[IF Competition] Nerd Quest

This is a spoilery post about Nerd Quest by RagtimeNerd. Please do not read on unless you have played the game! (And in fact I have to add some meaningless words here so that the real review doesn't show up on feeds; although frankly it's not the words that are meaningless, and indeed, not even the sentences; I'm reading Carnap at the moment, and he is way too quick in saying that a sentence is meaningless; for instance, "the moon is a city in Germany" seems to me false, not meaningless; but I guess that's what happens when you apply Russell's theory of types to our language about the empirical world.)

As I explained in a previous post, I want to write these comments on the form of advice to the author; not as reviews that end with a numerical mark.

What is good?

• It's written in Java, which means it is cross-platform compatible. And indeed: it runs perfectly on my Linux installation. Even better: it runs within my terminal of choice!

What could be better?

• The game. If you want to write your own IF engine, be my guest; but know that you compete against TADS and Inform. If your engine isn't at least nearly as good, people will dislike your game. This engine is not nearly as good; in fact, it is really bad. Hardly anything is understood. The output is ugly. And the game that showcases this engine seemed to be trivial and sparse.

Post-competition release?

No. This author should either spend a lot more time on writing his engine and writing a game to go with it, or (s)he should migrate to Inform or TADS or another existing system and then spend a lot more time on writing a game.