Introcomp 2015: Lair of the Gorgonath, Meld, Voltage Cafe

Introcomp is a yearly competition for introductions to interactive fiction games. The idea is that authors write up the first small part of their game, show it off, and get some early feedback.
Everyone else in the entire world may vote on as many or as few entries as they like, on the usual 1-10 scale (10 being the best). However, they are asked to judge games with one thought in mind, and one alone: "How much do I want to play more of this entry?"
With that question in mind, let's move to the first three games I played. Some spoilers will, of course, follow.

Lair of the Gorgornath, Part 1: "Bring me the Beard of Nimrod Supertramp", by Andrew Watt

Two things immediately strike the player: the awful title, which promises a combination of overused fantasy tropes and unfunny humour, and the interesting use of colour in the game to distinguish between moments of reality and dream. So we're off to a mixed start.

The game is a choice-based low-interactivity piece about a alow-level spy who is posing as a bounty hunt organiser so he can get a bunch of infighting no-goods to kill a incompetent-but-somehow-effective wizard for him and rescue a princess while they're at it so that he can be rewarded with a fantastic island. There's also something about a slave revolt and an ogre slaver and a beard and a soul in a wart and a whole bunch of other stuff. Which illustrates the game's main weakness: the author wants to cram in so many ideas that the reader has no time to get used to anything or to build up a coherent picture of the world or the situation.

Perhaps the most important thing in alternate world building is pacing. You need to feed your reader facts, but you need to feed them facts at the right speed. And therefore you need to know which facts are important and which can wait. Is this game mostly about the relation between the spy master and the spy? Then that is what we need to focus on, and we can forget about most of the rest. Is it about the particularities of Nimrod? If so, tell us more about Nimrod and less about slave revolts and spy society. Is this game about the relationships between the different bounty hunters? If so, make that the focus.

With focus and pacing, something coherent could emerge from what now looks like a chaotic mess.

Another problem of the game, in the current context, is that it does not feel like an introduction at all. It is short, yes, but it is also self-contained. A situation is introduced and resolved. The end. This might work as a prologue to a larger work, but I cannot see from what we have here what that larger work is going to be.

Meld, by David Whyld

David Whyld is a very experienced writer of IF, so it is not surprise that the game is technically competent. The setting could be a bit more exciting, though: right now most locations are defined by a single traits ("it stinks", "there's a grumpy guy") that don't really enhance our understanding of where we are. It also doesn't seem to make much sense. How can there be a tavern with dozens of patrons behind a locked gate that never opens while you're waiting outside? Why, if someone is blocking an alley, can't I just take another street to get to wherever I want to go?

The game is based around a melding/unmelding puzzle mechanic, which might be used to good effect in future puzzle design. However, from what I see here the mechanic is just too random. I have no idea which items can be melded or unmelded, so I'm reduced to trying every combination I can think of. Once I found myself just typing 21 different meld commands to see what was working, and not getting any aha-feeling from observing failure and success, I decided to quit.

Could be a nice game if David manages to make melding a bit more predictable.

Voltage Cafe, by anjchang

The writing is very sloppy, full of misspelled words and missing line breaks, and in general it just lacks any kind of polish. The implementation too is, especially for such a bare game, beneath par: eating something, which is one of the few actions you can take, doesn't give any reply, and commands like "ask her for coffee" don't seem to be implemented. (You have to "order coffee" instead.)

There's a general lack of direction here. It seems that you just have to order coffee and other stuff, drink and eat it, and type "write" an awful number of times. The basic message appears to be that if you drink enough, great thesis ideas will keep coming, and somehow, they'll all gel together into coherent chapters. After you've typed "write" often enough, you win.

As a game, this is hardly a success; as a depiction of writing a thesis, even less so; and I have no idea what the rest of the game could possibly be about, so I don't think it works very well as an introduction either. In this case, my advise to the author is to drop this idea and start with something else.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Keeping the narrative pressure on

Thoughts on a Trollbabe session