Bletchley Park, 1942. A component from the Bombe machine, used to decode intercepted German messages, has gone missing. One of the cryptographers is waiting to be interviewed, under direst suspicion. Is he stupid enough to have attempted treason? Or is he clever enough to get away?
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Adventure Book, bletchley park, cyoa, ebooks, game design, graham nelson, inkle, interactive fiction, kindle, kindliser, multiple choice games, short stories, technology
Well, it’s been a long time since I posted on this blog – inkle has been keeping me pretty busy. But there’s a couple of releases to report, both on active content for Kindle (so US-only!), and both appearing on the same day, as luck would have it.
Posted in games, kindle, publications, writing
Tagged black belt games, interactive fiction, kindle, shadow in the cathedral, textfyre
The last light has gone. The stars are coming out in the black sea above. Many are hidden by ice-fingered winds. My father is still not returned and the fire is almost gone.
But this is how life is: always an edge. A thin sheet on a diving-deep pool.
I hope he will return soon. I cannot summon him.
Posted in games, Inform 7, UI, writing
Tagged colder light, game, inform 7, interactive fiction, quixe, text adventure
Merry Christmas, and if you’ve just unwrapped a new game, here’s a sobering puppy-for-life type statistic which is urban legend in the games industry, and might even be true: the majority of console games are played once.
So what? you might think. Most books are read once, most DVDs are watched once, most Christmas cakes eaten once… But I don’t mean finished, I mean played. The majority of console games are opened, installed, booted up, played for a single session (possibly of several hours), then never booted up again. Even though games can afford tens of hours of entertainment; and even though games cost four times as much as books or films.
And that isn’t true of books, or DVDs, or Christmas cake. So why the difference? Is it just because people can get stuck on games?
I don’t think so. I think it’s deeper than that. In fact, I’m not sure there is a difference between the consumption pattern for a DVD, book or a game. I think instead that the difference is in what we mean by the word finished. (And, what is inkle going to do about it?)
Posted in games, IF Theory, inkle, storytelling, writing
Tagged assassin's creed, frankenstein, game design, games, inkle, interactive fiction, replay, replayability
Time to announce my new project:
Building on my IF and Undum work, inkle will make interactive stories for mobile devices, and do so in a beautiful way.
Our first project, Frankenstein, is being published in association with award-winning London-based publiser Profile Books; and is being written by Dave Morris (author of Mirabilis) and Jamie Thomson, super-talented writers with a long history of gamebook work.
Erik Temple, creator of many extensions for Inform 7 that do animations, sprites, and lots of shiny things, has a new demo up on his blog, this time demonstrating a text-game playable without typing.
It’s a really good piece of work and shows real potential for making text games accessible: teaching the syntax while letting people get on with the game. But it also highlights one of the text games major problems – there’s way too much choice.
Posted in coding, extensions, games, IF Theory, Inform 7, parser fiction, selection based fiction, UI
Tagged choice-based fiction, context, Glimmr, inform 7, interactive fiction, text adventures, UI
Over on the int.fiction forum, Victor Gijsbers has started a thread asking for people’s list of the best IF games ever. It’s quite a fun trip down memory lane and makes me long for the days when text-games were an unexplored terrain rich with possibilities…
For those who are interested, here’s my list, also posted on the forum.
Posted in games, old games, parser fiction
Tagged IF community, IF games, Infocom, interactive fiction
I was discussing challenge in games with a friend at work today – specifically, what to do with the player that can’t overcome it.
Interactive Fiction has long battled with the problem of stuckness, and these days it’s rare to see a polished game released without hints, walkthroughs, or such an incredibly linear storyline that pretty much anything you do will work. But could we be doing better? Consoles games increasingly are trying to resolve this problem: is there anything to learn from the experiments being done in the console world?
Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of work with choice-based stories. I haven’t played a new IF work in a long time – but this weekend I picked up Emily Short’s brief-but-beautiful Speed IF Indigo and it got me thinking about what I mean when I say “interactive fiction”.
(This isn’t really an article about that game, incidentally, which you should try out; rather, Indigo was such a very clean example of what text IF does well that it got me thinking.)
