HugoComp Discussion, Reviews n' Spoilers!

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 11:20 am

How long do these games take to play? I'm trying to be a better person, but I need to take baby steps, so I'll play these games if they're not too long and tedious.

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 11:58 am

My game takes less than five minutes.

I think ICJ's was less than 10.

I haven't tried the others yet, but I'm about to.

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 12:39 pm

I've been playing Tales of a Clockwork Boy for a while now. I *think* ... well, we might need to start a spoiler/help thread, but I think I need the line from the Golem for my lute. I'm not sure.

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 12:54 pm

What do we do? Do we post comments and opinions in here? Can we be frank?

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 12:56 pm

Yeah, comment, please. Be frank. Let us know how we did.

They are bite-sized games!

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 1:05 pm

So far I have played Rob's text game and Robb's text game, and neither of them are text games.

DISQUALIFIED.

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 1:31 pm

World Builder: Lots of crazy science words and a story I didn't completely follow, but generally well-written, and for such a small, almost on-rails game, I felt like I had a full interstellar adventure! That's all I wanted for Christmas.

7 out of 10!

(A few spelling mistakes, if the author is out there listening... "persuit" -> "pursuit", and "affect" -> "effect".)

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 1:48 pm

Party Arty, Man of La Munchies: A short, nonsensical little romp full of great humor and even a few clever little mechanics one might not expect from such a lighthearted affair! Just what the doctor ordered, I'd say!

8 out of 10.

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 2:34 pm

Flack wrote:I've been playing Tales of a Clockwork Boy for a while now. I *think* ... well, we might need to start a spoiler/help thread, but I think I need the line from the Golem for my lute. I'm not sure.

I'm stuck at the same spot.

Bainespal · Post by **Bainespal** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 2:48 pm

Our five little games sure covered a lot of ground! We had an in-depth IF satire, a clever parody, a space opera, a fairy-tale fantasy, and an artistic tragedy.

pinback wrote:World Builder: Lots of crazy science words and a story I didn't completely follow, but generally well-written, and for such a small, almost on-rails game, I felt like I had a full interstellar adventure! That's all I wanted for Christmas.

7 out of 10!

Wow... thanks! Writing it in such a short period of time felt like an adrenaline-pumping adventure, for me. Thanks for pointing out the spelling mistakes. I enjoyed writing the game so much that I'm considering cleaning it up and re-releasing it... I don't know. ;)

Flack wrote:I've been playing Tales of a Clockwork Boy for a while now. I *think* ... well, we might need to start a spoiler/help thread, but I think I need the line from the Golem for my lute. I'm not sure.

I don't know if we're going to do hints in a separate thread or what, so I won't try to be very specific. But did you notice an object lying around somewhere that doesn't seem to have any other use?

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 2:58 pm

Clockwork Boy:

A nice, small story with a couple of simple puzzles to add some "gamey-ness" to it, it is unfortunately, in its current state, hampered by:

1. Some shaky implementation.
2. A frustrating "guess the verb" puzzle.
3. Bad grammar/spelling.

However, I'm aware that the author is not a native English speaker, and is also very new to Hugo, so with those caveats in place, it's a perfectly enjoyable first try.

5 out of 10!

This concludes PINBACK RATEZ TEH HUGOCOMP GAMEZ.

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 3:13 pm

Alright, Robb won't stop CRYING to me in IM that I disqualified his game, so I'll UNDISQUALIFY both of the previously disqualified "games" and comment on them.

RETRO-NEMESIS: I had read the story before, and it's still the craziest, stomach-churningly bizarre thing Robb's ever written. I think he did an exemplary job of converting a static story into a (somewhat) interactive experience, adding plenty of the little quirks along the way that he is known for. I still have no idea how to rate the game, though. Because I still don't think it's a game. Uhh. As a text game (which is the rating scale I used for the other games), I give it 2 out of 10, and as an implementation of what it was, I give it... what... 9 out of 10? I have no idea. ? out of 10.

SPINNING: A few loosely related scenes over the span of the PC's lifetime, linked cleverly by prompting the "player" to enter a specific verb to push the text to the next scene. As a text game, I give it 1 out of 10, because the interaction consists of the game saying, almost literally, "type the following word to continue". As an experimental/art piece, I give it 6 out of 10, because while the mechanic is good, and the writing is excellent, veterans of such experimental pieces will probably pick up by the very first page what is going on here, so what is meant to be impactful at the end comes across with a whiff of triteness.

Hopefully I haven't made any enemies here. (I have probably made enemies.)

Bainespal · Post by **Bainespal** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 3:13 pm

Will anyone object if I add listings for all five games to the IFDB?

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 3:38 pm

pinback wrote:Hopefully I haven't made any enemies here. (I have probably made enemies.)

None here. I already fessed up to submitting the worst game of the comp, so a 6/10 is perfectly acceptable to me. In my defense I will say that I think you and Robb have different opinions as what qualifies as a Speed IF entry. In his original e-mail to me, he said that some Speed IF games only contain a single room or a single object to manipulate, and are traditionally much smaller in scale than a normal game. This is the first Speed IF I've ever entered so I based what I could do on a 48 hour window (which included learning Hugo). So yeah, I'm okay with 6/10.

Here is a PM I sent to Bainespal in regards to my game.

[Spoilers]

So ... the idea behind the story was that, in present time, the protagonist ("you") has just been shot in Times Square on New Year's Eve. I got this idea from a news story I read a few days before Christmas, where a 15-year-old Amish girl was accidentally shot and killed by a hunter who fired his rifle over a mile away. (Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ident.html) In this story (at least in my mind) the shooting was accidental, caused by a stray bullet.

The game itself is a series of memories -- the protagonist's life is literally flashing before his eyes. I then picked four scenes that I thought would be instrumental in the protagonist's life: meeting his future wife, having "feelings" for her (when their legs touch), the two of them falling in love at the waterfall, and the birth of their son. The last scene of the game brings you back to present time, as the protagonist begins to realize that he has been shot.

I recently watched Inception and was reminded of the idea that things in the real world can affect our dreams. As a kid I can remember listening to the radio and then hearing those songs in my dreams. This is pretty subtle and I wouldn't expect anyone to pick up on it, but there are hints in every scene as to what's going on.

- In the first scene, there are references to "cold metal", which could relate to the gun or the bullet. There are also a few references to it being cold, which is like dummy writing 101.

- In the second scene, you have the second reference to "spinning", which is a general reference to getting dizzy and lightheaded due to blood loss.

- In the third scene, the protagonist ends up with a soaking wet shirt. In real life, his shirt is now being covered in blood.

- In the fourth scene, there are a couple of things. The first is the reference to pain. I should have made this more pronounced. I thought about the protagonist expressing the feeling of pain as well but I cut that out. There's also the blood on the son, which is another vague reference. At this point in the game the memory really begins to blur with reality. The protagonist realizes something isn't right. The hole in the shirt causes his confusion. You're right, it doesn't make any sense to either you (the player) or he (the protagonist) at this point in the game.

The final scene brings us back to the present. The past four scenes have taken place in merely a second in the protagonist's mind. We see now that the son is grown and that the three of them are celebrating New Year's Eve out together. The game ends with the same dizziness and spinning feeling that the protagonist experienced at the beginning, which (I hope?) ties it all together.

I wrote the story in about an hour or so and then fleshed out a few things while doing the code, so I'm sure there are a few holes in it. :)

My previous attempts at IF have been (at least I would classify them as) "text adventures" -- small adventures without much fiction or story behind them. Even though this was a speed IF (and 3/4 of my time was spent learning the basics of Hugo!) my idea was to tie a story into the IF. Unfortunately that didn't leave a lot of room for "roaming around", especially due to time constraints and my own programming limitations.

Anyway, I hope the games makes a bit more sense now. Thanks again for playing it and sending me the transcript, I really appreciate your time in doing that.

[End Spoilers]

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 3:47 pm

I'm gonna split the thread so there is a separate discussion thread!

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 4:04 pm

Now that I see how much fun this was for everyone, I should have joined it.

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 4:23 pm

We would have loved to have you, pinback. Maybe we can do another one soon enough.

(I still use EditPlus for 90% of my Hugo coding and only recently updated your original syntax file to include some more reserved words.)

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 4:26 pm

Bainespal wrote:Will anyone object if I add listings for all five games to the IFDB?

I would wait until whatever updates are happening have happened. It's always kind of eye-roll-prompting when people put up game pages on IFDB without download links.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 4:27 pm

Here are my QUICK TAKES of the other games.

Argh, I am going to try to do these without spoilers. It's gonna be tough, and there's already spoilers in this thread. OK, screw it.

Spinning
My favorite part of this is the location of where the tragedy happens because many (citizens of that city) on the Internet are real smug now that their city is all cleaned up. I don't care for their smugness! No, my favorite part is that Flack is a full-fledged Hugonaut now.

(EDIT: With spoilers on it seems pointless to not mention denizens of New York City. Sorry.)

Unlike Ben, I didn't guess what was happening the story, so I felt bad at the end. Ben was probably rooting for the guy to die because that's what he "predicted" at the beginning.

World Builder
I cracked up when I saw that the artificial son was named "Hugor." Now, I played an early release of this, and since nobody else mentioned any trouble getting around, I'll assume the implementation was cleaned up after Bainespal got my transcript. I like that he assumed we all knew that the ship should be able to warp/go to light speed/etc. I would consider this to be the kind of "harder" sci-fi that people talk about? I think?

I like to believe that in the future, instead of your girlfriend getting mad and slamming the door and driving back to her house, she'll get in a space pod and go to light speed. And then you'll have to get half-dressed and follow her to Mars or wherever. I think we're all gonna find World Builder to be ahead of its time in that regard.

Tales of a Clockwork Boy
This felt the most like a text adventure to me. There's a few things I would have helped Tale out with if I had more time. I like that we are a clockwork person in this game, because it's really (when you think about it) not 100% necessary. The PC could have been the King and Queen's son, or a serf or a peasant or even more cliched in a fantasy world, black. But he was a clockwork boy instead. GOOD. This is good, we need more of this sort of thing.

There's a few places where we should have explained articles to Tale, but this is a great start for what I hope is a long career of making Hugo games.

Party Arty
Roody's masterpiece (so far). You are going to see Roody Yogurt win the XYZZY for best game one of these years or decade, and when it happens, we can point to Party Arty as where it all began to coagulate for him. At one point it had me laughing out loud on every turn. One of the finest games I've ever played and my stealth pick for the 2012 "Video Game of the Year." I can't say enough good things about it. Short, quick and satisfying, I am not going to let it anywhere near my girlfriend.

All this and we have the possibility of a game by COMMANDER TDARCOS in 2012? Whaaaaaaaaaat? Hugo, 2012 was made for you!

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 6:05 pm

HUGO CLOCK (if it meets the requirements and is officially let into the competition):

Now we're talking. Now we're fucking talking. Good atmosphere, a few truly satisfying old-school puzzles, and implementation which while not perfect by any means surely shows that the author didn't just throw up his hands and say "fuck it, it's a mini game" when considering fleshing everything out.

Some of the writing misses the mark (anthropomorphizing chairs is rarely a good idea), but I don't care. It was the most fun I had in the HUGOCOMP (if it in fact qualifies).

With a 9 out of 10, Hugo Clock WINS the HugoComp! (According to me!)

(If it qualifies.)