Looking for a couple of IF resources
richard develyn
I'm looking for a couple of documents which I've seen on the Internet
in the past but which I've now lost track of.
One is a list of DO's and DONTs (or maybe just the DONTs) for IF
authors.
The other is a rating system for puzzle fairness (related to the above,
I seem to remember it contained "cruel" for ones which become
unwinnable without any warning).
Can anyone help?
cheers
Richard
Mike Snyder
news:1134557006....@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> Hi there,
>
> I'm looking for a couple of documents which I've seen on the Internet
> in the past but which I've now lost track of.
>
> One is a list of DO's and DONTs (or maybe just the DONTs) for IF
> authors.
http://www.geocities.com/aetus_kane/writing/coa.html#bill
> The other is a rating system for puzzle fairness (related to the above,
> I seem to remember it contained "cruel" for ones which become
> unwinnable without any warning).
Don't know, but it sounds familiar.
--- Mike.
Mike Snyder
news:1134557006....@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> Hi there,
> The other is a rating system for puzzle fairness (related to the above,
> I seem to remember it contained "cruel" for ones which become
> unwinnable without any warning).
This isn't a rating system, but it seems helpful:
http://www.scottkim.com/thinkinggames/GDC00/bates.html
---- Mike.
Steve Evans
<ric...@skaro.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>Hi there,
>
>I'm looking for a couple of documents which I've seen on the Internet
>in the past but which I've now lost track of.
>
>One is a list of DO's and DONTs (or maybe just the DONTs) for IF
>authors.
There are probably a bunch of articles/references that fit the bill
here, with the most often quoted being Graham Nelson's "The Craft of
the Adventure":
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/Craft.Of.Adventure.T1.letter.pdf
Roger Giner-Sorolla's "Crimes Against Mimesis":
http://www.geocities.com/aetus_kane/writing/cam.html
or there's also C.E.Foreman's list of "10 Steps to Great Game Design"
http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.1e.html
If it wasn't one of these, then chances are you'll find what you're
after via the "Craft" pages at IFWiki:
http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Craft
>The other is a rating system for puzzle fairness (related to the above,
>I seem to remember it contained "cruel" for ones which become
>unwinnable without any warning).
That would be Zarf's Cruelty scale:
http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Cruelty_scale
--Steve
Mike Snyder
> news:1134557006....@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> > Hi there,
>
> > The other is a rating system for puzzle fairness (related to the above,
> > I seem to remember it contained "cruel" for ones which become
> > unwinnable without any warning).
This is probably what you're looking for:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.int-fiction/msg/6c8a75c2b939d9c5
---- Mike.
Quintin Stone
> On 14 Dec 2005 02:43:26 -0800, "richard develyn"
> <ric...@skaro.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >Hi there,
> >
> >I'm looking for a couple of documents which I've seen on the Internet
> >in the past but which I've now lost track of.
> >
> >One is a list of DO's and DONTs (or maybe just the DONTs) for IF
> >authors.
>
> There are probably a bunch of articles/references that fit the bill
> here, with the most often quoted being Graham Nelson's "The Craft of
> the Adventure":
Also,
Tips for first time comp entrants:
http://www.strangebreezes.com/if/writings/compguide.htm
First-Timer Foibles
http://www.mts.net/~coyne/foibles.html
How to Write a Great Comp Game
http://www.drizzle.com/~dans/if/great-games.html
==--- --=--=-- ---==
Quintin Stone "You speak of necessary evil? One of those necessities
st...@rps.net is that if innocents must suffer, the guilty must suffer
www.rps.net more." - Mackenzie Calhoun, "Once Burned" by Peter David
Andrew Plotkin
I should point out that the terms in that scale have not come into
common use. But the idea that it *is* a scale, sometimes called a
"cruelty rating" (or "forgiveness rating" if you turn it upside down)
is a common concept.
Your example of "become unwinnable without any warning" is not the
cruellest end of the scale. That reserved for games which become
unwinnable without any *notice* -- in other words, the player doesn't
realize he's screwed, so he keeps right on playing.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
I'm still thinking about what to put in this space.
Samwyse
> http://www.geocities.com/aetus_kane/writing/coa.html#bill
This site is best viewed with Firefox, with 'View / Page Style' set to
'No Style'. Blue text on a black background is indeed no style at all.
Mike Snyder
news:yl_nf.37349$tV6....@newssvr27.news.prodigy.net...
Dark blue background...
--- Mike.
Daryl McCullough
>Your example of "become unwinnable without any warning" is not the
>cruellest end of the scale. That reserved for games which become
>unwinnable without any *notice* -- in other words, the player doesn't
>realize he's screwed, so he keeps right on playing.
That brings up a question in game design: Is there ever
a good reason for *intentionally* making a game cruel in this
sense? Maybe because anxiety is an important emotional state for
fully appreciating some games?
--
Daryl McCullough
Ithaca, NY
Samwyse
Ouch.
Mike Snyder
news:dnpui...@drn.newsguy.com...
Distress apparently fits this definition, since there are a couple of things
that can happen to make the game unwinnable later. I don't necessarily know
that it's "unfair" though. In the first case, it's a task the game prompts
toward, so it's pretty obvious when you fail (although it's not obvious that
failing may have consequences later). In the second case, a clue is given
that you have forgotten to do something. But it's not a *direct* cue, and
players can continue without taking any further action.
In this case, it's meant to work toward the story. There is also sort of a
time travel aspect to the game, with the ability to reach death endings that
can't co-exist with the survival ending.
I wouldn't want to do this -- or play a game that does this -- if it was
very much longer than Distress. I just barely got away with it because it's
such a short game.
---- Mike.
Andrew Plotkin
> Andrew Plotkin says...
>
> >Your example of "become unwinnable without any warning" is not the
> >cruellest end of the scale. That reserved for games which become
> >unwinnable without any *notice* -- in other words, the player doesn't
> >realize he's screwed, so he keeps right on playing.
>
> That brings up a question in game design: Is there ever
> a good reason for *intentionally* making a game cruel in this
> sense?
Infocom did it for ten years, and it certainly wasn't by accident. You
can reasonably say "back then, nobody had considered the alternative",
but you're still left with the fact that they designed a lot of
puzzles -- what we still consider good puzzles -- that you can
completely screw up the first N times you try them.
More recently: "All Things Devours".
So, sure, there are good reasons. If you decide to make your game
always-winnable, you're excluding a very large range of possible
puzzles. A large range of possible IF interactions and scenes, to be
more general. You can try to put in workarounds and recovery paths for
your player, but then you're redesigning large parts of your game.
Maybe you want to do that, and maybe you don't.
I'd say that, these days, if you're going to put cruel puzzles into
your game, you should have some idea of why you're doing it. In "All
Things Devours", there's a very clear game design which requires a lot
of player death and retry. The result justifies the decision.
Contrariwise, you can't get stuck in "The Dreamhold"[*] because *its*
principle is to be accessible to new players, which means never ever
frustrating them if I can possibly avoid it.
I would never say that *all* games should seek to avoid frustrating
the player. It's an essential element of interactivity.
[* You can die, by way of demonstrating what player death is, but then
the game suggests you type "undo".]
Of course, it's important to let players know -- when they *start* the
game -- what kind of experience to expect. That was the whole idea of
the "cruelty rating" in the first place: to put into the game's
"about" text!
Paul E Collins
> That brings up a question in game design: Is there ever
> a good reason for *intentionally* making a game cruel
> [i.e. able to become unwinnable without notice]
Hmm...
I've seen a similar situation in certain other game types, e.g. those
vertically-scrolling space shoot-'em-ups where you can sometimes get
into a dead end with no choice but to keep going. In such a case, the
crashing and being repositioned is rather similar to dying and typing
"undo" (or restoring a saved position) in an IF game, but - while
there is a penalty in the shoot-'em-up, for you lose a life - there is
no penalty in the IF game.
Food for thought. I wonder whether there has been a text adventure
where you get a number of lives!
P.
Adam Thornton
Paul E Collins <find_my_re...@CL4.org> wrote:
>Food for thought. I wonder whether there has been a text adventure
>where you get a number of lives!
Zork I, for instance.
Adam
Timofei Shatrov
tried to confuse everyone with this message:
Balances...
--
|a\o/r|,-------------.,---------- Timofei Shatrov aka Grue ------------.
| m"a ||FC AMKAR PERM|| mail: grue at mail.ru http://grue3.tripod.com |
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`-----'`-------------'`-------------------------------------------[4*72]
Samwyse
> Food for thought. I wonder whether there has been a text adventure
> where you get a number of lives!
Adventure. You get respawned at the well house with your lamp.
"Oh dear, you seem to have gotten yourself killed. I might be able to
help you out, but I've never really done this before. Do you want me to
try to reincarnate you?"
Richard Bos
Or in the _real_ alternative browser, Opera, where "no style sheet" is
just a keypress away.
Richard
tommyh...@gmail.com
> This isn't a rating system, but it seems helpful:
>
> http://www.scottkim.com/thinkinggames/GDC00/bates.html
Thanks for that - I hadn't seen it before. It's mostly very
considered, but one bit made me laugh: it was provoked by an attitude
that stands in clear violation to Graham Nelson's right not to be
American. The word "idiosyncrasy" is especially delicious:
"Finally, if you really want to be cruel, you could make the man
British, so the combination should be 9-6-43, because the English order
their dates by day/month/year, rather than month/day/year. (If you
don't mention this idiosyncrasy elsewhere in the game, however, you
are falling victim to the "designer puzzle" trap mentioned earlier.)"