vivdunstan

Good bit of game design, planning out more of Chapter 4 of my latest parser interactive fiction / text adventure game. This time I was figuring out some plot structure in Twine, before coding in Inform 7. Figuring out obstacles, story beats etc. Have also been looking at ideas for Chapter 5. I'm designing/coding multiple bits at the same time. There will be 7 chapters overall. Quite a lot bigger than my previous game.

Especially pleased to manage this today because I've been too asleep all week to tackle it before. But finally got a good bit of game design work in! I was adding all the bottom half of this diagram today.

As I finish off my current IFComp game coding I've been musing on the choice of parser in this case.

With my previous IFComp 2018 game Border Reivers, which largely revolved around conversations, a number of players felt it would have been better as a Twine or similar choice-based web piece. Which I was eminently not ready to code in! Plus I have a real soft spot for traditional parser text adventure style games.

My SpringThing 2020 game Napier's Cache was more naturally suited to the parser game world model of rooms and objects. Though the puzzle element was still relatively low, so even that wasn't an ideal fit.

However I am confident that my IFComp 2024 game Bad Beer totally needs the physical modelling of space and location that parser gives. And it contains sufficient puzzles, including one fundamental one that is all about moving around the world. And there is another key element re space that I can't reveal here cos *spoilers*. But yup, I'm very happy with this choice.

I am now hoping to have Bad Beer ready for playtesting in the next couple of weeks. Fingers crossed!