The Bibliophile, by Marshal Tenner Winter

I beta-tested this game...there was a lot of work and love put into it, and a lot of testing. The author has a good formula down for getting stories off the assembly line, but I'd like to suggest upgrading that assembly line. The "test X" command in Inform is valuable. So would expanding the "think" command to give hints every turn e.g.

section thinky - not for release

every turn:
  say "Current hint: ";
  try thinking;

Hints make a game more robust and also expose the more arbitrary or unclued puzzles e.g. "I did tell the player this, right?" & you have to go check. I've slipped, myself, forgetting to make an important hinting device visible, and hints don't prevent that, but they've made it less likely. They force you to pave over things. In a game this big and long, anything that can help the player keep on track is good, and I've also found that if my interest flags in my own game when I walkthrough, what does that mean for someone not as invested in it?

I really want to see the author throw away the Call of Cthulu-world style crutch he's relied on in previous efforts and to make the jump to write his own stuff, however crazy he worries it might be. Because I think that is what is most memorable about this game...the touches like the cat, or using the Psychognomy spell.

Shufflecomp Judging Intro

This is my intent to judge shufflecomp. And what better judge of a contest inspired by music than someone who hates hearing music at his athletic club and has finally stopped being annoyed by other people's music on trains or buses? Why, someone who has been distracted from writing his own text adventures by music coming from below, that's who!

I wound up testing 8 of the games, and as such, I don't really feel comfortable saying too much about them besides that every one of the authors got back to me more than once--probably more than twice--and made some really good fixes. If every author in ShuffleComp was able to do this, then this really will be quite an event. I'd like to mini-review the authors I tested for to give a point according to the judging rules, in alphabetical order. My nine votes for best game will likely be confidential.

In the all-important (or at least easy to evaluate) pseudonym department, I give my nine votes to:

Starfinger X
L. Starr Voronoi
Histroy Gloam
Amadeo Voss
Efrain Finnell
Bramble Bobonong
Pergola Cavendish
Jed Brockett (bonus point for best author name/song name mixing)
John Earthling

How I broke into the scene

This is my first post that goes out to planet-IF, and I hope it's relevant, in that, if you want to start contributing, it can really be anything that helps you do so. I started in the most abstruse way.

There'll be other posts on this blog, too, to planet-IF, but they will probably be more summaries of a week's writing, so as not to detract from more serious and higher-level stuff. I'm glad to be accepted by the planet-if Big Man, and I hope you find my writings interesting and relevant.

More below the cut,
  Andrew Schultz

Lessons from Kingdom of Loathing

Kingdom of Loathing is a clever game disguised as a stupid game. It's even more than that! You may or may not have heard of it before, but I'm going to discuss how it's helped me with Fundamental Principles school failed to impress into me.

KoL's taught me a lot of things, from practical applications of economics to how people work together in projects to how to update a game or deal with feedback, to lessons of just plain generosity and decency. It's helped me build my own games, when it didn't suck too much time away. I was amused to see that someone else also quit because it took too much time.

Plus Mr. Skullhead, the head Funny Text Guy (IIRC) sent me a nice mail back after I told him basically this--that I needed to move on, and his going ahead with a comic book was way cool. But I was glad to support other projects, and I didn't regret my donations for those lovely Mr. A's that let you buy Items of the Month.

I came back. They added new gadgets. I remembered people, and people remembered me. I have to say that a full-blown MMORPG would be too much for me, but Loathing--well, it's quite a place. You can explore it without exploring it on the fan-maintained wiki. Or, if you like, it's on TVTropes.org. Here's the funny bits, or the best of them.

If you haven't played for a few years, it's a totally different looking game now, and not just because Jick's stick figures have gotten retouched extensively. The sea is (finally) complete.

Spoilers for KoL and Randy Pausch's Last Lecture are below the cut and potentially TLDR. It devolves into a story, but I hope the main point isn't lost, that--you have a funny cool idea and there's always room for development. Sharing that idea can inspire others to do so.

Miscellaneous e-readings

I'd meant to do more with this blog for Spring Thing, but ShuffleComp testing has taken up a lot of my time & I've enjoyed looking at what people did. There are still a few days left, though if you have seen this blog, you probably know about this link.

So I'll have to settle for mentioning a few e-texts I've been enjoying: Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey in e-text. It's probably one of the best CYoAs out there, and definitely the most ambitious--a detective story with relatively good internal consistency for a CYoA, but disappointingly hard to find in local libraries compared to others. The structure is unusual for a CYoA and it even goes left to right instead of jumping around. Best, you won't spoil things or get exasperated flipping through it due to the neat GUI.

Other books I poked at include Richmal Crompton's Just William and (for all the wrong reasons) Amanda McKitrick Ros's Irene Iddsleigh which is impossible to read in one sitting because...err.

Yes, you should write that small diagnostic.

A lot of times when I'm writing a text adventure, I think of how to write a test command a bit late. Part of that is that I still feel like I'm cheating to zip around the game, because it really is fun to poke holes in things, even my own. I recommend it to others, to have a "god mode" in your own game. Stuff you won't let the players do, or that you may only let trusted testers do.

The big problem is that I say, well, it'll only have so much impact. Part of the problem is me not planning ahead, but I've also found I was able to tweak a script or a player command to test other things as well. And even finding one bug it'd be a pain to track down again worked. It's nice that Inform allows a test command that lets you know there's a path through the game, but it's even nicer to be able to jump ahead or say "If this weren't broken..."

Because 90+% of the time, the small utilities I think up tend to grow or be cannibalized by other bigger ones, or they wind up being something I use without reservation.

It's just a lot of fun. And programmer testing often ISN'T. If you have powerful things to try, that bug that's driving you up the wall is less intimidating. And your testers and, down the line, your players will thank you for it. Spoilery examples for my IFComp 2012 game, Shuffling Around, follow.

Offensive Rebounds in Basketball

I'm a big sports fan. Not as big as I used to be. There's a lot of overexposure, ticket prices are up, etc. But on the bright side, people give real and cogent analysis, and we understand better what's valuable and what isn't, and how and why.

Offensive rebounds (OR) in basketball are, for those who don't follow, when a player manages to gain control of a teammate's missed shot. So if you like soccer, call it a tap-in. ORs weren't given much official credit, though coaches would often say, the wrong one at the wrong moment will kill a team tired from defending. Whether they have to defend for another 24/35 seconds, or the person that gets one is so close to the basket he can score easily, it's a big boost to a team on offense. Coaches go on and on about how ORs are about desire and preparedness. They weren't a big deal for a while, and if you remember Dennis Rodman, he was invaluable to his teams in getting these. He knew how to position himself or scramble for a miss, and while people remember his more visible head games, they were usually camoflague for the more practical stuff. (Lots) more below the fold.