Chat about "April in Paris"
Jim Aikin
reviews. Right now I'm mulling over some of the comments in order to
figure out how I might be able to do better next time. Feedback on any
of the following (or any other comments you may care to make) would be
welcome.
No significant spoilers follow....
a) I think the game is not helped by the extreme ordinariness of the
premise -- an American tourist trying to have lunch. High drama it's not.
b) The series of puzzles is highly arbitrary. This was more or less
intentional, because I didn't quite see how to create a series of
actions that would visibly bring you closer to your goal. But I think
this type of design makes gameplay less involving -- you can see when
you've accomplished something, but until the very end you can't see the
point of having done so.
c) April herself could use more conversation items. (In revising the
game for general release I may add a 'topics' command that will list
exactly what you can talk to a given npc about. Since the available
topics change from time to time, this will require a little coding.)
d) I'm thinking seriously about recoding the "large open space" design.
At present it uses the TADS ConSpace.t extension, which means, among
other things, that there are no room names printed out when you move
from one area to another. I think I may try recoding it so that the
areas are separate "rooms". This will require that all of the visibility
of people and objects from a distance be handled differently, so that
the space will still appear to be wide open if you 'x hostess'. But I
think it might make the gameplay less confusing.
e) I think the story has a mean streak in it. The waiter's stubborn
refusal, and the hostess's apparent complicity in it, are sort of nasty
without being funny. Maybe I could have more fun with this. For
instance, maybe you could actually find a menu or get one from the
hostess, but then the waiter would snatch it away from you again. Would
this type of change make the game more enjoyable?
The one fun thing I did was what happens if you actually hit the waiter.
Did many people try that?
Thanks in advance for all thoughts.
--JA
Conrad
> e) I think the story has a mean streak in it. The waiter's stubborn
> refusal, and the hostess's apparent complicity in it, are sort of nasty
> without being funny. Maybe I could have more fun with this. For
... Actually, I was thinking that the story could do with *less* of a
mean streak. Not that it's very mean, but it's all vaguely negative;
also it falls into vaguely negative stereotypes a lot: the American
tourist with the loud shirt, the snotty Parisian waiter; the damsel in
distress whose relationship with you is quasi-predicated on money.
It was very well implemented, I thought -- before you posted your bug
report, I discovered the standing-on-the-sidewalk glitch; but even
with that, I thought it was well-coded.
I would have liked higher stakes, I guess -- higher stakes and more
significance to the player's actions. I know there's a style of game
where the PC does fiddly things -- as a bogus, non-spoilery example,
you can't tell your daughter to do her homework because the neighbor
is playing his flute too loud, so you have to break into his garage,
steal his turtle wax, and wax his porch so his poodle slides off and
he has to take it to the vet (thus stopping the flute-playing) -- I
just don't like that kind of game.
> instance, maybe you could actually find a menu or get one from the
> hostess, but then the waiter would snatch it away from you again. Would
> this type of change make the game more enjoyable?
I think that the trouble is that the context isn't set properly.
If you want to make the waiter our out-and-out adversary, why not give
him a bona fide grudge against the PC -- we got him fired and stole
his job; we didn't tip him well last time; we made him look bad in
front of his boss -- and now he's out to make us look stupid in front
of our date, who's initially unaware of all this. Up the ante: it's
a first date with a girl we've been sweet on for the past year; we
want her to move in; we're looking to propose. All three. She
admires men who are good with waiters.
It turns out she speaks French, and he has a long conversation with
her that we can't understand. They keep looking at us and laughing.
What I'm getting at, Jim, is that the situation you've thought of is a
great situation, and you can really utilize it to best advantage by
setting the context to give the action/response/reaction cycle of the
game more significance and emotion.
> The one fun thing I did was what happens if you actually hit the waiter.
> Did many people try that?
I did hit the waiter, yeah. I wished you had gone off the rails even
more often, and maybe continued the game, bringing it back around so
that the experience was less confined.
Again, this is all from the point of view of what I like.
Conrad.