Jolt Country

I'm getting the urge to try to attempt to write my next game in the third person, with the player definitely not being the playcr character but have more of a 'What would you have Algernon do now?' sort of feel to it.

What games did this? Level 9's Lancelot, I believe, but I don't know what else. Has this ever worked for anyone? How hard will it be to change the library messages and to execute this?

What are your thoughts?

Scapeghost was third person and in the past tense, I think. Let me know if you need/want a copy of that game.

Hugo has a switch in the library where you can change it from second person to first or third. FoD and the new game are in first person, so I have 80% of the work done by changing that value. There are a few places where the library uses "you," though, and I change those instances to give a response which clearly does not come from the game's protagonist.

So, overall I would say that it's not particularly tricky. There are a couple of other comp games that I think were in 3rd person, but their names escape me... Paul O'Brian's reviews probably note it, though.

Would that make you the player's role a concience or some mind controller or just a suggesting force?

I'd hope that the player would feel that he's working with the narrator in telling the story. How well this'll work is anyone's guess.

I think it's absolutely crazy that Kent has coded library support for this kind of stuff already. Another reason why Hugo is the stuff of legend.

Roody_Yogurt wrote:What games did this? ... Has this ever worked for anyone?

Winchester's Nightmare, I believe. And no, it didn't work.
Maybe LASH counts, in which case it did work.

Also, http://www.wurb.com/if/search - there's a "3rd person" search option.

Yeah, it's interesting to note how often third-person actually diminishes the player's empathy for the character. Both in Winchester's Nightmare and Lancelot, I could only play the beginning of the games because it was such an effort to care.

More successful games on the list would be Adam Cadre's Pac-Man and The Beetmonger's Journal. In the case of Downtown Tokyo, Present Day, the device fit with the plot and setting.

I'm not sure what's best for me, so I guess I ought to just write more and see how it feels when played.

Still, in FoD you couldn't do ass backwards out of character things.