by Roody_Yogurt » Fri Jul 23, 2021 8:38 pm
Years ago, I started making a
Hugo port of ALIEN.BAS, but as you can see, I didn't get far (I see there's a typo in there but I'm too lazy to see if that's my own or if I was trying to be faithful to the source material). I forget why I gave up.
As far as examining things in games go, I admit that it's kind of shocking when games don't allow you to examine much, but some of the Phoenix games (especially the Doom trilogy) won me over. Other than the times the games were intentionally being a dick about what a particular object was (like when it would refer to what you eventually figure out is a wand as a cylinder with a star shape on one end), I didn't think that the lack of >EXAMINE particularly penalized me.
As an author, I find writing a million descriptions of everything to be super annoying, so I've actually considered making one probably-never-to-be-finished games completely >EXAMINE-less. Of course, there end up being some rare times where you actually
do have more to say about something, but I hope to get around the issue by doing things like adding an extra bit of text when you first pick something up, verbose inventory listings where relevant information is always included, and as a last resort, adding game footnotes ala "hitchhiker's guide."
I think, as long as there is a certain amount of trust established between the author and the player (where the player doesn't feel like the author is trying to pull one over on them), you can still make players feel "safe" even without object descriptions.
I guess I really should go finish that game and see if I'm right.
Years ago, I started making a [url=http://hugo.caltrops.com/play/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fdrive.google.com%2Fuc%3Fexport%3Ddownload%26id%3D1zdXsdyJQ4BPTFTEOLNkch2rEHMwUbAR0]Hugo port of ALIEN.BAS[/url], but as you can see, I didn't get far (I see there's a typo in there but I'm too lazy to see if that's my own or if I was trying to be faithful to the source material). I forget why I gave up.
As far as examining things in games go, I admit that it's kind of shocking when games don't allow you to examine much, but some of the Phoenix games (especially the Doom trilogy) won me over. Other than the times the games were intentionally being a dick about what a particular object was (like when it would refer to what you eventually figure out is a wand as a cylinder with a star shape on one end), I didn't think that the lack of >EXAMINE particularly penalized me.
As an author, I find writing a million descriptions of everything to be super annoying, so I've actually considered making one probably-never-to-be-finished games completely >EXAMINE-less. Of course, there end up being some rare times where you actually [i]do[/i] have more to say about something, but I hope to get around the issue by doing things like adding an extra bit of text when you first pick something up, verbose inventory listings where relevant information is always included, and as a last resort, adding game footnotes ala "hitchhiker's guide."
I think, as long as there is a certain amount of trust established between the author and the player (where the player doesn't feel like the author is trying to pull one over on them), you can still make players feel "safe" even without object descriptions.
I guess I really should go finish that game and see if I'm right.