New Game -- The Ebb and Flow of the Tide
PTN
you, either in soil or sea, neither can there be any hell for you. You
wait for some hours, knowing this. Then your friends come for you, and
slay you secretly and with ancient rite, and light great tapers, and
carry you away."
THE EBB AND FLOW OF THE TIDE is a work of Interactive Fiction based on
a short story by Lord Dunsany, originally published in 1910.
Currently in the unprocessed directory of the IF archive, or accessible
here:
http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/if/games/the_ebb_and_flow_of_the_tide.html
TIDE is the second in a series of adaptations of early fantasy tales
(the first being last month's THE JOURNEY OF THE KING), but is probably
closer to an IF art show piece than a game proper. Nevertheless there
is a narrative of sorts that moves forward to a definite conclusion.
Fans of friendly IF will be happy to know there is no way to die in
TIDE. Because you are already dead.
Happy holidays,
-- Peter
http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/if
Emily Short
PTN wrote:
> "You have done a horrible thing, so horrible that burial will be denied
> you, either in soil or sea, neither can there be any hell for you. You
> wait for some hours, knowing this. Then your friends come for you, and
> slay you secretly and with ancient rite, and light great tapers, and
> carry you away."
>
> THE EBB AND FLOW OF THE TIDE is a work of Interactive Fiction based on
> a short story by Lord Dunsany, originally published in 1910.
Hmm. I seem to be stuck at 60 points.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
Specifically, I am lying in the mud (again) and a storm has come up and
rain is filling my grave, but whatever it is that I'm supposed to
examine to trigger the next bit, I'm clearly missing it...
James Mitchelhill
What else can you do to the rain other than examine it?
--
James Mitchelhill
ja...@disorderfeed.net
http://disorderfeed.net
Emily Short
Aha. I *thought* I'd tried that, but I guess not.
Anyway, an interesting piece, but it was sometimes fiddly to find all
the triggers; I felt like I was struggling a good bit of the time. (Or
possibly this accurately represents what my protagonist ought to feel
during the long years of waiting. The rats were awesome.)
Still, I think the Dunsany prose works better in this context
(parcelled out into lots of small descriptions) than in the beginning
of "Journey of the King". I keep meaning to go back and play that
through, since I gather it gets more puzzly and interactive in the
later stages, but I found the initial conversation a bit overwhelming.
David Goldfarb
Emily Short <ems...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>Anyway, an interesting piece, but it was sometimes fiddly to find all
>the triggers; I felt like I was struggling a good bit of the time. (Or
>possibly this accurately represents what my protagonist ought to feel
>during the long years of waiting. The rats were awesome.)
I agree. I spent a lot of time re-reading the description of the
current state, trying to find something to look at.
There was one particularly annoying bit of "guess the noun": at one
point in the game, the description mentions "a sound" -- but the game
doesn't know the word "sound". I eventually had to scroll up and
notice that the trigger was originally introduced as a "noise".
--
David Goldfarb |"...at a guess, not more than one in three, and
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu |perhaps fewer, Republicans eat people..."
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | -- James Nicoll
PTN
On Dec 18, 5:55 am, goldf...@OCF.Berkeley.EDU (David Goldfarb) wrote:
> There was one particularly annoying bit of "guess the noun": at one
> point in the game, the description mentions "a sound" -- but the game
> doesn't know the word "sound". I eventually had to scroll up and
> notice that the trigger was originally introduced as a "noise".
Yes, I always try to leave at least one dumb coding mistake in the
first release of every game :(. Needless to say, "sound" has been added
as a noun for all noises -- something I thought I had fixed already,
but didn't end up in the release code, no doubt due to poor version
control somewhere along the line.
I'll upload the update in a few days (in case any other issues crop
up).
Thanks,
Parham
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(I did it because Emily Short's way is a great way to prevent reading
spoilers when others don't want to. hehe.)
Well I'm where I need to do the final move to get the last 10 points, I
listen to the bird sing, and my soul feels lighter than air, but
nothing else I can think of.
Hints?
Emily Short
Once you reach that point, you are finally able to move.
PTN
On Dec 18, 4:44 am, "Emily Short" <emsh...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>Anyway, an interesting piece, but it was sometimes fiddly to find all
>the triggers; I felt like I was struggling a good bit of the time. (Or
>possibly this accurately represents what my protagonist ought to feel
>during the long years of waiting. The rats were awesome.)
Perhaps its not the best feeling one wants to instill in players, but
the thought did occur to me that the longer one was stuck and could not
progress, the more you relate to your unending, miserable punishment.
> Still, I think the Dunsany prose works better in this context
> (parcelled out into lots of small descriptions) than in the beginning
> of "Journey of the King". I keep meaning to go back and play that
> through, since I gather it gets more puzzly and interactive in the
> later stages, but I found the initial conversation a bit overwhelming.
They are two very different styles, too. Dunsany wrote his tales of old
Gods and Kings specifically in a very Old Testament, King James Version
style which can be a real struggle if you're not in the proper frame of
mind. TIDE comes from his dreamer's tales, which are far more readable,
though still quite lyrical. It was fairly easy for me to add additional
text to TIDE without the reader being immediately able to tell which is
"authentic", but completely impossible to mimic the style in KING. The
only pure Dunsany in KING is in your conversations with the prophets,
and in general I kept that style in dialogue only, with the world
created to support inhabitants who might speak that way, but with
descriptions that are more easily read and understood.
Parham
By the way, sorry for using your method of writing; I didn't feel good
about it. I mean about using another's method. It just was a good
thought which I hadn't thought of.
Emily Short
Parham wrote:
> Thanks. That did the job.
> By the way, sorry for using your method of writing; I didn't feel good
> about it. I mean about using another's method. It just was a good
> thought which I hadn't thought of.
Don't worry -- I didn't invent it. It is standard practice on these
newsgroups to mark spoiler space in some way like that.
Emily Short
PTN wrote:
> On Dec 18, 4:44 am, "Emily Short" <emsh...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> >Anyway, an interesting piece, but it was sometimes fiddly to find all
> >the triggers; I felt like I was struggling a good bit of the time. (Or
> >possibly this accurately represents what my protagonist ought to feel
> >during the long years of waiting. The rats were awesome.)
>
> Perhaps its not the best feeling one wants to instill in players, but
> the thought did occur to me that the longer one was stuck and could not
> progress, the more you relate to your unending, miserable punishment.
Indeed.
I think it would work better if it were just a bit easier -- a few more
synonyms implemented, and maybe further prompting if the player seems
to have gotten stuck for a really long time. In particular, at the very
beginning I could not figure out what to do to get started, and hadn't
yet worked out that I could trigger progress by seeing/hearing/touching
things. So I nearly quit before anything much happened. I was down to
about my last idea when things moved forward.
I'm glad I didn't quit, though -- the imagery is dreamy and evocative,
and as I said upthread, I liked the rats.
> The
> only pure Dunsany in KING is in your conversations with the prophets,
> and in general I kept that style in dialogue only, with the world
> created to support inhabitants who might speak that way, but with
> descriptions that are more easily read and understood.
That seems reasonable. I think part of the challenge with KING (for me,
anyway) is that I tend to be fairly goal-oriented when reading IF; I'm
constantly (though subconsciously) trying to identify which bits of
information are going to turn out to be important to the interaction
later. This makes it harder to read really long passages, and
especially hard to read long passages full of abstract ideas and poetic
language. As an experiment, I read a few of these stories online, and
found them much easier going.
Anyway, as I said, I should probably give it another try and see what
happens when I get to the more puzzly bits.
James Mitchelhill
> James Mitchelhill wrote:
>> On 17 Dec 2006 15:37:50 -0800, Emily Short wrote:
>>> Hmm. I seem to be stuck at 60 points.
>>>
>>> S
>>>
>>> P
>>>
>>> O
>>>
>>> I
>>>
>>> L
>>>
>>> E
>>>
>>> R
>>>
>>> S
>>>
>>> Specifically, I am lying in the mud (again) and a storm has come up and
>>> rain is filling my grave, but whatever it is that I'm supposed to
>>> examine to trigger the next bit, I'm clearly missing it...
>>
>> What else can you do to the rain other than examine it?
>
> Aha. I *thought* I'd tried that, but I guess not.
>
> Anyway, an interesting piece, but it was sometimes fiddly to find all
> the triggers; I felt like I was struggling a good bit of the time. (Or
> possibly this accurately represents what my protagonist ought to feel
> during the long years of waiting. The rats were awesome.)
I definitely struggled on my first attempt and abandonned the game at 40
points. For some reason, my second attempt was much, much smoother, and I
went from 40 points to complete with hardly any repetition. I'm not sure
why that was; it may just be the degree to which the player's mind is
aligned with the author's intent at any particulary time.
> Still, I think the Dunsany prose works better in this context
> (parcelled out into lots of small descriptions) than in the beginning
> of "Journey of the King". I keep meaning to go back and play that
> through, since I gather it gets more puzzly and interactive in the
> later stages, but I found the initial conversation a bit overwhelming.
I enjoyed the prose. When it was working, the way the game flowed along was
excellent.
Sami
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Emily Short wrote:
> Once you reach that point, you are finally able to move.
Really? How? I tried "stand", "fly", "touch birds", "rise". I can't
sing to the birds, or feel them.
Sami
Oh, geez. Duh. I figured it out.
villagedweller
reasonable and meaningful. There were some missing nouns, and the
number of things invoked in the text that do not exist for the game is
a little off-putting, but not enough to make me stop playing.
To maintain that feeling of endlessness, I would implement more nouns,
but have them trigger the same text, or very similar text. I think that
would make the waiting and lack of control more obviously a part of the
game.
TheR...@gmail.com
>
> I definitely struggled on my first attempt and abandonned the game at 40
> points. For some reason, my second attempt was much, much smoother, and I
> went from 40 points to complete with hardly any repetition. I'm not sure
> why that was; it may just be the degree to which the player's mind is
> aligned with the author's intent at any particulary time.
>
> excellent.
>
> --
> James Mitchelhill
> ja...@disorderfeed.net
> http://disorderfeed.net
Same thing happened to me, only it was 20 points where I bailed the
first time, lamer that I am.
I've found in my time that the world would be a better place without a
great many adaptations (many adaptations of Japanese comics to
television suffer in the transition, more so the reverse; I also found
the film adaptation of the third Harry Potter to be execrable in almost
every respect, and Narnia's treatment of Edmond's character development
was inexcusable), but IF has the singular capacity of literally placing
one within the written word: it's not a simple matter to properly adapt
literature for IF, as "MANALIVE" proves, but it is perhaps the most
meaningful way to adapt any static fiction. I found "The Tower of the
Elephant", while short and fairly opaque at one point, to be one of the
stronger entries of IFComp '06 (more so than, say, "The Sisters", which
in some ways I found worse than "Tentellian Island"), and perhaps this
is due to my never having read the originals of either (something I
find always colors my impressions of an adaptation), I have to say that
"The Ebb and Flow of the Tide" is easily right up there with the likes
of "Shade" or "Fear" in the genre of short, evocative IF.
In some regards it seems not far removed from "The Space Under The
Window" - the entire game can be seen, pedantically, as a colossal
"guess the verb and noun" puzzle - but the execution is much better; I
found the frequent "untopic"-ing of Space frustrating, like playing a
maze game consisting of a series of forks only to find that 90% of them
lead automatically to dead ends. In Ebb, it feels more like you're
exploring your surroundings, rather than hunting down the trigger for
the next event.
In short: excellent work. I'll be sure to take a look at "The Journey
of the King" next.
Stephen Gilbert
I've encountered. I do, however, have a couple of suggestions.
For some reason, I always try the "jump" command in every game I play.
TIDE gives the TADS default response, which doesn't exactly fit with the
tone of the story. Every other action verb I tried was met with an
appropriate response (or "I don't know the word..."), though. I especially
liked the response to "inventory".
Also, I'd like to see responses implemented for internal actions such as
"think", "remember" and "pray". It was a bit of a disconnect for me when I
read "... yet perception and thought are still in your unhappy soul", but
the game didn't understand any of the contemplative verbs I tried. A soul
in such a dire position should be able to pray, if only to have the prayer
unheard and unanswered.
David Goldfarb
The song of the birds is conveying your soul to Heaven. Which direction
is Heaven?
--
David Goldfarb |"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu | uncertainty!"
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | -- Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker's
| Guide to the Galaxy_
David Goldfarb
Emily Short <ems...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>. In particular, at the very
>beginning I could not figure out what to do to get started, and hadn't
>yet worked out that I could trigger progress by seeing/hearing/touching
>things. So I nearly quit before anything much happened.
Hmm..."HELP" or "HINT" was beneath you? :-) Those give you this text:
You are dead, and cannot move. However, all of your senses are still
available, because your soul has not yet left your body. You can see,
hear, taste, smell, and feel. LOOK at your surroundings - EXAMINE
everything. SMELL objects if they are close by, FEEL them if they are
touching you, LISTEN TO them if they make a noise, TASTE them if they
drop into your mouth.
...which sounds like just what you needed. Perhaps that should have
gone into the ABOUT text.
--
David Goldfarb |Seen on the marquee of a disused porn
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu |theatre in New York City:
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | "What urge will save us now that sex won't?"
Emily Short
David Goldfarb wrote:
> In article <1166458074.6...@f1g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> Emily Short <ems...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> >. In particular, at the very
> >beginning I could not figure out what to do to get started, and hadn't
> >yet worked out that I could trigger progress by seeing/hearing/touching
> >things. So I nearly quit before anything much happened.
>
> Hmm..."HELP" or "HINT" was beneath you? :-)
Fair enough. It just didn't occur to me. The situation seemed so dire
that perhaps no progress was possible at all; I thought maybe all there
was to do was look around at all the scenery and then quit in despair.
I may have been traumatized by Sisyphus.
PTN
On Dec 18, 7:29 pm, TheRyu...@gmail.com wrote:
> IF has the singular capacity of literally placing
> one within the written word: it's not a simple matter to properly adapt
> literature for IF, as "MANALIVE" proves, but it is perhaps the most
> meaningful way to adapt any static fiction. I found "The Tower of the
> Elephant", while short and fairly opaque at one point, to be one of the
> stronger entries of IFComp '06
I enjoyed TOWER as well. Discussion about its status as an adaptation
was focused around whether you would dock it some points or not because
of that. I felt at the time this wasn't the most useful way of looking
at it, but couldn't really think of anything meaningful to say. If
nothing else perhaps TIDE and KING can offer additional discussion
points. Adaptation is of course a separate art from creating an
entirely original work, but one that I personally find no less
challenging or creatively satisfying.
PTN
Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I've uploaded version 1.1 to the
archive, which fixes the jump verb, adds 'sound' as a synonym for
'noise', adds more than one way to say 'up', and adds a few internal
action verbs as Stephen suggested.
-- spoiler --
Additionally I changed the grave trigger to something that I think is a
bit more natural, as I was never entirely happy with "examine grave"
moving the game forward once you have been deposited there.