No Time To Play

I’ve been working on a new game lately, with a nice pseudo-3D effect for the display. After a while, it dawned on me that what I was doing there essentially amounted to voxels. Which was strange, because while I had read about voxels before, my interest in the topic was academic at best. But now the connection was made, I decided to take a closer look, just to know what possibilities I might be overlooking.

But first, what exactly are voxels?

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This announcement is one week late (pesky real life…) but just after I published my port of Starborn — and Nitku graciously promoted it — a new user of Ramus surfaced and promptly did some very nice things with it.

Meet Conrad Cook. Not only he posted a minimal, “starter” Ramus document, a useful thing I failed to do myself, but followed up immediately with an original work called Unicorn Story. Which I am now hosting on the Ramus website at his request. Thank you, Conrad.

I also took the opportunity to flesh out the aforementioned website a little more, including an answer to the frequently asked question about (not using) jQuery. Hope this helps.

No, don’t get too excited. This is something I did myself, and it’s not even an original work but a port of Juhana Leinonen‘s Starborn. I meant to do it when the game first came out, but there was too much going on behind the scenes, or so it seemed from looking at the source code, and I hesitated. In the mean time, Nitku ported it to Undum himself, thus proving that in a keyword-based game a few boolean flags may well be able to replace a full-blown world model. So I took a closer look, and it turned out that more than half of the original Inform 7 code was dedicated to disabling the parser, implementing keywords as a game concept and other such changes.

On the Ramus side, development turned out to be very easy indeed. The only real problem is that I keep typing href instead of rel — understandable after over a decade of Web development. It may be worth implementing URL autodetection, like in HTML TADS, but my laziness is stronger than the annoyance factor.

Anyway, you can download the game here. Enjoy!

Created in 1985 (according to IFWiki), Alan may well be the oldest interactive fiction authoring system still in active development. Despite that, it never achieved much popularity. IFDB lists 46 Alan games; Baf’s Guide, only 42 of them. To put things in perspective, that’s the number of IFComp entries on a good year. That’s too bad, because the system has unique qualities.

I downloaded the binary archive of Alan 3 beta 2 for Linux, the latest stable version as of this writing. The system falls under the open source Artistic License; beware that both the website and readme files may still refer to the old “register-ware” terms in places.

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In game development, one of the most important learning experiences is releasing a complete, polished title, no matter how small and simple. You know what else is? Porting a game to a different platform.

Now, with most kinds of games, the challenge is adapting to the input and output capabilities of the new platform; the game logic, if well designed, can stay the same. But with a text adventure, it’s the other way around; gameplay remains essentially unchanged, but the internals can change considerably. That’s because an interactive fiction platform isn’t just a virtual machine, but also a world model, and the programming languages themselves, while of course equivalent, can have very different philosophies.

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It’s been almost a year since I last looked into IF authoring systems, and the market has shifted again. A Hugo title became the most talked about game in 2011 — one that features extensive multimedia and random combat to boot. Yay for Cryptozookeeper! There is also an ever-increasing number of (choice-based) Web games, outnumbering those written for my new favorite platform, TADS 3.

Speaking of that, soon after a new release of TADS came out with Web play support, thus bringing the old powerhouse in line with its main competitor, the news spread like fire that a new online service came out enabling people to author Inform 7 stories online. To top it all, mere days later the young Quest system announced official support for a similar feature!

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There’s been much talk lately about Unity 3D. A combination of rich toolset, portability, price and other factors conspire to make it increasingly popular. The recently released Indie Games Developer magazine opens with an article on it, and this sentence jumped at me:

In fact, [Unity] is so simple that it sometimes scares people off initially as they do not believe that something so easy to use can produce professional quality games and that there must be compromises to be made.

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So, earlier today Nightwrath shows me this video tutorial for Unity 3D (on YouTube). It’s not my thing at all, but I watch a little out of curiosity. Wait… this bloke sounds like a twelve-year-old. That picks my interest, and I click through to his profile, then his blog. Which is full of game and console reviews, and more video tutorials. To top it all, he makes music as well. And what do you know… he actually is twelve! How cool is that?

No, I won’t give you an “in the old days” speech. Things were different back then. But I’m thrilled to live in an age when so many people can make a contribution to the world’s culture, without having to ask anyone for permission. As Michael Masnick put it recently, We’re Living In the Most Creative Time In History, and that’s not a given. Be grateful for this freedom. Fight for it.

And don’t forget to check out Computoguy’s blog.

How cool is that?! by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

As promised last time, I got around to setting up a new website for Ramus. Right now, it contains the exact same information as the original web page, except this time it has room to grow. And because it’s a wiki, you can suggest additions directly inline! See you there, and thanks.

Remember Ramus? I can’t blame you if you don’t — the last update was half a year ago. But recently, a new user (hi, John!) pointed out some missing stuff in Ramus, such as an example of how to link to multiple fragments at once, or include a fragment inside another. (The latter doesn’t work, by the way. See the F.A.Q.)

I also want to write some documentation, including a getting started guide, but that will require setting up a proper website for Ramus first, instead of a simple homepage. I’ll get around to it, just not right away. Thanks for your patience.