there were so many people at yesterday’s klik of the month! and so many games to play!
this past week i was playing the king of rags and tatters (not the actual name, but a better one). at the bequest of a lady friend with whom i was still smitten, i was investigating a jeweler’s shop that had suddenly closed under mysterious circumstances for clues to a missing friend’s whereabouts. i had to take a rowboat to a dock that sat just under the shop’s backdoor. the rowboat leaked, and took on water as i braved the currents of the thames river. steering against the current, i manged to land the rowboat at the dock and pull it ashore moments before it filled with water and sank. i climbed up the narrow wooden stairs, finally, to the back entrance of the jeweler’s.
where i was told that to enter the window i needed to have taken the rope a friend used to hang himself in the previous chapter.
you’ve probably already guessed that my game is another one of my practical jokes. it’s a game about traditional adventure games and why i usually avoid them.
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I thought it was going to be a gag from the beginning, but the IRC gentlefolk guilted me into saving the kitty anyway.
The sad thing is that as an adventure game fan, I still obtained a tiny amount of satisfaction from this! Not to say it doesn’t serve its purpose as commentary, of course.
When I make an adventure game, it will take place in an isolated hub world, have fast-travel to every location, and a “play” button for anyone who just wants to experience whatever B-movie story I’ve concocted without having to suffer through any weird puzzle shit.
radix your game is the bee’s knees. i didn’t play it until this morning because there were just so many games this month.
You meant “the rope a friend used to hang himself”.
And if that’s true, then it’s a pretty hilarious travesty.
fixed, thanks.
yeah, it’s amazing, huh?
how does asking the player, after sailing a trecherous river to finally arrive at the place where she can seek some answers, to turn around, go to the other side of london, grab an arbitrary item and come back help tell the story?
(and how is it not jarring that the player character should be expected, upon the discovery of his friend’s tragic death, to cut the noose from the body and stick it in his pocket, thinking “this will probably come in handy later!”)
the goal i see this attempting to accomplish is to make the navigation of the game world more interesting and believable than simply typing north, east, east, south. and the player is breaking into the place, after all! getting around the world requires the player to climb trees, unlatch things with a walking stick, jump into windows.
but the walking stick is given to the player immediately and is of an obvious practical value. getting into the jeweler’s requires two things: a hook and the aforementioned rope. the hook is found in the rowboat the player uses to cross the thames – she can’t help but take it with her. it has frayed bits of rope on it, to give the player the idea of tying a rope to it and tossing it.
why not just give the player the hook with a rope already tied to it? the player’s critical action here is the tossing of the hook-rope into the window to climb in, NOT remembering that there’s a rope attached to my dead friend on the other side of london, going to fetch it, and bringing it back. that’s just a chore, and it doesn’t do anything to tell the story.
for all of the adaptive room descriptions and sophisticated parsers of modern interactive fiction, the logic of these games really hasn’t come very far from warren robinett’s ADVENTURE.
^^ ARTIST’S STATEMENT ^^
i think with some of them they’re just trying to fuck with you
but yeah, it was indeed an incredible turnout this month. i’m very impressed.
This was a lot of fun!
I really liked that you went and named all of the different areas for the game in that full map on your twitpic.
why does no one remind me when GT is on
i mean, KotM
you know you can sign up for an email reminder of when glorious trainwrecks will happen plus i post about it on my twitter the day of and usually a week before.
on naming, i really love older adventure games like robot odyssey where text labels might contextualize an oddly-shaped empty box as a subway station or an elevator. the abstract environments usually have just enough shape to carry the metaphor into the realm where the player can accept it.
this is the first i’ve heard of this so called email notification
and i don’t read twitters
so there
I think the problem you describe has nothing to do with the actual aventure game format and more with plain old poor design (or at the very least, insufficient testing/feedback)
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