If Comp 2020] Jay Schilling's Edge of Chaos

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Here is a link to download (or play online) Jay Schilling's Edge of Chaos, written over the last 8 years by Mike Sousa and myself.

https://ifcomp.org/ballot#entry-2197

There was an aye-aye behind the bar, staring at me horribly. Or maybe its face just froze that way. I was waiting for my client at ten at night in a dusty, dirty town in the middle of nowhere. Clouds out here were apparently one of the thirty million newly unemployed. There was a missing woman and my client was about to hire an amateur private detective with the world's most technologically advanced cellular phone. This was going to be a cinch. Seriously. It'll take me like two searches with it to close this case. Three if mid-investigation I check on my torrents.

Y-You're a player of the 2020 Interactive Fiction competition. I'm Jay. Let's straddle the edge.

Detective • Two hours • Parser-based • TADS

[Tdarcos]

Detective • Two hours • Parser-based • TADS

You used TADS to write this? You killed Kenny, you bastard! Err, I mean, You killed Hugo, you bastard! How could you give up on Hugo in favor of that monstrosity and/or spawn of Satan that is TADS?

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I didn't actually do the programming for it, Mike Sousa did. He is a TADS guy, so that's what we went with. I've got a few Hugo projects that I am working on right now so you have not seen the last of Hugo, sir.

The game should be playable on your tablet - if you wait a few seconds it will bypass the two opening screens and then put you at the command prompt.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

wait. "Monstrosity that is TADS" -- are you kidding around, or do you have a concern about TADS? Genuinely curious. Seems a totally capable language to me.

[Tdarcos]

wait. "Monstrosity that is TADS" -- are you kidding around, or do you have a concern about TADS? Genuinely curious. Seems a totally capable language to me.

In case you have forgotten, i tried using it and could not get it to accomplish what I needed to do, and creating a text adventure was just too difficult. I see no upside to learning the language, it's not like when I learned PHP, because I can use it for useful things that have significant, real world value.

Today, text-oriented Interactive Fiction is a niche hobby of very small interest to very few people. I don't see where taking the hard work to learn TADS "buys" me anything I can't already do using Hugo, something I am relatively familiar with.

I mean, I want to do certain things based on the commands given, and where appropriate, change the default behavior. I could not figure out how TADS works to accomplish this. And I don't know if I have the interest or desire to spend time learning a language that, as far as I can tell, provides no new functionality, and has a significantly steep learning curve.

If I was going to do anything, I'd figure a way to develop a full graphic-oriented Interactive Fiction system, with proper support for GUI controls and features, so that things like radio buttons, check boxes, drop-down menus, drawing are available, plus sound, images and video (which are already supported) along with an IDE which provides color syntax highlighting. Perhaps something that writes Unity code so people could use it to build games with less work.

If there is something TADS does not appear to do, that is reduce the effort, trouble, and plain work needed to write a game, specifically interactive fiction.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Just curious, I am glad that Hugo is working for you. Thanks!

[bryanb]

Robb, did you never write a game or start writing a game in TADS as a solo project? I had this vague idea that you had, but I don't know why I think that or what game it could have been. It seems like it would have been before you switched to Hugo, but maybe I'm just thinking of No Time to Squeal, another game you worked with Mike Sousa on.

Edge of Chaos news alert: someone on the intfiction.org forums got a little stuck on the NES puzzle. Dude got some help and then said it was a peculiar game. You can't please 'em all, there's always someone calling you down.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I have not! I think that TADS seems perfectly logical and the way the language is designed made a lot of sense to me after I had gotten employable at Java. I just did writing for NTTS, too.

[pinback]

TADS is more of a domain-specific language.

[Flack]

In fact, it's the gold standard of domain-specific languages.

[Sousa]

Robb, it was amazing working with you all these years on this story. You have this incredible ability to make words come alive, characters jump off the screen and give mundane objects incredible descriptions. Thanks for everything.

In reply to Tdarcos and his TADS comments.

Though I don't really think it's the spawn of Satan, I would agree with a lot of what you said. But there's a reason I'm a big TADS fan.

Fun never before revealed fact: I purchased TADS from High Energy Software circa ~1990 and wrote a couple of games that have unfortunately been lost to time. It was when TADS 2 was just released. I believe I still have the original spiral notebook documentation that came with my purchase somewhere in my attic.

So to me, it's the only thing I've ever known. It took a while to get into TADS 3 because it was so different and much more complicated, but I stuck with it due to nostalgia.

Robb didn't make the decision to go with TADS and I think if I knew Hugo, that would be the system we would probably use. :)

-- Mike

[Sousa]

Edge of Chaos news alert: someone on the intfiction.org forums got a little stuck on the NES puzzle. Dude got some help and then said it was a peculiar game. You can't please 'em all, there's always someone calling you down.

I have no problem having it called peculiar, but I do expect at least something to back up the comment -- especially when they rated it pretty low on IFDB. They also rated Photopia very low (same rating as Chaos) so they must have some peculiar scale that they judge games on.

But like you said, can't please them all...

[DeathByTroggles]

I have not! I think that TADS seems perfectly logical and the way the language is designed made a lot of sense to me after I had gotten employable at Java. I just did writing for NTTS, too.

Hey, I have it on good authority that you programmed Saied in TADS.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

The artist always sends me her initial sketches and I try to save them because they are just as awesome as when she colors them in, so with any luck, here is the initial sketch of our boy Jay Schilling.

https://i.imgur.com/CjEmY94h.png

Annnnnnnnd phpBB is not letting me inline it. Thanks, Retro.

[RealNC]

Annnnnnnnd phpBB is not letting me inline it. Thanks, Retro.

I think that's because imgur is down right now. I get 404 pages on all my images.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Hey! This is a review that is in Finnish that I was able to read thanks to Google Translate.

https://www.kirjallinensuunnistaja.net/ ... en-asialla