No Time To Play

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted; I’ve literally had no time to play as it turns out!  But as things have settled down, I’ve had a little more time.  Mostly occupied with my web comic (warning: blatant plug).

Anyway!  I had a lot of fun with a game last night, and I wanted to share it.

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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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How different can you make a roguelike and still keep it recognizable as such? The turn-based nature of the game was once deemed essential, but then Diablo happened and nowadays, realtime roguelikes are reasonably common. Permadeath is considered just as important, yet the first roguelike I played extensively didn’t feature it. Graphics, once considered un-rogue-like, are increasingly common for the genre. But otherwise most such games are much like each other… right?

Three very unusual titles have been brought to my attention recently, two by a friend (thanks, Jason!) and the other by IndieGames.com.

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Logo from Wikipedia

Good Old Games (GOG.com) has released the first and second trilogies of the Ultima series.  This is significant because for many people, Ultima was their first delve into computer RPG’s.  Not only that, but the Ultimas for better or worse have shaped all the RPGs that have followed it.

Some things that are staples today in what is considered an “expansive world” (like the ability to cook, or NPC schedules) started or at least became popular in the Ultima games.  And Richard “Lord British” Garriott, creator of Ultima, is a model for many developers who would like to strike it big in the world of game development starting from nothing but lines of code and a PC.

So, whatever your opinion of Ultima, it has a lot of historical significance.  And so I bought the two trilogies on GOG.com and started playing through them.  This article is going through the ones I have played, comparing my recollections of the games with my actual playthroughs and noting things that are interesting in each title.

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The Bastion Narrator Looks Like the KFC Guy

So I’ve been playing Bastion lately (By Super Giant Games and available on Steam), and this is interesting for a couple of reasons.  The biggest reason is that it’s an “Action RPG” and that’s a genre I don’t play anymore, and yet I’m playing this game.

What’s so bad about Action RPGs?  Well, I find its kind of a tired genre.  I’m talking about games like Diablo or Torchlight; real time games where your primary action is clicking at hoards of monsters.  This is distinct from Roguelikes which, generally speaking, are turn based and more “tactical” in a lot of ways.  Action RPGs are sort of repetitive stress disorder games, where you pick the best weapon or spell and “spam” it until everything is dead. (continue reading…)

Back when I first tried making a roguelike, Javascript wasn’t anyone’s first choice of language for a game. In all honesty, that was in the dark ages before Firefox. Nowadays, the various browsers sport much more functionality (and compatibility), so it’s no surprise that more JS roguelikes are being developed. As I’m trying to make one again, I figured it would be a good idea to see what’s out there. Two titles in particular have given me food for thought.

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After taking Inform 7 out for a spin, it was time to look into its primary competitor, TADS 3. The procedure was the same: take the toy, retro-style text adventure I wrote last year and see what it takes to port it, more or less intact, to one of the big authoring systems. As with I7, I installed the official development environment. The difference is that the TADS 3 Workbench doesn’t have a Linux port. But the Windows version runs just fine under Wine (with exceptions — don’t try accessing the manuals from the Help menu), so it was just as easy: download -> install -> go. Which, by the way, is why I didn’t insist on that part last time: there’s nothing to say about it.

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I mention interactive fiction quite often in my articles, but the truth is, I am no longer familiar with the state of the art. Back when I was still serious about writing text adventures, Inform 7 was in alpha and TADS 3 was in beta. Nowadays the two have effectively replaced older systems, and being familiar with them can be useful even if you don’t care about IF as an art form:

• Interactive fiction has multiple applications in academia, from educational games to teaching people how to program computers in a less intimidating way.
• Interactive fiction is an excellent prototyping tool for more technologically sophisticated game genres such as computer RPGs.

Now, I am superficially familiar with the syntax of both, from Cloak of Darkness, as well as from skimming the official manuals. But I wanted a closer look and, as it happens, I have just the thing.

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Is it ironic that a MMORPG designed to piggyback on social networking services reached me via someone in my real-life social network? Such is the case with Echo Bazaar, a browser-based title still in beta as of 13 February 2011 (two years after it apparently won an award from Escapist Magazine, hmm).

How about the fact that she has a Facebook account and I have a Twitter account, so initially we couldn’t interact at all in the game? Because, you see, Echo Bazaar is entirely dependent on these two services for authenticating players. That’s good on the one hand, as you don’t need to remember yet another set of credentials, and bad on the other, as many people stay as far away as they can from either.

But I’ll return to that later. For now, let’s see about little things such as story and gameplay.

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Making your own games is exhilarating, and surprisingly accessible considering all the work involved. But it’s still non-trivial; computer games are software, so beginners will struggle with learning enough programming, and they’re complex, so experts will struggle with juggling all the details.

This is why people have developed various pieces of software to ease game creation, ranging from the very general, that just help with the basic framework of a game, to modding tools that only allow making more content for a specific game (although the line is easily blurred, seeing how the Starcraft 2 SDK has been used to make everything from a falling blocks game, through shooters and racing games, and all the way to a full-blown MMORPG).

In the following paragraphs, I will focus on tools that cover the middle ground between those extremes.

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