What's going on?

NoShowConf will run all day Saturday and all day Sunday.

NoShow is at the MS-NERD center, adjacent to MIT.

This will be the primary IF hangout zone. We will not have a separate IF track -- it's a cozy conference, not a cluttered one. However, I will be proposing one IF-related talk and I hope you folks will propose more.

Note that NoShow is considerably cheaper than it was last year. (Thanks to Microsoft for providing event space to the Boston tech community.) If you are on a tight budget, you can grab the Game Jam pass, which is even cheaper and includes all the hanging-out and the free lunch. Last year there were IF folks lounging around talking the entire weekend -- don't feel like the presentations are the only reason to attend.

BostonFIG runs all day Saturday.

This is an open-to-the-public indie game expo. It's running at the MIT student center (a fifteen-minute walk from NoShow). Registration is free; they are currently running a Kickstarter to raise funds.

We are organizing an IF table at BostonFIG! (Thanks Clara.) This is still in flux, but we are aiming for a demo space where we can show off IF to the public, demonstrate IF tools, possibly run a workshop. This is what I expect to be doing all Saturday afternoon. Anyone who wants to help with IF outreach is welcome to come by.

The People's Republic IF Demo, Beerfest, and Chowdown.

On Saturday evening (7 pm), we will meet up to eat, drink, and catch up on IF. (Location is still being planned.) We're going to grab function space in a bar or restaurant, and have a screen and projector available.

The idea is that everybody gathers, orders beer and food, and starts talking raucously about everything that's going on. Then, maybe at 8 pm, I wave a giant wooden spoon in the air, shut everybody up, and point at the projector. This is your cue to jump up, plug in, and tell everybody what you've done in IF in the past 12 (or 24) months. For five minutes! Lightning talk, or just a few screenshots, then next person.

Hopefully that will go for 30-ish minutes. Then we go back to drinking and eating and talking raucously until the bar throws us out.

And then back to NoShow for Sunday.

Perhaps this is a bewildering array of event options. (I like to think of it as "feature-rich", or perhaps "Turing-complete".) The capsule summary is:

• NoShow: Cozy; conversation with IF folks and indie game devs; presentations for small interested groups.
• BostonFIG: Big, noisy; present IF to the public (gamers, but not necessarily aware of IF).
• Dinner: Our annual time to catch up on what's going on in the IF world. Also, beer.

And as I said, wandering back and forth between NoShow and FIG is easy.

What does this mean for you, dear blog-post reader?

• Consult your calendar. (September 14-15, 2013.)
• Register for NoShow if you want to take part.
• Register for FIG if you will be in town at all. (Free, no reason not to.)
• Donate to FIG's Kickstarter if you want to support that event financially.
• Submit a NoShow talk proposal if you have an idea for one.
• Email me if you want to show off anything at the IF dinner. Or at the BostonFIG table.
• If you're planning to attend any part of this, please comment here, email me, or otherwise let me know. (Planning dinner space means coming up with a head-count, eventually.)

I hope to see lots and lots of you, this summer.

To be clear, "ZAP-OMNI" is a debug command; it won't be available in the final version of the game. (And I'm skipping over a couple other debug commands I used, to compensate for links in the Antechamber chain that I have not yet implemented.) But "GO TO ANTECHAMBER" will work, just like that, once you have solved all the puzzles in the way. The point of the game is to make those tools available to the player.

So what makes this interesting gameplay? Like I said: puzzles with multiple solutions... and solutions that apply to multiple puzzles. It's no good getting into a room if you've used up the items you needed to have when you got there.

Beyond a certain point in the story, you need to start managing your automated solutions, making sure they all mesh together. That's going to be the real game. And I have now implemented enough of the map to start seeing these effects. Select certain combinations of solutions, and type "GO TO ANTECHAMBER", and the game says (very approximately): "Sorry, you got to the last door and you're stuck, because you've used up the rod of metal X getting that far. Also, when you swam through the flooded tunnel, the Y got soggy and the Z dissolved. Tough beans."

So we go.

Other news: My Unicode Parser for Inform 7, which I mentioned last month, is now available. I also helped get the Inform 6 web site back on line. It's been neglected since I7 came out; then, a few months ago, a server fell over and nobody's had the spare cycles to fix it. The site is still not particularly up to date, but it should now be stable, at least.

My Secret Project for April is not done, but it has reached the major implementation milestone that I was aiming for. I now flip over to the Secret Project for May, aka Secret Project STW-5, which begins... as soon as I upload this post.

Okay, it's not 2002 any more. The 2012 XYZZY finalists include Twine, StoryNexus, and Inkle projects. Yesterday I saw Emily Short saying:

Got rid of the IF vs. CYOA distinction on my blogroll of tools and languages. It was getting less and less meaningful. (@emshort, April 18)

As an IF guy, I shake my fist and lightning cracks from the sky behind me. Or my cane trembles in my upraised hand -- pick your symbolic lading. (Nobody point out that I wrote one of those choice-based XYZZY finalists, that would just be embarrassing.)

As a student of the game world, anyhow, this is all sorts of interesting. How are people (other than cranky old bastards) now using the term "interactive fiction"?

Let me first block off a dead end. (Apologies to folks who know this rant -- this hasn't changed since 2002.) "Interactive fiction" is not the category of interactive works which are fictions. (Nor the category of stories which are interactive.) That's never been a concensus definition in any part of the gaming world. The literal denotation just doesn't work, because it encompasses nearly every videogame every made. Maybe not Tetris. But probably Missile Command, and certainly Prince of Persia, Halo, and Animal Crossing.

(When IF Quake -- a parser-based re-imagining of Quake -- appeared, everybody thought it was a good joke. Nobody said "Quake is interactive and has a storyline, therefore the IF version of Quake would have to be Quake itself.")

So, what now? I'll throw out a bare-faced hypothesis: people are now using "interactive fiction" to refer to videogames that are primarily text. Or, which focus most of the player's attention on the text. Let me go back and look at Emily's "Creation Tools" list... yes, fits so far. Fits with the XYZZY nominees. IF -> text games. Yes? No?

(I am intermittently cranky about this usage not because it's a change -- okay, partially because it's a change -- but mostly because it's a rather shallow division. I want to compare, say, Versu not necessarily to other text games, but to other games that are using similar techniques! How would you accomplish that sort of conversational in a graphical, or primarily graphical, game? Is that not an interesting question? But this is the descriptivist part of the post -- I don't want to argue against the term, just get a clear view of it.)

Let me swing around to come at an unrelated game category (or is it?) -- a category that I'm pretty sure we see, but which doesn't seem to have a name yet.

When I played Proteus, my first reaction was "This isn't a game!" Jmac jibed back "Uh-oh! Game police!" which is totally fair. Clearly Proteus is built with game-design tools, draws its UI from game interface conventions, and focusses on techniques used in games. (Procedural environment rendering. The shaping of emotional arc from environmental cues in a free-navigation simulated space.)

Going back, one could make all the same points about Dear Esther, except for the procedural-generation bit. And Journey has elements of it, although it's not quite the same. What we have here is a terminology problem -- an interesting and distinctive category of game which people aren't sure what to call.

What characterizes this category? Exploration in a simulated world, but no blocking challenges. You will reach the end if you keep moving. (Not necessarily moving forward.) This is, in fact, an excellent analog to the "puzzle-free IF" label that people were tossing around (or flinging down) in the late 90s, when Photopia and its ilk appeared. (And indeed, people in the IF scene questioned whether these things were games -- but we never had much doubt that they were interactive fiction, i.e. A Resident Of These Here Parts. A nice benefit of having our own term of art to sling around.)

I like to say "Game design is an exercise in controlled frustration", so you see where my "not a game!" reflex is coming from. But I also like to say that "puzzles" must be understood, in the broadest sense, to include all mechanisms of pacing in interactive work. Clearly these games give deep attention to pacing! In my Dear Esther review I argued that by focussing on the single interactive mode of "walk around", the designers had focussed me on the ramifications of walking: the attempt (or failure) to reach a goal, the learning of space, the time taken to move (no running!) It's interactivity, it's just in fewer layers than we're used to.

I'm not saying that these pure experiments are going to become the next AAA category, because that's not how gaming works. All genres hybridize. Future games will draw elements from these things, and that's the real reason why we talk about them as games. But it helps to have a label!

I tossed the question out on Twitter, and got a few not-entirely-satisfactory responses:

• Ambient game: Doesn't get at the vital aspects of pacing and arc.
• Experiential game: Perhaps. Easy to misread as "experimental", though!
• Art game: Kind of taken already, by Gregory Weir and Jason Rohrer and that crowd. (That category overlaps this one, of course, but it's an aesthetic category rather than a structural one, and includes games with clear game-like challenges as well as those without.)
• Non-game: Jeez, I hope not.

(Back in my really early adventure-reviewing days, I tossed around the term "interactive movie". I'm not picking that one back up at this late date, though. It was a mistake.)

I am cautiously leaning towards "experiential game" at this point. (Note that, just like "interactive fiction", it is wrong as a literal description. Sure, every game is "experienced" by the player. I don't care; it's a label. Ask me about "science fiction" and "fantasy" some time.)

As a side note: recently someone commented, "The definition of 'interactive fiction'... it seems almost political." Of course it's political! When the concensus of a community changes, that's a political process. When two communities brush up against each other, and try to communicate, that's politics. These things are happening in the IF world(s).

One could say the same about the definition of "experiential game", or in fact the definition of "game".

(This post is not about the definition of "game".)

In other news... I guess there was PAX East. I was invited to take part in a panel on indie games storytelling -- that was fun. (I don't think it was recorded, though; sorry.) Then there was GDC, but I didn't go to GDC this year. Maybe next year. San Francisco is fun, but expensive, and I didn't want to blow a week of work time.

I also spent a weekend working on a long-term project: allowing Inform 7 to parse commands in other alphabets. It's just a tiny piece of that project, really. I added full Unicode support to the Glulx virtual machine in 2006. In 2010 I added a necessary bit of code to the Inform 6 compiler, allowing it to compile a Unicode-aware dictionary. In 2011 Xun Gong contributed a patch to permit Inform 6 source code in UTF-8. What I'm working on now is upgrading the Inform 7 parser library to use the Unicode-aware dictionary, and accept player commands containing any Unicode text.

(This is a nuisance, because the Inform 7 parser is mostly the same as the Inform 6 parser, which was the Inform 5 parser, which was way back in the 90s and presumed without thinking that a letter fits in one 8-bit byte. So now I'm fixing up byte arrays into long-word arrays everywhere. Boring, not too hard, but not done yet.)

(No, I'm not using UTF-8 arrays. Don't get me started. Never do text manipulation in UTF-8. It only wastes your time and annoys the warthog.)

This is not the last piece of the puzzle. We'll still need the Inform 7 compiler to understand Unicode vocabulary terms. (Right now it assumes that its parser is not capable of that, so it rejects such vocabulary out of hand.) And finally we'll need full non-English parser libraries! We have such things for some European languages that use the Latin alphabet. In fact right now somebody is working through a Japanese IF parser that uses Romaji. But these ought to be expanded to other alphabets, and I, as an utter monolinguat, cannot help much with that problem.

So I don't expect I7 to support non-English IF very soon. But I have my piece to finish, and every step on this road is good.

I have a Secret Project for April, and a completely different Secret Project for May. The May project will be my reward for finishing the April project. One secret project at a time, I promise -- I can only split my time so many ways.

Happy Spring, unless you're a Southerner. Happy April 1, which is not yet started as I write this. Good luck with the silly Internet foolery tomorrow.

Superficially, Versu runs like any CYOA-format game you might have seen in the past thirty years. But a bit of poking around reveals that there's more going on under the covers. You are rarely offered the simple "left door or right door?" choice that characterizes simple CYOA plots.

Instead, you can take a variety of actions relating to the current state of the world -- the events around you, the recent topics of discussion, the items you have to hand. Each of these actions has a cumulative effect on the world state. Some actions will remain available for many "turns", or throughout the scene; others will be opportunistically available in response to an event. Moreover, an action can affect several story threads at the same time.

Thus, in the drawing room, you can sit and drink tea while talking to the Dowager, or talk to the Dowager while sewing, or sew while making eyes at that handsome Mr Brown. You're always selecting single actions from a menu -- or hitting "more" to let time pass -- but the effect is more nuanced, because the conversation spans many actions, and proportions matter. Of course, context matters too. Scolding Mr Quinn after he has insulted you is quite different from scolding him after a compliment, or out of the blue.

The marketing copy describes this as "social AI". It is certainly AI in the game-industry sense. You can choose to play any character in a story, thus making the other characters NPCs, under program control. They will all chatter on through the scene, reacting to each other and to you -- or acting more vigorously, for scenes outside the decorous bounds of the drawing room. (Presumably the engine could run everybody, creating a completely noninteractive, procedurally-generated drama. But the current app doesn't demonstrate that.)

The down side is that the flow of events can appear, er, rather procedural; a bumpy road of character interruptions and not-quite-sequiturs. At one point I sat and mulishly sewed embroidery at Mr Collins for a good half-hour, in absolute silence -- only to find that he thought me "very slightly unfriendly". Good thing I didn't get out the rusty halberd, then!

This is of course the risk of any kind of videogame social interaction that isn't completely on-the-rails. IF has as much to complain of here as any badly-scripted commercial game. (A typical IF transcript reads tolerably when the protagonist is alone. But we have standards for human interaction that don't apply to somebody rooting around in an abandoned dungeon.)

The best examples in the IF canon are, unsurprisingly, Emily's dialogue-based work. If you're familiar with Galatea or Alabaster, you'll recognize the techniques in Versu: characters follow topics, topics can be recovered (or dropped) after an interruption, and text is adapted and polished to flow smoothly in sequence. However, you will never mistake the result for a hand-crafted cut scene -- any more than you'd mistake a FPS level run-through for a war movie. This is a game, and the prose supports what you can do with it, not vice versa.

What can you do with it? I was rather pleased, in "A Family Supper", to find myself steering the tone of a social gathering with no explicit direction or goals. (Terrifyingly like real life!) Then I hit The Twist, and found that the latter half of the game was strongly goaled -- although with plenty of play in how I dealt with those goals. Presumably I could have ignored them completely, or had an attack of Regency-style vapors. In any case, it demonstrated that the Versu engine was capable of handling both modes.

A story's state is not maintained between run-throughs; if you start over, you reset everybody's opinion of you. Similarly, while three of the stories share a set of characters, there's no state carried over from one to another. So, if there's any sense of progression in Versu, it lies in exploring variations. (The app supports this by awarding achievements for various endings and states.) Is it enough to engage me? Ask me in a week, I guess.

I am not an immediate fan of the Pride and Prejudice era -- that's one problem. The writing here is good (I picked this screenshot for the cheese line) but I mostly go for the wizards and robots and dragons and spaceships. But then, there isn't much fantasy and science fiction which is this well suited to deep social simulation. Maybe I should be thinking about larger timescales, and the interactions of societies? Or society-scale AIs? Iain M. Banks has all sorts of snarky fun with the teatime foibles of Planetary Minds.

Never mind. Just speculating, here.

I will now spend some time scratching at the interface. Please don't take this as a condemnation of the app; the interface is by and large good. I find it imperfect in several ways, and there's always more meat in discussing near-misses than in designs that are simply bad. So if you're not a designer, you can probably just skip this bit.

New text appears at the bottom, as you'd expect for a scrolling transcript. However, when choices appear, they appear in a box at the top of the screen. (See screenshot.) I found the continual up-and-down focus jumps somewhat jarring. I realize this is a tricky problem! If the choice box appeared at the bottom of the screen, it would block the most recent output; you wouldn't be able to see what you were reacting to. I'd love to make all the choices appear in the footer bar, but in a complex scene there might be a dozen or more available moves. They couldn't possibly all fit. (Again, see the screenshot -- the choice box contains a scrollable list.) So I don't have a solution, but I still want to complain. (Harrumph, says the UI designer.)

The footer buttons are simple: "Act Now" or "More", with the former bringing up the choice box (if available) and the latter allowing other characters to act. Simple is good. On the other hand, I found the "More" button just a little too attractive. Maybe I'm too well IF-trained, but my reflex is to tap "More" until everybody stops talking and it's my turn to act. You can do that in Versu, but it's a very small slice of the possible range! You want to put in your two farthings' worth.

I think, for the footer, I want some visual representation of what options are available. This could be very iconic -- perhaps just a colored bar, with different-colored bands for "Conversation", "Advancing Relationships", "Eating", and so on. (The different categories in the choice box.) Seeing this shift would be a cue for me to jump up and consider new options.

A more concrete complaint: mandatory actions. As I said, you can tap "More" until you reach a point where you're forced to respond. That's fine; it's entirely appropriate in many scenes. However, the choice box is then a modal dialog box. You can't back out of it -- not even to consult the objective list, or return to the main menu. If you quit the app at this point, you may return to find that your position is lost, because there's no access to the bookmark/save option.

This is really not good. There's no game-mechanical reason to use a modal UI here; it's just a choice point like any other. I'm okay with the choice box appearing pro-actively, but it should be as easy as usual to dismiss it. The "More" button should be disabled, is the only difference. (So when you return to the story, you just hit "Act Now" and get on with the mandatory choice.)

Other nitpicks... there's no way to get a transcript of a session. (Except for screen shots.) There's no preference setting for font, font size, or color. (It doesn't have to be fancy, but this is a reading app, and people have different reading preferences. For my iOS IF interpreter, I copied Apple's iBooks style menu -- can't go wrong there.)

The app is built in HTML -- that is, most of the content lives in an iOS WebView. This makes for easy development (and easy transition to a browser version, should the creators want to go that way in the future). But it's also a bit slow and jerkity, even on my iPad 3. I don't really expect them to upgrade the app to all-native code, but I can't help thinking how much cleaner it would feel.

The app also requires Internet access, because the story engine runs on Versu's home server. This isn't a complaint, but you need to keep it in mind for subway and airplane rides. (Or if, indie-game gods forfend, Linden Labs goes out of business and the Versu service dies.)

Finally, I have to wag a finger at the weak Voiceover support. It's not nonexistent; the UI is HTML, and HTML is voice-accessible by default. You can get Voiceover to read any bit of text on the screen. But new text is not read out when it appears. (If you keep tapping "More", Voiceover just says "More. More. More." You have to poke around to get the story text.) Also, when the choice list gets long, it's difficult to scroll the choice box to reach the later options.

It may be difficult to fix this. I have implemented Voiceover support for iOS native apps, but never for a WebView-based app -- I don't know what's involved. However, for a text-based story medium on a voice-accessible platform, it really is a shame to miss out support.

So. You know it's a Zarf review when you get down through pages of review and realize I forgot to say whether I liked it. I like it! Versu is distinctly different from any of the choice-based formats I've seen before. It leaves my old complaint -- "CYOA invites lawn-mowering" -- dead and buried in a pauper's grave; I shall not resurrect it. It manages to recreate the drama-management of Facade without invoking the keyboard-phobia of the open prompt. Future experiments in narrative interactivity may not use this style of character-based AI, but I am confident that this style of open, explorable choice will continue on.

Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home, my space-opera fairy tale, now joins Shade in the iOS App Store. As with Shade, I've added some illustrations for this iOS port. The art doesn't change the game, but it might make the important aspects of the ship's status easier to grasp.

If you're not familiar with Heliopause, it's a tiny little game that I wrote for @party a couple of years ago. It was inspired by my desire to stretch the traditional time-and-space scale of interactive fiction -- to deal with solar systems and centuries, rather than hand-held objects and minutes. It was also inspired by old pulp and New Wave sci-fi. (Count the literary references!)

Myrmidal is the queen of the bright worlds, and you've walked her million cities beneath her sky and beyond it. Myrmidal laughs and Myrmidal dances; they say no one weeps on Myrmidal, except for moments on the stage.

But even on Myrmidal the sun rises and sets, and the music grows tinny and harsh when you weary of dancing. Your best stories and your best lies draw the same fond laughter. This morning you decide to rise to the docks, and rouse your Horizon of Night from her sleep, and raise her sails. Somewhere are worlds you have never seen. And if your friends miss you at the dance, they can tell you so when you return.

(-- Heliopause, opening)

Related to this note, a new interview with me at Gamasutra, posted (and hosted) by Leigh Alexander. We talk about Shade, Heliopause, and how I think IF works on the small-and-touchy screen.

Over on the purely graphical end of the adventure-game spectrum, I'll note the release of Dagon, a framework for building first-person anamorphic-panning games. (This is the UI style of Myst 3, and of course many other games.)

Dagon is the framework build by Agustín Cordes for his upcoming game Asylum. You may remember the Asylum teaser demo from last summer; if not, it's worth a look. The Dagon scripts for the teaser are included with the download, so you can see how the system works.

Asylum is currently in the middle of a Kickstarter push -- they're 75% of the way to their (ambitious) goal. Kudos to Agustín for pushing out the open-source framework before the game's funding is assured. I hope it helps him hit the mark.

Next on the news list: Emily Short's secret project, which she and Richard Evans have been working on since before they got themselves acquired by Linden Labs.

Versu is an engine for choice-based, conversation-focussed narrative fiction. It is currently available as an iPad app; support for more platforms is planned. What you get right now is a free download with a tutorial, a short adaptation of a scene from Pride and Prejudice, and a longer ("30-45 minute") Gothic-ish story. For $5, you can buy an additional story about a polite family dinner party that turns to... well, I shouldn't spoil it, should I?

I started to write about this thing, but it grew into a full-on review. So I am cutting that loose to be its own post. Up next on the Gameshelf!

But first, the last of today's releases: Depression Quest, a choice-based indie release by Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, and Isaac Schankler.

You are a normal person, with a normal job, and a normal girlfriend, and a -- perhaps normal -- lousy feedback loop between your thoughts, your habits, and your biochemistry. Which is to say: depression. You play through a few months of your life, with simple illustrations and a placid, sombre soundtrack. Your decisions all suck.

This is the sort of bleed-on-the-page writing (and game design) which would be mawkishly simplistic if it weren't real, but it is real. You can smell that, even if you don't have depressive tendencies yourself. (I do, as anyone could tell you who knows my preference for writing code in a room with the shades drawn. All week.) If you don't believe that some people are like this, you need to play the game, and pay attention.

Depression Quest is built on Twine. It's exactly the sort of simple graph-based plot that Versu isn't. (Whoops! You haven't read the Versu post yet. Context ordering failure! Well, we'll get back to it.) Look: DQ isn't about its gameplay. The mechanics are simplistic and limiting, and that's the point, right? To underscore the point, half the options are blocked off in any given scene. This has been done before (Rameses is famous in the IF community), but it still works.

Several months ago I played Papo & Yo, which is a similarly honest game. Anna Anthropy's Dys4ia is also coming up in many people's comparisons. Notice how different all of those games are?

I hope nobody thinks that this is "dreary games about life sucking". (We've got the regular game industry for that, right? From Space Invaders to Missile Command, and then an infinity of games about war?) No: this is people communicating their lives, and choosing the interactive medias to do it. We must have this if anything called "game design" is to have a lasting impact. That is all.

I'm not sure how much more I want to say about Depression Quest. It is a free browser-based game. The author is accepting pay-what-you-want donations, of which a portion go to iFred, a education and research organization. (I had trouble with the donation button, so I dropped money directly on iFred. Zoe, if we ever meet up in real life, I owe you a beverage.)

Rather than waft more of my own sentiments around, I will just quote from the game's introduction:

Depression Quest is a game that deals with living with depression in a very literal way. This game is not meant to be a fun or lighthearted experience. If you are currently suffering from the illness and are easily triggered, please be aware that this game uses stark depictions of people in very dark places. If you are suicidal, please stop playing this game and visit this link to talk to someone. [...]

It goes without saying that because of the very nature of depression, it is experienced differently by every person who suffers from it. We aren't trying to say that this is the "best" or "most accurate" representation, merely that this is an amalgamation of the experiences of the developers and several people close to them. Many of the following encounters deal with issues such as therapy, medication, handling a love life, and reaching out to support networks. In reality, less than half of depression sufferers actually seek treatment, for reasons such as lack of money, perceived personal failing, or public stigma. [...]

We've written it this way so that we can focus specifically on the illness, which becomes more and more difficult to deal with as the person who has it is less and less well-off.

(-- Depression Quest, opening)

Last month I alluded to design problems with duplicated objects in the game. (That is, what happens if you try to create two doses of some compound, when the game is only set up for one.) Conclusion: I punt on this. The game will flat-out refuse to let you do it. If you try, it mysteriously fails.

You might think this is the cheap way out -- but it will work, and I can fit it into the overall mystery of the game. Trust me, every game design involves taking the cheap way out of some problems. You pick your battles, and this one is not mine.

(My motto at this point is: "This game already had enough scope creep in 2011, never mind 2012. The screws are officially on.")

Yes, there was a spot where the plot required two doses of a particular compound. Not any more. Now there's compound X and compound X-prime, with different names, and you can substitute one for the other. Implemented, ritual variation tested, problem solved.

Otherwise, I have slowly been stitching the map together. It now has many doors, and some of them are locked (or otherwise impassable). Some of these doors have keys (or other door-passing items). The puzzle-blockage pattern is no by means complete, but it's filling in.

As it happens, I didn't spend today on doors; I spent it on little bits of paper. I already had a mechanism for learning rituals, and recalling what you've learned, but it wasn't hooked into actual game objects -- the pieces of paper which you pick up and read. (You may recall one such from the teaser.) Now that's all put together.

(Except for the part where you get vindictive and set the paper on fire. You never need to do this, but hey, I'm not going to stop you... Should just be a few minutes of work.)

(In fact... there. I just did it. Behold the power of this fully operational environmental rulebook system.)

Okay, enough showing off. Plans for February: continue stringing together doors, door-goals, and paths through the goal-planning system.

I will also do another iOS release of one of my old games. Where Dreamhold had a dynamic map, and Shade had a rendering of the game's "to do" list, Heliopause will have a nifty display of your starship and its magnetic sails. Here, have a parting screenshot:

See, in this game you can make things. Say, a gonk potion. But then maybe you try to make another gonk potion. I have only implemented one gonk-potion object, so this is a problem. Right now I have a bunch of comments in my code saying "TODO: check if you already have one", and the reason they're still TODO comments is that I don't really like any of the solutions.

In some cases, you can't make more than one gonk potion because there's only one batch of gonk ingredients. Great -- but that leaves all the other cases. (Indeed, some puzzles revolve around finding a second batch of gonk-foo.)

I could have the game flat-out refuse. "You already have a perfectly good gonk potion!" Well, sure, but it's pretty embarrassing to refuse when the player has just gone through this elaborate gonk ritual and is tipping in the last ingredient. Besides, what if the player really wants two gonk potions? The plot is set up so that you don't ever really need two of the same thing at the same time... but the player doesn't know that.

I could add a second gonk-potion object -- but then what if the player makes three? Besides, the Inform parser isn't terrific at handling multiple identical objects. It can do it, but I'd rather not subject the player to that in an already-object-heavy game. For added fun, as I mentioned last month, the game supports "CREATE GONK POTION" even when the thing is nowhere in sight. If there were two of them waiting off-stage... "Which do you want to create, the gonk potion or the gonk potion?"

There are ways around this, but what this game does not need is another layer of abstraction strapped on. So I need to come up with something clever. And I need to come up with it soon, because today I looked at my notes and realized the plot does need two gonk potions to exist at the same time. In one specific case. Dammit.

I would say "That's the plan for January!" but January is also going to be holiday lunacy, it looks like. (Also, it's already 6% over.) I've got a couple of non-game-related things I need to update this month, and then we run into the MIT Mystery Hunt -- the event of the year for any puzzle-person in the Boston area. (Or, really, the US.) I don't do the Hunt every year; I skipped it last year, for reasons of personal sanity. This year, I'm in. Can't apologize for that.

So, the HL plan for January is to make as much progress as I can on the map's puzzle structure. And think about the plurality problem. I will report back at the end of the month.

In other recent IF news...

Emily Short has released Counterfeit Monkey, a gigantic IF game with a word-puzzle theme. I have played just the first few minutes of it, so all I can tell you is this: you start the game with a full-alphabet letter-remover.

SPAG, the online magazine of interactive fiction, is back from hiatus with a new web site, a new editor, and a new issue. Dannii Willis (known to the community for Parchment and other IF services) has refocused the zine and pulled together a sterling set of interviews and articles.

Activision has re-released their Lost Treasures of Infocom collection for iOS. (Zork 1 is playable for free, the rest of the games are a $10 in-app purchase.) I could devote a good half-post to its good and bad points, but this isn't the place. Let's just say: lotta playable games, complete with maps, invisiclues, and scans of the docs and feelies.

I feel like I should do a retrospective of my work in 2012, but you've been reading the posts, right? I released two short new games, wrote a whole lot of code, updated several libraries, got my iOS IF framework up to speed, and shipped Pocket Storm. Made a lot of cookies and didn't exercise enough. There, retrospected.

In 2013, I need to... well. Keep working on Hadean Lands. That's easy.

I need to get Shade and Heliopause back off the shelf, and ship them as iOS apps. If I have a business plan as an indie developer (which you might reasonably doubt), it is to get a bunch of quirky apps out and see if any of them are successful. IF apps are on that list. So is the set of word puzzles I've been keeping in my pocket for the past year or so. And maybe another Boodler-based audio project. Or the nano-clockwork puzzle idea?

We shall see.

Happy already-begun year, everybody.

The "pretty much finished" qualifier is because I haven't polished the output of this module yet. I type "CREATE IONIZER", and the game replies:

You open the beta-door.
You make your way to the Maze-Alpha.
You take the phaser.
You shot the alien!
You make your way to the Maze-Delta.
You take the ion widget.
You tinker together an ionizer.

This is perfectly readable but it's inelegant. I'd rather display this in paragraph form, skipping the less-important details:

"You open the beta-door, shoot the alien, take the
ion widget, and tinker together an ionizer."

Stitching together sentence fragments in I7 is moderately tedious. The mutable-string operations you expect in a modern language are possible in I7, but inefficient. (The leaden weight of Inform's history, which dates back to Infocom's Z-machine, which had no dynamic allocation at all). So I prefer to avoid that and instead muck around with a lot of state variables: have we just had a period or a comma? Hokay, capital letter time. Tedious. Not difficult. I'll get it set up eventually.

All of that business with the ionizer and the phaser is a test case, of course. The system works for the actual game objects too, and I have a bunch of those implemented. But since none of the game locations exist, I can't finish those shortcut rules yet.

Thus, the goal for December: create the map. Scary! Of course I've had a map drawn out for months, but it's slightly abstracted. (I may wind up splitting some rooms to improve the pacing, for example.) And a lot of the less-critical game objects are vaguely labelled "in quarters" or "in one of the labs" -- these are things which are easy to find, but the exact location is a matter of pacing, not puzzle gating. So I haven't nailed them down yet.

December will be a month of nailing. Hopefully by New Year's Eve, I will have an actual game structure to walk around -- rooms, locked doors, and puzzle barriers. There won't be any descriptions or game text; that will take much longer. But, even walking around the house-of-cards will be exciting.

I have another secret IF-ish project which should appear December as well. It's very small, but hopefully will amuse some people. More news when it's less secret.

The puzzle structure is -- I guess "pleasant" is still the right word. Kairo is pretty easy. You have exactly one verb: walk. Walk forward, walk on switches, walk into buttons. (You can jump, but I believe nothing in the game requires jumping.)

Kairo's puzzles are self-contained; each room is a puzzle in its own right, or else a mere hallway. This means you never have to remember clues, or associate information from one part of the game to another. You will never discover a connection between two machines, or trace an interesting pipe or drive shaft through the game world.

On the one hand, this modular design is deliberate. Even if I hadn't heard the designer boast about it at PAX, I would quickly have picked it up from the game. It provides a good clean bracket for the solving experience. You never have to run around hunting for more information. (Running around can be a drag in any first-person exploration game.)

But on the other hand, the design sharply limits the kinds of challenges the game can offer. And I think the game could have done more, even within that limit. The puzzles don't make much use of the architecture. You are not challenged to find ways over, around, or through. And also: the architecture doesn't make much use of interactivity. Some areas transform, but mostly in decorative ways, or as rewards, or simply to open new passages or transporters. Impressive, to be sure; just not interactively impressive. Nor does the game do Rhem's trick (really I should credit it all the way back to Riven) of providing puzzle architecture, areas that move and transform in complex ways which must be understood and manipulated.

So, as I said, I got through the game in two evenings. I solved three or four puzzles purely by accident. In two of those, I don't understand what I did; I just hit switches (or a switch) until the right thing happened. Of the rest, a couple really made me think; the majority were fairly straightforward.

And then there were a couple of secret extras that I didn't work out -- rooms with no obvious purpose, hidden doors that I didn't open. Potentially nifty, but I haven't gone back to solve them.

None of this should register as a complaint. Kairo is being sold for a casual-game price -- eight bucks -- midway between a free-to-play twenty-minute Flash escape game, and an old-school full-price weekend-killing story adventure. The challenge is in line with that; I got my money's worth. And I'll never turn down a couple of nights' worth of charismatic megalithons.

If I were to level a charge, it would be that the game world never really coheres, beyond the visual level. An adventure can set up its narrative drive through discovered texts and journals (old gag though that is). Or it can build a narrative out of its artistic details, the discovered connections and implications hidden in the visual world. Or this structure can come from the gameplay itself -- the connections you discover between the puzzles and mechanisms that make up the game. By solving, you learn what it's for.

Kairo disavows each of these strategies: it chooses minimalist artwork, (nearly) textless presentation, and modular puzzles. They're separate design decisions, but together they more or less rule out the sense of a coherent narrative world. It's not a flaw in the game, but a missed opportunity, I guess.

I'll be interested to see how other, upcoming new-style adventure games handle this stuff.

Non-HL news: I released Pocket Storm! A meditative, procedurally-generated thunderstorm for your iPhone. (Based, as you might expect, on the Boodler sound engine.) I was also an exhibitor at the Boston Festival of Indie Games, where I stood and demoed Shade and Meanwhile for eight hours straight. Whew. (See blog post.)

On the technical side: this month I got the iOS Glulx interpreter polished up. Previously I had the iOS Z-machine interpreter working -- that's what I used to release Dreamhold. However, Hadean Lands will be well beyond the Z-machine's capabilities. (It already is, in fact.) Most of the iOS porting work needed for the Glulx interpreter was either easy or identical to the Z-machine work... but the last few percent was a bear, of course. The bear is now placidly licking honey from its paws.You can see the result (if you're into iOS source code) on GitHub.

This brings up a question, though. The same week I posted that source code, Apple released the iPhone 5. It also updated its development environment to support it -- but the oldest iOS devices are now not supported. (The original iPhone, iPhone 3G, and the first and second-gen iPod touch.) I believe it's still possible to build an app that's universal across all iOS devices, but it requires some finicky command-line work across two different sets of dev tools.

Does anybody care? When I launched this Kickstarter thing, the iPhone 4 was brand-new and plenty of people were still on older models. (I still had an original iPhone.) I intended to support all models; the interpreter code I've posted does support all models. (Albeit letterboxed on the iPhone 5.)

Obviously, time has passed. You don't need me to remind you of that. If I release the game with minimum specs of "iPhone 3GS and iOS 4.3", will that leave you out in the cold? Let me know. I am willing to do the extra work for back-support, but only if it benefits real people.

(Let's not get into the "Apple hates everybody" rat-hole. There are blogs for that. The situation is what it is, I have to decide how to exist in it.)

For October, I intend to design a major new subsystem for HL: shortcut actions. Enacting a detailed alchemical ritual is fun -- the first time. The second time, it's grinding; you'd really rather just type "create potion of foo". So I will support that! ...As long as you have access to all the ingredients. ...Some of which require other rituals to create. And -- this is the hard part -- without accidentally introducing any new solutions.

Yeah, headache. See you in a month.

I did not get much chance to look around the rest of the show, because I was standing and demoing for eight hours. That laptop in front of me? Didn't open it once. I thought I would be able to work on some HL code during slack time in the show. Ha ha.

But I could see some very nifty first-person 3D exploration games running across the room, and hear the shrieks of Conway's Inferno. (All my puzzle friends noted Conway's Inferno as a clear puzzle hit; I agree. When the iOS version ships, buy it.) And I got a few minutes to chat with Jason Scott before he showed his movie. I hear Peter Molyneux dropped by, but if I saw him, I didn't know it.

I did not win one of the show awards, which were voted by the crowds. (Didn't expect to.) You can see Shade got a string of yellow dots -- votes for "best narrative" -- although, to be fair, I think a couple of people were voting for Meanwhile. I don't see the winner list posted, but I know that the Best Narrative trophy went to Resonance, so congrats to Wadjet Eye.

Conclusion: this festival was a big success. It was an excellent way for crazy small-time developers like me to show off games, talk to people, and generally demonstrate our existence. Many people tried my games; more people watched the documentaries. I pushed the PR-IF link on anybody who expressed an interest in IF, so I expect we'll have a packed meeting in October. (Not yet scheduled, sorry.)

The show will happen again; it will be bigger next year. If you're a game maker in the New England area, and you're not big enough to set up a gigantic booth at PAX or GDC, you want to be at BostonFIG in 2013. I will be.

Quick example (you want a quick example, don't you?): the general command is "BURN X WITH Y". (There are many synonyms, of course.) So I set up a rulebook, and start filling it in with both general and specific rules.

• burn (hardwood) with (burning softwood): The fire isn't hot enough for the hardwood to catch.
• burn (softwood) with (burning magnesium): The wood burns away instantly.
• burn (burning magnesium) with (burning softwood): The wood burns away instantly.
• burn (wood) with (anything burning): The wood catches fire.
• burn (anything burning) with (anything burning): "That's already on fire."
• burn (anything) with (anything burning): "Randomly settings things on fire won't help."

These are not straight out of the game -- I don't really have magnesium -- but they give you the idea. It doesn't matter that some of these rules overlap; I7 arranges them from most specific to most general, and finds the first one that covers the situation. This means that I can start with some broad cases, and then add details until I'm satisfied. I don't need to plan the whole matrix from the beginning.

Which is good, because there's no way to think of all this stuff from the beginning. That case of "BURN FLAMING MAGNESIUM WITH BURNING SOFTWOOD"? I didn't realize until I tried it that it needed its own case. Sure, I could have let the "already on fire" case cover it -- but that wouldn't be satisfying.

(Then I built the retort, which has a sort of bunsen-burner arrangement, and realized that requires a whole new set of mechanisms. That took four days right there.)

Anyway, that's the war stories for August. What's up for September: a lot of little mechanisms and transformations which are needed for puzzle-solving, even though they're not rituals in their own right. For example, drawing a gold bead out into gold wire. Or jumping into a pool, and finding that all your possessions get soaked. (I'd say this is the easy stuff, but, well, liquids and fire. They're always extra work. Stay tuned for more war stories.)

In non-IF news: keep an eye out for another secret iPhone project! It should hit the App Store next week. This is an audio project, and if you're a long-time follower of my work, you might be able to guess which audio project.