2 posts tagged “game design”

I feel that there is a certain lack of the cute and the charming in IF. Where is the Orisinal of interactive fiction, I ask you? Well, one answer is that it is easier to do understated and adorable successfully in the visual realm, and also that it is easier to do it in a context other than that of extended plot. But still! I am thinking that while I am still in the kiddie pool of being an IF amateur, I should be sure to include lots of sweet mammals. Perhaps hordes of cuddly wombats. Who's with me?

Have you seen the Eyezmaze game Chronon? It's a game of contigencies, like On's previous Flash games in the "Grow" series. There are a number of set points at which you can manipulate various items, and depending on the order in which you mess with them, different results ensue. The objective is to find the optimal order in which to do things. In his best games, wrong choices and right choices alike have interesting/charming outcomes, which keeps things lively, and the right choices are emotionally satisfying.

Chronon is nifty in that it works on this same principle, but you can bounce back and forth along the timeline to see how a given change you made affects things down the line, instead of having to work your way through the sequence and start over each time you want to do it in a different order. If I do X at 6:15 and Y at 9:05, what's the state of affairs at 12:25? Ooh, not good -- let me go back to 9:05 and do something else and see how that works out.

At the same time, a nice thing happened where my sense of what my objective was changed while I fiddled around, and based on things I glimpsed at the end of the timeline while I was definitely still provisionally rearranging things. Spoilers ahoy:

It seemed at first that I should want to poison the shuffling monster who I figured had imprisoned "me" (I'm not sure why I associated myself with the little figure in the cage, especially since it was clearly in no position to be doing all the stuff I was up to with moving pots and pans and clocks around). But long before I got to the point where I could slip some poison into his cake, I did some other thing that resulted in the shuffling monster's coming home to a dark and empty house, and he looked SO SAD. There was no way I wanted to poison him now! And indeed it turns out that the winning ending is happy for all involved.

So, my question is: Is there any way at all to achieve, somehow, a similar effect in interactive fiction? It's tantalizing, and obviously it would be very different in all kinds of ways in its execution, but something that somehow echoed this structure and experience while working as IF seems like it would be so great to me. How might it be done?

PS. I used the quote feature in lieu of a proper spoiler tag so you could see where the spoiler ends. Is that a good convention, do you think?