White Skies, Fighter Planes

Some unexpected awesome courtesy of Emily Short's IF Cover Art Drive: a lovely cover image for Snowblind Aces, which now also adorns the game's page on this rocketship.

The person responsible is, as yet, a mystery...

Gun Mute: Let's Also Beta

I've uploaded Version 4 of Snowblind Aces - just a few little tweaks and fixes, including the mother of all typos. It's time to move on, I think, and finally get my mute cowboy game into beta.

Picking the game up again for the first time in a couple of months has given me mixed feelings about it. One important decision I made with Snowblind Aces - which I think is probably going to apply to all my future games - was: no puzzles. The thing is: I hate puzzles. There's nothing more annoying than a game with great atmosphere, characters and dialogue, which then expects you to take a break and figure out different ways to open a door.

My mute cowboy game, henceforth called Gun Mute, is a step in that direction in that I tried to make it about simple combat-oriented puzzles, but I still worry about the gameplay - and also everything else. But, well, it's practically done, so I might as well get it out there.

If you want to volunteer as a tester, feel free to comment below. Alternatively, I may come to you...

Friday Victory Blogging

Snowblind Aces wins Text the Halls.

Over the weekend I'll be coming up with a post or two about all the other games in the competition. ;-)

Snowblind Aces

For the TIGSource Text the Halls competition...


Snowblind Aces
An adventure/romance by Pacian
Competition result: 1st Place

-Download .t3 file (600kb)
-Download zipped windows application (1Mb)

Features include:

• TADS 3 game, interpreters available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Windows executable version also available.
• A short game with the emphasis on decisions rather than puzzles.
• Adaptive hint system helps out if you get stuck.
• State-of-the-art 'English words' graphics system, 100% future proof.
• Yours for the rock bottom price of COMPLETELY FREE.

10% of all proceeds go to the Icekin Preservation Fund. Help protect our shared ecological heritage.

Instructions

1. Download and Run the Game
-If you have Windows, you may prefer to download the zipped executable. Just click the link above, unzip the download (this step is probably not necessary) and double click the application.
-Alternatively, if you're a seasoned IF player, or you're using Linux or a Mac, download the .t3 version. Run the file with an interpreter from this page.

2. How to Play
Snowblind Aces is a simple IF - or 'interactive fiction' - game. Interact with your environment by typing phrases like 'examine me' (or just 'x me'), 'go north' (or just 'n'), 'shoot the bad guy' (or just 'shoot guy') and so on.
-A more comprehensive guide can be found here.
-Alternatively, type 'instructions' during play.

Changelog

Latest version: 5
-Fixed a couple of errors in the text.

Previous version: 4
-A few small changes to the dialogue web.
-Fixed a stonking great typo right at the beginning.

Previous version: 3
-Fixed a few typos and a broken hyperlink
-The hint system was misfiring in the forest clearing
-The fire-making bit had a small bug and didn't account for an important possibility

Feedback

All bug reports and suggestions are welcome. An email address for me appears as a hyperlink in the game (type 'credits'), or you can comment on this blog post.

Snowblind Aces: Let's Beta

Snowblind Aces is now essentially finished. I need to write the rest of the built-in hints, and I want to add some garnish to the interactivity, but everything important is there.

Now, this is a relatively complicated game that I've written in less than two weeks, so I expect there to be all sorts of bugs unintended behaviour and typos non-conventional spellings. If you'd be able to beta test* the game before Christmas Eve (because it's not like you have more important things to do at this time of year ^_^;) please PM me at the TIGSource forums or leave a comment below.

(I don't think I have any lurkers, but I'm afraid I'll only consider letting you on as a tester if I already 'know' you to some extent).

*Which basically involves playing through the game and making notes of what goes wrong for you.

Future events such as these will affect you, in the future...

Well, that's all my stresses out of the way, and my Christmas tree up. Snowblind Aces needs to be done for the Text the Halls deadline of Christmas Eve, and I've surprised myself by getting a lot done today. It's now possible to reach the ending, although a lot of text is missing, and one very important point out of the maximum possible score of seven is currently sitting in the unimplemented depths of my dialogue web. Still, I'm feeling pretty confident.

Best case scenario: beta release on Saturday.
Worst case scenario: game released on Christmas Eve with no testing...
Really worst case scenario: game release prevented by zombie apocalypse.

The Time to Act

Dialogue... Um, Web

Well, since the lead character of Snowblind Aces isn't mute, I've had to get to grips with the TADS 3 dialogue system-a-ma-jig. And yeah, okay, I'll admit that it definitely has nift (ie. it is nifty). One thing that's great about it is how easy it makes it to create conversations that flow from one topic to another. It's also great for creating characters that are as interested in talking to you as you are to them.

A couple of things I've made design choices on: one seriously nifty feature is that it's so easy to make topics different depending on what you've already talked about. So if you ask Alice about her husband, you could get a different answer from her depending on whether or not she's told you about his affair. I have, however, elected to use this feature only sparingly in Snowblind Aces (ie. where it would be inappropriate not to). I want Snowblind to be a really replayable game, and while I think that organic games are great and all, there's nothing more annoying than making a character say or do something cool and then having no idea what combination of topics and actions made them say it. It might be okay for something like Galatea, where the whole idea of the game is to investigate whether the player character can believe that Galatea is a real person, but for an adventure-romance where players are likely to be looking to get a certain ending... it would probably be a new kind of annoying.

Also, for my sins, I'm going to be using the conversation system in a similar-ish way to the Poizoned Mind one. TADS 3 has an optional 'topic inventory', which I'm going to be using. Topics won't stay in the inventory after you use them, but they may reappear if they change or if they take on a new relevance. Also, since - as I suspect a lot of people do - I tend to just type 'topics' over and over to see what I have left to say, I'm making hyperlinks of all the topics mentioned in dialogue. This may shoot me in the foot if it means that people end up accidentally asking (what they don't realise are) the same questions over and over again, so I'll have to be careful.

Anyway, I'm still really stressed (it doesn't take much), but hopefully my schedule is clearing up and I can start turning that complicated mass of doodles above into a complicated mass of TADS 3 code...

Game-Start: Announce

Snowblind Aces:


Competition deadline: Christmas Eve.

No, I don't know how I'm going to finish it in time. Yes, this is putting testing of my mute cowboy game back.