[IF] The Baron Revised

I have been spending but little time on interactive fiction--blame the fact that I only have a few more months to complete my PhD-thesis--but I do think it's time for a little update. I've got three projects running, and today, I'll be talking about my revision to The Baron.

The competition release, back in spring 2006, promised that a new version would be released soon. Well, I've finally started working on it, not least because The Baron has been the subject of some critical attention recently, including being used in a University level course on video games. Here is the probable feature list of this revised edition:

• A complete rewrite of all the prose in the (English) game. That certainly was long overdue. As an example, here's what happens when you try to attack the wolves you hear in the distance as you start walking along the forest path. Old text:
  

  You would love to, but the wolves are still too far off.

  New text (beta):
  

  Yes--we define ourselves through action. But the wolves are still too far away, hidden between the trees, invisible to your merely human eyes. You will be ready when and if they come for you.

  That's a relatively radical rewrite; mostly I'm just improving the style a bit. Here's a location description from the forest. Old text:
  

  Here the path is narrow and winding, and hardly recognisable under the snow. Moonlight penetrates the dense foliage only sporadically. Eastwards lies the baron's castle; to the west, your own footprints lead back to the village.

  New text (beta):
  

  The path here is narrow and winding, and you have to move forward with care and attention, lest you wander into the forest and lose your way completely. Bleak puddles lie on the snow wherever the moon manages to penetrate the foliage. Going eastwards will bring you to the baron's castle; in the opposite direction, your footprints lead back to the safety of the village.

  And the prose is not just growing longer, either, though these two examples might give that impression. Anyway, I'll go over all the prose a couple of times, and then I'll try to get another whole round of proofreading done. I certainly hope that the result will be a marked improvement.
• Some minor gameplay tweaks. For instance, a couple of people got stuck in the throne room, which should never happen. There are also some optional things I want to clue better: the dolls, for instance, since I don't think anyone ever got to listen to their (many) conversations.
• Addition of new material in the menu: more walkthroughs, some information on the piece's subject (only visible after completion), some thoughts on the piece's design (as promised in the competition version).

If you know anything else that ought to change, do let me know.

[IF-RPG] Fast-paced Combat

Another design goal for a tactical combat system is that combat always keeps a certain pace. What you want to avoid are situations where both sides have better defence than attack, that is, situations where damage is done only rarely and in small quantities. Once you've got that, you've a protracted and boring combat.

To solve this design problem, I have introduced something called deadly combat. It works as follows:

• There is a global variable called the deadly combat number. This is 0 at the beginning of each combat.
• Every round that no damage is done, the deadly combat number increases by 1. (To a maximum of 5.)
• All combatants get the deadly combat number as a bonus to both to-hit rolls and damage rolls. Thus, if nobody has been hit for 2 rounds, everybody gets a +2 to-hit bonus and deals 2 extra damage.
• If damage is dealt, the deadly combat number is reduced by 2 at the end of the turn. (To a minimum of 0.)

As far as I can judge now, this works quite well; it injects a natural tension mechanic into the fights, since they become more and more dangerous the longer nothing happens. (And it leads to new tactics as well, since you can attempt to get the deadly combat modifier up before you attack.)

There is also a skill called "deadlier combat" which, when activated, doubles all deadly combat damage bonuses.

[IF-RPG] Cost of Skills

The basic idea in combat is that the player has a couple of standard actions--attack, concentrate, defend, retreat, perhaps others--and a lot of other actions that are made available as he learns more skills. (Currently, there are skills like "Smashing Blow", "Anger", "Sacrifice", "Burning Hands", "Summon Imps", "Curse".) Using skills costs Zeal, and Zeal is regained by (a) winning difficult fights, and (b) doing other things that make the Gods of War happy.

But what we want is the following:

• We want the player to be using skills often. It is boring if the player types "attack" 90% of the time, and is saving his skills for a few desperate situations.
  
• We want the player to use all his skills, because that is more fun than just using the same skill again and again. Now all skills are unique tactical options; and if some options are better, or more generally useful, than others, the player will use these options more often. This means that each skills must be the best available tactical option in a fair number of situations.

Let each skill have an intrinsic cost of n Zeal. Let m be the number of times the skill has already been used in this specific encounter. Calculate the real cost of using the skill as follows: cost = n * (m - 1).

That is right, all skills are free the first time you use them during a fight. So you can do everything for free once; and for easier fights, this will be enough. If you need to use a skill more than once, the cost keeps increasing.

This will reward players who use all their skills; it will also reward players who use their skills in every encounter. I think this will lead to diverse tactics, where people weigh the pro's and con's of paying Zeal for re-using a particular skill or using another skill that is still free.

[IF-RPG] Design Diary

I'm working on a new Interactive Fiction project, which is going to be far larger than The Baron and Fate. It is, of course, going to be an ambitious literary project about violence, redemption and hope--but it is also going to feature RPG-style tactical combat. Why? Well, because tactical combat is fun, or at least can be fun if done right, and because the standard game-aspect of interactive fiction, puzzles, is just not my thing.

Okay. Now what I'm going to do is start a design blog, right here, because this thing is just too big for me to keep motivated unless I can show off what I'm doing to a couple of people now and then.

By the way, this is not just a game idea: the source code is already 45000+ words (bigger than Fate), and a working combat system is in place (though I'm sure it still requires substantial changes).

Oh, and it currently has no name. I used to call it Idols of War, but that was several iterations of the game idea ago, and it no longer fits the project. I've also thought about This Comedy's Inferno, but that's too self-conscious. So I'll just call it IF-RPG for now.

Spring Thing 2007

A new Spring Thing competition has been started, and just like last year, I have submitted a game. See the website for details.

If you wish to participate as a judge, you'll need to download the games and a good interpreter. Good interpreters that can run all of the games (which are in three different formats) are Gargoyle for Windows and GNU/Linux, and Spatterlight for MacOS X.

[IF] The Baron wins a XYZZY!

The XYZZY Awards are the Academy Awards of the Interactive Fiction community: all pieces published in the year before are eligible; in a first round of voting, five games are nominated in one of ten categories; in a second round of voting, one winner is chosen in each category; and finally, there is a ceremony on IFMud where the winners are announced.

That ceremony was yesterday, and I am happy to tell you that (1) The Baron was nominated in seven of the ten categories (best game, best story, best writing, best NPCs, best PC, best individual NPC and best use of medium), and (2) also managed to actually win of them: Best Use of Medium. This makes me very happy, especially since exploring the potential of the medium was my most important aim.

The other winners were:

• The Elysium Enigma, by Eric Eve (best game, best individual NPC)
• Floatpoint, by Emily Short (best setting, best NPCs)
• Delightful Wallpaper by Andrew Plotkin (best writing, best puzzles, best individual puzzle, best PC)
• The Traveling Swordsman, by Mike Snyder (best story).

All of these are well worth playing.

The meeting and the birth

Why are we interested in interactive fiction and roleplaying games as new forms of art? Presumably not simply because they are new and relatively unexplored, but because of the interactive aspect in its modes of creativity, complicity, judgement. (Thinking about the artistic modes of interactivity should be one of highest priorities.) Traditionally, a work of art is created by a writer, is the responsibility of the writer and expresses the judgements of the author.. Sessions of playing an RPG or reading a work of interactive fiction may transfer one or more of these wholly or partially to the players and/or readers.

Why is this a good thing? What can a work of art that is interactive in this sense do that a non-interactive work can not? But perhaps this is already the wrong way of thinking, if we wish to arrive at a critique of IF and RPGs.

First, there may not be a work of art. Is the program or the game book a work of art? It is certainly not the work of art we are looking for. Is the played-out session the work of art? No; for the played-out session is not interactive. The transcript of a session is simply a story written in a strange style. In roleplaying and in interactive fiction, there is no work.

Art used to come to us as a work. Now it comes to us as an event.

The work/event distinction is not the thing/performance distinction. There is a very real sense in which we can watch the same performance of a play twice, but cannot play the same session of an interactive fiction story or a roleplaying game twice. We can recreate a session, but only by stepping outside the modes of creativity, complicity, judgement in which the original session got its specific meaning.

Second, the event of art does not primarily do anything. Even for works of art, it is wrong to think of them as objects that primarily are the cause of certain effects on the reader, even though they may be that as well. Primarily, a work of art is an opening through which another world can reveal itself to the viewer. An event of art is primarily an opening through which the player can step into another world.

A book, a movie, a theater performance or a painting is a work that allows a world to reveal itself. A roleplaying game or an interactive fiction story is an entrance into a world. A session of a roleplaying game or an interactive story is an event of entering a world and acting in it. Reading a book is like meeting a person. Playing an interactive story is like being born.

From now on, I will talk about these modes of art as the meeting and the birth.


Here are some questions. Isn't the enrichment that art can give us the meeting with the Other? Is it possible for us to be reborn as someone not ourselves, or are we locked into repeating our ingrained beliefs and behaviours in the world which we have entered? Can we believe that interactive arts are an alternative to the mainstream arts captured in the framework of mass media, technology and the economy if that means we have to believe that the world opened through the program/book must somehow be free of these influences? If escapism is the attempt to escape from all responsibility, are the interactive arts with their simulated and therefore unreal responsibilities not the pinnacle of escapism?