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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The ritual engine has been the fun part. Of course I've already implemented a version of this, for the Hadean Lands teaser that I posted with the original Kickstarter project. But that was built to handle just one ritual (ignoring the starting "lamp" puzzle, which is a one-off set of actions). Generalizing it to support the giant branching ritual tree I've got in my notes -- that's what we call fun. But I've got three rituals in there now, and they all work, so I must have gotten it right.

To make sure I've gotten it right, I built a little unit-testing script. (One can eyeball code for three rituals, but in the course of the next umpty-um rituals, mistakes will be made. I can smell 'em coming.) It's just a bit of Python hooked up to an interpreter -- I wrote the whole thing this afternoon. But for every ritual, I can now write down a list of commands and the expected outcomes (following the engine's state machine). Plus, I can write down a list for every way to do a ritual wrong, and all of those expected outcomes. (Interesting, informative failures are key to interesting IF.)

(For I7 experts: yes, this is similar in nature to the I7 Skein facility. However, I've never had good luck with the skein -- whenever I try to use it, the IDE eats my data. So I wrote my own thing. Yes, it is a personal failing. But my script is nicely tuned for HL, and more compact, and it's also easier to check into Git, so there.)

And the secret project? I won't lie -- it's not IF-related. It was a wild idea that popped up early in the month, when WWDC was coming up and everybody was agog with rumors about an SDK for AppleTV apps. It was a good idea. More importantly, I could have finished it fast, submitted it, and been one of the first apps in its category in the new AppleTV App Store.

As a developer, I have to pay attention to those sorts of opportunities. I am obligated to finish HL, but I am also obligated to keep an eye out for other paths to success. So I spent a few days on the Secret Project, and no apologies.

Well, WWDC went by and those rumors -- turned out to be rumors. Tim Cook didn't say a word about AppleTV apps. No SDK, no AppleTV App Store. So the Secret Project is back on the shelf, and I've been back on HL.

I do intend to finish the Secret Project, for iPhone. It's still a good idea! But in the iOS App Store it will be about the hundredth app in its category, and there's no advantage to finishing it right now. That makes it lower priority than the IF work. Maybe by the end of the summer, I'll get it done.

I should also mention another Secret Project, on which I spent no time at all, because it wasn't mine. Jason McIntosh has just released an iOS version of The Warbler's Nest, his short award-winning IF work from 2010. Jason is the first IF author to pick up my IosFizmo framework. (The first one who isn't, you know, me.) If you haven't played The Warbler's Nest, and you have an iPhone/iPod/iPad, drop a buck on it. Jason's cat needs kibble.

First, this Z-code interpreter (an iOS port of Fizmo) is available on GitHub now. Do you have a Z-code game that you want to put in the App Store? Now you can. (I mean, when the bug is squashed.) Free or for money, it shouldn't be a problem either way.

(You'll have to be a registered iOS developer, though. Also, I haven't documented the build process in any useful way -- sorry. This will improve over time. For the present, just install the project and its submodules from GitHub, replace Game.z5, and fire up Xcode.)

Some answers for the IF author contemplating an App Store release:

• Can I customize the display style?

Yes. I put in hooks for game-specific fonts and color schemes.

• What about that awesome map?

The map is Dreamhold-specific, so it's not included in the interpreter release. The same goes for the Game Center achievements. I think I'm going to keep those as private extensions. (I'm pretending to do this for a living, so I have to have some kind of, whaddayacall, "value add".)

If you're good at iOS coding, you are of course free to write your own interpreter customizations. The source is under a BSD-style license.

• Is this a fully functional Z-code interpreter?

Urm, mostly. It only handles V5 and V8 at this time. (The V3 status line code might work, but is untested.) Timed input works, but the color opcodes do not. There are undoubtedly some bugs -- I know the status line height can go wonky at startup in some games. (Fortunately not Dreamhold! I know what's going on with this bug, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.)

• What about Glulx? (Hadean Lands will be a Glulx game, after all.)

I have most of the Glulx interpreter working (see iosglulxe), but it's missing one key feature -- the ability to launch the game where you left off. This is critical for iOS, obviously. Follow my GitHub progress to see when that's ready.

• Can anybody use this? What if someone goes and posts all of your IF on the App Store?

The App Store has a lot of cloning and shovelware floating by. This is a sad fact of the app world. It is possible that somebody could take this opportunity to flood the world with games using my name -- or, for that matter, start uploading the entire IF Archive.

I hope that doesn't happen, though. I would like to build up a small selection of Zarf IF games on the App Store, both free and for-money, with nice game-specific bonus features. That would be good for the Zarfhome label.

(I have nothing against iOS Frotz, which is awesome -- it's not an app that features particular games. Flooding the App Store search results with a bunch of cloned IF is entirely different.)

(Note: if you are this sort of shovelware bozo, and you're posting other people's games from the Archive for free, you're a bozo. If you do it for money, or put ads on, you're a bozo who is probably violating a bunch of software licenses. All my games say "Do not distribute commercially without permission," for example. Don't go there.)

Well, we'll see what happens, right? Enough of that mess.

• And Hadean Lands?

I turned Dreamhold over to the App Store review queue a week ago. Since then, I've been chewing through the pile of HL design documents that have been accumulating for the past oh-so-many months.

I now have a complete picture of the puzzle structure -- every ritual and special action, major and minor. It's... somewhat terrifying. Remember I said "53 major puzzles"? It's up to 72 now. There are 98 distinct spell components on the list.

Inform's parser isn't really optimized for carrying around 98 objects. I mean, you can't actually carry all 98 at once, because some of them are made from each other. But it's still way too many. Inform allows it, but I suspect the parsing will bog down on slower machines -- like phones.

But then, why should the player have to do all that inventory management at all? Expect a lot of attention to shortcuts and automatic object-fetching. "You run over to Herbarium and pick some rosemary..."

Anyhow, the next step will be typing all of these puzzles and components into PlotEx, to make sure I haven't completely broken the plot. (I'm sure the first thing I'll discover is that PlotEx isn't optimized for 98 objects either, and then there will be some more optimization. Whee!)

After that? My usual IF implementation strategy is "start with the first room, work forward until done." That is absolutely not going to work here. What will I do instead? Stay tuned...

A couple of other IF-related links from the past month:

The Bundle in a Box charity promotion is offering seven Windows adventure games in a pay-what-you-choose bundle. This includes six graphical adventures (by Jonas Kyratzes, Wadjet Eye Games, and Size Five Games) and one text game: Peter Nepstad's 1893: A World's Fair Mystery. Proceeds support indie developers and charitable causes.

Is it time for a text game revival? (Gamasutra article by Leigh Alexander.) Runs through several sorts of text-based games, from Infocom's heyday to modern e-literature, the Kickstarter revival of many old fan favorites, Emily Short's new project at Linden Labs, and so on. Includes the splash banner for Hadean Lands, so I'm in favor.

Interactive Fiction Communities: From Preservation through Promotion and Beyond (Article by Nick Montfort and Emily Short.) Introduction to IF (which I'm sure you don't need) but also a history of the genre and the community, in some detail. Worth reading if you haven't been immersed in the stuff for the past few decades.

I started writing this a full year ago, and I got the basics of an IF interface working: the status window, the story window, text input, scrolling. But I put it aside in the spring -- I wanted to get Secret Hideout and Meanwhile out the door. Now that HL is in progress, I decided to make sure the interface was up to snuff.

Turns out I made some mistakes back then; it was, after all, nearly my first iOS project. (Alas, poor KLD.) So the past couple of weeks have been spent ripping out inadequate code and hammering on it. If you follow my twitter feed, you'll have gotten some hints of this. Text scrolling is no longer stupid. The "more" flag works. The threading model is no longer a disaster waiting to happen. Also, I have a nice preferences menu for fonts and colors.

The biggest chunk of work remaining is to save and restore properly. The IF system that I'm using goes back to Infocom's design, which saved and restored the game only when the player typed "save" and "restore". There was no notion of the modern app world, which barely acknowledges that programs start and stop at all -- an app is expected to have your data ready the moment you look at it. This is possible in IF (iOS Frotz does it), but I've never integrated the feature into my own IF toolset. That'll be the big job for after GDC.

Anyhow, here's an interpreter snapshot, running my 2004 game The Dreamhold. Not fancy, but think ebook reader -- you want the UI to get out of the way of the text, not to distract from it. It still needs some icon work, mind you, and the menus are ugly. Not done yet; but greatly improved.

(IF mavens will note that The Dreamhold is a Z-code game, whereas Hadean Lands will be Glulx. True! The interpreter you see here is based on Fizmo, a Z-code interpreter. But nearly all of the interface code will be shared with the iOS Glulx app. The text windows, input, scrolling, menus, and so on are exactly the same.)

Now, this interpreter will certainly be finished before the game. (Sorry!) My plan is to release The Dreamhold as a free iOS app. I'm aiming to do that in early April, although that's not a firm date. I want to get the interpreter out there, both for real-life testing and for some eyeballs (in the "never heard of IF but what's this free app?" camp).

After that? Well, once the interpreter is done, it will be easy for me to release the rest of my existing IF catalog. They might be free apps, or I might charge a few dollars. Of course these games are available for free now, in iOS Frotz! So I'm not going to put the screws on. Maybe I'll add a little bonus content. You know the drill. Not life-changing work, but if it makes some money, it'll aid the cause.

Furthermore, anybody will be able to release an IF game using the same interpreter. Everything I've got is posted on my Github page. (The IF interface library is iosglk; the interpreters are iosfizmo and iosglulxe. Yes, iosglulxe is a couple of weeks behind.)

And Hadean Lands will follow, eventually, on a date to be announced.

Over the past month I have nailed down the outline for Hadean Lands. I know all the major puzzles that occur, and the order you hit them in. Or rather the possible orders, since there's a lot of variation. I'm using a traditional bushy-middle-act structure (many things to do but free order in which to do them -- think Myst). But there's a lot of puzzle interlocking going on too, beneath that high-level structure. Keeping track of this is why I wrote PlotEx, and you better believe it's been helpful. I can say for sure that the outline is consistent.

I haven't actually counted the major puzzles here, but I bet you want to know... okay, let's say 53. (The number is a little fuzzy, because you have to do certain things more than once, with variations. Yes, there will be shortcuts.)

The next milestone is sorting out the minor puzzles. These tasks aren't so much for challenge, but rather for pacing, and for setting up future puzzles. The locked grate in Adventure is the right analogy here. You get keys, you unlock the grate. It's not a big deal, but it spreads out the early exploration, gives a plot beat (underground now!) and gets the IF newcomer (we all were, then) used to the notion of using appropriate verbs.

Also, many of those major puzzles (30 of them) are alchemical rituals or procedures, which require ingredients. A one-ingredient ritual is no fun! I'll need a fair number of extra items just to fill out recipes and make the action sequences satisfying.

So for each ingredient X in a major puzzle, there will be a lot of "explore to find ingredient X", and a judicious proportion of "make ingredient X out of Y and Z". (Which means adding puzzles, or at least locations, for Y and Z. Don't worry, that recursion won't get more than one or two levels deep. They're minor puzzles after all.)

I could approach this by simply making up Y and Z items until all the slots on the chart are filled. But this would be boring. I mean for you, not just for me. (Okay, for me too.) One-use-per-item is a poor adventure game model.

Instead, I want all of the rituals to overlap. Y should be used in two different rituals; Z in three. Think back to my HL teaser: the untarnishing ritual starts with ginger oil, but you also have peppermint oil available. Shouldn't that lead into a different ritual? What if you start with ginger but use the binding word instead? These don't go anywhere in the teaser, but they will in the full game.

In essence, the space of ingredients and magic words forms a map -- and this abstract map should be explorable and interesting, just like the game's physical map. So this is what I've started working on now. Making up a lot of Y and Z items, but arranging them in a satisfying way. (While still obeying the major puzzle ordering constraints, of course.)

And that's this month in Hadean Lands.

(I should probably restate this, although it's not news: the estimated completion date on HL is "I don't know yet." This will continue to be true for quite some time. When I've gotten five of those 53 puzzles implemented, then I'll have a basis for estimating my progress rate.)

On the freelance side of my life, Fealty for iOS continues forward. It's playable single-player, but still all placeholder artwork, and the Game Center integration only half-works.

I am also doing a small commissioned IF work (!), which will appear on-or-around the beginning of January. Crazy, eh?

Zarfhome Software is pleased to announce the release of "Meanwhile for iOS". Jason Shiga's acclaimed interactive comic is now a truly interactive app for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

On the way home from the ice cream store, little Jimmy discovers a mad scientist's wonderland: an experimental mind-reading helmet, a time machine, and a doomsday device that can annihilate the human race. Which one would you like to test out first?

Jason Shiga's graphic novel redefined the "choose your own adventure" format by combining artwork, story, and pathways into a looping, branching narrative structure -- a story in which your choices are surrounded by the cloud of possibilities you didn't choose. Now he has redesigned "Meanwhile" for the infinite canvas that iOS provides. The entire story is woven together on a single, enormous page. You can follow the pathways, or zoom out to view the entire structure at will.

"Meanwhile" is set in a mad scientist's laboratory, but it is grounded in probability and the Many-Worlds theory of quantum mechanics. To decipher the full story, a reader will need a grasp of logic and an eye to the playful possibilities of changing history. (Or, indeed, an ear! "Meanwhile" is fully playable through VoiceOver, making it one of the few graphic novels accessible to the visually impaired.)

Zarfhome Software is Andrew Plotkin's new studio for interactive fiction, narrative experiment, and things you haven't seen before. Zarfhome was launched last year with an astonishingly successful Kickstarter effort, and is now pursuing several projects, including "Hadean Lands".

• There are way too many ideas in this file. My notion of what should go into this game was, let's say, overambitious.
• However, the ideas that are coalesced into puzzles and plot are fine. (Except for that thing about airlocks. That isn't going to fly.)
• Thus, I must throw out 80% of the unattached ideas, and use the rest to fill in the gaps in what I've got. And then I'll have a design.
• True, there are a lot of gaps. But there are plenty of ideas to fill them.
• Geez, this is a complicated puzzle structure. No wonder I bogged down before, trying to fill in the gaps.
• To the bat-cave!

Er, that last should read: I need a complexity management tool! So I quickly wrote one: PlotEx, a Python script for exploring puzzle plot constraints.

This is not an IF creation tool, specifically. It just lets you express your puzzle constraints in a simple way: what needs to happen before what, what requires what tools, and so on. Then it computes all the consequences of the scenario; it shows you what states can and cannot be reached. You can try variations like "what if the player never solves that puzzle?" or "what if the player has an extra invisibility potion?" Basically, it tells you whether your game is solvable, or whether parts of it are solvable too soon.

I've written a whole big article about PlotEx, plus documentation, so I won't go into further detail here. Bonus example: the plot logic of Enchanter rendered in PlotEx. Take a look if you think it might be useful to you.

Has it been useful to me? Heck yes. I have now filled in many gaps, and I have a much better idea of what elements I can put where without breaking HL. Furthermore, I can keep testing this; I can write unit tests for the game logic, effectively.

Of course, you might say I would have made more progress if I hadn't written up a whole big article plus documentation. Maybe. But this is how us geeks work.

More soon.

In other news -- or rather, the news I started with: Meanwhile has been sent off to App Store review. If nothing goes wrong, it will be available Tuesday, November 8th (slightly earlier in Eastern climes!)

Happy Hallows, or whatever you do. (I watched the Anti-Morris.)

Okay, I can't promise you will be excited. I'm sure some of you are saying, "What the heck, this is a comic book. You are not a comic book guy. You are an IF guy."

I can only reply: I picked up Meanwhile at PAX East in 2010. (My blogging cohort Jmac posted about it at the time.) I immediately fell in love with it -- a thoughtful, beautifully-designed take on the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre. When I got my iPad, I immediately said "That. I have to do that. In people's hands. Interactively. It will happen."

But these are generalities. What is Meanwhile?

On the way home from the ice cream store, little Jimmy discovers a mad scientist’s wonderland: an experimental mind-reading helmet, a time machine, and a doomsday device that can annihilate the human race. Which one would you like to test out first?

This is of course a great story hook. But look deeper.

The basic idea of a branching narrative is context-free -- if two branches come back together, the book can't remember how you got there. Some CYOAs ask you to keep track of items or stats, but it's a hack and a nuisance. Basically, the CYOA model is poor at stories where you focus on a problem, explore it, and try many approaches. CYOA stories really want to, well, branch out and take you to new situations. (See Sam Ashwell's ongoing posts about classic CYOA books.)

(IF, of course, is for precisely this -- you explore a problem and try many solutions, most of which will fail.)

Now look in particular at Meanwhile, at what Shiga has done with the CYOA concept. Each story element is about context. The helmet lets you loop back through a character's memories and see what's happened from a different point of view. The time machine lets you loop back through events and change them. And the doomsday machine -- well, something has to kick off the plot.

So you have this problem -- the destruction of all humanity -- and multiple ways to approach it. It wedges experimentation into a CYOA model. Since it's ultimately an intellectual problem, story branches can merge together; your history is what you've learned, not what you've done.

This is already cooler than 90% of the CYOA books I've seen. But because it's a branching comic, Shiga has a whole range of artistic tools that the old books never considered. Two story branches can be laid out in parallel on the page. You can't jump tracks, but you are aware of one path as you follow the other. Panels can be juxtaposed and contrasted. You can see storylines as you flip pages. Again: context. Even on your first run through the story -- which will almost certainly end badly -- you get a notion of your goals, your options, and the chances that you missed.

All of that works on the printed page. What does it gain from the dynamic, interactive form? Fluidity, I'd say. You aren't bogged down with the mechanics of page-flipping and line-tracing. You can zip forwards at a natural reading speed, and then back up easily, without the accumulation of finger-bookmarks that CYOA books invite.

Also, you can zoom all the way out.

So that's why I had to do Meanwhile for iOS.

Beyond the enthusiastic handwaving, I should probably answer some obvious questions about this.

The book is organized in pages, but this app uses a giant square layout. Did I rearrange it?

No, Jason Shiga did. I originally prototyped this as a page-turning app, following the book layout. When I pitched it to Jason, he said he loved the idea, but did I think maybe it might work better as a single giant scrolling page? Like in this photo?

I said, heck yes.

Is the artwork and story identical to the book?

Almost identical. A couple of panels have been updated.

All the secret stuff is there. But the secret codes are different. If that's what you're asking. Heh.

Why "Secret Project M37"?

The book has 37 full-page spreads of artwork. I originally prototyped this as a page-turning app, see... no, I've already told that story.

Does it work on the smaller iPhone screen?

Sure does. You can see less of the surroundings, so there's less context -- it's not as cool. But the experience comes through.

(Again, screenshot does not final button design.)

The web site says "Voiceover enabled". Is this really a comic book readable by the visually impaired?

Sure is. If you turn on the iOS text-to-voice mode, it will read out each panel as you reach it, and then read the choices for the next panel. You can navigate the whole thing with standard Voiceover gestures.

(Fortunately, this is a very talky comic, so I didn't have to describe a lot of action!)

Could this interface work for other comics?

Maybe. Are there any other comics out there like Meanwhile?

This interface took a lot of tuning to get right. I didn't just slap yellow squares onto Meanwhile. (There's a blog post in that design story, eventually.) So the code is very specific to this book. But I am interested in other interactive storytelling projects, and maybe this code will be adapted to something else someday.

How long will it be before Meanwhile ships?

As I've said, the delays in this project have an up side: the thing is practically finished now. There will be final design decisions, and beta-testing, and of course Apple takes a week to approve apps. But I anticipate getting this thing into the go-pipeline in early November.

And Hadean Lands?

I realize it's frustrating that my last word on the subject was in August, and was "no change until the current project is done". And then I've been silent about the current project.

But the silence is over, the project is almost over, and it will be IF time again soon.

What does that mean? Well, several things. The past year has made clear to me that I need to have several project-trains moving at the same time; and (to jump metaphorical tracks out of the frying pan) I need fingers in several pies at once.

I started out 2011 thinking that Hadean Lands had to be my big money-making breakout. That was, in truth, kind of a paralyzing notion. But it was also kind of illusory. Here I am; I've finished one project, nearly finished another, and I also have some iPad contract work lined up. (Not story-related; it's a board game port.) None of these projects now has to be The One That Succeeds And Pays My Rent Forever. But they all could be. (Okay, not My Secret Hideout, probably.)

Thus, I retreat from a promise: I will not be working on IF full-time for the rest of this year, or next year. I apologize for that. But I will be working on IF again, and that includes Hadean Lands.

The iOS interpreter engine is in better shape than the HL game design. So it is likely that I will ship some of my old IF as iOS apps before HL goes out the door. I'll start with The Dreamhold, probably -- as a free app. (I'm not going to charge money for a game that's been free since 2004. Plus, it's already included in iPhone Frotz. Plus, one goal is to stress-test the iOS interpreter code. Gonna get a lot more coverage with free apps than with cashy ones.)

So, you'll see me release other work -- and other IF work -- before Hadean Lands is done. I regret that but I don't apologize; that's the way my life is going to work, if it works at all.

What I can tell you is this: by the time Meanwhile ships, Hadean Lands will be my "work on this every day" project. That doesn't mean it will be my first priority on any given day, but there will be steady progress. Sometimes I get wrapped up on a project and crunch on it for weeks; Meanwhile was like that. But the steady progress works whether I'm obsessed or not.

(What's my current "work on this every day" project? I do have one. Shall I say, River-and-Swamp design work? But it's not a high-priority project; it will probably be shelved next week, until either the board game or at least one IF project reaches fruition.)

In the long term, I hope to offer you an ever-growing tally of interesting projects across the game and narrative domain. And I hope that, in aggregate, they pay my rent.

All for now.

My Secret Hideout is an interactive text toy for the iPad. You build a little tree on the right half of the screen. As you do, the left half displays a description of your secret treehouse fort. Every change you make to the tree causes the text to evolve. The larger your tree, the larger your treehouse gets.

(If this screenshot doesn't work for you, scroll down -- I've copied the sample text at the bottom of this post.)

This is not a game. It's not really a construction kit either. You don't decide what rooms and elements go into your treehouse; you can only make changes and watch the variations. But I think that has its own charm. It's a toy, and a toy should be discovered through play. Just like IF, really -- there is no menu of treehouse elements, so you will keep finding new ones as you explore.

I also think that the tree is a pretty good toy on its own. Dragging around the leaves is fun! The tree reacts as you play with it; it's subtle animation, but it adds a lot of bounce and snap and physicality to the interface. I spent a lot of time making sure that was satisfying.

My Secret Hideout is just about finished. I need to add another couple of room options, and polish the usual list of UI edges which nobody but me will ever care about. I've said that I intend to ship it -- at least into Apple's hands, for approval -- by Labor Day (Sept 5). I'm still good with that deadline.

This thing has a wacky history. The concept started out as "The Folding Book of Fairy Tales". Imagine a picture book, but rather than turning pages, you fold them, bringing together different elements and forming new shapes. Wacky, eh? I have no idea where that goes. I would like to get back to that someday.

Well, I didn't have a picture book ready to go, but I started writing some paper-folding code. You Twitter followers saw me starting to rant and mutter about origami a couple of months ago. I got that working pretty well, too. Then I pulled out this idea of a fantasy world of procedurally-generated text. I put them together, and presto:

That worked nicely. But I wasn't satisfied with it. Playing with paper-folding is fun, but it feels destructive -- or rather, it feels bounded. You fold the paper, and it gets smaller and smaller, until you have this little angular spitball that won't fold any more. (Memory limits, you know, even with infinitely thin paper.) I don't have a full origami simulator, so it's not like you can make a crane. And it just didn't seem to fit the treehouse theme.

So I tossed all that paper-folding code off to the side. (I will definitely do something with it someday, even if it's not the Folding Book of Fairy Tales.) I started over with this tree-building toy... and that worked much better.

Will I develop this further? Maybe. If My Secret Hideout turns into a hit, I'll be happy to expand it to My Secret Underwater Hideout and My Secret Cave Hideout and My Secret Hideout in Space. (In-app purchase would be great for that, if it weren't for the patent situation. We'll see how that goes.)

Now the elephant-in-the-treehouse question. My Secret Hideout is obviously not a text adventure. (Although I've brought some of my text-adventure skills to bear on the descriptions.) Where is Hadean Lands in all of this?

For that answer, let's go back to February, when I started prototyping what I am still referring to as Secret Project M37. I was pounding away on HL design documents and iOS interpreter code. But I knew that would be a long process of pounding, and I wanted a relatively fast project that I could crank out and start making some money. (And iOS dev credibility.)

I created a prototype for M37. It looked good. I got excited and worked on it for a couple of months (while still working on IF code).

Then M37 got bogged down in one of those annoying delays. As a software developer I want to imagine that any problem can be solved by sitting down and hacking all night -- but that's false. This wasn't a technical issue, it wasn't anybody being incompetent, it was just paperwork that was slow. (I won't go into the whole story, because it doesn't matter.)

So that was frustrating. If I were a perfect person, I would have used the delay to push Hadean Lands forward. But I got stuck on the idea of "fast project, crank out, make some money". So I pulled out the origami idea and the procedural text idea and threw together My Secret Hideout.

I started that at the beginning of June. So it's looking like a "fast project" for me is three months -- except that, remember, I wrote a whole origami library and then took it out. So really two months. (And now I have an origami library in reserve.) That's pretty good; that gives me confidence that I can keep an iOS dev cycle going.

After I ship Hideout, I will be concentrating on M37, because it too is just about finished. (And the paperwork is just about settled...) Even though M37 isn't IF either, I promise you will be excited and you will understand why I made time for it this past spring.

Once both of those are out the door, it will be IF time again. I realize that you all have extended your faith to me, and I've been less stringently focused on Hadean Lands than I could have been. I beg your further indulgence. It will all come together.

Here's the text from the sample screenshot, in non-screenshot form:

My secret hideout is a cluster of sturdy rooms hung around a majestic oak. The walls are roughly cut but fit tightly. The well-lit living chamber is restful and quiet.

Behind that is a room with leftover paint cans scattered everywhere.

To the left, past a secret arch, is my library. Maps are piled everywhere. A plate of cheese sits on a side table, and the smell of old paper permeates the place.

The entire construction is powered by raincatchers that funnel water down through the branches past tiny turbines.

And just for kicks, here's a second one:

My secret hideout is a meshwork of tree branches, low in an elm. The walls flutter gently in the wind; vines weave through them. The uneven sleeping chamber is restful and quiet.

The treehouse is easily defensible. A ladder of heavy boards runs down the tree. I can also parachute out if necessary.