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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: [Announce] Exposition in IF -- draft in progress
Message-ID: <GGFoLD.BwL@world.std.com>
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 22:46:23 GMT
References: <9im7el$664$1@wiscnews.wiscnet.net> <Xns90DD9721Aknight37gamespotmail@209.155.56.82>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:89762

Knight37 <knight37@gamespotmail.com> wrote:
>I really liked the way a lot of the Infocom games did their exposition,
>though, with feelies in the package before you even started the game. It was
>interactive, and it really added to the flavor of the game, plus you got the
>idea of who you were supposed to be before you even started the game up.

In my just-released "The Weapon", I took the opposite tack
(as did many Infocom games, I think, e.g. Trinity's comic
book), using the feelie to reveal the backstory in detail,
and leaving the in-game prologue to roughly describe the
character and the task.  This has the advantage that if
done carefully, the feelie can be skipped without endangering
playability. (There was a puzzle game in comp 1999 which
put the entire prologue text in a readme... I think it was
SNOSAE? It made the game really goofy without it.)

>As an aside, it bothered me that the bedroom description in the example game
>was something about it being a Monday ever time I looked at it as opposed to
>describing what the room looked like. That's another no-no IMHO (using room
>descriptions for non-descriptive text) and may not be the best thing to put in
>an example game for newbies. :)

Something I did a lot in "The Weapon" (and somewhat in "Fit for a Queen")
was include non-description text in room and object descriptions, but
only the first time they printed--I have a compiler modification that
allows me to very easily write text that only prints once.  You can
see "through" this if you simply examine each thing two times in a row,
but if you play it normally, I think it's a nice improvement.
(Try LOOKing again on the first turn, or examining DOORWAY, WINDOW,
SLAB, CHERYL twice in a row.)

The same tech is used in places simply to shorten some descriptions that
might otherwise get tedious, and is used in reverse in a few places to
provide a hint the second or third time you do some action.  Unfortunately,
if knowledge of that was widespread, people would just go around examining
everything twice and only reading the second one, which would rather
defeat the effort that went into making it that way. So it's probably
best used sparingly, instead of frequently.

SeanB
