…and quite frankly, so many stinkers right away!
seriously, I’ve played some kind of space visual novel which was just linear clickety-clickety for every damn paragraph or dialogue sentence for the entirety of it! It had just 3, PRECISELY 3, actual meaningful interactions and 2 of them were not for branching, just small flourishes, like the many irrelevant choices in a ChoiceScript game. I guess only the last interaction may have branched or not.
I didn’t read any of it, only got glimpses of what was going on as I clicked my way through. That’s the annoying thing about linear choice-based IF: it really doesn’t demand any real attention span from the player, no challenge, no sense of accomplishing anything at all. You just clickthrough like a guy falling towards his doom. Gave it a 2 for so much broken text and images and even music and no actual INTERACTION OR PROPER FICTION. You know, I very much prefer to read a pageful of text or to read small snippets of text and actually act my way through somehow. This is what new IF authors don’t get at all…
Now I’m playing one that seems to had forgone text altogether - at least I’m grateful for that as each small snippet of twitter sentence seems to get ages to get animated on screen, like as if they are reading for really small, illiterate kids - in favor of symbols! That’s right, this is all about choosing the right symbols to speak with the game. It takes the old problem of guess-the-verb to whole new heights! A 3, for originality and presentation.
…
1 Like
lglasser is twitching again. IF Comp game videos, Monday 2 PM CST (UTC-6).
Weeding out the material that’s inferior or incompetent is always the least fun part of the process, but on the bright side it sounds like things can only get better from this point. 
I didn’t get off to an early start this year as I like to do usually. I’ve been so busy I’m just downloading the games today, and looking ahead I’m sad to say I might not be able to play them all this time around (as I have done for the past several years).
Keep us updated on your experiences, and I’ll check back in once I’ve had time to get through a few entries.
Half the games are an hour or less - this year the estimated playing time is published on ifcomp’s website. Many are 15 minutes. A couple games are really long 5+ hours to finish.
Good luck!
There was an author, Filip something, who was heavily promoting for some time his new web cyoa engine with battles run by luck and some parameters. He entered a game in it, Insignificant Little Thing (or something like that).
Think your usual Tolkien fare of orcs, goblins and trolls - sorry, ogres - coupled with Game of Thrones gore and addiction to human waste. That’s the background for 2 fleeting human slaves. There’s a fair bit of world modelling at place, you can go back and forth rooms and examine things more attentively and get things into your inventory. And choose wisely your actions, of course.
And while there are some rudimentary lock-key puzzles, most of the challenge comes - as in mainstream games - from battles. Some choice of actions are displayed along with a “?” button to clearly inform the player of the intention and perhaps the odds according to current stamina as such. You choose one and let the dice roll. If you’re unlucky, you may try once more at the cost of some stamina (the author claims this is kind of like Skyrim in text, but there’s no bread or cheese around easily).
It’s short and there’s far more text than real action. Plus, as I finally broke free from orc slavery, with a special sword at hand and some promise of further adventures, the game suddenly ends. Looks like the proverbial first shot is free. Anyway, charming enough and with some real meat. an 8 in my book…
meanwhile, in that other forum, a whole host of clones new and old busy at promoting their games. Impressive.
well, now that NeoGAF got rid of their sjw crust, there’s hope IF will be their last bastion, and thus become way more widespread. sadly, that doesn’t mean more parser games, of course, but more clickable twitter fiction…
Perhaps they’ll even vote en masse on this IFComp…
