The game's extremely minor, but kind of an experiment. You can stick prewritten text from a story into the Adrift generator in a few hours, it turns out. But the problem is, there isn't a lot of gameplay. More and more I realize that motivating the player, explaining exactly what the goal is, right away, is usually a good idea.

The contest is here: http://www.shadowvault.net/comp.htm

However the Inform version, on the archive, is a bit different. I basically stuck to the barebones, 15 kb Adrift version, but I did add a couple things. Someone played the Inform version and reported he couldn't get out of the first room but it turned out to be not a coding error but rather a glitch in my being clear about what to do. He didn't report any other problems so I'm assuming the Inform version is playable. I hope.

I had some recourse to the Chix example code, thanks, from which I gleaned mainly that I'm no programmer.

Hey, what's the link for that Adrift competition mentioned above?

The hidden subtext to all of this is, if this is a competition requiring new games, that we have a new game from Eric Mayer! I don't know why I missed this the first time around.

The Adrift competition I did the 15 kb game for ends tonight and the Adrift site itself is down. Thus I may temporarily be spared the ignominy of knowing I finished behind Chris Coles. However I uploaded the Inform port (or my attempt) to the If Archive because...well...I have to do something with it. Probably takes five minutes to play. I realize it isn't all that appropriate to mention in a Hugo leaning forum but I haven't decided whether I'll announce it otherwise so this is an exclusive right now. thorn.z5