I have wanted to make it a goal to write one IFDB review a month. Maybe of an old game, and not a review to beat up on an old game which wasn’t very good, but just–this game interested me, and I found the good and bad interesting.
And my Windows scheduler pops up http://ifdb.tads.org once a day, and I’m sad when I don’t see any new reviews for a bit.
It’s been interesting to see new people move up the ranks and replace the old top reviewers, and even if we don’t make it to the top, it’d be neat just to add our voice and maybe encourage others to post there. People have been reviewing…
So has anyone else thought about reviewing more on IFDB? I find that not having too high a goal helps you do stuff, and it helps when anyone else has the same goal.
This thread inspired me to write a review that I’ve been meaning to write for a couple years: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=hxb9w8nsowgom8qw&review=41873
Unfortunately, I doubt I’ll keep up with the thread’s goal as I’m actually pretty terrible about making the time to play IF these days (and finding ones I really like). On the other hand, I’ve been meaning to share some thoughts with you about Heezy Park, your EctoComp game from 2015.
Overall, it was a cute, enjoyable, and fun game, but the thing that I found most striking was that, in the end, I found some of the in-game help a bit misleading. I really liked the abstract hint of the MegaSol, but there was something about some of the THINK responses that distracted me from the solution instead of leading me towards it. Especially since the game funnels the player’s actions a fair amount, I ended up thinking maybe sometimes giving the player less is the right answer. I made this decision myself in my little joke ALAN game, IN-D-I-GO SOUL, and Heezy Park sort of reinforced my feeling.
Anyhow, I’ve always thought it was interesting that the game made me think so much about that dynamic so much but have largely held my tongue because I wasn’t sure if it was useful criticism.
Thanks, actually, I was planning to re-release it and figured I could do some cluing better. I’d let the re-release get bogged down. So this is a real help!
Good luck on keeping the goal up. I find setting seemingly very low goals works quite well for me.
Roughly related to the Yerkes-Dodson Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes–Dodson_law
We have to have the right amount of emotional involvement, and nobody can calculate it for us.
My goal is to have a game in place of the usual time wasters. Sometimes I’m amazed how much I get done just avoiding the obvious traps.
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Truth be told, kinda tired of just beating clickable drivel myself over there. I wish there was something more substantial to talk about rather than all the twitter fiction that pops up over there. Luckly, IFComp is almost upon us and luckly it’ll feature more than clickable fiction…