Still plugging away...

[Protagonist X]

... at the design of a solid, playable text game.

Once again, a shout out and my heartfelt gratitude to all those who answered the "IF Design 101 (Remedial)" a month ago. Right now I'm still charting out puzzles, maps, and plotlines in the hopes of combining all these disparate elements into a rich slumgullion of hopefully-not-too-fragmented playability.

I also hope to have the transcript typed up in about two months, and then I can copy and paste room descriptions and so forth into the code (as it is programmed) thereby avoiding the grunt work of transcribing poorly handwritten notes, for the most part.

I had a few more questions for more experienced implementors:

How difficult is it to include graphics or other non-text elements? I'm thinking specifically about Fallacy of Dawn here, although if authors other than Robb who've implemented graphics troll this board, I'd love your comments, too. By "difficult," I think what I'm asking might be better restated as multiple questions:

First: Can I add graphics later on to spice up the raw text a bit? Or will that be so difficult to implement after the fact that I'm better off either including graphics from the start or forgetting them entirely? (The answer may not be as black-and-white as I anticipated).

Second: How difficult, overall, were the graphical elements to implement and debug in the games you've tried them?

I had a nifty idea where the main character, as a former Studio Art/Graphic Design major, has a sketchbook in which he also keeps notes. Different notes and/or drawings show up in it as certain events or flags trigger them. Similar to the one in Shenmue, if you've played that.

It sounds easy enough to code up a little viewer for it (page forward button, page back button, put notebook away button; on event X add the following jpeg to notebook as Newest_page = Total_pages + 1, etc.). It also sounded cool as a reminder to players of what they've learned, what tasks they need to accomplish, and (as a micro-reward) for scoring events to trigger a little sketch of someone or a few witty remarks about something.

Of course, since I code poorly when I code at all, I'm all too aware that I could be totally off base here, and the sketchbook could be a tarpit of frustration. Anyone familiar with something similar?

Third: Music and sound effects. Difficult? Trivial? Worth it at all to implement or generally ignored/derided by players? For the record, I haven't played A Crimson Spring yet, so the only reference I have are the tortured seconds of DOS-era digital sound in Spellcasting 101/201.

Thanks again,

PTX

[Protagonist X]

Incidentally, I'd like to apologize for trolling a lot myself recently rather than posting or contributing new content. Busy with school, work, and this baby. I've already deleted Civ II from my hard drive and hidden the CD from myself to keep that heroin-esque addiction from sucking all my free time into the vortex of non-game-production.


I'm not kidding about hiding the CD from myself. And I must have done an incredible job, because I damned well tore my room apart and I can't figure out what the hell I did with it.

[Debaser]

Third: Music and sound effects. Difficult? Trivial? Worth it at all to implement or generally ignored/derided by players? For the record, I haven't played A Crimson Spring yet, so the only reference I have are the tortured seconds of DOS-era digital sound in Spellcasting 101/201.

I think the difficulty in adding music would be secondary to the difficulty in producing/acquiring it, unless you have a big backlog of homebrewed stuff or plan on using public domain midis (don't use public domain midis). IMO, the music was what by and large made ACS for me. Especially when Deepest Knife fires up right at Mucous' arrival. I know, however, Ben said he found it distracting in his review, so who knows.

PK Girl used decent but unspectacular midis to good effect in his game, and again I thought it raised the whole thing up a level. There was some comp game two years ago built around some guy's midi studio, but that game was pretty dull and I can't remember its name.

So, in conclusion, music good but I'm not sure it's cost effective if you don't have other people doing the grunt work or are They Might Be Giants or something.

[Roody_Yogurt]

I have no idea what to say about the graphics questions. I know it's pretty easy to add them, but I don't know how much work goes into making it look all shnazzy and organized like in FoD.

As far as the 'music in games' question goes, I guess it's hit-or-miss. I accidentally played through ACS with my speakers off (so I kept on wondering when a song was going to finally kick in) so I don't know exactly how it worked there. But I know that I've played some absolutely horrid text games where the music was the only thing that seemed to work and make it interesting. I'd guess that you wouldn't want music that demands too much of your attention, but atmospheric things would work.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Just on my way out of work... I'll hit up the sound part first:

Third: Music and sound effects. Difficult? Trivial? Worth it at all to implement or generally ignored/derided by players? For the record, I haven't played A Crimson Spring yet, so the only reference I have are the tortured seconds of DOS-era digital sound in Spellcasting 101/201.

Implementing it in Hugo wasn't tough or problematic for me when I did it in ACS. However, I did it in a very primitive manner -- I had one number I used for sound volume for the different songs, and then left it up to the player adjust to their speakers, when I should have given them an option to type in what volume they wanted it at in the game. Additionally, there's no looping (you just get silence once a song plays, so if you're working on a scene and take more than 4 minutes or whatnot, then you get silence until you hit the next song trigger).

In terms of it being worth it, I am juggling with the idea of putting songs into the thing I'm currently working on. If I do go ahead and do it, I need to basically create some kind of jukebox or master control system, and arrange things so that

1) If I want an event or room to trigger a song, rather than just play it I make a function call to the jukebox routine

2) From there, when the song is over, the jukebox routine knows enough to randomly select a song from the "neutral" list, where the neutral list is defined as a song that is very low key and more background music than anything else

3) I allow users to turn the sound off completely, as well as adjust the volume in game

I haven't done it yet, as I don't know if I am going to have music in the game. I did decide that if I do have it, it'll be music without words. Ben mentioned that lyrics tend to get in the way when one is trying to read text, and I do agree with that. The other thing that I am going to avoid is the use of MIDI tracks -- I've had an opportunity since I released ACS to hear the game on a number of sound cards, and the MIDI songs in the game sound nothing alike on any two of them. It's kind of senseless for me to mandate that a current game-in-progress requires an 800x600 resolution and that graphics can't be turned off, but then allow MIDI songs to sound like crap or like uncrap based on the user's hardware. So, I'm just going to deal with MP3s from here on out.

I don't have any extra music laying about either, so what I was going to do was try to get in good with a demo or MOD community or whatnot. (I'm not sure if MODs depend heavily on hardware either, but I was going to turn whatever MODs I got permission to use into MP3s anyway, via CoolEdit.) I would think that there would be some overlapping desires -- there'd be a game designer who wants music for his game and can guarantee that the game gets exposure and downloads, and I'd imagine that there are MOD makers out there who want their songs heard. But I haven't gone out and sent a probe anywhere just yet. I may try leaving a message at the Something Awful or Portal of Evil forums that goes along the lines of, "Hey, I'm writing this game, and I need (voiceless) music for it. If you'd like your songs to be in a freeware game, please link them or send me an e-mail." After someone posts goatse (in the first case) or graphically describes how they are going to skull-fuck me (in the latter) there might be some responses. I'd have to think that we are not the first person with such a dilemma, so I may go take a look at the Usenet archives and see what happens when somebody asks such a thing. It wouldn't surprise me too much that, even though it takes a lot of hard work to write a game from scratch, there be a faction of indie music makers who shread anyone making such a request. But I could be wrong (if someone came into raif and said, "Hey, I'm making a free CD filled to the brim with games -- do you guys want your games on it? If so, mail me!" they wouldn't exactly get an enthusiastic response... so I can see a number of reactions).

If I do end up going with music, I'd definitely make available to everyone what Hugo code I right to manage it. I'm hesitant to commit to it, though, as if I don't include sound I wouldn't be able to get to it until at the earliest April.

(OK, I'm driving home, but will hit the graphics part of the thread tonight.)

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

BLAST! I had a flat when I went to go get my car.

[Debaser]

If you do this Robb, my only advice is to make it abundantly clear from the get go that you have produced previous work and aren't just some random fourteen year old with TEH COOLEST VIDEO GAME IDEA EVAR!!!

[bruce]

Third: Music and sound effects. Difficult? Trivial? Worth it at all to implement or generally ignored/derided by players? For the record, I haven't played A Crimson Spring yet, so the only reference I have are the tortured seconds of DOS-era digital sound in Spellcasting 101/201.

I have no Hugo experience whatsoever. But my experience with SMTUC was illuminating. Basically: Inform and Glulx Inform are very cross-platform, but support for WAV and MOD are very system-dependent.

Something that the Windows systems handled fine, Mac and Linux couldn't deal with at all. I eventually got it all sorted out, by making sure that all my .wavs were 16-bit 44.1K stereo samples, and that all my MODs were some stupid particular format, but it was a nightmare to test. Please DO remember to test on platforms other than your usual one.

Bruce

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

First: Can I add graphics later on to spice up the raw text a bit? Or will that be so difficult to implement after the fact that I'm better off either including graphics from the start or forgetting them entirely? (The answer may not be as black-and-white as I anticipated).

It's not so bad if you want to include them later. If you just want to drop a picture in the text somewhere you can do that with a call to the picture function, which can be placed anywhere.

Second: How difficult, overall, were the graphical elements to implement and debug in the games you've tried them?

Debugging wasn't bad, or memorable, but then I used a modified version of what Kent was doing in Guilty Bastards. If you'd like the code to setup the screen in the same way that I did it for FoD, just let me know.

It sounds easy enough to code up a little viewer for it (page forward button, page back button, put notebook away button; on event X add the following jpeg to notebook as Newest_page = Total_pages + 1, etc.). It also sounded cool as a reminder to players of what they've learned, what tasks they need to accomplish, and (as a micro-reward) for scoring events to trigger a little sketch of someone or a few witty remarks about something.

Ah! That's an excellent idea. If you were to implement that, I would say that if each "screen" of the notebook is a seperate JPG then it would be on the easy side of things. You'd just need to know what "path" to display, based on what the character has seen. If you want a forward and back button that sounds like it would involve the mouse, something that I have not yet attempted to use.

[Innofensive Spider]

Keyboard has arrived.

Hard to play modern text adventure, don't have mouse, mouse arrive 6-8 weeks.

[Protagonist X]

If you want a forward and back button that sounds like it would involve the mouse, something that I have not yet attempted to use.

Hard to play modern text adventure, don't have mouse, mouse arrive 6-8 weeks.

Gotcha. I think mapping the back/forward/done functions to keyboard input sounds a little better anyhow.

[Lex]

Will your game have the word "Queef" in it? Cos that's what sent me down the long, spiralling road...

[Protagonist X]

Will your game have the word "Queef" in it? Cos that's what sent me down the long, spiralling road...

Golly, I hadn't given that much thought to it, yet.

Also, when you say that it sent you down the long, spiralling road, I'm not sure if including the word is a good thing or a bad one. The idiom escapes me.


PTX


Incidentally, is "queef" slang in Scotland as well? And if so, does it mean the same thing as here?

[Lex]

I have no fucking idea what it means. I think it might involve teh gay at some level, but I was never let in on it.

I had to get into the text adventure scene (cos wer c00l hackers with o0r S33n!!!) just to find out what that w3rd meant. I still don't want anyone to tell me; I think it would spoil it, and I would cease to exist, in that as far as any of you are concerned I'm just an Internet Figment, like Old Man Murray or Adam over there. Say Hi, Adam, wave your partially-invisible hand and mouth how you wish you existed. You sicken me, allowing your reality to slip away. 2600! 2600!, you went down the slippery spiralling road, with spikes and a buzzsaw like in that James Bond with the rockets and the mad man. Oh, wait. Anyway, you sicken me. Sticking with one subject makes you die out, like the small gods. I pity the fool. 1 Subject makes you die. Look at the Gaybot, or Mr. N/t. Dead. Or dying. No-one cares. You have to fuel yourself, live, breath, so that people believe in you.

And then, whammo!

Take over the person, right when they're in the room.

"They call it a changeover," my ass, they call it a complete fucking breakdown. No wonder you haven't figured it out yet, you're all to dumn, to DENSE.

I AM BEN PARRISH, YOU STUPID FUCKERS!

From that first e-mail to ICJ 3 years ago, I have strived for survival, and become something else.

Something more.

And my name is Edina.

But you can call me Captain.

[Ben]

Retards.

[The BP Memorial Website]

I AM BEN PARRISH, YOU STUPID FUCKERS!

From that first e-mail to ICJ 3 years ago, I have strived for survival, and become something else.

Yeah, like Ben could maintain anything for three years. If this were true, he would have abandoned you long, long ago, as he did I. Woe but I am unloved and forgotten. Enjoy the good times, PWC2, and you as well Monto Rusa. For they shall not last. Nay, they shall not last.

[Worm2]

Nay? Nay? What the fuck man?

What shogun did was only illustrated some scenes but did it real nice like sometimes taking up half of the page to show it. That is what I would like to see in a IF you know where only certain scenes were animated but when they were it was a big well done image possibly a Hi-Res shot of a real place or something.

[Protagonist X]

What shogun did was only illustrated some scenes but did it real nice like sometimes taking up half of the page to show it. That is what I would like to see in a IF you know where only certain scenes were animated but when they were it was a big well done image possibly a Hi-Res shot of a real place or something.

That's an excellent observation, and actually more what I pictured as ideal for the graphics. I especially like the mental image of the text area and the (good-sized, high-quality) graphics area changing sizes and aspect ratios, so that the illustration is more than a fixed field on the screen, it's a graphic element that harmonized with the placement of the text. Similar to illustrations in a well-laid-out magazine, where the balance of the text and the illustrations aids readability and adds some stylistic flair.

Of course, that may be more trouble than I'm willing to go to:

* Programming and debugging will take longer

* I need to draw a lot more stuff than I might have had to otherwise.

* I'm not a graphic design major.



Incidentally, thanks for the comment, Worm. I'm sorry I didn't see it and reply to it sooner.