The Gaming Philosopher

Introduction If you are using Inform ATTACK, how much code does it take to create a monster? Six words. The boar is a hostile person. I have spent a considerable time coding up three monsters for my dungeon crawling game. The third one took me about 1600 words, which is a little more than 6. Where does the discrepancy come from? One of the main design goals of almost any tactical combat game should be to make the enemies as diverse as possible. This is not necessarily easy. Desktop Dungeons , which features only a handful of monsters, has only few good ones. Mostly it is just the "raise one stat, lower another" approach: a monster with a lot of health but little damage, a monster with little health but a lot of damage, a monster with high magic resistance but low health. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has many awesome monsters, like hydras and ugly things, but also (certainly on the earlier levels) a lot of monsters that feel more or less identical. And I for one wasn't i...

With the basic system in place, the times has now come to think about content. In fact, I have already coded up two rooms -- one of which is the Entrance Hall, which doesn't do an awful lot. But before I dive into content creation, I should spell out my design philosophy, both to make it explicit for myself, and to get some early feedback. Thematic background The thematic background of the game will be sword & sorcery : gritty and violent fantasy that takes place in crumbling civilizations built on the ruins of even older empires. It is a world where wizard don't throw around fireballs and other flashy weapons of mass destructions, but cast curses that trap the soul or rot the body -- curses they have learned in a search for forbidden knowledge that left them more demon than human. It is a world where horrific monsters threaten mankind everywhere, but where no elves, dwarfs, orcs, trolls, faeries, or any of the other "races" of Fantasyland have ever been see...

After getting the basics of randomly generating the dungeon map in place, I spent some time cleaning up the code. This is a necessary step in any larger project: whatever you have written after several hours of obsessed coding may work , but it is almost certainly not pretty. Cleaning up the code can be as easy an rearranging it and adding headings, but more commonly also involves separation (any part of a routine that might come in useful elsewhere should be written as a stand-alone routine) and rewriting (of code that is either ugly or not as general as it could be). One thing I tried to do this time is reducing the number of global variables I used -- using local variables for local properties is neater and less prone to strange bugs later. However, I don't think you can send local variables to rulebooks. You cannot, for instance, write "consider the monster scoring rules for (guy - a monster) at (place - a location)" and then use "guy" and "place...

Would it enhance my productivity if I start a public design journal for my projects? That is one question I'm willing to answer by performing an experiment, and the other question is: will anyone be interested in reading these posts, or will they just clutter up Planet IF? The second is the more important one. I am torn between two desires. On the one hand, I want to write a showcase for the ATTACK extension that is just good dungeon crawling fun. On the other hand, I want to write a piece that is important in terms of story or character or, well, anything artistic. I first considered some far-fetched ways of putting them together. I then told myself sternly that I had to make a choice. I have finally decided to just do both at the same time. Fail-proof strategy right? Anyway, here is the first design journal for what is going to be the unapologetically tactical game -- which I haven't named yet, so I'll call it Dungeon for now. The basic idea was given to me by playin...

So, after a decade the IF Theory Reader has finally appeared. Great news, obviously; but, as the editor (Kevin Jackson-Mead) warns us, it may "not necessarily represent the state of the art in interactive fiction theory". IF ten years ago was different from IF today. Which is not to say that we cannot learn anything from these essays, of course, only that we have to approach them with a certain caution. (As well as with a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance, as always.) The first article in the reader is the famous Crimes against Mimesis , by Roger Sorolla. For the greatest part, it reads as a discussion of what was wrong with old-school adventure games: Objects that make no sense in the fictional context, but are just there to enable the player to solve puzzles. Different literary genres mixed together without rhyme or reason. Puzzles that have no connection with the fiction -- especially gratuitous mazes, riddles, and so on. The lock-and-key syndrome, wh...

Assuming that the Wikipedia editors know their English, the title of this post should be correct idiom, weird though it sounds to me. Anyway, with the XYZZY Awards awarded, it seems as good a time as any to look back on 2010, both for the scene as a whole and for me personally. Interactive fiction itself On the one hand, 2010 was not like 2009 -- nothing came out that I loved as much as Blue Lacuna, Make it Good, The King of Shreds and Patches and (to a lesser extent, because it was so much shorter) Alabaster . On the other hand, we did see a large number of good games. For evidence, just look at the IF Comp: places 14 to 16 are Leadlight, Gigantomania and Under, in Erebus , each of which is really good. Thirteen games placed above them. And many good games appeared outside of the competition. What were the highlights of 2010? The following list will be an eclectic mixture of games that everyone loved, games that I loved, and games that I think have not received enough attentio...

Those who keep an eye on the IFDB will have seen that for the past few days I have been playing IF like there is no tomorrow -- basically a belated attempt to play everything that has been nominated for a XYZZY award. But I would like to take the time to talk about some of the non-IF I have been playing as well. So without further ado, we start with Braid After the phase of frustration and despair , and the phase of bafflement and anger , there is the phase of careful reflection. One thing I have learned from the encounter with this game is that one should not persevere , or at least I should not do so. If a game frustrates you with its gameplay, then you are not going to be in the mood to appreciate anything it does right. If you dislike playing it, don't play it. This is not as much of a no-brainer as it may seem. It is, for instance, not true for books. I dislike reading Sein und Zeit because of the style, and yet the book gives me insights that make it worth persevering...