[Art of Fugue] Open Alpha 2

-
The development of my/our puzzle game The Art of Fugue (see my earlier posts here and here) is going well, and today I would like to present the second open alpha to you. You can find the game file here, and the source here.


What is new? The fourth puzzle has been removed, as has the functionality that made it possible to solve this puzzle. However, four new puzzles have been added. The new puzzle four is some fun with mathematics. The fifth puzzle, contributed by Jimmy Maher and Dorte Lassen is about movement; I have used their code to create puzzle six. Puzzle seven is about making indistinguishable objects distinguishable.

I believe that puzzle six and seven are of a higher difficulty than puzzle one to five. Puzzle six seemed especially hard, but it is possible that I have simply missed an easier solution.

Also new is the menu system. You can now switch between puzzles through the menu. As you progress new puzzles will become unlocked. The game keeps track of which puzzles you solved, and also of how many turns it took you. It has a built-in database of best solution times, and will compare your solution with the best known solution. It can print your solution to the screen so you can mail it to me if you have improved on the best known solution!

You can still switch between all puzzles--even blocked puzzles--by typing "next puzzle" and "previous puzzle". These commands will be removed in the final release. There is also a cheat code that will unblock all puzzles: "bwv1080".

The one known bug is that you can still sometimes get parser questions, and these will break the game. This happens only when you type a verb that requires an object without an object, like "take". Please refrain from doing this while testing the game.

What do we need right now? More contributions! Follow the lead of Jimmy and Dorte and add your own puzzle to The Art of Fugue!

Ideally, we would have about 20 puzzles in the first release, which I'm planning for the last days of 2009. I think the mininum is 12 or so.

Especially welcome would be puzzles of intermediate to hard difficulty, and puzzles that make interesting use of the parser; but please send in your easy puzzles as well. (If we have too many easy puzzles, we can always try to make them harder.)

Comments

  1. Victor Gijsbers13 October 2009 at 01:20

    I have posted a slightly updated game version (behind the same link). It no longer clears the screen immediately after showing the banner/introduction. :)

    It also theoretically has cover art, but I couldn't see it. This might be due to Gargoyle, but I'm not sure. Please tell me whether you do/do not see cover art.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jimmy Maher13 October 2009 at 08:34

    Nope, no cover art. The file you've posted isn't even a .gblorb, just a bare .ulx file. You might want to check Inform 7 under the Settings tab. Make sure you have "Create a .blorb file" (or similar) checked.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Victor Gijsbers13 October 2009 at 10:34

    Ah, right, that's probably what is happening. I was choosing .ulx instead of .gblorb because some people had trouble opening the .gblorb last time; but I understand from your comment that a .ulx cannot contain cover art.

    Inform 7 might have warned me about that...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keeping the narrative pressure on

-
I played another session of Trollbabe yesterday, and I would like to take the opportunity to write a little bit about GMing this game (and similar narrativist games). This is not a worked out manifesto so much as an attempt to think through an approach that I've been taking more or less instinctively. First, some context. This game was online, with two people I had never played with before: Judith and Katy. Actually, it's not quite true that I never played with Judith. I've known her for some 38 years, and possibly the first roleplaying I was ever engaged in was on a vacation with her family and my family. She acted as a kind of story guide, and I and her brother Adriaan played characters in an unfolding short story. I was thrilled by the possibilities inherent in such an activity, but it would take more time before I really discovered the world of tabletop RPGs. Both Judith and Katy played a bunch of roleplaying games before, though as far as I can judge they were all fai...
Read more

Walter Benjamin, "Der Erzähler" (The Storyteller)

-
In the comments to my last post, Ian mentioned an essay by Walter Benjamin , Der Erzähler ( The Storyteller ). Benjamin was an important German philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century; he wrote on a wide range of topics, but his best-known work is probably his essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (it is widely cited as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , but The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility would have been a better translation). Der Erzähler is a very rich and complex essay. It claims to be a reflection on the work of Nikolai Lesskow (in English known as Leskov, I believe); but it also touches on the difference beween a story (in the sense that a storyteller tells stories; Erzählung , not Geschichte ) and a novel, on the communicability of experience, on the role of death in modern life, on the nature of wisdom, on the relation between man and nature, and on several other topics. All...
Read more

Thoughts on a Trollbabe session

-
Yesterday, I played a second session of Trollbabe with Erik and Michiel, even more delightful than the first. ( Trollbabe . I dislike the title of the game, to be frank, but it's the only thing about it to dislike. Let me stress that the whole point of the game is that you're playing strong, independent women. With horns.) To give you an impression of the context, let me say that both Erik and Michiel are very good friends of mine, and that we've done a fair amount of roleplaying before, though mostly D&D. In fact, the two of them have played various editions of D&D almost exclusively, and neither had any previous GMing experience. That was about to change. In the first session, I GMed their characters Rolda (Michiel) and Vekir (Erik), who were together in a single adventure -- something that is not a given in Trollbabe . This time, we were going to do the same thing, but in addition I would also get to play a character, one adventuring at a different location. Mi...
Read more