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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: WHICH OF THESE DO YOU PREFER IN IF?
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Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 10:52:47 GMT
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Ashley Price <ashleyprice@DELETE-THISbtinternet.com> wrote:
>You are at the end of the first section of my game. Once you do the correct
>command you will go somewhere else and will not be able to return to this
>section. But what if you do not have all the items required for the next
>section (or the one after that) that may be in this first section?
>
>I take it you would like to be warned, otherwise going to the next section
>without the necessary items will make the game unwinnable (and possibily,
>uncompletable - if that is a word)?

I'd rather the game be structured in some way so that you can't go
on without getting everything, but it's not that you're just stopped
by the magic fairy who says "you have to have X Y and Z for the next
section".

If there's no way to design around that, I'm not sure what the best
thing is.

"For a Change" implemented a check like this and warned you AFTER you
did the action that you had made the game unwinnable. (Except I
think it only warned you TWO turns after, hope you had multi-turn
UNDO--if it did, my bad for not thinking of that at the time I
beta-tested.) This seemed to make people not very happy, but nobody
could think of anything better either. (I'm thinking specifically
of a review from either zarf or Adam Cadre, I forget.)

The Weapon was in beta a long time, and one of the hings I was
trying to resolve during those many months was how to deal with
one particular puzzle, which if I allowed you to do the winning
action too early in the game, you would make the game
unwinnable, yet still be able to solve lots of the puzzles
in the game; and although there would be an obvious change in
the scenario it probably wouldn't be clear you had done something
wrong. I ended up with a lame hack--you couldn't get out of the
handcuffs until the same stage of the game where the action was
safe without closing things off, so I made the action be
not-takable until you were out of the handcuffs, with some
spurious fictional justification for why the handcuffs prevented it.

But then I'm personally a strong proponent of never being closed off,
i.e. it's impossible to make the game unwinnable--that's what I prefer
in games I play so that's what I strive to write. I don't know how
universal that really is; look, for instance, at Lock & Key or
better yet Varicella (since it is basically part of the design
of Lock & Key in a sort of special way).

Another puzzle in The Weapon included an action that if I had
let you take it early on, it would have put the game in a state
where no matter what you did on that turn, you would lose on the
next one. At the appropriate time in the game, there WOULD be some
action you could take to avoid losing. I would have LIKED to let
you do this action and lose, and at least learn by dying a little
(as the sort-of fallback-clue system), but I was uncomfortable
with the idea of giving the player even ONE turn of the
game-closed-off-ness; because (a) the player might spend an
inordinate amount of time searching for an action that
would get them out safely (despite there being none), because
(b) on a terp with only one turn of UNDO, they'd potentially
lose a bunch of progress, and because (c) I wanted to promise
in the ABOUT that the game never closed off. Unfortunately, I
couldn't even find a lame fictional explanation for letting you
not do it, so the PC had to intervene and refuse, which is just
barely better than the magic fairy.

SeanB
