>TILT AT WINDMILLS

Blue Lacuna Fan Art

2012-02-02T09:39:00.000-08:00

A while ago I received a beautiful piece of art illustrating a moment from Blue Lacuna. I was excited not just because it's a beautiful image, but because it was the work of Evan Dahm, one of my favorite webcomic artists. I had previously read Evan's beautiful Rice Boy, a heartbreaking, mythic fable set in a fantastical world. (Anyone who enjoyed Blue Lacuna would certainly like Rice Boy, too.)

I think what pleases me most about the image is its remarkable attention to the particulars of the story. Beyond just the topography of the island, tiny details are just right-- like the outfit the central character is wearing, or the tunnel mouth by the roots of the windsigh tree. You can click on the image for a larger version.

So thanks, Evan, for the gift; and if you haven't read Rice Boy (or Evan's current episodic webcomic, Vattu) it's well worth checking out.

maybe make some change

2011-10-07T08:30:00.000-07:00

The second of the three MFA projects I'm publicly releasing (the first was Perfect) is now online. Called maybe make some change, it's an experimental work playing near the edges of traditional IF. It's available in both a web version needing a cutting edge browser, and a more archive-able Glulx adaptation. The piece was previously exhibited at this spring's IF Demo Fair in Boston under the name what if im the bad guy (which later became the title for a different but related project).

I've written more about this project in a post at the blog for the Expressive Intelligence Studio, where I'm now working on a computer science PhD.

FIRST WORLD Problem

2011-10-01T12:12:00.000-07:00

My good friend and frequent high school collaborator Jeremy Rishe has recently launched First World Problem, a non-linear episodic narrative about two New Yorkers in a relationship slowly disintegrating in the connected yet shallow trivialities of 21st century life. (It's a comedy.) The show consists of a series of episodes, each a Youtube playlist containing a group of short video clips linked thematically or temporally. Both episodes and the individual clips can be watched in any order, to slowly build up a portrait of two characters that's at times hilarious and at times maybe disquietingly close to home. More clips and episodes are being released each week.

I wasn't involved with the production, but it looks to be shaping up into a delightful mash-up of mockumentary, satire, and character study, something like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf as directed by Christopher Guest. Check out the First World Problem trailer for a taste of the comedy style, or visit the First World Problem Youtube channel to start watching the episodes released so far.

Teaching IF at UCSC

2011-09-21T23:47:00.000-07:00

This summer I taught my own class for the first time, through the department I recently graduated from (Digital Arts & New Media at UC Santa Cruz). The class, somewhat inelegantly titled "Games as Literature: The Intersection of Writing and Play," aimed to introduce students to contemporary text-based interactive work, giving them ample opportunities to both play and author projects across a broad spectrum of electronic literature. I'd like to do a bit of a post-mortem to compare notes with other teachers and pass on my experiences.

The course was a five week, five credit summer course, which meant an intense schedule: nine hours of class time per week. I ended up with eighteen students, all undergraduates from mostly computer science and gaming backgrounds, but with a few literature and theater people mixed in. I wanted a focus on contemporary work, to emphasize that this is a living medium with active authors, so I limited the works we'd look at to those written in the 21st century (i.e. the last ten years or so). I wanted to move students through the various subgenres of electronic literature, roughly speaking adding a little complexity each week.

So: week one was hypertext fiction (taking traditional literature and adding the link), week two was IF (adding simulation of spaces and things), week three was (the more nebulously defined) computational and simulationist fiction (adding procedurality and systems), and week four was (the even more nebulously defined) spatial and collaborative fiction (adding multiple players or embodiment of fictions in real-world spaces). Finding good material for the third and fourth weeks was more of a challenge, since they're outside established genres and are much more sparsely populated. The final week would be spent working on and displaying final projects: during each of the first three weekends of the course, students were assigned a "weekend experiment" to create a short work using a tool we'd looked at in class for creating related projects.

My initial thought was to teach three different authoring systems in these first three weeks, then let students pick whichever they were most comfortable with to create their final project. I chose Twine for the hypertext week for its free, friendly, cross-platform interface that exports self-contained HTML. Somewhat predictably, I picked Inform 7 for week two. I had a hard time finding a system that meshed with my concept for week three, however. I considered Fox Harrell's GRIOT system, but it's not publicly released and its LISP syntax would probably terrify novice coders; Chris Crawford's StoryTron was another possibility, although the interface can be fairly overwhelming. Eventually I settled on the somewhat imperfect compromise of splitting the Inform 7 portion over two weeks, focusing on rooms and objects in week two and rules and routines in week three. This in turn led me to reluctantly assign my own book; I sort of hated to do this, because I think it puts a severe cramp in how honest students are going to be about whether the book is helping them learn anything or not, but there it was.

We touched on creative writing skills and techniques, but didn't have time to get into interactive story theory (despite there being several great resources out there these days). The "readings" assigned were all interactive pieces for students to read and discuss in class. While it would have been great to include the theory, I think the focus on encountering the works themselves (often missing in classes that teach older, more canonized e-lit often incompatible with modern computers) was more important.

Week one went well: establishing a routine for the rest of the course, we looked at a representative work in each mode together in class on Monday, discussed additional works read as homework on Wednesday, and took Friday to learn how to use a system to create such work. I tried to assign challenging work where I could with interesting themes, to emphasize that what we were looking at was literature, not (or not just) game. Starting with hypertext was a great way to emphasize this aspect of the course, and we had some great discussions about what interactivity adds to written fiction. The students did well with Twine, although we ran into a few technical problems, including some crashes and out-of-sync documentation. (I gather it's no longer in active development, which is a shame since it's an otherwise lovely and easy to learn tool.)

The two weeks we spent on interactive fiction were more challenging. I picked Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home (Andrew Plotkin, 2010) and The Warbler's Nest (Jason McIntosh, 2010) to show in class, two works that together are an excellent introduction to the medium's potential. Warbler in particular is wonderful at guiding players to the proper syntax and interaction points, and going around the table round-robin style suggesting commands, students could navigate to an ending without me offering any help (including a rousing discussion before submitting the final commands). We ran out of time before reaching the end of Heliopause but were doing well, and students got into the writing and fantastical setting.

For Wednesday, the class was assigned to read Earl Grey (Rob Dubbin and Adam Parrish, 2009) and Everybody Dies (Jim Munroe, 2008). Grey was maybe an odd choice: it has a clever central mechanic (adding and removing letters from words to change objects in the game world) but is railroaded with single-solution puzzles that are often far from obvious. Students were frustrated and complained, but (with no offense meant to Rob and Adam) the experience provoked a great discussion about what not to do in IF design. I think looking at some work with flaws was useful throughout the course, although in an academic setting there's always a risk that this will backfire. This happened more frequently during the close reading presentations students had to give on related work: I included some questionable projects on the list of works that could be chosen, including 1-2-3... (Chris Mudd, 2000; a much reviled piece which I've previously been an apologist for) and LASH (Paul O'Brian, 2000). Students didn't necessarily have the background or vocabulary to know how to engage with some of these pieces successfully, and I think if I taught the course again I'd replace some of these with more accessible works.

Also less successful was trying to teach students, some with no prior programming experience, a significant portion of Inform 7 in two weeks. In hindsight, I tried to move way too fast with this material: I was expecting students to be using rulebooks and extensions while they were still struggling with basic syntax. In week three I introduced them to two extensions, one for conversation (Conversation Framework for Sand-dancer, for synchronicity with the textbook) and one for combat (Inform ATTACK by Victor Gijsbers). The hope was that this would let them explore integrating systems and simulation into their projects without having to do a lot of heavy lifting from scratch. While partially successful (students were able to copy and paste from my examples to get the extensions to basically work), I think it might have been better to spend the time clearing up more fundamental questions about rulebooks, the subtleties of naming, synonyms, and the printed name property, and how named phrases (I7's version of functions) work and interact with other parts of the system.

I also have to admit that students had more difficulty picking up I7 than I'd have hoped. The squishiness of the syntax and the difficulty of determining where the boundaries are between the language proper and the Standard Rules (not to mention any extensions) led to a lot of frustration and confusion, especially among less-confident programmers. Of course, teaching any programming language is difficult, especially under such severely constrained conditions, and I'm hard pressed to think of better alternatives. One option might be to try using an IF design tool that offers a GUI (such as Quest or ADRIFT, although both sadly lack OS X versions, something of a dealbreaker when at least half of incoming students have Macs). This would let students working on basic projects about spaces and things focus more on content and less on syntax. The disadvantage of this would be robbing students of a base to build on: we certainly couldn't learn enough I7 in a single week to get to any of the advanced features that would let you do more than you could do with a simpler tool. When I floated this idea on the last day of the course, the students overwhelmingly agreed that despite the frustration, they preferred sticking with the same language for multiple weeks and building up a skill set with it over starting from scratch each week. I'm not sure there's an easy solution here.

The fourth week of the course was rather scattered (the category being a sort of "everything else" grab bag) but Echo Bazaar proved immensely popular, and we got to field trip outside to look at some augmented reality. During the final week I mostly gave class over to project work time, with an attempt to stress the importance of factoring end users into the design of any interactive work: students could beta test each others' projects in class.

Some impressive final projects came out of the course. Will Lee's Apothology switches between hypertext and IF to tell a story about the futility of choice, with a Kafka-like protagonist arrested for a crime he didn't commit and sentenced to death. The story's conclusion suggests that God is the only one with true choice, followed by a readout of the project's source code. Robert Segura's Peakstar's Legacy was a prequel to Morrowind that involved both combat and conversation systems, introducing a unique mechanism for conversation that bolded words you could ask about and italicized words you could tell about. Victor Nguyen also used Inform ATTACK to create a Left For Dead homage involving half a dozen characters, both allies and enemies, trading blows with various weapons in a gory, fast-paced free-for-all. All the final projects were damn impressive for students who had been introduced to IF and Inform 7 less than a month previously: I was very proud of all the work produced and how much effort the students put into the course.

Overall I think the course was a success, although I certainly learned a lot about teaching in general and teaching e-lit in particular. While exhausting, it was also incredibly rewarding. Maybe the best feeling came on the last day when several students asked me when I'd be teaching another course: I don't know the answer to that yet, but it was validating to hear. Even more validating was the genuine excitement about computational literature as an exciting, living movement: for students who weren't even born when Infocom went out of business, that was an encouraging thing.

Perfect

2011-08-14T18:26:00.000-07:00

One of my goals for the summer is to get the projects from my MFA show this past May-- the ones that don't require custom hardware, at least-- onto the web. I've been working on this, but it's a lot of not-fun (cross-browser compatibility, properly crediting sources, debugging Javascript frameworks) at the moment, so the going is slow. I've also been distracted by finishing up this game and teaching this class (more about both later) so the amount of summer free time has been less than expected.

Anyway, here's the simplest of the three pieces, "Perfect." This is the least IF-like and least developed of the projects: it's more of a hopefully interesting experiment in how narratives can be made to feel more sculptural than an actual, you know, story or anything. Should work in all modern browsers with a decent screen size; let me know if you have problems.

(Though I wasn't aware of this piece while I was designing "Perfect" or writing my thesis, I just recently came across the similar experiment "Morningside Vector Space" in Oulipoems, a part of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume One. It's always somewhere between creepy, annoying, and validating to discover someone else has already had your great idea, although I think both the 2004 piece and my own have unique takes on the core idea.)

what if im the bad guy? and other stories

2011-04-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

My MFA exhibition, Permutations, is now running at UC Santa Cruz. I'm presenting work alongside nine other graduate students as the culmination of our Digital Arts and New Media masters degrees.

My project is titled what if im the bad guy? and other stories, and is a collection of four experimental pieces "exploring how narrative can be made tactile, tangible, and sculptural" (to quote the show's write-up copy). The piece I showed at this year's IF Demo Fair is part of this collection (although confusingly, that piece is now called maybe make some change; a different piece related to the same subject material now has the title what if im the bad guy).

None of the pieces are straight IF, although two of them use Inform 7 and Glulx under the hood. One of the pieces uses augmented reality and iPads to explore a story positioned in physical space. Another involves navigating through time to explore the history of a fictional house. It may be the first IF displayed in a gallery setting that uses all the buttons on a game controller as input. I'll probably be posting a little more about each piece in the weeks ahead.

All of the pieces except the augmented reality one will eventually have some sort of online release, although this will require some time and thought which I don't have just at the moment... look for them later in the summer, and in the meantime, if you're in or near the Bay Area, you're welcome to visit the show. It's free and open to the public this weekend, plus May 5-8 from 10-4; Friday the 6th it stays open later for an evening reception.

Understanding More

2011-03-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

The world of interactive fiction can sometimes seem like a secret club: you can only get in if you know the handshake, and you can't learn the handshake without getting in. The snake oil sold by the parser affects the initiates but not the masses: if you type the wrong things, it rarely tells you what to try instead.

There are two mistaken assumptions in the perpetuation of this model, both dating from the 1980s: people will read the manual, and natural language processing is an unsolved problem. The first has never been particularly true and is less so all the time, while the second gets less accurate with each passing year. We may not be able to recognize all natural language yet, but I feel we can at least try a little harder.

Player Experience Upgrade is a single-download compilation of ten Inform 7 extensions by several leading authors that will improve the success rate of commands entered into an IF that includes it. Some preliminary testing suggests about 20-40% more commands are recognized than with vanilla I7, reducing player frustration and increasing retention time. Little to no additional work is required by authors other than downloading and including the extension. (At least, that's the intention; if you find otherwise, please let me know so I can continue improving.)

The packaged extensions include the group I developed while trying to make Blue Lacuna more accessible to non-IF initiates (a wildly successful experiment, by most accounts) as well as others adding many basic improvements to the standard distribution, from commonly tried but unrecognized verb synonyms to oft-fixed and re-fixed rough spots in the standard rules. Many of the most common and easily correctable input patterns are silently recognized: things like ending a command with a question mark, simple spelling errors, typing a noun without a verb, or entering a blank line (the single most common response to an IF command prompt, now mapped to >LOOK). The two most common unrecognized command forms, asking who/what/where questions or trying to >GO TO an item within the room, produce tutorial-style messages explaining what better options to try might be. (>GO TO adjacent locations is also understood, providing an alternative for the (many) people unused to compass directions.) Other stuff we've all seen new players try, like >SIT DOWN or >GET OUT OF THE CAR, now works, and when you can't see any such thing it's much more likely to be true.

One of the extensions within Player Experience Upgrade is new, and worth mentioning on its own: Neutral Library Messages. Every Inform-based game comes pre-loaded with several hundred texts which explain the results of actions or refuse to carry out commands that aren't understood or contradict the world model. The default set of these messages (which also date back to the '80s and have accumulated, barnacle-like, on IF design systems ever since) are riddled with many misleading, distracting, or unhelpful responses that experienced players see past but newcomers stumble over.

Neutral Library Message replaces many of the standard messages with more neutral or helpful variations, as well as styling out-of-world parser messages differently than in-game narration. Jokes, puns, and especially humor at the expense of the player have been excised, as well as messages implying too much about the player character or story world: "Violence isn't the answer to this one" may not be true, and not all PCs are "adventurers" or poor singers. Many parser-related messages go to greater lengths to try to explain what was wrong or confusing, and the style change makes clear to players what text is from the author and what text is from the underlying system. An extension like this will never make default messages interesting, of course, but it hopefully builds a safer baseline less likely to intrude on the author's voice or the player's experience.

To add Player Experience Upgrade to your Inform 7 project, download it then click File > Install Extension from the Inform 7 application. You can now type Include Player Experience Upgrade by Aaron Reed. in your source text, and you're done. Some tips on customization can be found in the documentation (also accessible from the "Installed Extensions" link in Inform's Documentation panel), or you can browse the individual extensions for even more details:

Approaches by Emily Short
Default Messages by Ron Newcomb
Extended Grammar by Aaron Reed
Neutral Library Messages by Aaron Reed
Numbered Disambiguation Choices by Aaron Reed
Poor Man's Mistype by Aaron Reed
Punctuation Removal by Emily Short (packaged with I7)
Remembering by Aaron Reed
Small Kindnesses by Aaron Reed
Smarter Parser by Aaron Reed

Blue Lacuna Transcripts Analyzed

2011-01-06T02:21:00.000-08:00

In 2005, I analyzed the transcripts of players at a public exhibition of my IF Whom the Telling Changed. This analysis helped shape my thoughts on IF interfaces as I was starting work on my next major project, Blue Lacuna, designed to reduce the number of commands rejected by the parser. This fall, Lacuna was exhibited in a similar venue: I decided to record a new set of transcripts and see if I'd managed to improve things.

Takeaways for the impatient: Rejected commands do seem to be a significant factor in a player's decision to stop playing. Lacuna is twice as good at recognizing player commands than Telling. Players spent about 50% longer with Lacuna than with Telling. And the number of total player inputs rejected as typos or for trivial syntax reasons has been greatly reduced, thanks to keywords and extensions.

Find the full report, in all its pie-chart-filled glory, here.

Why Text Adventures on Mobile Devices are Important

2010-10-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

At IndieCade, the number one comment I got on Blue Lacuna, by far, was:

"This would be really cool if you could play it on an [iPad/iPhone/Kindle]. I could see myself playing something like this that way."

How delightful that there is a KickStarter project going on right now to realize this possibility.

Brenda Brathwaite at IndieCade

2010-10-12T00:10:00.000-07:00

I had a wonderful time at IndieCade in Culver City last weekend, and it was great to have Blue Lacuna participate as a finalist. I'll have some more things to say about the festival and reactions to my game later in the week, but I wanted to first devote a post to what was, for me, the best moment of the weekend.

Saturday afternoon I attended a keynote address by Brenda Brathwaite. Most recently in the news for last year's controversial game Train, Brenda spoke about the larger series of games it's part of, "The Mechanic is the Message," which explores human tragedy on both personal and stunningly epic scales. Starting with a joke that "tragedy in most games is not having enough hit points," Brenda moved on to speak about the power games can have to move us emotionally, and connect us to stories and histories through simulation and reenactment. Originating with a desire to help her daughter understand that the slave trade was not just about "black people going on a cruise," Brenda has spent several years crafting a series of games and meta-games exploring the systems behind violence perpetuated on groups of people, saying "wherever there is human on human tragedy, there is always a system." In the same way we can understand a system of urban planning by playing SimCity, Brenda wants to make games that help us understand the pervasive systems of exploitation, coercion and complicity behind genocides and removals, and how individuals who think of themselves as moral can get caught up in these systems to perform acts of terrible immorality. The talk was incredibly powerful, and led to a lot of self-reflection on my own projects and ideas for future work.

Blue Lacuna at IndieCade

2010-10-08T08:32:00.000-07:00

The 2010 IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games is getting underway today in Los Angeles, California. Blue Lacuna is a finalist, along with some amazing other games, and I'm very excited to be here to participate.

If you're in the L.A. area and want to stop by, check out the "Game Walk," open Saturday and Sunday, where you can play the 32 finalist games. It's free and open to the public. The games are spread out between several venues in Culver City, near the intersection of Culver and Main. Blue Lacuna is at the WWA Gallery, 9517 Culver Blvd. Check out the IndieCade site for further details.

Experiment 2

2010-10-05T20:31:00.000-07:00

This is the second in a series of experiments about interesting, little-explored story spaces made possible with Inform 7. I posted the first experiment a few months back.

Click through to read the literate source of the experiment first, then try playing it in your browser, or altering it in your local copy of Inform 7.

Reviews

2010-10-03T12:06:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you're getting sick of hearing about it, but I wanted to note that some great reviews of Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 have popped up online in the past few weeks. One's greatest fear when working on a book like this is that it's going to be too obtuse, or conversely too dumbed down, to be useful. It's been wonderful to hear that people seem to be enjoying the book and finding it a useful resource for learning Inform 7.

One place without any reviews yet is the book's Amazon page. If any past or future reviewers have an account there and wouldn't mind posting your thoughts (perhaps on a break from reviewing comp games?) it would be a much-appreciated way to help me a little with the book's promotion.

iSeven eBook

2010-09-23T09:13:00.000-07:00

An electronic version of Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 is now available on the Amazon Kindle store. Many people might not be aware that you no longer need a Kindle to read Amazon e-books: they have reader software for many platforms including the iPhone and iPod, BlackBerry, Android, Windows, and Mac, with your reading automatically synced up across any of those devices you own. I've previewed this e-version of the book on a Kindle DX, and it looks very nice-- tables and diagrams are all preserved, as well of course as all the original text. (One issue to note for those with accessibility concerns is that most of the tables seem to have been converted to a graphical format. The book is not too heavy on tables-- a couple per chapter-- but there will be some information missed out on if you're using a screen reader.)

The book is also available electronically from Safari Books Online and eBooks.com in various formats.

Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 Table of Contents Posted

2010-08-26T11:36:00.000-07:00

Amazon has posted the Table of Contents, Index, and first few pages on their website for Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7. Click on the cover or "Look Inside!" to view this material. They'll begin shipping copies out tonight and tomorrow.

Official Book Website

2010-08-17T02:15:00.000-07:00

The official website for Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 is now online. This also means the book's example game, Sand-dancer, is released: it can be played online and downloaded. As previously mentioned, this is a real interactive fiction that you'll build line by line as you progress through the book. Versions of the story as it exists at the end of each chapter are on the website for those who aren't up for quite that much typing.

Amazon lists the book as shipping tomorrow, which means it's quite possible some of you will see it in print before me. On a related note: if anyone with the ear of an audience who might be interested in this sort of thing is interested in a review copy, let me know.

Blue Lacuna Source Code

2010-08-14T22:13:00.000-07:00

Something I meant to do a long time ago, before grad school intervened: the source code to Blue Lacuna is now publicly available as a browseable webpage, downloadable PDF, and compileable archive.

The archive contains all of the extensions necessary to compile, including snapshotted versions of third-party extensions as they existed at the time of its release, as well as all of the internal extensions I used when creating it. You'll need to use an older release, Inform 5Z71, to compile. Other instructions and snafus can be found in the archive zip file.

I'd originally planned to also offer the source in the printed book form I showed off at PAX East, but a frustrating series of technical difficulties with various print-on-demand publishers has led me to give up on this project for now. This may be for the best: I don't expect Progue would care much for being immortalized in the form of a dead tree, anyway.

My goal in distributing the source is not to model well-written Inform code, which it certainly is not: I was learning the language as I went along. Rather, I hope it will be of use and interest both as a record of the story's creation and a window into the pathways and choices not taken in your own traversal.

In this same spirit, I've also posted an archive of bonus material related to this project's three-year design process. This includes some of my original design notes, early versions of the source code, world-building exercises, and collected reference images.

With these two things out of the way, I'm hoping to finally move Blue Lacuna out of my "active projects" directory where it's been lingering for well over a year and a half now. Bigger and better things are coming soon!

...well, at least better things.

Best Practices in IF

2010-08-09T12:58:00.000-07:00

Whenever we code, there are both formal rules we must follow and informal habits we adopt to make things easier on ourselves. These "best practices" are common in mainstream programming textbooks, but have received less attention in the IF world than perhaps they deserve.

One of the most common, nearly genre-defining parser errors is the dreaded "You can't see any such thing," which all too often appears in reference to something the story just narrated your character seeing. In Chapter 4 of my upcoming Inform 7 book, I introduce an IF best practice called BENT designed to help minimize this problem. Those who want to get BENT should Bracket Every Notable Thing in descriptive text: make every object that could sensibly be interacted with by the player a text substitution.

The description of Base of the Tower is "Behind [the building] [a steel girder] rises from [the sand], one of three legs of [the huge electrical tower] looming like some gargantuan spider into blackness above you. [A tumbleweed] drifts lazily against the rusted metal among [scrawny weeds] and [bits of trash]. The desert stretches in all directions except back south towards the building."

Why would you do this? To mangle a metaphor, it keeps you from writing nouns your parser can't cash. Now, it's not just a game-level problem that "EXAMINE GIRDER" is not a recognized command: you've made it a compiler-level problem, too. Having told Inform that something called "the steel girder" exists in your story world, it won't let you compile your story until you've created that object, instead giving you a problem message explaining that it doesn't yet exist.

More importantly, BENT forces you to think about the gameplay implications of the words you type. If you're describing the piles of trash, and you write something like this:

The description of trash is "Aluminum pop cans, newspaper pages, plastic bags, and other junk rest in precarious piles underneath the steel girder."

...bracketing all that stuff may cause you to realize that you're just creating a lot of red herrings and frustration for both yourself and the player. Instead, you might refine your description to this:

The description of bits of trash is "Worthless and forgotten, drifting against snags like non-biodegradable snow."

...which requires nothing to be bracketed, and correctly signals to your player that this item is not important to the story.

What counts as notable is subjective, of course. In this example I've left out "gargantuan spider" since it's part of a metaphor (the player really can't see any such thing) and "blackness" since it's an abstract concept. Synonym words like "legs" must be dealt with differently, too (through Understand rules). But the hope is that adopting BENT will get you in the habit of looking for ways to keep the parser's mental model of the story world in line with the player's.

Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7: Coming August 2010

2010-07-24T16:21:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I mentioned that I was working on a book about Inform 7. That book, Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7, has just gone to the printer, meaning it should be shipping in about three weeks. It's 448 pages with a foreword by Don Woods (co-author of Adventure) and a closing thought by Richard Bartle (creator of the MUD). It is, I believe, only the second book specifically about interactive fiction to be released by a mainstream publisher since the 1980s (the other, of course, being Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages). Needless to say, I'm honored to be in esteemed company.

The book teaches readers how to tell an interactive story with Inform. Working through its chapters, readers will construct a complete IF called Sand-dancer, which I created in collaboration with professional game designer Alexei Othenin-Girard. This is a real game, not just a half-baked example, and I walk through every step along the way from initial design through beta testing and debugging (including diagnosing and fixing over a dozen real bugs encountered by testers).

The book assumes no prior knowledge of programming, but also doesn't treat I7 like a regular programming language: loops, for instance, are barely mentioned. In fact, Thinking in Inform 7 might have been a good title. Writing this book has taught me much about the language that I never knew: some more elegant syntaxes, better ways to use others, how to write with rather than against the strengths of the language. I hope the book can help pass on this knowledge, both to newcomers and those who've already fired up an Inform project or two. The book is also up to date with the latest release, showcasing much of the new power and flexibility introduced in recent months, and uses none of the deprecated features that will soon be removed.

I feel it's impossible to design good IF without learning some of the fundamentals of storytelling, so in addition to teaching syntax, the book also delves frequently into narrative theory and design. I talk about good practices and design patterns, and style tips like how to write good descriptive text or good library messages. I also look into why things work the way they do: why are rooms so common in IF, and what are the pros and cons of an ASK/TELL based conversation model? Finally, I also heavily employ and recommend the use of existing extensions, in the hope that new authors will be able to bootstrap themselves past the struggles and coding challenges that have already been solved.

I'll have more to say about the book in the weeks ahead, but in short, I'm proud of the result, and grateful to the many who have helped make it happen.

Experiment 1

2010-07-16T18:19:00.001-07:00

Over the next few months, I'll be posting a series of short experiments as literate Inform 7 source texts. Experiment 1 lives here in code, comments, and playable format. Click through and choose "Source text" to read along.

The story description is "Giving objects in a story world symbolic weight has often been done by hand, but rarely procedurally. Here's one method for doing so."

Publications Etc.

2010-04-28T18:55:00.000-07:00

Kay Bechtold of the University of Mary Washington has let me know that the literary journal produced by her department, Othergate, has just gone live. Kay interviewed me earlier this year for this issue, which focuses on fantasy and science fiction but has also made a place for experimental fiction. The interview talks about my creative process and my work on Blue Lacuna. What's very cool, though, is that three playable extracts from Blue Lacuna are presented as a companion piece, juxtaposed with related snippets of the game's source code. So you can play through the first conversation with Progue, while also looking at the way that conversation was coded in Inform 7. I think this style of presentation (combining authorial perspective or critical analysis with both a playable extract, not just a transcript, and contextualized excerpts from the source code) is really an excellent way to present an interactive fiction in a serious context, and I would love to see this style catch on in other online publications discussing IF. Kay and the rest of the Othergate team have done a fantastic job at implementing this, so definitely check out their work. (There are free speculative fiction stories, too!)

(To those of you wondering how I got excerpts from Blue Lacuna, with its gluttonous use of indexed texts, tables, lists, relations, and extensions, to play within Parchment: imagine you must flee the country and are given a small suitcase in which you must put everything precious to you, except that the suitcase is already half-filled with lead weights and you own at least twenty-five absolutely vital things the size of a sofa. Actually, a better analogy might be to imagine the trash compactor scene from Star Wars except without the bit where R2-D2 shuts down the power in time.)

Coincidentally, I also just received an issue of GEE: Love For Games, a German gaming magazine, which would be unusual since I don't speak German but apparently I was interviewed for that, too. (It was on the morning after I got back from PAX, and apparently not enough sleep had happened to restore my ability to form long-term memories.) I can't speak to the content or quality of the article, "Wortspiele," but a rough guess as to its outline can be made via this chronological list of proper nouns: Blue Lacuna, XYZZY-Awards, William Crowther, Adventure, Mammoth- und dem Flint-Ridge-Höhlensystem, ARPANET, Don Woods, Scott Adams, TRS-80, Infocom, Zork, Sierra On-Line, Ken Williams, Softporn-Adventure, Mystery House, King's Quest, Das Internet, Violet, Blue Chairs, Lost Pig, Grunk-Ork, Gourmet (einer Slapstick-Situationen), Blue Lacuna, Jason Scott. And the article has some of the neatest IF-related illustrations I've ever seen: they look a bit like woodcuts at first glance, but when you look closer, all the elements are made up of repeated words for that aspect of the scene (so the small white house is made up of the repeated word HAUS). It's very cool-- unfortunately neither the article or illustrations can be seen on the mag's website (excerpt here at the very bottom, resized so you can't really tell-- but see how the light rays spell out "licht?") but if you happen to live in Germany and want to pick up a copy, you'd have a couple of cool IF prints to display.

Lastly: the Othergate interview links to the Amazon.com page for my Inform 7 book, which I did not know existed yet until just now (the page, not the book). It's already ranked #778,539 on the site, pretty impressive for a book with several chapters still lurking like grues in dark and evil corners of Southern Incompletia. Pre-order, come up with tags, write one of those reviews that offers expert analysis of products not yet released-- it's the page you made!

2010-04-25T20:29:00.000-07:00

When I first heard about TWIFcomp, the competition for interactive fiction with source code of 140 characters or less, I thought it was impossible. Upon reflection, I realized it was merely ridiculous. Then I wrote three entries and so apparently did many many other people apparently in dire need of duct tape and ramen noodles.

What's great and perhaps unexpected is how much variety there is in the entries: it's not, as some predicted, just the same trick or joke over and over again. There are abridged versions of popular games, delightful hacks, clever winks, explorable environments, NPCs, and even, as in any comp, games that could have used more beta testing. Many of these have meaningful interaction, and many are recognizably stories. And who would have thought Inform 7 could be succinct?

What's also lovely, though, is that most of these entries require both playing the game and reading the code to get the true experience. I wonder if this isn't true of longer IF, too, and we're mostly just too busy to realize it. I've been thinking a lot lately about how the mechanisms by which an interactive text are generated could or should be exposed to the audience. Also, the advantages of writing shorter games. I think TWIFcomp captures a little of what we all should be doing more of: rapid prototypes, rapid feedback, sharing source code, and building on the best of what's come before.

Also, check out my entries: a simulation of life, a puzzle game with an unreliable narrator, and three jokes about chickens. That roll of duct tape is mine.

PAX Takeaways

2010-03-30T08:24:00.000-07:00

I returned from PAX already one day behind in my spring quarter, so while I expect and hope to see some more detailed write-ups of these points from others, I wanted to very quickly post some of my broad takeaways from the weekend in Boston while they're fresh in my mind.

Get Lamp was pretty great. The 70 minute cut we got to see was by turns informative, funny, touching, and energizing. A lot of people are pining for a longer, deeper cut, but in some ways I wouldn't be surprised if this remains the most popular version of the film, or at least the only one you can get your friends and family to sit still for. Any documentary can only get across a certain number of points, and while this cut certainly doesn't say everything I'd like it to (what about "Modern IF is acclaimed for its experimental storytelling?") it does hit very hard on "IF is a unique art form worthy of attention," which is perhaps the best message to broadcast to the larger world. Kudos to Jason Scott for nearing the end of his epic quest to tell this story.

IF folk are amazing. Seriously, what a fantastic group of friendly, brilliant people. I perused treasured artifacts, was gifted a feelie (a purple data cube from Piracy 2.0), had a blast writing my first Speed IF along with Alexei and Duncan, chatted theory with the people who invented the theory, and generally enjoyed the hell out of myself. It was especially satisfying to meet Don Woods and Brian Moriarty and know that our community comes from a long line of friendliness and brilliance.

We are no longer alone. Something that came up again and again in discussions is that the IF community is no longer the sole audience for IF: whether it's middle schoolers playing TextFyre games, casual gamers experimenting with Hoosegow, academics writing theses or the wider gaming community taking notice, we actually have an audience now. The amateur IF development cycle has traditionally been to disappear for 3-36 months and come back to the community with a completed game, but maybe we need to do less impressing each other individually and more impressing the world collectively. IF outreach is as important as ever: it took over portions of nearly every IF-related PAX event. I talked to a number of gamer geeks at PAX who were fascinated by what we were doing but had never actually played (or sometimes even heard of) IF. I believe continuing to find new ways to help outsiders discover our fascinating medium remains a vital mission.

Let's find ways to collaborate. Emily's Alabaster experiment seems to have been a great success; Rover's Day Out and Shadow in the Cathedral were both collaborations. Making use of the increasingly comprehensive Inform 7 extensions page is a more subtle form of collaboration (and TADS 3 has extensions too). Finding more ways to get each other commenting, contributing, and collectively improving our work from the design phase onward is a worthwhile goal, and something that will be on my mind from here on out.

Oh, and I'm writing a book. I can now officially announce that I'm writing a tutorial book on Inform 7, to be published later this summer by Cengage Learning under their Course Technology line. The book will work a little like the classic Inform Beginner's Guide for I6, acting as a companion to the official documentation that takes you through the process of developing a full example game, Sand-dancer, from first line through beta testing. The book is designed for writers who want to tell interactive stories, and presupposes no knowledge of either programming or IF conventions. I'm hoping the book will be a great gateway drug for students and authors into the pleasure of building story worlds with Inform 7, and will have more to say on it in the months ahead as I get it finished up and submitted.

Spin

2010-01-21T23:48:00.000-08:00

I'm working on a technically simple but conceptually far-reaching Inform 7 extension to fundamentally alter the power dynamic between author and player.

The idea is to stop punishing players for not thinking the exact way a given author does. Since IF's open-ended interface gives the illusion of open-ended solutions to problems that almost always have one and exactly one implemented solution, players are invariably let down when their well-reasoned out solutions are not options implemented by the author. (Even assuming the game has no guess-the-verb, hinting, or bug-related problems.)

"Spin" is an experimental extension to address this by introducing a meta-device (on the level of SAVE and UNDO) that lets player and author take turns having ultimate authority over the story. When the author has spin, he can introduce puzzles and prevent the player's forward progress through the narrative. But solving a puzzle, or earnestly interacting with it without hitting on the author's arbitrarily correct solution, transfers the spin to the player. The player can then spend it (returning it to the author) to bypass a puzzle, effectively saying "I'm still interested in your story, just not this part."

The goal is to assist more players in reaching the middles and ends of interactive stories they are genuinely interested in, but frustrated by, without them having to feel they are "cheating" by consulting out-of-game hints or walkthroughs.

Sample transcript follows. I'm very interested in responses or suggestions.

>DOWN

Hall of the Mountain King
You are in the hall of the mountain king, with passages off in all directions.

A huge green fierce snake bars the way!

>WEST
The huge green snake bars the way!

>KILL SNAKE
Attacking the snake both doesn't work and is very dangerous.

>GIVE FOOD TO SNAKE
There's nothing here it wants to eat (except perhaps you).

(You reclaim spin.)

>SPIN
Visible things that can be spun: the snake.

>SPIN SNAKE
You notice the snake reclines under a vicious stalactite. Finding a loose rock from the ground, you heft it, then hurl it with all your strength at the stalactite. It shatters, raining stones down on the snake. The stones and snake disappear into a crevasse, and after a few moments, everything is silent again.

Hall of the Mountain King
You are in the hall of the mountain king, with passages off in all directions.

(Spin goes back to me.)

>

...(later)...

A huge green fierce dragon bars the way!

>SPIN DRAGON
You don't have spin.

>EXAMINE DRAGON
I wouldn't mess with it if I were you.

>KILL DRAGON
With what? Your bare hands?

>YES
Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands! (Unbelievable, isn't it?)

(You reclaim spin.)

>EAST

Secret E/w Canyon Above Tight Canyon

A threatening little dwarf comes out of the shadows!

>THROW AXE
You can't see any such thing.

>SPIN DWARF
With a sudden burst of fury, you slam the dwarf against the cave wall and strip away his supply of nasty little knives. As you release him, he slinks away into the shadows, casting a hateful glance back. This one, at least, won't be troubling you again.

Secret E/w Canyon Above Tight Canyon

(Spin goes back to me.)

>

The case for aesthetic IF

2009-12-03T23:23:00.000-08:00

Over on rec.arts.int-fiction, there's a battle raging. Words like "irresponsible," "amoral," and "criminal" have been thrown around; comparisons to counterfeiters, malware authors, and racists have been implied. No one has invoked Hitler yet (we're mostly a polite bunch) but it may be just a matter of time.

What's it all about? Basically, how much control interactive fiction authors should have over the way their output appears to users.

Lining up on one side are the stalwart coders, arguing that by working in a text-based medium, authors are morally obligated to ensure their works can run on any platform that displays text, display however the viewer wishes to see them, and be accessed by any user who wishes to convert that text into another format (like sound).

On the other side are the frustrated writers, arguing that presentation and aesthetic sensibility should be a vital component to their interactive fictions, and that by keeping IF at a lowest-common-denominator standard the medium is being held back in the 1980s rather than evolving into the 21st century.

The firestorm is mostly a derailing of Andrew Plotkin's solicitation for feedback on a significant update to Glk, the presentation layer he wrote a decade ago for Glulx IF games. While the changes seem to be a step in the right direction (and unfortunately my lack of nitty-gritty technical knowledge prevents me from offering intelligent insight here), concern has been raised about whether they go too far or not far enough in giving authors control over how their games appear. I still don't think it's clear to many on the writing side of the aisle how the process of styling text would change or improve for authors under this proposal; knowledgeable people have said Inform 7 extensions could be written to make styling text simple, but I'm hazy about whether this means "simple like the bold tag in HTML" or "simple like recompiling the Linux kernel." Points have also been raised about whether authors have been consulted enough in this or any recent proposal affecting their work, or whether these technical discussions are happening in isolation from the people who actually make games with these systems. In short, the discussion has moved from comments on a technical proposal to debate about the fundamental relationship between author and player in IF; and to be clear, this post is largely a response to the larger questions, not the specifics of Plotkin's proposal.

I wanted to address a few arguments I've seen raised against authorial control, because I think this issue is one of the most important facing the future of the IF community. As my own work has moved towards the realm of public exhibitions and artistic recognition, I have constantly battled with the barrier to entry caused by IF's primitive-seeming, barebones appearance. I'm working on a Inform/Glulx project now that will be presented in a gallery, and it's maddening to have zero or almost zero control over such basic issues as text color, line spacing, and alignment. It makes my project look amateurish, and I'm getting the sense most people are going to glance at it, then decide to give it a pass.

I would love to write my own interactive fiction infrastructure that lets me do what I want, but... I'm just not that good of a coder. And to give up the massive benefits of Inform 7: the extensions, the natural language coding, the multi-platform support... would be heartbreaking.

OK, so: arguments against authorial control over output:

"Letting authors make their text stylish gives them unacceptable control over my computer."

I think this argument speaks to the Linux-using, Greasemonkey-scripting, network-security-conference-attending side of the IF community, the technical wizards who have made everything we do possible. I have a great deal of respect for these people, but at the same time I don't necessarily think they represent the views of the majority. In David Platt's book "Why Software Sucks" he relates a story about usability, where he frequently opens talks at computer industry events by asking audience members how many of them drive a car with a stick shift. Something like 50% of hands go up. He next asks what percentage of cars they think are currently sold with stick shifts, and the guess tends to be around 30%. He then tells them the actual statistic is more like 10%, and launches into a talk about the dangers of assuming your users are just like you.

I think it needs to be acknowledged that most users surf the web with Javascript and Flash enabled, don't use custom stylesheets in their browsers, and rarely adjust the brightness and contrast on their televisions. The small minority who do should not be dictating the base experience for the large majority who do not.

We can certainly still keep both communities happy: I am for, if anything, extending the abilities of interpreters to control appearances. But I also accept that increasingly the greater part of my audience wants to just pull up a website to play my games, using whatever the hell colors, fonts, and backgrounds I've chosen for them, and I want to be able to give those people the best experience I can.

"Letting authors make their text stylish will cause authors to write games that disagree with my personal aesthetic."

Surely, that's your problem. Most television disagrees with my personal aesthetic, so I choose not to watch it. Problem solved.

Perhaps an unstated addendum to this argument is "... and if enough authors follow suit then my beloved interactive fiction will be ruined." Well, folks, that's the breaks. Hearts were broken when silent film gave way to talkies; for some, the movies were never the same again. Times and tastes change, and if IF is held back by a stubborn refusal to evolve with the times, all the promising young authors who want to invigorate the medium will find another medium to invigorate instead.

"Letting authors make their text stylish will lead to games that rely on colors and styles, shutting out blind players."

I'm absolutely sympathetic to the worry here. I understand the importance IF has to many blind fans. Among my proudest moments as an IF author are the e-mails I've received over the years (and continue to receive) from blind kids who've played my game "Gourmet," included built-in on their BrailleNote handheld readers.

There's an assumption here which I'm not sure is valid: that most IF authors, if given the ability, will immediately start producing games impossible to play by blind people without providing any consideration for their needs. I can only speak for myself, but I took care to ensure that Blue Lacuna remained accessible. I had two blind beta testers; I created a screen-reader mode that changed the presentation of the backwards text puzzle to prose descriptions rather than diagrams of letters; I left in standard IF commands so the highlighted keywords could be ignored.

Blind users, at least to the best of my ability, did not suffer with Blue Lacuna. The people who suffered were all of the sighted people who were unable to choose from more than two colors of keywords, who had to remember that "bold" was standing in for a color even though it wasn't as visually distinctive, who had to dig into the menus of unfamiliar interpreter programs (since most of my audience was new to IF) to do things like activate color at all, in one interpreter's case, or make the background something that allowed my forced-into-fixity colors to be seen.

Also, let's not put the cart before the horse. We're trying to fix a problem that hasn't happened yet: a glut of games incompatible with screen readers causing a sharp drop-off in the blind IF population. If and when such a thing occurs, it's a problem that can be addressed. But don't tell me I can't make pretty games because hypothetical blind people can't play hypothetical games by hypothetical authors.

At the same time, forcing people to continue making their games accessible to the blind is legislating from the compiler. I choose to make my games more accessible to the blind because they are an audience I am interested in reaching. If I chose to make my games more accessible to disadvantaged children under 12, I might make different choices, perhaps some of them stylistic. In fact, I was severely crippled in my attempt to make IF more accessible to people who've never played IF, a vastly larger audience than blind people and children under 12 combined.

"Letting authors make their text stylish will prevent IF from working on smartphones and other nontraditional platforms."

But surely that's the concern of the game author. If I were deciding whether or not to do a project in Flash, I would have to weigh the fact that it wouldn't work on the iPhone. If I were directing a 3D movie, I'd have to acknowledge that it wouldn't look nearly as cool on a 13 inch 2D TV. If I'm writing IF doing critical things with positioning or style requiring a certain size of monitor, I understand that I'm writing to a subset of my potential audience.

There are two cases I can think of where this problem becomes someone else's concern besides the author's. 1) You own a nontraditional device and have a vested interest in making sure future IF can be played on it. Fair enough, but that's also your responsibility as a purchaser of nontraditional devices: if Flash is very important to you, you might not want to buy an iPhone. 2) You are concerned that making IF accessible on fewer platforms will erode its audience. This is a valid concern, but again, it's doing things backwards: if and when we come to a future where all IF is written for 23 inch monitors and participation in RAIF is going down because people only want to play IF on their iPhones, then we can address what to do about the issue. I don't see the wisdom in crippling the present over hypothetical futures.

Finally, I wanted to offer a few counter-arguments. Since these align with my opinions, I find them mostly self-evident; if anyone wants to argue or elaborate on these, please feel free. I have to get back to work on my ugly prototype.

"Letting authors make their text stylish will result in the rise of beautifully designed, aesthetically pleasing games."

"Letting authors make their text stylish will open up new branches of textual storytelling and give authors new ways to tell their stories."

"Letting authors make their text stylish will attract more people, especially younger people, to IF."

"Letting authors make their text stylish will reduce the perception that IF is a laughably outdated medium."

"Letting authors make their text stylish is something that authors want."

On the Lecture Circuit

2009-10-31T15:19:00.000-07:00

Since starting the Digital Arts & New Media MFA program at UC Santa Cruz this August, I've had very little time to look back at Blue Lacuna. There was more I'd wanted to do with it, particularly on the presentation side, and I still hope to get to a Release 4 some day that takes advantage of the recent speed improvements in Inform 7, but damned if I know where I'm going to find the time...

On the plus side, academia is offering me plenty of opportunities to present my work to audiences. This past Friday I did a overview talk on Blue Lacuna for a group of students at the Expressive Intelligence lab, where there seemed to be a lot of excitement and interest in what I was trying to do with that project. Next week, I'll do a talk about blueful for about 170 students in Introduction to Digital Media, the class I'm a teaching assistant for. (The timing of this is lovely, since we've talked a lot about hypertext and just last week got into social networking and crowdsourcing.) Finally, on November 12th I'll be speaking in Reno, Nevada at the Prospectives.09 digital arts festival, where Blue Lacuna was accepted into their "Present/Symposium" track. I'm not sure how big a crowd to expect for this, but I do know it's a large auditorium and I'll be on a panel with three other grad students afterwards.

Meanwhile, new projects are pending. Exciting things are afoot on both the interactive and non-interactive fronts. For now, though, you'll just have to be patient and >WAIT.

Towards procedurally generated content in Inform 7

2009-05-06T18:09:00.000-07:00

Recently, there was a bit of newsgroup discussion about procedurally generated content, and how this has been a relatively unexplored field in IF. Which is curious, because text, at least in certain forms, is a lot easier to procedurally generate than most other media.

The discussion was a happy coincidence, because this is something I've been interested in and playing around with for a while. In the process of this playing I've created a pair of low-level extensions, which you can preview at the links below and should be appearing on the Inform 7 Extensions Page before long.

Procedural Randomness lets you create predictably random sequences of text, so that for instance you could have the walls of a room be random but consistent colors:

set seed to location;

say "The walls are [one of]green[or]white[or]red[or]fuchsia[or]maroon[with procedural randomness].";

Every time you returned to the same location, the walls would be the same color.

The second extension, Dynamic Rooms, makes it easy to create and destroy rooms during play. (It's so easy because the extension's just moving around a stock of unused rooms, rather than fiddling with creating objects in memory, like the more advanced Dynamic Objects by Jesse McGrew.)

Understand "dig [a direction]" as excavating. Carry out excavating: let rm be a newly created room noun of location with name "Cave".

Neither of these are terribly exciting in and of themselves, but will serve as the bedrock underneath more elaborate extensions to come (which in turn were spin-offs of the really interesting problems I'm working on). I'm also curious to see what other uses other people put them to; I'd also love to hear from anyone with ideas, suggestions, or similar work along these lines.

blueful fades

2009-04-28T22:19:00.000-07:00

I never had a clear conception for how blueful would end. It clearly couldn't last forever, both because of postage expenses and the difficulty of maintaining the continually breaking links, as the web's busy pedants slowly report each nodes as off-topic or violating terms of use. I suppose I imagined that eventually I would just take the whole thing down, close the exhibit, as it were, and that would be the end.

Well, except I didn't really realize how popular it would become. (There have been literary critiques, at least one homage, and Google is up to 7,740 hits-- there were 114 the day I began the project.) And blueful has become part of Blue Lacuna's history, too-- one of the reasons I've been dragging my heels about pulling the plug.

So blueful has been tweaked and is now in its "archive edition." As pages go down, users will report the broken links, and I'll replace that node with a screenshot of that page at its prime... continually fading away (clicking the image will bring it back, if only temporarily). At the end, you'll be able to see a photo of your chosen postcard-- a poor, if closure-providing substitute for the original ending. Thus it will continue to slowly fade away, but the story will remain accessible for those just discovering it.

Hints, Books, and Slugs

2009-04-18T19:05:00.001-07:00

In honor of this year's Spring Thing (there's still time to vote!) and the one-year anniversary of Blue Lacuna's first awkward steps into the world, I have three springtime updates to share.

First: the Blue Lacuna hints page has finally been updated and restored to the website. I'd purposefully taken it down before release, since I wanted to hear from people about which puzzles were stumping them, and I figured if hints were available I'd have a much harder time finding out. Unfortunately, an older version of the page remained cached by Google, so it seems everyone was getting their hints anyway, just in an out-of-date and uglified version. The new improved hints page is all Javascripty and fancy and, more importantly, now actually accurate.

Secondly: somewhere near the end of BL's development, I got the idea that I could convert the source text into a printed book on lulu.com, as a reward for myself when I finished: the thought of a weighty volume to place on my shelf and point to when people asked me how I spent my mid-20s was appealing. The book turned out better than I imagined, so I thought I might as well make it public in case anyone else wants to own a 738 page tome of adventure game source code, cost to print the thing be damned. I even threw in an essay on the making of the game (more specific than my recent article in SPAG), the original concept document for the project, and a glossary of Progue's slang. Just think, you could be the only one on your block and/or continent to own one! Check out a swoon-inducing Lightbox photo gallery if you still aren't convinced.

Finally, some personal news: I recently learned that I've been accepted into the Digital Arts & New Media MFA program at UC Santa Cruz. The campus is gorgeous, the faculty top caliber, and the program itself is fantastic. (I just need to get Emily Short a job there and I could have a thesis committee made entirely of IF fans.) During my time in the program, I plan to continue playing at the experimental fringes of what interactive stories can do, and am incredibly excited to become a Californian again this fall. Go banana slugs!

Bleak and Twisted

2009-03-31T22:30:00.000-07:00

Enough reviews of Blue Lacuna have come in that I've launched a page collecting them on the official site.

David Monath's review in the new issue of SPAG is the latest. He has a lot of praise for the game, and a lot of good criticism, but the second half of the review seems to veer into scorn and vitriol, which has been a surprisingly common if unexpected reaction.

For one thing, I don't understand why people get so nasty when talking about bugs. I don't like them either. I spent six months beta testing with a dozen people. I want you to tell me about the remaining problems so I can fix them. Sneering at me as you do so is unproductive.

More significantly: a few sentences in the review caused me physical pain. Like "Don't make the mistake of becoming attached to the characters."

Or, "It's important to understand just how irrelevant you the player will be at the end of the game."

Ouch. Did I really fail that completely?

Most of David's statements about the endgame mechanics are catastrophically wrong, and it's intensely frustrating that he phrases his assumptions as if they were absolute truths about the game. There are a lot more possible outcomes and alternatives present than he discovered. But then, that's my fault, isn't it? If bugs or poor design kept people from discovering all the options available, I have only myself to blame.

Other people have found paths that led them to emotionally satisfying endings. I've had reports of players shedding tears over the conclusions they reached with Rume or Progue; one described the character arc he created for his protagonist as "intensely therapeutic." But is it equally accidental that these people found endings they thought were meaningful, rather than ones that led David to call my work a "bleak and twisted" portrait of humanity, a "training simulator for sociopaths?"

I've known for a while that Blue Lacuna has a lot of stories inside it. I guess it only makes sense that some of them are not very good.

Release 3 of Blue Lacuna

2009-03-04T21:07:00.000-08:00

Release 3 of Blue Lacuna is now available for download for all platforms. This version fixes quite a large number of bugs encountered by people over the past six weeks. Thanks to everyone who sent in bug reports, and please keep them coming!

Release 2 of Blue Lacuna

2009-02-04T13:33:00.000-08:00

The second release of Blue Lacuna is now available on the downloads page, fixing a large number of minor and one or two major issues that players have found in the first week of release. There were a few cases where, in certain scenarios, it was possible to break the game and strand yourself; if you're playing the first release and think you've done this, e-mail me and I may be able to help.

A note: save games for Inform stories do not transfer between versions, so if you've started playing already with an earlier release, you may prefer to stick with it.

Thanks very much to those who have sent in bug reports, and please continue to do so!

pruning blueful

2009-02-01T19:56:00.001-08:00

blueful, by its nature, was designed to be ephemeral, to slowly vanish into the noise of the web. But I plan to keep it "pruned" and functional as long as I have the time and money to afford to do so. I just recreated the node that was formerly a wikipedia user page (who knew even user pages have to be on topic?) which makes the sixth time I've had to redo a node since blueful went up about a week ago.

One of the interesting things about blueful to me is that the entire thing is really a violation of terms of service. Except for a few things like the flickr images, I am technically using most of these sites-- MySpace, Craigslist, Last.fm-- for purposes other than that which their creators intend you to, and in some cases even allow you to. Several people have commented that they feel like explorers or trespassers following a secret trail through sites where others conduct their business unawares. Perhaps one of the reasons that blueful has been so well-received is this feeling of illicitness, the mild shock of seeing art in a place where it's normally not expected, or even allowed.

A review of blueful.

2009-01-30T12:56:00.000-08:00

Lara Crigger at Gamers With Jobs has just posted a review of blueful that's about half extremely positive and half extremely negative. Both halves of the review (and the comments below) raise good points, but mainly I'm just ticked to have blueful called "genius," "pretentious," "brilliant," and "obnoxious" within the span of a few paragraphs.

I'm really loving the reaction to blueful so far, both good and bad. I can only imagine how much people are going to hate and love Blue Lacuna.

Reactions to blueful.

2009-01-29T10:48:00.000-08:00

The response to blueful has been everything I hoped and nothing like what I expected. I've just put up a tag cloud of comments, which quite possibly represents the most warm and powerful reaction I've ever received to something I created.

I'll have more to say about blueful later, but I wanted to share this.

Blue Lacuna is officially released!

2009-01-28T22:02:00.001-08:00

I've just formally announced the release of Blue Lacuna. Check out rec.games.int-fiction for the happy news, and go to the official website for the download.

Blue Lacuna technically went live on Monday morning when blueful launched. Blueful, the prelude to Blue Lacuna presented as a series of hidden pages across the net, revealed the link to the download at the end of the journey. blueful's moderate viral success means that some 200 people have already downloaded Blue Lacuna and are (hopefully) starting to play.

More later, after I recover from being happily, gloriously drunk.

blueful

2009-01-26T12:22:00.003-08:00

You have always been different.

blueful.com

368,988

2009-01-02T20:45:00.000-08:00

What a strange journey it's been.

This is probably close to the final word count. Testers are giving the last few chapters one more polish, and then it'll be released.

One of the things on my shrinking to-do list that I recently crossed off without doing was writing a foreword. It may be that I need some time and distance before I'm able to sum this thing up, or add anything useful in terms of framing or setting-up. For now it will have to stand on its own giant, misshapen, strange, and wobbly legs, for better or worse, and see if it can lumber out into the world on its own to find an audience, and devour them.

Maybe by the time the Deluxe Release comes out this spring (and which you'll start hearing more about here before much longer), I'll be ready to introduce it. For now, Blue Lacuna just is. I hope you like it.

Tweaking and shaping...

2008-12-21T20:22:00.000-08:00

After three weeks of testing, I'm amazed and pleased to report that Blue Lacuna has been tremendously improved. Everything from spelling and punctuation errors to pacing, tone, description, and story ideas have been thoughtfully hashed through and commented on by my team of testers. Big thanks to Stephanie, Doug Egan, Depresiv, Victor Gijsbers, Emily Boegheim, Alexei, Scix, Henry, Sharon Rishe, James Jolley, and Neale for their help in this phase of testing.

After three weeks of testing, I'm also terrified and alarmed to report that nobody has finished the game yet. (Though not for lack of trying -- I've sort of forgotten how big it is.)

I think I'm going to grab a quick team of people to run through the last few chapters of the game hard looking for bugs. The beginning is holding up very well and lots of people are working on the middle right now, but the end still needs a lot of testing attention, and isn't likely to get enough through natural processes.

But we're almost there...

Final Testing Begins!

2008-11-27T23:50:00.000-08:00

Just sent this to the beta mailing list: if you're interested in testing and aren't signed up, you can do so at http://lacunastory.com/mailing-lists.html .

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful that Blue Lacuna is (finally, finally) ready for final beta testing!

For those who haven't tried it yet, Blue Lacuna is an interactive novel in the tradition of Myst and the classic text adventures, where your choices don't just decide the ending, but determine the nature of the story being told, and your role in it.

For those who tested before, Blue Lacuna is both a) fully completed now, and b) much improved based on suggestions and testing that happened in the first go-round earlier in the year.

I realize it has been quite a while since my last mailing, and many of you may no longer be interested; I also realize that those of you who helped test in the first round last spring may have had enough! If this is you, please feel free to unsubscribe (link at bottom); I certainly won't take it personally!

For the rest of you: I'd like to get an idea how many of the people on this mailing list are interested in testing and have some time to donate at some point in the next four weeks. If you think this might be you, please drop me a line to let me know (aaron@lacunastory.com).

Rather than turning everyone loose on different chunks of the game each week, this time I'll be giving the full version to a few people at a time. Your goal will be to play it through from beginning to end (probably over a few sessions). After the first few people make it through and I fix any discovered bugs, I'll unleash a few more of you on the corrected game, and so on until release, hopefully in about a month.

Let me know if you're interested in helping out with the final beta, and thanks in advance for your generosity! I hope those of you in America had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and those of you elsewhere are looking forward to a great weekend.

Take care,

--Aaron

(P.S. Check out http://lacunastory.com in the days to come-- there may be some changes.)

1!

2008-11-26T23:42:00.001-08:00

...

1 and a half...

2008-11-25T15:41:00.001-08:00

...

2

2008-11-24T00:26:00.001-08:00

...

3

2008-11-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

...

4

2008-11-19T11:43:00.000-08:00

...

5

2008-11-16T15:45:00.001-08:00

...

343,180

2008-10-08T21:01:00.000-07:00

Wow, it really is almost there.

Going through and filling in the corners in the few places that still have poor implementation and testing. But all the pistons are in place now, and all the fuel is there. It's just a matter of making sure the cylinders keep firing no matter what.

Damn, I'm too tired for metaphors. Minus away from computer days, about 12 more days before the October deadline. Getting close but I think I'm going to make it.

Speed

2008-09-29T13:23:00.000-07:00

After some brutal days of code-scrobbling I have managed to get the average time-per-move down from the completely unacceptable 3.8 seconds to the only-moderately-annoying 1.1. This is still longer than I'd prefer, but my eyes will bleed if I try to find any more bits of inefficient code, so it'll have to do for now.

~~1. Finish the Epilogues~~
~~2. Rework "Staying With Rume" in Chapter 1~~
3. Finish Progue scenes for his "Uncertain" psyche.
~~4. Finish sketched-but-unwritten portions of The Confrontation.~~
~~5. Finish fleshing out and implementing "Forest" and its people.~~
~~6. Add support for~~ Intelligent Hinting (half done)
~~7. Finish attitude-~~adjustment Progue mini-scenes. (a third done)
8. Go through whole game and solve any structural / derailing issues.
~~9. Optimise for speed as much as possible.~~

Progress...

2008-09-24T17:46:00.000-07:00

-- Made a small but important speed breakthrough: certain puzzles involved changing the structure of the map to open or close various exits, but I discovered the new I7 pathfinding code caches map info only if the map never changes. Reworking this stuff improved speed in certain cases.

-- Wrote an extension called "Poor Man's Mistype" that somewhat replicates the spelling-correction functionality of "Mistype" of old (which no longer compiles on modern Inform). It's a pretty rough and lazy way to try to catch spelling errors, but hopefully it will be better than nothing.

-- Got a good deal into adding "Intelligent Hinting" support. (This is the code that allows the game to play itself; originally developed for BL, it was later spun off into its own extension, and now the original has been rooted out so the shiny plug-in could replace it. Actually much easier than I was expecting, although testing this fully will take a while longer.)

-- Took advantage of several bug fixes in the latest I7 build to restore several old bits of functionality which had been broken or commented out.

Rume

2008-09-22T13:18:00.000-07:00

The intro of BL (the Prologue and Chapter One) has probably been subject to more revision and disproportionate attention than anything else. Which I suppose is appropriate, since that's the segment that determines whether people will stick around for the rest of the story.

A particularly vexing portion of this has been the character of Rume, and specifically the nature of the player's choice to leave or stay with them. Originally conceived of as a plot device to help explain Wayfaring and bits of backstory, Rume has slowly evolved from a quick cameo into a more and more complex character, who now, depending on the player's choices, can be one of the most important characters in the game.

Near the end of this sequence, the player must choose to stay with Rume, or answer the Call. I had always been aware this was sort of a false choice (since the body of the game occurs if you answer the Call) but conversations with various friends convinced me that giving the player a false choice so early in the game would undermine my whole philosophy that the player's intentionality was actually significant, not just illusional.

So what happens if you choose to stay with Rume has been through three complete iterations now. I think I've finally hit on something I'm happy with. Of course, the player still does end up on Lacuna, but hopefully with altered goals and a different perspective. And the choice has repercussions much later in the story, as well: among other things, it's a prime deciding factor in which epilogue you receive.

So:

~~1. Finish the Epilogues~~
~~2. Rework "Staying With Rume" in Chapter 1~~
3. Finish Progue scenes for his "Uncertain" psyche.
~~4. Finish sketched-but-unwritten portions of The Confrontation.~~
~~5. Finish fleshing out and implementing "Forest" and its people.~~
6. Add support for Intelligent Hinting
7. Finish attitude-adjustment Progue mini-scenes.
8. Go through whole game and solve any structural / derailing issues.
9. Optimise for speed as much as possible.

This is immensely encouraging. Almost done!!! Well, for certain values of almost.

Another one bites the dust

2008-09-19T00:08:00.000-07:00

I'm finished enough with Forest to cross it off the list, which now stands thusly:

~~1. Finish the Epilogues~~
2. Rework "Staying With Rume" in Chapter 1
3. Finish Progue scenes for his "Uncertain" psyche.
~~4. Finish sketched-but-unwritten portions of The Confrontation.~~
~~5. Finish fleshing out and implementing "Forest" and its people.~~
6. Add support for Intelligent Hinting
7. Finish attitude-adjustment Progue mini-scenes.
8. Go through whole game and solve any structural / derailing issues.
9. Optimise for speed as much as possible.

To celebrate, I'm taking tomorrow off entirely for a much needed break.

One of the funnest things about interactive fiction is you get to design and "build" stuff that you could do in no other medium, including graphical computer games-- at least not as easily. If the standard screenplay advice is "show, don't tell" (meaning use the visual nature of the medium to its best advantage), a similar principle for IF should be "do, don't tell" -- I.e. if anything about the plot or characters can be presented in a way that allows the player to interact with something to uncover the information, that's probably better than just having them read about it.

With that in mind I removed an NPC from Forest, the Historian, and replaced him with a room-sized 3D map of the galaxy which the player can move on four axes: selection of objects, zoom, moving forwards and backwards in time, and changing the information shown. In addition, I was able to design and implement a gesture control system simple enough to require no instruction. This is something you don't get the opportunity to do every day.

319,000

2008-09-15T23:04:00.000-07:00

I'm now crossing #4 off my list-- some of the prose for Confrontation needs work, but at least none of it is meta-prose. ("This scene happens here.")

For the end of October deadline, things now stand thusly:

~~1. Finish the Epilogues~~
2. Rework "Staying With Rume" in Chapter 1
3. Finish Progue scenes for his "Uncertain" psyche.
~~4. Finish sketched-but-unwritten portions of The Confrontation.~~
5. Finish fleshing out and implementing "Forest" and its people.
6. Add support for Intelligent Hinting
7. Finish attitude-adjustment Progue mini-scenes.
8. Go through whole game and solve any structural / derailing issues.
9. Optimise for speed as much as possible.

I've dabbled a bit with 9, but it may be a lost cause. There are just no tools to optimize the speed of large IF projects, simply because there are so few of them. A few hours of painstaking testing shows that my before, instead, after, and every turn rules combined are responsible for about 35% of the runtime, but I have no way of knowing whether that's just the amount of time it takes to check all 450+ of them, or whether 449 of them go by in a flash and the 450th is causing a slowdown.

I will probably turn to #5 next, since it's about the only piece left that still has bits to be designed. (There are a few rooms here which do not yet exist.) I'm guessing this will be about a 2-3 day project.

In other news, the new build of Inform is markedly faster and I only needed to adjust one bit of code to get it to compile. Presumably there are a few more subtle things that are broken now. Hopefully there are no major bugs and I can make this the final version of Inform that BL will be released in.

Thursday

2008-09-12T00:23:00.000-07:00

Productive day. Tweaked and finalized the spaghetti-like logic of the Confrontation, which involved cutting a number of the endpoints that were unsatisfactory or never reached. Now have a precise and well-defined number of states going into Epilogue. Also got about 1/3 of the way into revising the prose. There are still some major paragraphs of Confrontation that need to be converted from outline to Progue dialogue, maybe 6-8 thousand words, but if I can get in another day this productive I could be done with this by tomorrow or Saturday, and that's another thing to check off my list of 9. Huzzah!

epilogue c

2008-09-11T01:24:00.000-07:00

Got most of Epilogue C written. Ran into some complications where the preceding sequence, Confrontation, is not 100% locked down, so I'm a little unsure exactly what states certain things can and cannot be in by Epilogue. This is actually a little messy since parts of Confrontation appear to be written using an older model. This will probably be next on my list.

In short, I can't quite honestly say I finished the Epilogues but I'm going to check them off the list anyway. Woohoo!

Epilogues

2008-09-10T00:22:00.000-07:00

There are three Epilogues in Blue Lacuna (different from the various "endings" which occur beforehand) which represent the very last things a player sees on a navigation of the story. The Epilogue attempts to make meaning of the player's decisions throughout the story and provide a satisfactory coda. The sequence runs only about 10 to 15 moves for any given playthrough, but is about 16,000 words of code and prose, almost to novella length.

Which Epilogue a player gets depends on which of three principal characters the game has determined you care most about by the end: yourself, Rume, or Progue. Each is completely different from the others, but all are split into two parts: a dream-conversation with a character, during which certain past actions are explored and commented on, and a final coda, where the player takes action to conclude the story. Part of the reason so much text is required is because of all the possible decisions and combinations thereof the player might have made, but also because even for these last few moves of the game the player is still being asked to make choices, which affect the nature and flavor of the story's resolution. Giving the player meaningful choices even when the plot has largely come to an end has been a difficult but ultimately worthwhile design process.

The Progue and Rume codas were finalized tonight, although they still need testing and rewrites. Each of these dream-conversations are also written. Tomorrow I hope to finish the convo and coda for the "yourself" epilogue, which will let me cross off one of the "9 Final Steps" on my list to "complete" Blue Lacuna. (By complete I mean have nothing left to design, plan, or implement; theoretically all that should be left after that point is rewrites, bug fixes, and any changes that arise from further testing.)

My recently-acquired goal is to get through this list by the end of October:

THE 9

1. Finish the Epilogues
2. Rework "Staying With Rume" in Chapter 1
3. Finish Progue scenes for his "Uncertain" psyche.
4. Finish sketched-but-unwritten portions of The Confrontation.
5. Finish fleshing out and implementing "Forest" and its people (one of the two endgame worlds).
6. Add support for Intelligent Hinting
7. Finish attitude-adjustment Progue mini-scenes.
8. Go through whole game and solve any structural / derailing issues. (Ensure it's not possible to get in a broken or unwinnable state, that all conversations have emergency exit points, that all dramatic scenes can't be broken by a player taking an unexpected action, etc.)
9. Optimise for speed as much as possible.

300,894

2008-08-18T19:01:00.001-07:00

Really, it's almost done. I swear.

284,886

2008-07-31T12:06:00.001-07:00

tuesday

2008-07-01T22:17:00.001-07:00

Wrote a 4,000 word conversation today that I feel pretty good about: "Long Walks." It's not very interactive but I think the writing is good. Also started on a system to replace Inform 7's scenes in conversation with a more flexible object, the episode. This is customized for Blue Lacuna and should make keeping track of and debugging the 100+ Progue scenes easier. Essentially I've categorized all the types of Progue scenes and moved the code for each type into one place instead of dozens of places.

New motivation system: letter grades on each part of the story / interface. F is unimplemented, A is "proud of." No A's. On the plus side, only 5 F's. (Out of about 25 items.) New system is to increase one itme one letter grade per day of BL work, and to write one conversation per day.

Talking like Rorschach. Can't seem to use pronouns. What's happening to?

Was thrilled to see many of my suggestions for Inform 7 show up in the preliminary draft document Graham is sending around, and even more thrilled to see many of them marked with "We agree." Even the compilation speed issue may be addressed soon. Woohoo!

259,961

2008-06-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

18 months ago, it seemed a fairly bold lie to claim that the finished version of Blue Lacuna might reach 200,000 words. Now, I'm hoping to pull it in under 300,000, but that doesn't seem likely. (Why am I hoping this? Among other reasons, it takes just under two minutes to compile at this point. There are also several "bounds exceeded" bugs that Graham and I have been leapfrogging with various releases of BL and Inform 7; I'm terrified I will hit a wall at some point that prevents the game from getting any larger.)

Hoping to get the testers going again at the end of July. Today: implemented the full-complexity version of the Epilogue.

A bit late but...

2008-04-14T16:21:00.001-07:00

You can now play a sneak preview release of Blue Lacuna as part of the Spring Thing interactive fiction competition. I would love to get feedback and comments!

Beta Begins

2008-01-09T09:24:00.000-08:00

For anyone who didn't catch the announcement on rec.arts.int-fiction, I've started a mailing list for beta testers. You can sign up at http://www.lacunastory.com. Testing begins on Friday and will continue until the release of Blue Lacuna (yes, that is the official title now) on April 2nd.

I will probably discontinue posting here about the game during the beta, so if you want to keep abreast of updates, please do sign up for the mailing list. I may still post the odd entry if I need to complain, reminisce, or otherwise do stuff that wouldn't be appropriate for the mailing list, as I can still maintain the illusion that nobody reads this blog but me, when I close my eyes tight enough.

3 months to go.

2008-01-02T10:17:00.000-08:00

Just about 90 days till release and I wish I had another year. Such is ze life of an artiste.

Things are more or less on track. Later this week I'll start putting out feelers to gather my testers together. Still working out procedures for how I'm going to manage it all, but: the idea is to divide the remaining time up into week-long chunks, each one beginning with a "milestone" release and certain things testers are instructed to poke at. The following week's milestone release will include bug fixes and a new set of stuff to test. In this way I'll keep the train moving as I'm laying down the tracks in front of it. The hope is that testers can tune in and help out on whatever weeks they have time and interest for, even if it's just one or two. They'll have a week to make some time to test without having to worry about not having the latest build.

I'll be launching the website soon, as well as two mailing lists: a weekly one for testers, and a monthly one with more general updates. Check back in a few days for the details.

The end is finally in sight!

156,500

2007-12-27T14:27:00.000-08:00

Still working.

more debugging.

2007-12-11T22:59:00.000-08:00

// Conversation: Progue's after discussing relationships rule).

// Conversation: checking if the NPC has anything else to say rule (because Every turn when a attentive other person is in location (old man). if last beat snov_novel suggests a beat (nothing) and ( conversation fuse is not 0 (0) or actual last beat (dc_doorpuzzle) is ephemeral (true) we'll continue.
// Conversation: conditions not met.

// Progue: reporting on Progue rule (because Progue is in location and Progue is fulfilling and the animus of Progue is not poetry-reading).

// Progue: Progue hates monotony rule (because player is awake and Progue is fulfilling and the animus of Progue is not spying) (increasing activity counter by 1).

// Drama manager: adding 46 (# turns since last chapter advance) to boredom meter.
// Drama manager: adding 31 (# turns since last landmark turn) to boredom meter.
// Drama manager: adding 120 (frustration tracker * 5) to boredom meter.
// Drama manager: setting boredom meter to 0 because something dramatic is happening.
// Drama manager: deciding NOT time for excitement (197 < 400).

// Conversation: conversation bookkeeping rule).

// Ambience: ambient messages rule NOT running (because  /  / nothing dramatic is happening is false)

140,345

2007-12-09T11:01:00.001-08:00

Techno is great stay-motivated music.

Still coding.

2007-12-05T13:35:00.000-08:00

More or less made the December 1st deadline. Plugging away full steam. More later.

Deadlines.

2007-11-28T08:30:00.000-08:00

I've entered Lacuna (which may end up being called "Blue Lacuna") into an interactive fiction competition with an entry deadline of April 2nd, 2008.
I've made a detailed road map for how to get it finished by then, which essentially boils down to:

December 1: Feature Freeze.
January 1: Alpha release. Feature complete. Small group testing.
February 1: Release B. Initial beta. No "placeholder" text. Larger group testing.
March 1: Release 0. Final Beta. Well-written. New batch of testers.
April 1: Release 1 (Competition Release).

If all goes well to that point, I'll spend the next few months prepping the "Storybook" interpreter and the commercial release of the Deluxe version of Lacuna.

I guess I haven't really mentioned my plans here, but they're essentially this: Lacuna will be made available for free, but I will also release it as a boxed game in a deluxe edition that features, among other things, the Storybook interpreter, immersive sound effects, and "special features" like the full source code and an extended version of my game "Gourmet." Both Storybook and the sound effects will dramatically enhance the experience of playing the game. For a hint as to how the former will work, try this analogy: Storybook is to Gargoyle as Gargoyle is to DOS Frotz. Or maybe Storybook is to playing IF as Time Machine is to backing up files with rsync. Storybook will, I hope, be eventually released as an open source project. The design document is all done: I just have to find time to code the thing... hopefully this April and June.

In the meantime, on Lacuna, I'm trying to track down any nebulous features I may have wanted to include at some point but forgot to actually program. One of those is a sort of "Drama Manager" which tracks how long it's been since "something interesting" has happened, as well as guesses at the boredom / frustration level of the player, and can draw from a large library of scenes to spice things up. If the player is stuck on a puzzle, some of these scenes may change things in such a way that the puzzle becomes better hinted or otherwise subtly easier. It's all in service of the notion that Lacuna is more of a novel than a game: unlike the vast majority of puzzle IF, there hopefully won't be long stretches of boredom while the player waits for inspiration to strike.

Technically my deadline is December 1st, but I'm giving myself until Sunday at midnight to lock these things down. Ah, deadlines!

Latest casuality: MAX_STATIC_DATA

2007-11-19T10:25:00.000-08:00

MAX_STATIC_DATA is the latest default variable whose size I have exceeded.

I'd become buried under a mass of suggestions and second-guessing, some prompted by the August demo, but most by myself in a fit of reexamination afterwards. These were spread out on so many notebook pages and in so many files that I'd become unsure how to move forward-- should I be working on this system, if it's going to change? Am I writing these conversation nodes according to the latest spec? So last night I went through every damn page of notes and comments and either rejected it, actioned it in iGTD, or made one, new, ultimate master list of "potential changes." It felt great.

One of the big lingering issues to be resolved in this process is the precise natures of Progue's mental and physical illness. I've been reading like crazy the last few months, and have read a lot about the history of madness, books written by mad people, books written by doctors about mad people, books written by mad doctors, etc. It didn't feel like it was helping at the time, but when I sat down to decide once and for all exactly what's going on in my character's head and how it manifests itself (symptoms, behaviors, forms of speech) it came very easily.

I also managed to write about 8,000 words of dialogue over the weekend, not too shabby.

Back from my latest hiatus.

2007-11-18T20:49:00.001-08:00

127,490.

Two demos down.

2007-09-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

Well, I've demoed the entire game for one friend, and the first few chapters for another, and am simultaneously encouraged and discouraged. The former because people seem happy with the plot, the writing, the characters, and the structure, they like the interface, and they want to know what happens next. The latter because the game itself is still bug-ridden. Major systems like conversation and movement break all the time. Obviously, since it hasn't been tested at all yet, but it was still discouraging to see happening.

There are a few issues raised by the testing that I need to consider, but overall, no earth-shattering, plot-structure-shaking problems. So I think the long, strange design phase of this project has finally drawn to a close. The rest is just implementation.

More when I'm back home and working again.

123,000

2007-09-17T23:03:00.001-07:00

Ready for the big demo. Not as ready as I'd hoped to be, but the game is at least completable without using debugging commands, which is a good first step.

I feel justified in calling it a novel, since the script which plays the game through as quickly as possible-- i.e. ignoring looking for clues, descriptions, conversations etc... just plays the fastest possible way from beginning to end-- takes 7.5 minutes to run on my dual core 2.0 ghz Macbook. A future script to actually test everything thoroughly is going to be at the very least twice as long. And a human will of course play through exponentially slower.

Will post again after I see how it plays for people new to the story.

117,743

2007-09-11T12:54:00.000-07:00

Continuing to prep for the big demo next week. Lots of tweaking the exposition to make sure information is getting revealed, and in the right order. Also continuing to detail the endgame worlds. More later.

I Get Things Done

2007-09-04T11:33:00.000-07:00

I've found some great new software called iGTD that's allowed me to better keep track of everything I still need to do on both Lacuna and Storybook. This allows me to sort tasks by priority, difficulty, due date, etc., and gives me a better sense of accomplishment as I can see things getting checked off one by one. It also helps with the problem of remembering what I'm supposed to be working on at any given moment (seriously!) as the codebase is so large now I can easily get lost in it, reeling drunkenly from one problem to another and not getting anything accomplished.

My latest deadline is September 18th, which is when I leave on a week-long vacation. During the trip though, I'm going to demo the game for two different groups of friends, so I'm trying to get it in a nice presentable "rough cut" form. iGTD has really been helpful separating what would be "nice" to have done from what "needs" to be done.

Things are slowly starting to come together, though. Last night I wanted to test something on Progue, so I yelled at him from across the game map. True to programming, he looked up at me, stopped what he was doing, picked his way to where I was, and started a conversation (in a slightly annoyed tone), and the game reported all this correctly. Of course, the specific thing I wanted to test didn't work; but it's nice to see all the systems and mechanisms start to be able to manage on their own, after all this time.

I also posted a new "teaser" webpage for the game on my website. The quote at the beginning is actually not from the game itself, but one of the pieces of short fiction that will accompany it.

"You can only have one option here: love or art?"

2007-08-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

Recently progress has slowed a bit, as I've been splitting my time between a lot of grunt updating work (mainly standardizing old code to the latest expectations) and re-learning Java, which the "Storybook" interpreter is to be programmed in. I want to be able to get a "proof of technology" for Storybook running, to verify that it can do everything it needs to do, on all major platforms. If I can't do this, I'll need to either a) revise my vision for Storybook, or b) get serious about finding a better programmer who can help me create it.

I've also been distracted by a happy development in my personal life named "Kevin," but as this is a highly focused progress-oriented blog I shall say no more.

...

2007-08-19T21:52:00.000-07:00

More progress. Moving Lacuna from "possible to complete" to "possible for someone other than the author to complete." This involves fixing a lot of reporting rules, methodically improving and standardizing movement and room descriptions, hinting the puzzles better, and at a few key points giving the player better nudges as to what to do next.

The hope is that in a few weeks I can have some friends play the "rough draft" and elicit comments.

Storybook

2007-08-16T09:42:00.000-07:00

Once again struggling with a conceptual problem, basically centered around the notion of whether there's enough dramatic interest through the center part of the story, and whether I need to stir some up. In the meantime, I'm building out a detailed design document for Lacuna's "other half," a new interpreter with the working name Storybook that will leverage the processing power of modern computers to provide a different way of playing interactive fiction.

I really want to keep the exact nature of Storybook under wraps, but here's a hint: In my opinion, the save/restore mechanic is an archaic holdover from the early days of computing, and is certainly not the ideal way to experience a multilinear interactive story.

Milestones

2007-08-09T10:40:00.000-07:00

I've now passed the 100,000 word mark. Hopefully the first 100,000 were the hardest.

What I have been calling the prologue is actually more like the prologue and first chapter. These I've been polishing up into a state of as-near-completion as possible. I hadn't planned on it, but I might release this section of the game in a few weeks to get comments on the interface and hopefully some more public encouragement. I'm really feeling pleased with how everything is shaping up; and for the first time in months, I've actually been writing; revising and tweaking and editing prose until it feels right.

Another few hours work on this segment, I think, and then it's time to start concept testing the outline, to see where the weak links in the story are and what parts of it need better pacing, better hinting, expansion, contraction, or deletion.

Once that's done... by the end of August, I hope... it will be knuckling down to write that second 100,000 words of dialog and description. A 2007 release of the open beta* at least may still be possible, if I stay on target.

(* After Whom the Telling Changed had been released for a while, I went back to it and heavily revised it, probably adding about 20% to the size of the game. I'm expecting to do something similar with Lacuna, but will more explicitly advertise it as an "open beta," and save the publicizing and possible commercialization until after it's had some time to organically improve.)

95,------

2007-08-06T14:07:00.000-07:00

Closing in on 100,000 words of code and prose (not counting the standard Inform library). I've been working on the Prologue and the first conversation, along with the optional "tutorial mode" in this section of the game that helps familiarize people with the interface. More later.

90,029

2007-07-27T08:05:00.000-07:00

I'm back to the word count again. Oh well, it's a good excuse for turning and everything on and making sure the entire tangled thing still compiles.

Continuing through the outlines of Progue conversations. Testing this is going to be interesting. Some conversations are triggered by Progue's psychological state, others by the progress the player has made on the puzzles. Some by various other tracking variables (whether Progue likes you or not and how much, whether he's starting to equate you with his lost children, etc.) Most of them are triggered by some combination of these three. Making sure that everything happens when and only when it should is a little daunting.

In other news, I'm hoping to have a version of Lacuna ready for concept testing by mid-August. I'll take a few friends and walk them through the story, to see if the pacing and ordering is working out. Based on reactions, if I need to make additional changes to the structure of the game, I can--and otherwise, it's back to write all of those conversations in full and finish fleshing out those room descriptions and implementation details.

87,536

2007-07-22T09:59:00.000-07:00

Got "The Storm" finished and tested, in terms of the logic involved, and did some tweaking to try to figure out what is slowing down the game when Progue is moving around. A lot of it seems to be Inform's built-in pathfinding, which would seem to be not terribly computationally efficient, but there is also the weight of the dozens of demons and systems running to keep time and tide running (not to mention a boatload of other stuff, too). At some point I may have to enlist the help of an Inform expert to see if I can optimize my code any more.

Continuing forward through outlining all possible Progue conversations. Maybe 20-25 of them. Making progress.

"Progue takes a perch on yourself and grins broadly."

2007-07-19T12:35:00.001-07:00

Debugging.

The Storm

2007-07-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

A novel often has a series of chapters, each with its own narrative drive and all fitting into the larger narrative arc of the whole story.

Interactive fiction sometimes has a great opening chapter, and a great finishing chapter, and great bits and pieces through the middle. But it is the rare piece of IF where the middle doesn't lag, particularly if the player is stumbling around stuck between puzzles. When this happens, the narrative urgency drains away, the seams of illusion become more and more visible, and all the magic dies.

In Lacuna, one of the ways I'm trying to counteract this problem is by including a number of scenes (or "chapters" if you will) that specifically take place during the "lull time" while the player is working on puzzles. These aren't just filler: they serve to strengthen your relationship with Progue, reveal more about the plot, or rachet up the dramatic tension. These sequences typically don't help the player solve any puzzles (there's another mechanism for that) but they serve to distract the player from the main issue long enough to look at it with a fresh perspective when they return, and open up new avenues to explore just when you think the wall you're beating your head against has no cracks.

Over the last few days I coded in the basics of one of the major sequences in this category-- let's call it "The Storm." This is really a series of sequential scenes, building up to a dramatic event, and then allowing the player to make some decisions that affect the game state in nontrivial ways. Though it will feel like a cut scene, control is never taken away from the player; agency is maintained the entire time, meaning there are at least six unique ways the entire sequence can end, based on the player's actions.

I'm very excited about this scene and others like it. At the end of Myst, you had to make a choice between which of the two imprisoned brothers to free. But the game ended once you made that choice. Even the "winning" ending (a third alternative) happens very soon after the choice. In Lacuna, you get to make choices with the same degree of magnitude, play through their consequences, and then live with them throughout the rest of the game. Much later, you might look at what's going on and say "Is this all because of what I did during The Storm?" And you'll be at least partially right.

update

2007-07-15T21:29:00.000-07:00

On the most zoomed-out level, and under the newly redesigned system, Progue has six major psychological states that he moves through during the course of a play session of Lacuna. I've completed the outlines for the first two of these, including a lot of basic conversations and differing behaviors.

One of the interesting things I'm discovering is that there's a lot of humor in Progue's character. A scene which I had always intended to be deadly serious turned out to actually have a lot of comic potential when I went to stage it. I think this is okay: if it makes Progue more likeable, the player will probably be more emotionally invested and interested when things do turn serious towards the end.

The latest count is 81,207 words. This would be higher, but I've removed over 6,000 words since the last count (the original Progue introductory conversation and the original prologue sequence.)

ruminating, resting, fishing, loquating...

2007-07-14T15:01:00.000-07:00

Working my way through Progue's infrastructure now... setting up the frameworks of all of his conversations so that I can alpha-test his relationship with the player. I thought of a new, more interesting opening scene to introduce this pivotal character, and have revised a lot of Progue's autonomous behavior for the early portion of the game. He rambles around the island doing various activities; sleeps when it gets dark; changes his behavior based on his mood; and is aware of what he's doing during conversation. There's still a lot of work to do here, but I've made good solid progress.

* You have won *

2007-07-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

A tool is now in place that lets me quickly jump to any portion of the game and be sure that all variables, conditions, states and objects are where they should be if the game had actually been played to that point. Additionally, the system for turning on and off blocks of code to aid compiling speed has been tweaked such that even with all game modules turned off, the base code knows enough about the structure of the plot and the transition between scenes to be able to step through all the way to the end of the game. So for the first time ever in Lacuna, I saw this post's title: the default Inform message indicating a successful completion. Fairly arbitrary, but it felt good.

Next up will be a similar system for dealing with Progue and his conversations-- in many ways parallel to the complicated states and multilinear development of the plot. Once that's finished I'll have a firm infrastructure and good testing tools, and the creative work can proceed with full force.

Completed: one outline.

2007-07-12T10:34:00.000-07:00

The skeleton of Lacuna is now complete. It's now possible to advance the game machinery from the opening flash-forward prologue all the way to the final epilogue. Good work, me! I'm going to try as hard as possible to forget about the fact that I originally intended to get it finished over a weekend in April.

Progue's new mental workings are programmed, if not made use of in the code yet. Much of the outline makes use of "meta-Progue," who just asks you the outcome of a scene, somewhat disconcertingly ("We either can become friends or I can start disliking you," he chummily summarizes). Two things I want to add immediately to the skeleton are a whole bunch of Progue conversations with this one-paragraph level of detail, so that I can actually roughly simulate the ability of the player to manipulate the relationship with Progue over time, and a "Progue's Head" control room to allow me to adjust any of Progue's variables for testing purposes. On a larger scale, I also need to work out a system that will allow me to jump to any point in the game with all appropriate conditions and variables set, and also probably rework things so that I can easily comment major chunks of the code on and off without breaking things elsewhere. (Right now there are a lot of cross-references, so it's not as easy as it should be to do).

I feel like the four-ton boulder has finally started rolling again.

Reframing paradigms, again

2007-07-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

Progue, the pivotal central character of my game, is troublesome. Not only am I having trouble writing dialogue for him (which we'll have to leave for another blog post), but after hours and hours and hours of conceptual work, I still have not exactly locked down the technical means by which he will be realized: so I'm stymied on both fronts (the technical and the artistic) when I try to deal with him. This morning I finally made some real progress.

During my hiatus, I wrote a pair of technical papers to submit to academic conferences (on interactive narrative and hypertext, respectively) detailing aspects of Lacuna's design. One of them detailed the "archetype" system I'd devised for determining Progue's long-term behavior. This was something I came up with in Hawaii and was conceptually pleased with: based on how the player treats him during the game, Progue is eventually shoehorned into one of several character archetypes (villain, friend, father, etc.) which is then used to determine what happens during the endgame. My paper was rejected by the conference, but as soon as that happened I felt a sort of relief.

Once my archetype system was in no threat of being set down in stone in conference proceedings, I almost immediately realized that I'd designed it backwards. I'd come up with interesting archetypes, but these didn't necessarily translate into interesting endpoints for the relationship with Progue; I had "favorite" endings and others I wasn't terribly interested in. Rather, I should have designed the interesting endpoints first; then worked to construct a system of emotional evolution that would allow the player to reach them. So I did that this morning, taking my "favorite" of the old endgame solutions and adding a few new ones, so that all the endings are equally interesting.

This ties into one of my most strongly held beliefs on interactive narrative: all possible pathways should be equally dramatically satisfying. Obviously each individual person will like or dislike certain outcomes more than others; but rather than having one "best" ending and a series of "runner-up" or "losing" endings, the author should at least strive to make them all as interesting as possible.

Well, I'm back.

2007-07-08T23:10:00.000-07:00

A short break from Lacuna turned into a longer break than I'd ever intended. I'd once hoped to be done by now. Oh well.

Getting back to work was, for some reason, terribly frightening. I'd meant to do it weeks ago. Finally, today, I got back into the code, took stock, made some changes, and got my bearings again. There is still so much to do. I just need to get in there and do it.

More as I get back into the swing of things.

80,543

2007-04-29T20:57:00.000-07:00

We’ve chosen 80,000 words as the cut-off point because there’s something that seems to happen to stories that go on for more than 80,000 words--the length of the book crosses a boundary in terms of scale and scope.

I don't seem to be in a coding mood today. Didn't seem to get much done. Spine almost finished except for some fiddling with the final confrontation. Seems like there's still an infinite amount of work to do.

Is this all worth it?

Starring Anthony Hopkins

2007-04-26T10:12:00.000-07:00

Just got in an hour of work this morning, fixing some bugs in Reb and writing a bit of description for the major character you meet there. This is a person who has served only a placeholder role in the plot structure so far-- I knew he needed to exist, and I knew he needed to have a certain conversation with the player at a certain point in the story, but other than that I didn't really know anything about him. I took a quick stab at giving this character a description with some personality, and a decent introductory monologue. I find an easy way to make a first pass at this sort of thing is to imagine what some particular actor would do with the part. All sorts of mannerisms, bits of business, costume details, and facial expressions usually come to mind: I can write some of this down and then have a springboard to start developing the character. I gave him a bit of an opening monologue too-- all the hooks that will grow into the root-like structure of the conversation, still to be written.

Progress.

Inching closer, else by else.

2007-04-24T13:50:00.000-07:00

Coded some of the semi-tricky bit involving geography repositioning itself for dramatic purposes in one of the endgame worlds (let's call it "Reb" for now). I managed to uncover two new Inform 7 bugs in the process, both for semi-obscure situations. Fortunately nothing show-stopping. Reb's spine is almost done, though fairly threadbare and pitiful; I keep stopping myself from diving into details.

The only thing left to code is some of the machinery to handle leaving and repeat visits and what happens if the player leaves in the middle of X, and so on. The design decision to keep from restricting the player for arbitrary reasons is sound, but it makes for some extra work to account for situations that a lot of designers would just avoid with a "You're not going to do that" message.

It will be worth it. Wherever there are rails, I'm trying my best to hide them.

Not dead yet

2007-04-23T13:44:00.000-07:00

Ran into some conceptual and structural problems with the endgame worlds. To make the design of both of these as realistic and mature as it needs to be, a lot more thought was required than I'd initially guessed. I didn't think I'd have to get into this to complete the spine, but certain design decisions will affect the underlying framework of the game, so my push to finish the game's framework was derailed. I've spent the last few weeks thinking and discussing things with friends, and I think I'm ready to code again.

I'm also really starting to feel urges to get this thing finished up. That might help keep me coasting over further bumps in the road without so much delay.

Progress!

2007-04-09T23:02:00.000-07:00

Great progress tonight. The last puzzle on Lacuna is coded (I could put a qualifier there, but in the spirit of "progress!" I'll abstain) and nearly all of the supporting mechanisms are in place. I even found time to add some details to things like the lava tunnel door. Furthermore, I believe every room on Lacuna now has a description, although many are not fully implemented with all of the time of day and weather details, and there's still plenty of work to do fleshing out the environment. But: all of the objects necessary to solve puzzle exist, and all of the game mechanics to support them are functional, although certainly bugs are still there. Trust me, this really is progress!

I still need to backbone out the two endgame worlds-- one of them has all the rooms and some mechanisms coded already, so it should be simple; the other will require a bit of coding but nothing migraine-inducing-- and then deal with the final business on Lacuna-- and then-- wow-- the rough cut will be done!

Then it's just the part about my main character having only one of his two dozen conversations written.

Progress.... progress...

(Hey! 76,107 words!)

I am now halting in abject failure

2007-04-08T23:17:00.000-07:00

No, don't worry, not me; that's the end of the message Inform 7 gives if you do something that breaks the compiler. One of the many risky things about Lacuna is that I'm programming it in a language that is not yet out of beta. Fortunately, the developers behind this unfinished system manage to work small miracles, and their "beta" language is astonishingly robust. It's only rare that I manage to break it.

Despite some fits and starts, including an utterly frustrating few hours where I completely rewrote some code, twice, only to finally decide the puzzle it served was unworkable in a text adventures, I made good progress, and almost but not quite reached my stated weekend goal. The aforementioned puzzle redesign ate up a lot of time; the old puzzle was beautiful and elegant, but, sadly, had fatal flaws that only presented themselves when I came to actually code it. The puzzles in Lacuna are pretty tightly integrated with both each other and the story; ripping this one out pulled up a number of roots I didn't except to have to replant. The new puzzle-- actually, the two new puzzles-- while perhaps not quite as elegant, is still functional and retains much of what was good about the old one.

There is still one major puzzle to code on Lacuna-- but other than that, it is now possible to play the game from the very beginning all the way to arrival at the endgame worlds (in truncated form, albeit). The two endworlds will require some time to structurally code, and then I want to implement some sort of crude simulation of the flow of interactions with Progue, but I should have my "rough cut" of the game before long. This has been a tremendously valuable exercise: there's nothing like actually coding stuff to bring all the lingering flaws in the design out into the open. Once this business is through, it really will be mostly writing from here on out-- except, of course, for all the changes I'll no doubt decide to make after playing through the rough cut a few times.

I am now halting (for the evening) in abject exhaustion. Good night!

etc

2007-04-06T22:35:00.000-07:00

Did some set-dressing tonight around the Egg-- not strictly necessary for making it through the game, but useful to have more fleshed out because it's a key expository sequence-- and also added some significant chunks to Progue's goal-seeking code for his idle time. Neither strictly gets me closer to my weekend goal, I suppose, but both will help the first run through feel like its of a more completed game. All the description writing also pumped up the word count, although I'm not paying attention to that anymore. (*cough69,480cough*)

A person is usually hale

2007-04-05T23:13:00.000-07:00

I put in the infrastructure for the "injury" business, a way of allowing agency. Part of the design philosophy of Lacuna is to, whenever possible, allow the player to do something they've requested. In many games with a lake you'd receive, at best, a stock message like "There's no time for swimming" if you tried to jump in: Lacuna will cheerfully describe you taking a nice swim, even if it doesn't necessarily advance the story. One of the interesting side effects of this is that allowing the player to do somewhat dangerous things opens up new angles on the storytelling and the relationship with the central character. Indeed, the scene I coded tonight might even occur before you've met the central character, leading to a very interesting starting point for defining a relationship with him.

I'd hoped to code more "conversation backbones" this evening, but only ended up having an hour to work because of spending the evening with friends. My goal for the weekend is to get my skeletal version of Lacuna complete, and, by Sunday night, "play it" all the way through for the first time. My earlier analogy of a rough cut was perhaps a bit generous; it's going to be more like laying all the storyboards together in a row, but it will still be a notable milestone.

remove the sun

2007-04-03T22:56:00.000-07:00

Continuing my quest to complete the backbone of Lacuna, the infrastructure for the dreams is now in place, and a skeleton of each dream is presented in-game. I learned an excellent piece of advice on how far to carry simulationism in IF from Emily Short: only simulate some aspect of the real world if it's important to your story or puzzles. As it turns out, dreaming is used in Lacuna for at least three separate purposes. The code for sleepiness and even some circadian rhythms was done way back in the Myst fanfic days; what was done tonight was testing of the scene mechanism for dreams (complex due to the various types of dreams going on) and particularly the coding for the final dream wherein you set two passwords (for which I made use of an excellent extension by Jesse McGrew.)

Speaking of extensions: since the bulk of Lacuna is now tied up in custom extensions, there's no longer an easy way for me to see a total word count. This is probably for the best, as I'll no longer obsess over what is ultimately a very poor and not terribly useful measure of my progress.

(67,116.)

Bite-sized

2007-03-31T12:09:00.000-07:00

Lots of piddly work today. Making sure all of the puzzles in the main part of the game work correctly and in sequence. Fixing up lots of room descriptions with newer syntax. Also I split the main file into a bunch of smaller chunks that I can comment on and off, to save time during compiling. (Inform 7 wasn't really designed for longer IF; I'm worried I'm going to hit some unforseen wall eventually...)

Assuming all the existing puzzles check out, there's at least three I still have to code, including one that's pretty complex, and another that still has some conceptual issues to work out. But hopefully in a few more days it will be possible to play the "rough cut" of Lacuna all the way until the lengthy end-game begins.

64,480

2007-03-29T22:35:00.000-07:00

The opening sequence rough cut is complete, though there will still be much to write there before the final cut-- namely the conversation with Rume. But you can now wayfare, and get to Lacuna.

I have been leaving behind a trail of smashed assumptions at the start of my source code. A number of internal variables in Inform are set to modest values by the compiler; as each is exceeded by my story's ever-expanding girth I must manually declare a more robust value. Tonight's victims were MAX_OBJECTS and MAX_DICT_ENTRIES; may their default values rest in peace.

Spine building

2007-03-28T21:51:00.000-07:00

"The concept of love is an abstraction in the Bedroom." <--- Lacuna source code, written tonight.

Veering off in a different but more useful tangent tonight, I've decided to focus on getting the "spine" of the game built out-- all the scenes, the way they fit together, the rooms they take place in, the decision points, and so on to the very end, even if some of this is in only skeleton form. The goal is to have a sort of "rough cut" version that could actually be played through from beginning to end, rather than the thousands of pretty pieces that are often disconnected from each other at the moment.

In this spirit, I put in place the first two vertebrae: the very beginning of the game, a short, evocative flash-forward, and the first real scene, including the "opening move" choice which was part of my reconceptualization of Lacuna after I dropped the Myst universe connection. I'd written some of these out in longhand in a notebook in Hawaii; it felt good to convert them into digital form and the well-backed-up vault of the Lacuna project directory.

Also tonight I made a few small changes required to get Lacuna to compile under the newest build of Inform. So far each successive release of the Inform 7 open beta has required only minor tweaks to my code, a testament to the I7 design team. For this release I had to run a regex on the code to change a certain phrasing that the new build doesn't like; but I did get everything to compile again, in the end.