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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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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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.

Well-known game developer Raph Koster starts 2012 with a 6-point guide to making cheaper games, to which the Rampant Coyote responds thoughtfully as ever. Here at No Time To Play, we are definitely interested in this particular topic, though we prefer to frame it as making games faster instead. Since time is money, that’s the same thing in the end: both come down to making games with less work. That’s especially important nowadays, as development times/costs are skyrocketing towards unsustainable levels (as Shamus Young points out at every turn).

But how can you do that? Let me add my own two cents first.
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This is undoubtedly no big deal for most game developers, but all my games have been mute so far. Not by choice, either. I know people who are equally good programmers, artists and musicians, but that’s hard. Those of us who are more specialized have few real options:
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Buzz Grid running on MicroEmulator

Last time I announced taking a break from programming. And I have… for about a weekend. During which time I caused a pretty sweet raytraced scene reminiscent of a 1990-something adventure game. Reading a book about Myst the weekend before must have something to do with it.

Then, of course, my mood to program came back. Or maybe it was the vitamin supplement I’ve been taking. Fact is, less than a week later I can play Buzz Grid on my Nokia E51. And boy, that makes me happy.

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