-time meeting, or even just a week when everyone
> agrees to contribute to an ongoing discussion in the newsgroup.
> However it's done, the basic need must be to focus on identifying a set
> of fairly universal IF standards. Obviously, we're not all going to
> agree on a complete set of standards, nor adhere to them rigidly, but
> it would be a huge step in the right direction.
Would you also believe (and I *am* serious this time) that I don't
necessarily think that a set of standards is a good thing. I was just
pointing out that it's something Infocom had that we lack.
The more diverse range of design styles inevitably means that there
are games I have problems with. That doesn't mean I dislike the
diversity!
On the other hand, I would very much like to see the matter discussed
here. Not so much to generate a *universal* set of standards, but so
that authors are aware of what standards other individual authors have
chosen. Make a choice, rather than letting it fall arbitrarily out of
your program, sort of thing.
I think a real-life workshop is kind of hopeless. How many of us are
on opposite sides of the Atlantic?
>>There is nothing we can do about it. [The unsaleable state of IF]
Oop! I didn't mean the current unsalability of IF; I was talking
specifically about what Infocom had that we didn't. And I was being
rather arbitrary about the beta-testing, too. I don't think we can
beta-test games as well as a commercial company, but the heavy
pounding of the public release *does* serve the purpose. You just have
to accept the fact that the whole wide world will see a buggy first
release.
Phil Goetz
Julian Arnold <rai...@arnod.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>I think much of the problem that we face with such specialisation and
>multiple-authors is the fact that, with some exceptions undoubtedly, the IF
>community (i.e., the membership of raif) never actually physically meet.
>Even when two authors are trying to collaborate on a game and both can write
>and code, the creative process is stifled somewhat by this lack of personal
>contact (no rude jokes please 8). It is in fact quite difficult to bounce
>ideas off each other via e-mail -- the Internet's fast, but not fast enough.
>Mind you, I have been/am doing this for a game, so it's not impossible.
OK. Any authors in the Buffalo NY, or Columbia MD area who want to meet,
and possibly talk about interactive fiction? In Columbia, where I am now,
I'd suggest monthly meetings at Border's Bookstore on Snowden River Parkway.
That way if nobody shows up, you can have coffee and read books.
Phil Go...@cs.buffalo.edu
Ivan Cockrum
>> and possibly talk about interactive fiction?
Unfortunately I'm in neither area, but if anyone in the New York City
area wants to me to discuss IF, I'd be up for it.
-- Ivan
Neil K. Guy
: (That doesn't mean that _all_ I-F should be written in teams; far from it.
: If you can get a co-author that you work well with, who can understand the
: game as well as you do, then I'd say go for it. But remember, I-F is the
: absolute last holdout for the lone programmer/author -- all other forms of
: computer and video entertainment require the combined efforts of large
: teams. But I-F directly discourages it. That's what I like about it.)
I'd have to agree with that. Although my game has taken years to write
and probably years more will pass before it's done, it'll be a fairly
unified product of one person, not a committee. And I think there's
something to be said for fiction created by the vision of one person,
not a bunch of people hashing out ideas. Then again perhaps I tell
myself that because I'm not a very good team player when it comes to
creating stuff... I want the thing to be my product - and I'll take the
blame and the credit for it.
It's also rather nice that IF is, as you say, one of the few areas of
computer entertainment where you can turn out a professional product solo.
In fact, I can't think of many committee games really. Some people have
mentioned Shades of Grey, which I haven't played. I know the Infocom games
were largely written by one or two people, though how the collaborative
process worked with two+ people I don't know. I seem to recall reading in
interviews that the Imps worked fairly independently, while bouncing
ideas for feedback purposes off each other. Anyone have any insights on
this?
- Neil K.
--
Neil K. Guy * ne...@sfu.ca * te...@tela.bc.ca
49N 16' 123W 7' * Vancouver, BC, Canada
Jesse O. Sanford
> Unfortunately I'm in neither area, but if anyone in the New York City
That sounds like a good idea.
Anyone else want to meet to discuss IF?
This is a logical place to get some type of meeting happening.
--
Jesse O. Sanford <je...@columbia.edu>
"Oops! Synchronicity works!"
Neil Demause
: On Sat, 16 Dec 1995, Ivan Cockrum wrote:
:
: > Unfortunately I'm in neither area, but if anyone in the New York City
: > area wants to meet to discuss IF, I'd be up for it.
: That sounds like a good idea.
: Anyone else want to meet to discuss IF?
: This is a logical place to get some type of meeting happening.
Sure. Pick a time and place. After the holidays sometime?
Neil
Eileen Mullin
> Unfortunately I'm in neither area, but if anyone in the New York City
> area wants to meet to discuss IF, I'd be up for it.
Well, let me offer to get the ball rolling... :)
Afternoon tea at my spacious apartment, perhaps after New Year's?
Fellow metropolitan New Yorkers should e-mail me to help coordinate a IF
players' meeting date/time.
Eileen
Alexander Williams
Julian Arnold, replying to the mystic words as written, saying:
>contact (no rude jokes please 8). It is in fact quite difficult to bounce
>ideas off each other via e-mail -- the Internet's fast, but not fast enough.
>Mind you, I have been/am doing this for a game, so it's not impossible.
The solution to this, while it might seem strange to some, is to
go over to rec.games.mud, grab the latest list of active MUDs,
MUSHen, MUCKs, et al, pick one, and meet there. Instant realtime
Internet communication in a shared environ.
For my part, I'm using the things I've used here on the newsgroup
and in IF in general over the past few years to create a new type of
MUD system, integrating RolePlay-based interaction (guided by a
freeform RPG system) with areas devoted to pure-IFesque adventure
zones reminiscent of Zork and the old Infocom titles. It doesn't
promise to be easy nor is the language my choice optimum (LPC is
more C-like than Scheme-like, unfortunately ...) but ... its a
start, and it'll be a place that my fellow IFers might find
interesting once development proceeds apace.
--
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Edan Harel
>:
>: > Unfortunately I'm in neither area, but if anyone in the New York City
>: > area wants to meet to discuss IF, I'd be up for it.
Sure.
>: That sounds like a good idea.
>: Anyone else want to meet to discuss IF?
>
>: This is a logical place to get some type of meeting happening.
>
>
>Sure. Pick a time and place. After the holidays sometime?
Well, I go back to school sometime in the middle of Jan. Early January
good? (I could make it during the weekends, I suppose, but not as easily)
Course, we could always meet via IRC ;-)
Ivan Cockrum
>>
>> Fellow metropolitan New Yorkers should e-mail me to help coordinate
>> a IF players' meeting date/time.
Eileen,
That certainly works for me. As I'm self employed, my schedule is
pretty loose, so I would defer to whatever time is most convenient for
others.
-- Ivan