SPAG
The
Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games
ISSUE
#51
SPAG #51 is copyright (c) 2008 by Jimmy Maher.
Authors of reviews and articles retain the rights to their
contributions.
All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine
with the traditional 'at' sign.
IN
THIS ISSUE
Editorial
IF News
Interviews
with the Top Comp 2007 Finishers:
Sam
Gordon, author of Lord
Bellwater's Secret
Christopher
Huang, author of An Act
of Murder
Admiral
Jota and Grunk, authors of Lost
Pig
The
World of Italian IF: A SPAG
Special Feature
A
History of Italian IF by torredifuoco
Italian IF Interviews:
Enrico Columbini
A Review of L'Apprendista Stregone by Enrico Columbini
Giancarlo Niccolai
Alessandro Schillaci
Roberto Grassi
An
Interview with Peter Nepstad
Reviews
of the H.P. Lovecraft Commonplace Book Project Games
Dead Cities by Jon
Ingold
Ecdysis
by Peter Nepstad
The Cellar by David
Whyld
Handyman Wanted by
Roger Tober and Nige Copeland
Beyond the Threshold
by Thomas 'Nihil' Busse
El Museo de las Consciencias
by various authors
Lieux Communs by
various authors
Other
Reviews
1893: A World's Fair Mystery
by Peter Nepstad
Rendition by
nespresso
Sunburst Contamination
by Fredrik Ramsberg and Johan Berntsson
EDITORIAL
Two people who
played a big role in the history of interactive fiction recently passed
away within a day of each other. You probably know
the identity of one of the figures of whom I will write, as news of his
passing has been all over the Internet and even made its way into the
New York Times.
The other's passing, though, you may not be even be aware of.
The two gentlemen never met one another and moved in very
different spheres, but they do share one thing in common: they both had
immense influence on IF without even seeming to realize it.
What can I say? We swim in a very small pond.
Let's deal with the obvious first: Gary Gygax in the early 1970's
invented a little game called
Dungeons
and Dragons with the help -- exactly how
much help depends
on
who you ask -- of one Dave Arnenson.
D&D begat
Adventure when Will
Crowther, an early enthusiast, decided to try to bring some of his
tabletop RPG experiences to the computer.
Adventure in turn
begot not just more text adventures and in turn this community, but
also graphical adventures and the more combat and simulation focused
genre of computer RPGs. As the years went by, other forms of
computer games in turn co-opted many of the tropes and storytelling
methods of these genres. Meanwhile, computer RPGs went online
and became
MMORPG's, easily the most profitable niche in the modern PC game
market. To say that the modern gaming landscape would look
different without Gygax's creation hardly begins to describe the
situation. Would IF exist today without
D&D?
It's a question I can't answer, of course, although I suspect
it would, albeit in possibly a very different form. Certainly
we would have far fewer games with dragons cluttering up our history.
It's almost criminally easy to make fun of
D&D
and (the stereotype of) the people who play it, of course, and
many of the articles that have greeted Gygax's passing have indulged in
plenty of snark. I understand. It's hard for any
writer to hold back when presented with such a juicy target.
(For an excellent 2006 article that has its fun with
D&D but
gets to the heart of its appeal at the same time, go
here.)
I do wonder whether many of these writers realize, though,
just how influential Gygax's geeky creation has actually been on modern
culture, and not just on gaming culture. I would argue that
the recent glut of big-budget fantasy movies can, for instance, be
traced
back, through many twists and turns and by no means exclusively, to
D&D.
People who have no idea what the game even is are feeling its
influence when they go to their local cineplex.
Gygax himself didn't seem to understand just what he had wrought.
He came to
D&D
from the mathematically rigorous, simulation-heavy world of wargames,
and always seemed to relate to his creation in those turns.
The standard Gygax model for
D&D
involved descending into a generic dungeon just because it was there,
killing everything inside, and taking away the loot. He
played the game not as a shared story or as improvisational theatre but
as a single unit wargame, a series of challenges to be tactically
overcome. As such he was largely an uninterested bystander
for the last twenty-five years of tabletop RPG innovation.
Nor do I suspect he would find much of interest in our work
in this community. Still, he was by all accounts a man who
genuinely loved games, and he began a revolution -- even if almost
accidentally -- in the way we tell, play, and think about stories and
games. Not a bad legacy to have. The bad Hollywood
movies and glut of generically bad fantasy novels all over the shelves
of your local bookstore we'll just agree to overlook.
The other person I want to eulogize here is even more
tangentially
related to IF. Joseph Weizenbaum's passing has not
received
the press of Gygax's, but he is nevertheless a fascinating figure.
You might recognize Weizenbaum as the creator of
Eliza, the first
chatterbot that, in addition to causing a huge stir in the media at the
idea of a computer actually doing something clever and at least mildly
entertaining, was also a big influence on early IF. One can
see
Eliza
in the old Scott Adams games, for instance, where the player is assumed
to be talking to and ordering about a character in the game world.
This "PC" even occasionally talks back to the
"player."
In the modern era we
have largely (though not completely) retreated from this model in favor
of the player directly embodying a role in the game world.
Still, a "game" of
Eliza
is indistinguishable in a casual glance from even a
modern game of IF.
I had always thought of Weizenbaum as just "the
Eliza guy," but
recently dived deeper into his life and work while researching
a
paper on magical and technological AI. Weizenbaum
never had any illusions about
Eliza.
He was bemused and eventually disturbed by the reactions of
people to what was essentially a clever language hack, to the point of
writing
a
book
not about, as one might expect, the wondrous future of computer AI but
rather a scathing critique of the field and a warning about the dangers
of attempting to reproduce the magic of our humanity in a machine.
I think of Weizenbaum's book when I read about research into
creating fully computer-generated stories and when I look at projects
like
Chris Crawford's Storytron
and the fascinating but ultimately frustrating
Façade.
As a newbie IF author just working on his first full project,
I
don't want to let you create your own story with my game. I
want
to rather let you find your own way through
my story.
I don't
want to railroad you or frustrate you, and I want to make the best use
I can of interactivity. Still, while the interactivity may be
yours the fiction is mine. I don't think that the main
strength
of new media storytelling is in becoming a sort of wish-fullfilment
fantasy, a box from which you can get any story you want. I
rather think it is a way of allowing you to engage with characters,
settings, and, yes, story, in a way that is more immersive and
immediate than you might find in a conventional printed work.
A
novel lets you read and imagine a story; IF lets you directly explore
the story. At the core of both, though, must remain the human
author working her magic. IF must be a good faith
relationship between player and author. If the player tries
to
break that bond, acting deliberately out of the PC's character
and
actively attempting to "break" the story in the name of some demand for
absolute freedom, I submit that the fault lies with that player.
In other words, I'm pretty much with
Stephen
Bond on this one. For better or worse, Weizenbaum's
book helped to bring me there.
Here at
SPAG
I've made some
changes, as I'm sure you've noticed. Some of you may not like
it,
but I thought it was time to bring the magazine forward, if not all the
way to 2008 (we do still play text adventures, after all), at least to
the late 1990's. I won't be sending out each issue to
subscribers
anymore, but rather sending a link to the page where you can
read
it. For those who like to print the issue for offline
reading, a
printer-friendly version is still available by following the link at
the bottom of the framing page. Publishing the issues on the
web
page in HTML will allow us to make use of such modern niceties as
italics and boldface, allow other sites to link to individual
articles, and allow us to return the favor. I think it will
make
the magazine easier to navigate, easier to read, and much more
attractive to newbies. Last but not least, it will make my
life
much easier. I really cannot express how painful it is to
edit a
plain ASCII newletter with hard line-breaks. I look forward
to
spending more time drumming up and creating richer content and less
time cursing in front of my text editor. Even if you aren't
sold
on the changes to the delivery model, I hope the content of future
issues will make up for it. I have high hopes and big plans
for
the future!
But we've got a lot to offer right now as well: a great, in-depth
conclusion to our series on foreign IF, with articles, interviews, and
reviews focusing on the Italian community; interviews with the
three top finishers from last fall's Competition, including the newly
annointed XYZZY Best NPC Grunk himself; an interview with Peter Nepstad
about his IF work; and reviews of all the Lovecraft Competition games
plus a few others. Enjoy!
Back to Table of Contents
IF
NEWS
Spring Thing 2008
The Spring Thing 2008 games have just been released. Only
three titles, but at first glance they all look very promising.
You have until April 28 to play the games and submit your
votes.
Third
IF
Whispers Game Released
House of Dream of Moon
is a game written by ten separate authors, each of whom had only the
preceding section to base their own work on.
C-40
Competition Results
The C-40 competition to create games for an imaginary hardware
implementation of the Z-Machine with only 40K of RAM has concluded.
It attracted three entrants, but all by the same author (the
idefatiguable David Fisher) and none of them were actually IF.
Still, they do make an interesting collection of Z-Machine
abuses, and one can never have too many of those, right?
Thanks to Sam Trenholme for running the competition.
IF Art Show 2008
Marnie Parker will be running another IF Art Show this year for more
avant-garde works. The deadline for submitting an entry is
May 2.
ZLR, a new Windows
Z-Machine Interpreter
I don't know about you, but I find it a little mind-boggling that in
this age of Inform 7 text adventures are now bogging down our
multi-gigaherz monster machines. Still, here we are, and
Vaporware is working on an ultra-high performance Windows terp to
address the problem. Now if he can just add Glulx support.
(Another thing that boggles my mind is that even many
moderate-sized games now require Glulx. Ain't progress grand?)
Flaxo,
A Flash-based Z-Machine Interpreter
In other Z-Machine interpreter news, Peter Mattsson is working on an
implementation in Flash. When completed, Flaxco could be a
great
way to offer IF for web-based play. To answer the first
question
that comes to mind: no, it's not hideously slow, at least in running
the (Inform 6) sample game.
Folio
Z-Code Interpreter
And finally, because mankind can never have enough Z-Code interpreters,
we have this cool specimen that renders games in a graphical book
format. Still an early release, but well worth checking out
as a novel (pun intended) new look for IF.
WIDE
Alessandro Schillaci has released WIDE, a Windows IDE for Inform 6
development similar to JIF but written in good old platform-native C++
rather than Java. It's still in beta, but looks quite far
advanced already. See our interview Alessandro in this issue
for more discussion of WIDE.
One-Room
Game Competition Results
The
2007 edition attracted an impressive nine entrants: five in English and
four in Italian. David Fisher's entrant
Suveh Nox was the
winner. Thanks to Francesco Cordella for organizing the
competition.
Treasures of a
Slaver's Kingdom
S. John Ross has created a very, very bad game that he strongly
cautions you not to play under any circumstances.
French
IF Competition
The French IF community's annual competition has come and gone.
Five entrants, the winner being Eric Forgeot's
Les
Heures du vent.
Child's
Play
A new game by Stephen Granade. It's a dog eat dog world in
the
nursery... Stephen has also released his Inform 7 source code
for
the game
here.
DreamPath
Ido Flaishon has designed a new system for creating Choose Your Own
Adventure-style stories. Closed source and Windows only, but
free
for non-commercial use.
Interactive
Short Fiction Competition
IF
Beginner's Comp
Two competitions recently took place, each challenging entrants to
create a game suitable for introducing beginners to IF. They
not
only share a theme, but also four of the same games as entrants.
The difference? Mark Engelber's IF Short Fiction
Competition is judged by its organizer, while the winner
of David
Fisher's (there he is again!) IF Beginner's Comp is determined by
popular vote. It didn't make much difference, though:
Mrs. Pepper's Nasty Secret
by Jim Aikin and Eric Eve won both handily enough.
IF
Cover Art Drive
Emily Short has initiated a project to pair up artistically
challenged authors with artists who have enjoyed their work and might
want to return something in the form of a cool bit of cover art to
advertise and represent their game. Read all about it on
Emily's
blog at the link above, and if you have the talent please think about
helping out.
Legerdemain
Not a traditional IF game, but rather a textual
RPG which, in
its author's words, "borrows heavily from the genres of
Roguelike
games as well as interactive fiction." By Nathan D. Jerpe.
2007
XYZZY Awards
The 2007 winners of the XYZZY Awards, our community's equivalent of the
Grammy Awards if the Grammy Awards didn't suck so bad, have been
announced. Congratulations to all the winners, and especially
to
Admiral Jota and Grunk, whose
Lost
Pig cleaned up pretty good.
PAWS
After a five-year hiatus PAWS (the Python Adventure Writing Systems) is
back. PAWS is, as you might have surmised, a library for
creating
IF using the programming language Python.
Back to Table of Contents
Interviews
with the Top Competition 2007 Finishers
It's been a
long-time tradition with
SPAG
to publish interviews with the top three finishers in each year's IF
Competition. This year, Sam Gordon (author of the third-place
game
Lord Bellwater's
Secret), Christopher Huang (author of the second-place
game
An Act of Murder),
and Admiral Jota and Grunk (co-authors of Comp winner
Lost Pig) were all
kind enough to answer my questions.
Back to Table of Contents
Interview
with Sam Gordon, author of Lord
Bellwater's Secret
Jimmy:
Tell us a little bit about that insignifcant portion of your life
outside of the world of IF. Introduce yourself to SPAG's readers.
Sam: In "real life" I live in England; I'm married, with three
children; and I work as an IT project manager for a large company. I
think my family believe me to be a reasonably normal and well-balanced
individual...with the exception of my interest in the world of IF,
which they regard as a bizarre social aberration, not to be mentioned
in polite company.
In my work I have engaged in collaborative projects with other
companies in the U.S.A., Canada, the Middle East and continental
Europe, so I would like to think that I have gained a slightly greater
"world view" than is sometimes ascribed to my fellow countrymen. The
famous headline "Fog over English Channel: Europe isolated" doesn't
work for me! Although the IF community is probably strongest in North
America, it is actually quite international in its make-up and I think
that adds to its strength and diversity.
Jimmy: How long have you
been interested in IF, and what prompted that interest?
Sam: My first encounter with IF was in 1981. It was my first job in the
IT industry and we were developing embedded systems using the new Intel
16-bit microprocessors of that era. We used Intel's custom development
systems to compile code and download it into target systems and, one
day, one of my colleagues turned up with a floppy disk which he loaded
into the development system and showed me a program called
ADVENT.
I was instantly lost in the world of caves, beanstalks and bears: I
"worked" late into the evening that day, until a company security guard
virtually threw me out of the building at about midnight.
I enjoyed the Infocom games when they came out but rather forgot about
IF until about 3 or 4 years ago when I read something about Inform 6
and, from there, discovered that there was a thriving IF culture.
Jimmy: In addition to
Lord
Bellwater's Secret, you have written two games for One Room Game
Competitions: Final Selection and Urban Conflict. Before we get to
Bellwater, tell us a bit about those games, and about the challenges
that come with writing in such a restrictive format. (Bellwater is
almost one room too,
come to think of it...)
Sam: By nature, I'm a great starter of new things and a poor finisher
of anything (but please don't tell my boss or our clients!) So,
unsurprisingly, I've started writing a lot of games but only finished
the three that you mention. I think perhaps the discipline of working
within the constraints of a single room scenario is good for me in
avoiding over-elaboration and increasing the chances of finishing.
Final Selection
was my first "published" game: at the time I thought that a one-room
game would be a good starting point as I would be able to write it very
quickly. In any event it missed the 2005 one-room competition and I
ended up reworking it for the 2006 competition, so it wasn't very quick
at all.
Final Selection
was an unashamed puzzle game with very little story: a classic
one-roomer, I suppose.
I began working on
Urban
Conflict (along with several other ideas that have never
seen the light of day) almost as soon as as I had finished
Final Selection.
It was inspired by a visit to a museum in Budapest, which included an
interesting exhibit explaining the workings of the Kalashnikov assault
rifle. I wanted to do something quite different from the usual one-room
formula and instead tried to model the interaction of two people,
confined by circumstances to sharing a single room. I think the game
received some credit for being ambitious but was generally not liked as
a game.
Jimmy: Bellwater is one
of the two
top three finishers from this Competition that have no supernatural,
magical, or science fictional elements at all. That's rather unusual
for a genre that is still somewhat dominated by fantastical stories.
Any thoughts on this? (Boy, that's vague, huh?)
I'm not very confident in my own writing ability and I suppose I have
been rather unambitious in terms of the actual story-telling of my
games. I am enormously impressed by authors who can write good fantasy
- and for me that means creating a world that is entirely convincing
and consistent, in which the laws of physics may not be the ones we are
accustomed to, but there are some consistent laws in place,
nevertheless. Tolkein was a master of that: Isaac Asimov, Philip
Pullman and J K Rowling are pretty good too. Come to think of it, I
also admire the more whimsical (and less consistent) fantasy writers
like Douglas Adams as well, but I've never tried writing anything
whimsical.
I have toyed with writing something a bit more magical: one of my
unfinished games involves replacing all the usual "game rules" with a
completely different set if the character happens to be holding a
particular magical object:. For example they can "see" inside closed
containers which they examine. However, I'm making no promises about
whether this will ever be finished!
Jimmy: Bellwater had a
really nice
Victorian feel to its scenery and its writing. As someone who
has
read way more Dickens, Trollope and Brontë sisters
than is healthy for anyone, I just have to ask whether you are a fan of
this era of literature?
Sam: Thanks for the kind words about
Bellwater!
Dickens is certainly one of my favourite authors: he was a wonderful
storyteller and created such vivid characters. I would definitely
include "David Copperfield" in my list of 10 favourite books of all
time! Dickens wasn't a conscious influence on
Bellwater
but was probably lurking somewhere in the background (come to think of
it, "Lord Bellwater" almost sounds like a name out of Dickens). Also,
it's difficult to write that sort of genre without a nod to Conan
Doyle. I have to confess to not much liking the Brontës....and
I
have already been severely reprimanded by one Competition judge for the
fact that none of the Brontës' titles appear in Lord
Bellwater's
private libarary! At the time I was working on Bellwater, I had just
been rereading some of Daphne du Maurier's novels. Although they were
written much more recently, they have some similarities with the
Victorian novels with, for example,
My Cousin Rachel
being set in the 19th century and being pervaded by a vivid sense of
impending doom. Although I wasn't directly trying to copy her writing
style or mood, I was certainly influenced.
Jimmy: Your game made a
great point
of always telling me where I was in the room. For instance,
when
I examine the desk after looking at the bookshelves I see this: "You
turn from the bookshelves and walk over to the desk." I can't say this
annoyed me, but I was a little confused about why the game was so
concerned with informing me of my position. Was I just missing
something obvious?
Sam: I did something similar in
Final
Selection
as I wanted to create a sense of space and movement, although I was
restricting myself to the single room. I decided to do the same with
Bellwater,
with the same intention. One of the difficulties with a one-room game
is that it can seem as though you are standing still, surrounded by a
heap of objects and I certainly wanted to avoid that. I wouldn't try to
use it for anything other than a (predominantly) one-room game. For
those interested in the actual writing of code, I would add that behind
the scenes, the game is actually implemented as several "rooms" at the
code level, although all remain "in scope" all the time. This has the
advantage of managing some of the potential disambiguation problems
(the game assumes that the player is more likely to be referring to an
object in the current area, rather than a distant corner of the room,
for example). However, the automatic movement between areas of the room
ended up getting very complicated: if the player types GET KEY, for
example, the game can easily move the character to the part of the room
where the key happens to be; however LOCK DOOR WITH KEY presents a lot
more problems for automated movement, particularly if, for example, the
player is in the fireplace, the key is by the window and the door is at
the other end of the room!
Jimmy: I was a bit
frustrated that I
couldn't get an unequivocally happy ending out of the game, to the
point of replaying several times in the hope of seeing same. Why did
you decide to leave even the winning ending rather mixed in tone?
Sam: Yes, a lot of people were unhappy with the ending! I tried writing
several different endings but was unconvinced by an unequivocally happy
one. One of the themes of the game was supposed to be the iniquities of
the British class system (although I certainly wasn't trying to ram
that down the player's throat). I felt that even with the protagonist
being successful in his quest for justice, it would be most likely that
the British establishment would close ranks and deny him his full
inheritance
Jimmy:. Huge compliments
on the
design of the puzzles, which were clever but always fair and solvable,
and on the way you took into account so many incorrect actions the
player might try, such as hiding in the fireplace and trying to ambush
her attacker. Any thoughts on either of these choices, or the general
design of the game as a whole, to share?
Sam: Thanks again for the compliments! The feature that people have
commented on most favorably was the bookshelves - people seem to have
amused themselves either with taking volumes at random from the shelves
or looking up their own favorites in the index. Several have asked me
if there are really 1200 books on the shelves, like it says in the room
decription. (In fact there are only about 50 titles implemented, but
they are allocated to their positions on the shelves only when the
player tries to remove them.)
A wall safe is always a bit of a cliche. In real life, you don't leave
the combination lying about, but in IF you have to let the player find
it. In
Bellwater,
I think the
player has to put together the information from three sources and use a
bit of logic to work out the combination. I thought this was fair (and
I'm glad you agree).
The final puzzle that allows the player to escape from the room was
made unneccessarily hard by some rather weak implementation. I'm fixing
this in a bug-fix version of the game.
Jimmy: I concur with
your assessment.
I thought the safe puzzle was great fun, and was able to
solve it
on my own. The final puzzle, on the other hand, got me
because
the game didn't understand GO THROUGH WINDOW or even ENTER WINDOW, only
EAST. Grr... Anyway, moving on...
Did you play the other
Competition games? Favorites? Impressions?
Sam: Yes I played most of the games. I thought that almost
all were very solid and competent but that
Lost Pig
stood head and shoulders above the rest, and well deserved its winning
position. The character of Grunk and his style of speaking were
beautifully depicted and that illusive "sense of immersion" was fully
realized.
Jimmy: Are you working
on anything now? Can you tell us about it?
Sam: Although I have quite a few partially-implemented games, I am not
really working on anything definite (apart from a bug-fix version of
Bellwater that just
tidies a few things up).
[Fix
that window! -- Jimmy]
Ideally I would like to try a collaboration with another writer. I
think that working with someone else could be great fun. I often feel
that IF is more like drama than literature and it would be interesting
to work with someone who has had some experience of acting or writing
for the stage. However, even just a different perspective would be
useful. I think, for example, that
Urban
Conflict
could have been a much better game if I had worked with a collaborator
and we had worked together on the relationship between the two
characters. However, life outside IF is quite busy at the moment and I
don't want to start scouting around for a writing partner until I can
definitely commit some time to the project.
Back to Table of Contents
Interview
with Christopher Huang, author of An
Act of Murder
Jimmy:
Tell us a little bit about your life when you aren't writing
IF.
Interests, job, geographical location, etc. Whatever you feel
comfortable sharing and that won't attract Internet stalkers...
Christopher: I work in an architectural firm in Montreal. And
yes, I did sketch out floor plans for the house in
Act Of Murder.
In my downtime, I while away the hours playing games, unless it's
November in which case I'm writing for National Novel Writing Month.
Jimmy: So, ten years or
so since your
last full-fledged effort, the very well received Muse: An Autumn
Romance. You are part of an interesting pattern of IF authors
popping up again from out of nowhere. (As I write this, Brent
Van
Fossen has just released a new version of his old classic She's Got a
Thing for a Spring after a similar delay.) What prompted you
to
write some IF again?
Christopher: Well, I remember talking quite a bit about writing
something big -- well, bigger than Speed-IF anyway -- after
Muse,
but Real Life got in the way. By the time I caught my breath
again, I'd forgotten too much about Inform and about the
groundwork for any other projects I had percolating at the time to get
started again. Then Inform 7 came out, and I didn't have to
relearn anything after all: relearning a coding language is boring as
hell, but starting afresh is easy and interesting.
Jimmy: I'm frankly in
awe of the
randomization in your game, not only because it exists at all but also
because it works so seamlessly. The plot never feels clunky
at
all. Tell us how you approached the design. And
just
exactly what all is randomly determined on each playthrough?
Upon
first playing, I assumed the game just worked like Infocom's Moonmist,
selecting from a handful of pre-designed scenarios. Now,
though,
I realize what it does is much more intricate and impressive.
Must have been a nightmare to test the thing...
Christopher: I'd actually been wanting to do something like
AOM
for years now. I first started out with something with a cast
of
about 20 to 30 characters, one of whom would be randomly picked for a
victim, and eight others who'd be randomly picked to be present in the
game as suspects. As you might imagine, that was rather a bit
more than I could chew.
Later on, I thought to approach it from a different angle.
Instead of looking for interesting suspects or stories, I started with
the mechanics instead. I took the classic "method, motive,
opportunity" schtick: two people to be cleared by mutual alibis, one
person who couldn't have done the deed in the way it was done, and one
person with an "anti-motive" -- that is, someone who would have wanted
the victim alive rather than dead. That gave me four innocent
people, and of course one more for the guilty party. After
that,
it was just a matter of creating characters who would fit into the
mechanics, and developing a story that would work. Also,
picking
weapons that would fit the requirements.
A lot of this is thanks to Inform 7's table function. The
game would probably not have been possible otherwise.
Jimmy: One thing
distinctive thing
about both Muse and Murder is the fact that they both take place in our
own everyday, mundane reality, without the science fiction and fantasy
tropes that still tend to dominate IF. What led you to set
your
games in "reality-based" worlds?
Christopher: To be honest, science fiction tends to turn me off; space
stations, alien planets, high technology, that sort of thing usually
makes my eyes glaze over, unless something special catches my attention
really really quickly. As for fantasy, I'm pretty
neutral.
I figure that if something has fantasy elements in it, the story had
better be something that cannot be properly told without them; and none
of the stories I've come up with so far have required fantasy elements.
But, I love mystery stories, particularly those written between the
1920s and 1940s. So that's what I tend to read.
And, as I
said, I'd been wanting to do something in that genre for years.
As for
Muse...
well, I'd been
reading a lot of Anthony Trollope at the time, particularly Trollope's
Barsetshire Chronicles. The first line, "The summer of 1886
found
me..." had been percolating in my head for quite a while.
(Believe it or not,
Muse
was
once intended to be a mystery story. The murder or murders
would
take place in Barchester, and Rev Dawson would solve them from
Switzerland via telegrams to and from his sister Emma.)
Jimmy: Always great to
talk to
another Trollope fan! Dickens is good, but Trollope is
better,
and really deserves more exposure in America. I spent much of
2007 reading all six Barsetshire novels...
Another thing I notice about both games is that you are trying to tell
quite subtle (by IF standards) stories in each. Let's take
them
one at a time, if you don't mind talking about your earlier game too
much. Muse is a Victorian romance. How difficult
did you
find it to translate such a concept into the IF world of objects and
puzzles? How successful do you feel you were?
Christopher: I never really thought of
Muse
as a "romance" in the popular sense of the word; to me, it was a story
about one man's mid-life crisis: the fact that Rev Dawson is just 1
year short of 60 is a lot more significant than he ever cares to admit,
and add to that the life of strait-laced rectitude that his occupation
implies.
A number of puzzles had occurred to me before I even began. I
don't know if I thought they were anything special, but I do remember
being rather pleased with how well they fit into the story.
In
terms of success as puzzles, I think they were, for the most part,
satisfactory. Perhaps the puzzle involving the changing of
rooms
could have been better clued....
The one puzzle that I think was not so successful was the conversation
with Konstanza. It was a bit of a last minute thing: I'd just
read about "conversation mazes" and decided that I had to have
something of the sort in the game. Unfortunately ... well,
you
only have to look at something like
Galatea to see how
such a thing should have been done!
Jimmy: Similarly, An Act
of Murder is
a classic locked-house murder mystery which forces the player to
grapple with ephemeral concepts -- alibis, motives, and methods --
rather than locked doors, mazes, etc. I thought you made
heroic
efforts to make this feel natural for the player, but also felt the
game fell a bit short at times here too, in that I wasn't always quite
sure how to translate the notion in my head into actions in the
gameworld. (No shame there, what you were attempting is just
SO
difficult.) Any thoughts about trying to map the logic of a
mystery novel onto a development library still to some extended focuses
on creating more Zorks?
Christopher:
AOM
is more a
meta-mystery, I guess. I'm still rather pleased with the
master
table that organises all the suspects and the roles they are to fill in
the story, but I don't know if there's any engine within that could
lend itself to a development library. Otherewise, I was
mostly
just learning as I went along.
Jimmy: Act of Murder has
an unusual
number of well fleshed-out NPCs for an IF game. Tell us about the
process of designing and coding them.
Christopher: The mechanics came first, and the suspects were drawn up
to fill the spaces that the mechanics required. When I first
began coding, I had a bunch of names and no story, no way to actually
relate them to each other. I knew I wanted a "man of action"
character -- the Colonel Mustard archetype -- so I randomly assigned
that to the suspect labelled "A" in my notes ... and voila, Alexander
Wolf. Then, a woman in a wheelchair, because I just like the
imagery ... a prissy, superior, socialist-type ... someone related to
the dead man ... and someone in a position of trust, like a lawyer or a
manager. As the story fell into place, so did the suspects'
characters and their relationships towards each other. I do
remember that the animosity between Cedric and Deborah was a fairly
late development, for instance.
Coding them was largely about giving them things to say in response to
the player's questions, since there wasn't much else for them to do
or react to. And you can never code in enough
responses,
once you set down that road. In this case, a lot of their
speech
was peppered with if/otherwise conditions, to mesh with the scenario as
currently set up. I do think there's a lot more that could be
done (but which I doubt I'd get around to doing!). In the
case of
their alibis, I had to pull out whole new set of rules to deal with all
the if/otherwise conditions.
Jimmy: One problem that
has plagued
earlier IF mysteries was the necessity to be in the exact right place
at the exact right time to spot suspicious behavior. You
avoided
this by setting your game after the crime is already complete and
giving your player a fairly static crime scene to explore, which
enhances playability at
(perhaps) the expense of a certain element of drama. Any
thoughts on the tradeoffs you made here?
Christopher: I do miss the action. There is a possibility, in
one
scenario and one scenario only, of causing Elinor to move to the
Terrace and Benedict to refuse to answer any more questions, but that
was the only "action" I managed to put in during the game.
And there'd actually been even less action to begin with: I'd initially
put all the details of the case in a text-dump right at the beginning,
and had the player start out in the Study, having already presumably
met all the suspects. Some testers complained that they
didn't
have a good grasp of who the suspects were, and some said the text-dump
was a bit too much information all at once, so I created the
introduction sequence.
Jimmy: So, you just got
paid $500 for writing IF! That's unusual. What will
you do / have you done with the money?
Christopher: Bank it. I am a parsimonious, miserly wretch and
I like to see my bank account grow.
Jimmy: In this you are a
man after
Trollope's heart. He kept careful track of the exact sum
earned
by each of his books, almost down to the shilling, and gave this
accounting prominent place in his autobiography. Needless to
say,
his reputation among the art for art's sake crowd was destroyed forever.
But back in the world of
IF... Did you spend time with the other Competition
games? Favorites, impressions, opinions to share?
Christopher: I did play most of the other games. I did enjoy
Orevore Courier,
despite what I said earlier about my gut reaction to science fiction:
it caught me early with the PC's attitude, and then there were
pirates. Pirates are cool. Plus, I'm rather fond of
games
like this, where a lot of it is about managing and controlling the
reactions between the different elements.
I know I spent an inordinate amount of time on
Slap That Fish! and
Jealousy Duel X,
trying to get everything perfect.
I couldn't get very far into
Press
[Escape] To Save,
but it reminded me of Rybread Celsius so much that I wondered if this
might in fact have been him come back, as it were, from the
dead.
His early games, however flawed, had a certainly exuberance that I
rather miss.
Jimmy: Will we have to
wait another
decade for your next game, or do you have plans to work on something
before then? Any hopes / plans / ideas for a next game you
might
be able to share?
Christopher: Oh, I'm thinking of a new release already. Of
course, that's what I said ten years ago, after
Muse. I
don't know. Perhaps you'll have to wait for Inform 8!
Jimmy: Congratulation on
your excellent Competition showing, and thanks again for doing this
interview for SPAG's readers!
Christopher: You're welcome!
Back to Table of Contents
Interview
with Grunk and Admiral Jota, co-authors of Lost Pig
Jimmy:
First of all, SPAG is of course a family publication, so I just need to
confirm from you before continuing, Grunk, that you are in fact wearing
pants at the moment.
Grunk: Grunk not just wear pants. For this, Grunk wear
two
pants. But wearing two pants not easy, so Grunk put one pants on leg
and other pants on head. Pants on head not very good pants because them
have big hole. (Not have hole before Grunk put pants on, so Grunk think
maybe putting on boots before Grunk try putting on other pants not help
there.) Pants with hole not good for covering Grunk up. But hole good
for looking out of.
Jimmy: I've read all
that over very
carefully, but I'm still not actually sure whether you are fully
covered in all the important places. Perhaps we should just
wipe
that imagery out of our heads and move on...
Grunk, those of us who
have read your
blog already know a bit about your personal history, particularly
illustrious military career. Perhaps, though, you could fill
in
the blanks a bit to describe your pre-military, pre-farmhand doings,
and also to tell us what you have been up to more recently.
Grunk: Before Grunk work on farm, Grunk at home with mother and father.
(Before that, Grunk at home with mother and father and brother, but
then Grunk brother join army.) Then one time Grunk walking down road
and see tasty pig. So Grunk get hungry and eat some pig. Then man come
out and yell at Grunk, say Grunk pay for pig. But Grunk not have any
coin! So man say, Grunk work and pay for pig that way. That how Grunk
start working on farm.
Now, Grunk not even in army any more. That because army not there any
more. Place where army at all fall down. Fall on top of Grunk boss in
army, so now Grunk just work for Grunk. Live in woods with some friend
from army that not in army any more either, looking for person that
give coin and food and thing if Grunk wave sword and go "RARRR!". There
lots of person that pay coin and food and thing for good "RARRR", so it
all work out OK.
Some time Grunk tell story too.
Jimmy: I think I speak
for everyone when I say we can't wait to hear it.
How did you end up with your own doman name? Very unusual for
an orc...
Grunk: Grunk not know how that happen either. Grunk never say that it
OK! Not know what "domain" mean, but that not mean it OK if it take
Grunk name. Grunk ask Prgukar, and him say Grunk should get "lawyer".
But it turn out that "lawyer" not really kind of spiky club. It just
kind of person. Oh well.
Lawyer say that now Grunk get to share name. Then lawyer take all Grunk
coin. Next time, Grunk just use spiky club.
Jimmy: Jota, your life
has not
received all the public exposure of Grunk's. What sort of
things
do you get up to when not writing IF with Grunk? How long
have you
been interested in IF? Tell us a bit about yourself, please!
Jota: By day, I'm a software developer in New Hampshire. By night, I
fight international crime using a legion of remotely-controlled
cybernetic cantelope from my command center deep underneath a converted
textile mill in downtown Manchester.
However, of more interest to your readers is how I first started
playing IF. My very first exposure to it was sometime around 1990 (give
or take), when I was about thirteen. My parents gave me a copy
of
Star Trek:
The Promethean Prophecy for
the Apple IIgs. I had fun not just playing the game, but also trying to
figure out how the underlying logic worked. (For instance, DAMAGE was
implemented as a verb meaning "TELL ME ABOUT..." -- presumably to
facilitate parsing lines like "SPOCK, DAMAGE REPORT".)
A few years later, I started playing Sierra's
Space Quest and
King's Quest
games illicitly in the High School computer labs. A friend suggested
that if I liked those, I might be interested in this other game, and he
showed me a copy of
Zork
I.
There
are more of these? I
thought. One thing led to another, and eventually I was downloading AGT
(since it was for writing adventure games, whereas most of the Internet
resources I found only seemed to be for something called "Interactive
Fiction"), and the rest just followed naturally from there.
Jimmy: I had that Star
Trek game too,
and also hacked the hell out of it trying to figure out how to actually
beat it. I'm not at all convinced today that it actually was
possible to beat, at least in the Commodore 64 version I had.
Still, remembering that game brings the warm fuzzies in a big
way, even if reading the manual that promised the
ability to
do all kinds of things that didn't actually work when you tried them in
the game (again, at least in the Commodore 64 version) was more fun
than actually playing. Sometimes I think about trying to
implement something like the game described in that manual (as opposed
to the one on the disk), because I've never seen anything quite like it.
How did you come to the
name Admiral Jota?
Jota: High School Spanish class. Everyone had to take a Spanish name.
Since I used to be called by my initials ("JJ"), I just translated that
directly ("Jota Jota"), and then shortened it to just one J.
The "Admiral" part was more of a joke. When you play videogames where
you fly around in spaceships and blow things up, everybody wants to be
the ship's captain, right? Well, I did that one better. Once I got
online, it's what I used whenever I went somewhere that wanted a "full"
name, rather than just a simple handle. Before I knew it, it had become
my semi-official nom de 'Net.
Jimmy: While you have
plenty of
Speed-IF and IF Whispers collaborations to your credit, this is your
first attempt at a fully-fleshed, polished game I believe...
Jota: What, you don't think
Pass
the Banana was fully-fleshed out and polished?
Jimmy: Actually...
Jota: Well?
Jimmy: Well...
Jota: Hello?
Jimmy: You see...
Jota: Oh, alright.
Jimmy: ... ahem... I
think everyone
was impressed by Lost Pig's level of polish: the translation
into
Grunk's "unique" diction was accomplished seamlessly, the one
significant NPC (no, not the pig, although he was cool too) felt very,
very alive, etc. As I wrote in my review, any game that
understands REACH IN CRACK WITH POLE has officially impressed
me.
Perhaps you can tell us about the game's development history.
Jota: The original concept came to me in 2003. It was shortly after I'd
run out of steam at keeping up Grunk's journal. Stephen Granade had
decided to save himself a little work by building a web form to let the
ifComp authors input their game info themselves (the lazy bum). He
wanted some folks to test it for him, so I just tried sticking in some
silly stuff: author? "Grunk"!... title? oh, something dumb...
Lost Pig...
subtitle? uh, let's make it a dungeon crawl...
And Place Under Ground.
Then Stephen said "You should write that!" And I thought, "Ha ha,
right! Hmm..." After that, every once in a while the idea would bubble
up to the surface of my brain again, and I'd think about possible
puzzles or objects or interactions, maybe take a few notes, and then
completely forget about it again.
Then in 2006 I sat down and wrote the whole thing in a month or so
(much of which was spent battling the Z-Machine's 64kB limit for
writable memory).
Jimmy: I thought your
use of a TADS 3
like conversation system worked really well, aided of course by the
fact that you wrote out an absolute sledload of responses for our little gnome
friend. Any thoughts on conversation in IF?
Jota: I think conversation in IF should be tailored to fit the game in
question.
Since
Lost Pig
is essentially
a puzzle game in the old-school dungeon crawl style, I felt like it
should have a topic-driven conversation engine, like the old ASK/TELL
systems. Thus, all of the dialogue in the game is represented as simple
topics that can be accessed at any time (once Grunk has been exposed to
the subject in question) with the TALK ABOUT command (for which ASK and
TELL are just synonyms). These topics are parsed like any other game
object, and are moved into scope as Grunk learns about them.
On the other hand, the game is also driven by the Grunk's unique
perspective, so I wanted the way conversation was presented to reflect
his thought processes. Presenting a small selection of the topics that
he might happen to be thinking about at the time seemed like a good way
to represent this, and displaying them in the stilted syntax of IF
commands complemented Grunk's own style of speech.
As for the sheer number of topics, that's purely because of my own
style as a player: when I'm playing IF, I tend to try almost everything
that I think of, and as an author, it seemed only natural to give
responses to the things that I would have tried if I myself were
playing the game. In fact, there are many supported topics which are
never explicitly mentioned as dialogue options. The current version of
the source (which I'm in the process of revising to remove a few bugs
that were in the comp release) contains about 250 topics altogether.
Jimmy: Wow! I
think a new standard has just been set...
Grunk, please move on and do not read the rest of this
question. Thanks!
Jota, I have to tell
you, I sometimes
get the impression that Grunk is not, shall we say, the brightest bulb
in the chandelier. Was he REALLY able to rescuse the pig and
escape from underground by solving all those complicated
puzzles?
I sometimes got the feeling his adventure might have been embellished a
bit when translated into IF...
Jota: Well, I'm pretty sure he did get back with the pig somehow, and
I'm almost certain the gnome was real. But to be absolutely honest, I
strongly suspect that gnome might have offered him a bit more help than
Grunk really wants to admit. I mean, if it were me,
I certainly
wouldn't have just sat there the whole time while an orc rooted through
my home trying to find useful objects...
Jimmy: Okay, Grunk,
thanks for not
reading that last one. This one is just for you. Will we ever
see
more blog entries from you, or better yet a new IF adventure featuring
you? Or perhaps being the world-famous star of a Comp-winning
game will just keep you too busy?
Grunk: Lots of thing happen to Grunk, when Grunk still in army and
after Grunk in army and before Grunk in army and in between time too.
Grunk still like telling story about thing that happen to Grunk. But
not know yet how Grunk tell next story that Grunk tell.
Maybe next time, it just normal story like in journal where Grunk talk
and other person just listen. That less work than this kind of story.
But maybe Grunk make it one long story that have beginning and end, and
not have lots of little piece like journal. Or maybe Grunk do some
other thing that not like either one at all. Maybe next time Grunk just
do song and dance instead. (Probably not, though. Grunk not very good
at dancing.)
Jimmy: What will you do
with the $500
Lost Pig earned you? (Or perhaps I should say what have you
done...) Did you divide the cash 50-50?
Jota: My part of the money is sitting in the bank, happily earning
interest (interest which is helping to finance my melon-bot army, of
course).
As for Grunk's share, we couldn't find a good method of currency
exchange, so I set him up on eBay instead. I had to explain to him what
most of the things were, of course. He ended up picking out an old
color Game Boy, a copy of
Super
Mario Brothers, and several cases of spare batteries.
Grunk: Little man hit brick and coin fall out. Grunk hit brick and
Grunk hand hurt. Grunk play some more, maybe find out what Grunk doing
wrong. Maybe Grunk need eat more mushroom.
Jimmy: Did you get a
chance to play through the over Comp games? Favorites?
Impressions?
Jota: I did play through some of them, although I didn't have time to
play them all. From what I did play, I was especially impressed
with
An Act of
Murder. He
did a great job of matching his writing to the style of the genre, and
the gameplay was solid -- a good game even without the randomization
and replayability. I wouldn't have felt bad taking second place to it.
Jimmy: And finally, what
are your future plans, Jota? Working on anything now?
Jota: For non-IF, even though I'm not updating Grunk's journal, I do
periodically write short pieces of my own still, such as the series of
posts starting
here
and continuing on succeeding days.
For IF, I'm working on a collaboration at the moment. It's a humorous
fantasy puzzle game as well, but it's otherwise completely unrelated to
Lost Pig.
I'm doing the design
while my collaborator is coding it. It's in Inform 7, a language which
I personally find nearly impossible to write in, so it'll be
interesting to see how that works out.
Back to Table of Contents
The
World of Italian IF: A SPAG
Special Feature
For over a year now,
SPAG has
been running a series of features that highlight the histories and
cultures of the various non-English IF communities. In this
issue we wrap the series up with an examination of Italian IF.
We will begin with a general history, followed by interviews
with several key players and a review of an exceptional classic Italian game.
Huge thanks go out to
torredifuoco,
who has been absolutely tireless in putting most of this together.
Back to Table of Contents
A
History of Italian IF by torredifuoco
Enrico Colombini: the Beginning
(1982-1985)
The first Italian piece of IF was
Avventura
nel Castello (
Castle
Adventure) by Enrico Colombini, released in 1982. He
developed it on an Apple ][, after he had met with
Adventure at an IT
fair two years before. Like in Cinderella's tale, he played
only one (quite long) game, and then the very next day didn't
find the colossal cave on that monitor. He had to wait until the game
showed up on a diskette disguised as
Apple Adventure.
Only then could he study some code and began developing
something in Italian. He came up with a well-designed quest set in a
Scottish castle which players must escape -- alive -- using a two-word
parser. He soon found a distributor, J. Soft (a division of Gruppo
Editoriale Jackson, an Italian IT publisher). His game sold
well enough throughout the country, even though Apple ]['s weren't
terribly common computers in Italy.
In 1984 J. Soft came to an arrangement with Apple Computer Italy, and a
second version of the game was bundled with the Apple //c.
Meanwhile, videogame publishers and computer magazines
started pushing interactive fiction. Users switched from consoles to
microcomputers, and the computer market became wild. Piracy was
commonplace. The Commodore 64 was the king of micros,
followed by the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (aka Timex Sinclair in the USA).
Many users played IF works written in English.
Gruppo Editoriale Jackson brought out three books about writing IF with
Basic during 1985: Mike Grace's
Avventure
e Commodore 64 (translation of
Commodore 64 Adventures),
and two books by Colombini -
Scrivere
un gioco d'Avventura (
Writing
a Text Adventure Game) and
Avventure (
Adventures). These
latter two were the better by far. The author's witty style and
up-to-date information trumped the competition.
Scrivere un gioco
d'avventura featured the annotated source code of an
example game for the Apple ][, easily portable to other microcomputers,
while
Avventure
described the development of a mini-adventure and was bundled with some
software: two example games and a tool called Modulo BASE (BASIC
Module) for five machines -- the Apple ][, IBM PC, Commodore
64, Sinclair Spectrum and MSX. Italian IF players now had the
tools to become authors.
Bonaventura Di Bello and
the Newsstand (1985-1988)
As a consequence, in 1986 J. Soft released some good titles by new
authors in a variety of ways. Some were bundled with Jackson's
magazines, such as
Etrusk
by Marcello Giombini; others were sold by mail-order through ads in
magazines,such as
Il
Mistero della Piramide (
Pyramid Mystery) by
Enrico Ragaini. Another popular title was
Missione Odessa (
Odessa Mission) by
Paolo Giorgi. All displayed the telltale signs of Colombini's
Modulo BASE working under the hood.
However, Colombini wasn't the only coder in town. Others developed
their applications or used other tools. It is possible that
no Italian software house devoted itself exclusively to IF because
piracy strangled the software market. Everybody could find
copies of the latest games everywhere: from friends, from computer
shops and, last but not least, from the newsstand! In the
latter case, they changed titles, rewrote credits and added some
instructions in magazines.
There were a few exceptions to the rule. Let's take a step
back to 1985, a great year for Italian IF. The newsstand
offered original software, too - i.e. IF works written in Italian.
It all started from a collaboration between Arscom (a
"software house", or coders' team) and Edisoft (publisher) giving birth
to a magazine, Next Strategy, that developed new Italian IF for the
Commodore 64. They hit the market with series of
adventure lines each featuring its own hero. Games were written in
BASIC, but made use of Assembly routines to to display
graphics. Here started the first golden age of Italian IF.
It lasted for three years, from 1985 to 1987.
Edisoft's formula was imitated by a number of publishers,
which is not surprising: in three years they sold about ten different
collections of magazines totalling about sixty issues and over 170
games, mostly for the Commodore 64 but also for the Sinclair Spectrum
and MSX, written by a collection of about ten authors. Quite a feat.
One of the most talented, fondly remembered, prolific, and quickest IF
authors of all time was one of the "dirty ten". His name is
Bonaventura Di Bello (aka BDB), who wrote over seventy pieces in about
a year. I should add that about twenty more were conceived
and written for Sinclair ZX Spectrum during the previous six months.
BDB began on the Sinclair Spectrum after he being fascinated by Artic's
Adventure A: Planet of
Death. He decided to try his hand at IF
development and bought an authoring system, Gilsoft's
The Quill, which
came bundled to
The
Illustrator, an application that allowed authors to add
images to their work. Soon he had completed his first piece
in Italian,
Dimensione
Sconosciuta (
Unknown
Dimension), allowing it to circulate freely, with his
address on the splash screen. He even submitted his game to a
competition hosted by a magazine named
Load'n'Run.
Its first prize was a Sinclair QL, the most powerful of the
Sinclair computers. He wasn't allowed to participate, but they offered
him a fee to properly publish the game. In the meantime, and thanks to
the free circulation, a publisher, Edizioni Hobby, contacted him
because they needed a coder who could crank out three adventures every
month for the Sinclair Spectrum.
In 1986 Edizioni Hobby started a magazine,
Epic 3000, with
three new games for Commodore 64 by Arscom and three for Spectrum by
BDB. It lasted seven issues, and then was replaced by two
magazines,
Explorer
and
Viking.
Arscom fled to another publisher while BDB remained to attend to the
new projects.
Explorer
appeared in late 1986 with three games per month for the Commodore 64
and three for the MSX, and for the first seven issues these were
portings of those he wrote for
Epic
3000;
Viking
came out in early 1987 with three games per month for the Commodore 64
and three for the Sinclair Spectrum, and these were totally new.
These two project lasted about a year each --
Explorer for twelve
issues,
Viking
for eleven - but games were written for a twelfth issue of
Viking.
This totals 69 different games plus three unreleased, each one ported
to two machines. Though the magazines eventually died,
players loved them. Indeed,
Explorer and
Viking lasted
longer than any similar publication.
Let's look at these two magazines. They weren't too elaborate
but rather had a home-grown feel; there was little artwork.
However, they offered all a text adventure fan could want: IF
reviews, sometimes hardware reviews, a few technical articles about
authoring, introductions and solutions to bundled games. Most
importantly, they encouraged their readers to communicate with them, be
it through phone calls or letters or the questionaires they included
asking for feedback about players' preferences and thoughts.
They were open to ideas and collaborations.
BDB wasn't solely responsible for the many games. There were
some -- about ten -- collaborations. Gian Paolo Gentili
contributed most of all, but Max Di Bello, Adelaide Mansi,
Nick Carpentieri and Lisa Serlini also participated. Max Di
Bello and Francesco Gasparro gave sometimes a little help in the tech
department. BDP followed the Arscom model, featuring
well-defined heroes that could reappear in later adventures.
He gave life to about forty different PCs, of
which most appreciated appeared in perhaps four or five games.
Every PC was tied to a genre, such as science fiction,
horror, western, fantasy and so on. If I had to compare his
games to those of another author I would choose Scott Adams, only with
better room descriptions and a generally less minimalist approach.
The games also featured graphics. BDB had good
design and writing skills that compensated for the intrinsic
limitations of
The Quill.
In fact, he used
The
Quill and
The
Illustrator for the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum,
but adapted Colombini's Modulo BASE for the MSX - omitting the graphics.
Colombini was like a prezzemolo, as we say in Italy.
Prezzemolo, or parsley, we put everywhere, in every
recipe. In 1987 he released the third (still commercial)
version of
Avventura
nel Castello for MS-DOS, distributed by Hi-Tech, while in
1988 the second edition of
Avventure
came out with a more powerful version of Modulo BASE and a new
ambitious example game,
L'Apprendista
Stregone (
The
Sorcerer's Apprentice).
However, the glory days were almost over. After
Viking went out of
print nothing appeared to replace it; the Italian IF market was
collapsing. To release for the newsstand meant to work at a
loss, and momentum seemed forever lost even outside Italy.
Infocom itself survived for only a couple more years.
The Dark Age (1989-1999)
The early 90's saw all the remaining software houses publishing to IF
quitting the business -- Infocom, Level 9, Magnetic Scrolls, etc.
IF went out of fashion. Computer magazines weren't interested
anymore. The reign of the 8-bit machines came to an abrupt
end with the arrival of the new 16-bits -- Amiga, Atari ST,
IBM compatibles and so on. The concept of shareware was
spreading, and the World Wide Web slowly gained ground.
In Italy hardcore IF fans kept writing IF as a hobby.
Roberto Barabino is one of the authors who was active during
this period, and is appreciated as a good writer and a good
coder. In 1991 he released a humorous piece for the Amiga,
Ullisprick, as
freeware and it passed from disk to disk as in the old days.
Some lucky players got their hands on the collections of IF games that
came out in 1991 and 1992,
The
Lost Treasures of Infocom I & II and
The Magnetic Scrolls Collection I.
Meanwhile, rec.arts.int-fiction was created as well as the IF Archive,
and in 1993 Graham Nelson released his specialized IF programming
language, Inform, as freeware.
The late 90s were the years in which IBM compatibles and the Internet
had their boom - at least in Italy. It started very well: in 1995 there
was the first IF Comp, in 1996 Activision released the
Masterpieces of Infocom
CD.
During 1996 the Italian scene began to show some vitality: Colombini
released
Avventura nel
Castello for PC as freeware and Barabino finished two
titles,
Alieni per
Sempre (
Aliens
Forever) and
Vanilla,
written with Visual BASIC. IF developers weren't very
well-organized but in 1998 Ilario Nardinocchi
nevertheless released out his translation of the Inform library into
Italian.
A New Rise: the Italian
IF Community is Born (1999-2003)
The Big Bang that would mark the beginning of a new era for Italian
IF soon to followed. During early 1999 the
initiative of a few gave birth to a new IF community. Simone
Zanella created a website, IFItalia, with a specific aim: to
collect and make available the Italian production of games,
articles, walkthroughs, etc. Months later, he was among the
successful promoters of it.comp.giochi.avventure.testuali, the Italian
IF newsgroup, and wrote its manifesto. Then came an IRC channel
dedicated to IF.
The newsgroup was soon invaded by graphic adventure players whose
concerns were of course off-topic, but they eventually found another
group for their discussions. icgat became the place where IF
fans gathered to discuss ideas and start projects. Two
examples: the Avventura dell'Anno (Adventure of the Year) Award and
Progetto Lazzaro (
Project Lazarus).
The former was a prize given to the best game of the year and
the latter a website managed by Sauron and devoted to the search for
commercial games and magazines from the 80s with the purpose of
preserving them.
Other important developments during 1999 and 2000 included the beta and
first version of Giovanni Riccardi's Infit (another translation of the
Inform library) and his translation of two example games, and two
translations by Paolo Vece -- Adam Cadre's Gull manual for
Glulx and Kent Tessman's Hugo Manual. There were also a lot of new
games by new authors and a couple of new authoring systems: Paolo
Lucchesi's
MAC
(
Mystery Adventure
Creator) and Colombini's
Idra (
Hydra).
Colombini also released one of his books, and all the bundled
software, as freeware.
Throughtout the following three years the Italian IF community grew
stronger and stronger. Although Zanella stepped away from
IFItalia because he lacked spare time and the website wasn't updated
again until 2003, icgat worked like a charm. Another shared
project was the translation of the
The Inform Beginner's Guide
by Roger Firth and Sonja Kesserich; many people took part in it.
Vincenzo Scarpa was writing a book on authoring IF with
Inform in which his annotations and explanations about the
Ruins source were
the main course. The number of games written during those
years steadily increased, reaching about fifteen games per year
in 2002 and 2003. In 2001 Colombini released another
version of
Avventura
nel Castello, this one for the Apple ][, and its source as
freeware. In 2002 Francesco Cordella organized his first ORGC
(One Room Game Competition). In 2003 Riktik, using a CMS,
revived
IFItalia,
which was hosted again in the same domain thanks to the kind initiative
of Tommaso Percivale. There was also the first title released
for Roberto Grassi's From Hell project, which was an effort to
stimulate the production of remakes/portings, giving new authors
material to practice with. Finally, during late 2003
Terra d'IF (IF-Land)
#1 came out: this Italian IF webzine was another idea by Grassi.
Of course he found many contributors among icgat denizens.
Losing the Grip?
(2004-2008)
Recent years have featured some ups and downs.
First of all the good news: many interesting projects and ideas took
shape. There were some translations, including the second
edition of the
IBG
(2004); the third edition of the
IBG
(2006), entitled
Guida
a Inform per Principianti or
GIP and translated
by many authors;
Guida
a Inform-Glulx (2006) or
GIG which included
the Inform Release Notes,
Gull
and other texts and was translated by Marco Falcinelli and Paolo
Vece; and
Il
"Bibbione di Glk" (
The
"Big Book of Glk", 2007) which included Andrew
Plotkin's Glk API Specifications 0.7.0. and other texts and
was translated by Lorenzo Marcantonio. Vincenzo Scarpa
released his book,
Come
Scrivere (e Giocare) delle Avventure Testuali in Inform e Glulx
(
How to Write (and Play)
Text Adventures with Inform and Glulx, 2006). In
2005 Rob Grassi announced a new Italian software house devoted to IF,
Mondi Confinanti (Bordering Worlds) and the same year took second place
in the IF Comp with
Beyond
(written in collaboration with Paolo Lucchesi and Alessandro Peretti),
as well as two XYZZY Awards. He also started a Google Group,
rakontointeraktiva, about localizing IF-specialized programming
languages. Alessandro Schillaci produced some interesting
software:
JIF
(2004), the
SGW
(
Simple Glulx Wrapper)
library and
StorylandOS
(2005),
IFPEN
(2007) and a beta of
WIDE
(2007). The ORGC is also still there, solid as a rock.
But there was some bad news too: in late 2006
Terra d'IF died
after just ten issues.
Progetto
Lazzaro was temporarily frozen some years ago, and and
still is today. But worst of all, since 2004 the production
of new games has dropped considerably. Due to this,
the Avventura dell'Anno Award is not given anymore. At least
half of the community's recent production consists of one-room games;
the Italian IF community really should write more IF nowadays.
Comps & Awards
There are two traditional events that capture Italian authors'
attention: the Avventura dell'Anno (Adventure of the Year) Award, a
prize given to the best piece of the past year; and the ORGC (One Room
Game Competition), for games that take place in a single room of course.
Avventura dell'Anno was created by the initiative of
IFItalia and icgat
denizens in early 2000, and it lasted until 2004. Hopefully
it isn't gone forever. Hosted by many dedicated individuals
that did the dirty work, it worked this way: they nominated games
through a thread on icgat and then sent votes by e-mail to the host.
The rating methods varied as years went by, as the award
became more and more similar to the XYZZY Awards, with sub-categories,
a ceremony on the #if IRC channel, and real prizes too.
Winners of the award:
1999
Non
Sarà un'Avventura (
It Won't Be an Adventure)
by Roberto Barabino
2000
Uno
Zombie a Deadville (
A
Zombie in Deadville) by Tommaso Caldarola
2001
Enigma
by Marco Vallarino
2002
La
Pietra della Luna (
The
Moon Stone) by Paolo Lucchesi
2003
Filaments
by JB Ferrant (Italian translation by Marco Totolo)
The One-Room Game Competition arose from an idea which struck Francesco
Cordella in 2002 while playing Andrew Plotkin's
Shade.
His first reaction was to write a game,
L'Avventura del Ciclope
(
Cyclops Adventure);
then an article; finally, he thought about a competition.
He hosts this comp on his blog,
L'Avventura è
l'Avventura (
Adventure
is Adventure) . He sometimes gets some help by others,
especially when he enters a game of his own. The first ORGC
took place in 2002. Since then only one year has
been missed, 2004, due to a postponed deadline. Competition
rules have stayed almost unchanged from the beginning, except for a
major variation in 2003, admitting games written in any foreign
language.
Winners of the competition:
2002
L'Artificiere
(
The Artificer)
by Paolo Lucchesi, Sting1, Percy
2003
Il
Barile di Amontillado (
The
Barrel of Amontillado) by Marco Dattesi
2005
L'Armando
by Andrea Rezzonico
2006
Final Selection by Sam Gordon
2007
Suveh
Nux by David Fisher
Authoring Systems
Italian developers wrote a number IF authoring systems or editors
supporting, but the truly important ones, which allowed authors to
build really good games, were few: Enrico Colombini's Modulo BASE
(BASIC Module),
Idra
(
Hydra) and
Paolo Lucchesi's
MAC
(
Mystery Adventure
Creator).
Let's start with the beloved Modulo BASE. His first version
came out in 1985. As the name suggests, it isn't a system but
a module written in BASIC that provides a framework for would-be
Italian IF authors. Its merits shouldn't be underestimated;
it showed newbies how a program like these works, the inner secrets of
adventure games. It is well-designed, simple and
flexible. And It came with some great documentation -- two
books worth -- explaining all the tricks. Although it didn't
give authors a complex world model and featured only a two-word parser,
it was a good starting point for developers because they could build
upon it. Do you need a three-word parser? No problem, a coder
could put Colombini's routines to good use, modify this, add that and
there you go. The first version featured short room
descriptions, similar to those by Scott Adams, but hackers could easily
modify this too. In 1988 its author released a second version
written with GW-Basic for MS-DOS with some major changes.
Messages (nearly all the text) were put in an indexed text
file and authors could insert common commands between text chunks -- a
sort of embryo programming language. The new tool
borrowed a few ideas from the Infocom games, such as room description
management. In 1999 both versions, with example games and one
book, were released as freeware.
Paolo Lucchesi's MAC for DOS, Windows and Linux systems
appeared in 2000. It's a simple scripting language (sources
can be compiled) that allows the creation of old-school IF.
Lucchesi was inspired by Brian Howart's
Mysterious Adventures
and Gilsoft's
The Quill.
No structured world model yet but the parser understands up
to four-word commands. MAC supports .png graphics regarding
rooms and messages with some restrictions in the allowed image size and
color palette. Four standard definitions files that contain
predefined verbs and system messages in two languages, English and
Italian, are provided. Despite authors complaining about a
few design oddities that could be improved, the language was used to
write about a dozen titles in Italian between 2000 and 2003, which
isn't bad at all.
In 2000 Colombini brought out another freeware tool, Idra, written with
HTML/Javascript and designed to create hybrid games that resemble text
adventures or simple Choose Your Own Adventure-style games but
make use of a point-and-click interface. With this tool
developers can build applications which don't qualify as "games"; in
fact it is used mainly outside the Italian IF community.
Of course Italian authors are also able to write IF with a specialized
programming language, Inform, and another well-known English tool,
ADRIFT, thanks to the effort of a few dedicated individuals who
translated libraries and files.
Regarding Inform: the first translation was released in 1998 by Ilario
Nardinocchi, who mantained it till 2002. His translations
continued through the Inform 6/10 English library.
Giovanni Riccardi released the first version of his
translation, Infit (Inform in Italiano), in 2000. His latest
release was Infit 2.5, which appeared in 2004. It supports
Glulx and the English Inform 6/11 library. Inform 6 with
Glulx is by far the most highly-regarded system among Italian IF
authors.
Throughout 2004 Roberto Grassi worked on producing an Italian version
of ADRIFT. His latest release is version 1.5, and he has also
found the time to write three tutorials on the system.
Today much is going onbehind the scenes. Roberto Grassi is
again attending to an ambitious project: a translation of the Hugo
library. Giancarlo Niccolai is going to build an IF engine
with Falcon, his recently-devised programming language.
Giovanni Riccardi once said he would like to rewrite Infit from the
ground up and is having a at the Inform 7 library... Well,
time will tell.
Remarkable Games
Alieni per Sempre
(
Aliens Forever)
by Roberto Barabino.
Avventura nel Castello
(
Castle Adventure)
by Enrico Colombini and Chiara Tovena.
Beyond by
Mondi Confinanti (Roberto Grassi, Paolo Lucchesi and Alessandro
Peretti).
Cosmic Adventure
by Davide Orlandi.
Enigma by
Marco Vallarino.
Flamel by
Francesco Cordella.
Forma Mentis
by Paolo Maroncelli.
Il Barile di Amontillado
(
The Barrel of
Amontillado) by Marco Dattesi.
Il Mistero di Rocca Ventosa
(
Rocca Ventosa's Mystery)
by Lorenzo Carnevale.
Il Mistero di Villa Revoltella
(
Villa Revoltella's
Mystery) by Michele Susel, Liviano and Lorenzo Mos.
Il Principe dei Ladri
(
Thieves' Prince)
by Riktik.
Kazan by
Francesco Cordella.
La Pietra della Luna
(
The Moon Stone)
by Paolo Lucchesi.
L'Apprendista Stregone
(
The Sorcerer's
Apprentice) by Enrico Colombini and Chiara Tovena.
Little Falls
by Mondi Confinanti (Alessandro Schillaci, Roberto Grassi and Enrico
Simonato).
Lo Scarafaggio
(
The Cockroach)
by Carcosa Edizioni (Fra Enrico and Kewan).
Natalie
by Fabrizio Venerandi.
Non Sarà un'Avventura
(
It Won't Be an Adventure)
by Roberto Barabino.
Schizo by
Tommaso Caldarola.
Terry Jones - L'Occhio
del Condor (
Condor's
Eye)
1
&
2 by
Bonaventura Di Bello.
Uno Zombie a Deadville
(
A Zombie in Deadville)
by Tommaso Caldarola.
Vanilla
by Roberto Barabino.
War Mage
by Giancarlo Niccolai.
Italian IF links
IFItalia
(archive)
Informazioni
(programming language - I6 translation)
Terra d'IF
(webzine)
Alessandro
Schillaci's website
Bonaventura Di
Bello's blog
Enrico Colombini's website
Francesco
Cordella's blog
Giancarlo Niccolai's blog
Marco
Vallarino's website
Paolo
Lucchesi's website
Roberto
Grassi's website
Tommaso Caldarola's
website
Acknowledgements
I'd like to thank a bunch of people whose writings helped me in various
ways:
Back to Table of Contents
An Interview with Enrico
Colombini (conducted by torredifuoco)
In 1982 Enrico
Colombini wrote and sold the first text adventure in
Italian,
Avventura
nel Castello (
Castle
Adventure),
for the Apple ][. In 1985 he published two books
about
writing text adventures which were hugely successful in popularizing
the genre. Along with the books came a tool written in BASIC,
named Modulo BASE (BASIC Module), and more games:
L'Astronave Condannata
(
The Doomed Spaceship)
and
L'Anello di
Lucrezia Borgia (
Lucrezia
Borgia's Ring),
for five different microcomputers. Later, in 1988,
he
revised one of his books and made Modulo BASE more powerful.
A
new game for MS-DOS,
L'Apprendista
Stregone (
The
Sorcerer's Apprentice), showed off the new features.
He developed another small example game,
Il Drago delle Caverne
(
Cave-Dragon),
for a course in BASIC in 1989. These programs were
updated
and refined until 1999, when they were released as freeware along with
the book
Avventure
per MS-DOS (
Adventures
for MS-DOS).
In 2000 he released another tool, Idra (Hydra), for
writing
Choose Your Own Adventure-style games in JavaScript. In
short,
he's a living legend, but don't mention that to him or he
will scold you.
torredifuoco: Enrico, I
wrote a short introduction but it isn't enough. Could you tell the
readers a little about yourself?
Enrico: As a teenager, I guess I could be classified as the
quintessential nerd: from Meccano to electronics, I was in full control
of technology... and of little else. I read a lot, though, so I had the
seeds of my redemption in me. Now I'm married, we have a son and I just
lead a quiet life: I've always been a quiet type, but I never ceased
being a nonconformist and an idealist, whatever the price (and it can
be quite high, at times). I'm sitting at my desk, but my mind is still
adventuring out there, as always. What never ceases to amaze me is
that, of the many things I designed in electronics, software and
publishing, only adventure games survive in the collective memory: they
probably happened to be born at the right time (I suppose there's a
humbleness lesson in that).
torredifuocot: People
still remember
you today mainly because of Avventura nel castello, even
outside
of Italian IF circles. Let's talk about it. How did you decide to write
your first text adventure? I'd like to hear about the design phase,
too. You credit your wife, Chiara, as co-author... Lastly, why did you
choose a (Scottish) castle? Can you recall any source of inspiration?
Enrico: As I wrote (in Italian) on my site, the inspiration came
from
Adventure,
i.e.
The
Colossal Cave, more exactly from the 350-point 1980
version we played on my brand new (well, new for me, but actually quite
used) Apple ][.
We (Chiara, my friends and I) played it a lot: it was fascinating and,
above all, it was something utterly new. However, the "no save" feature
was irritating; I couldn't get around it by copying the save file
between game sessions, because the disk was protected, so I decided to
look into it. I wrote a primitive disk analysis utility ("DAN"), found
out the protection system (it was just a different sector coding
scheme), removed it and added the save/restore commands. I also had a
look at the code, of course, but I wasn't particularly impressed with
what I saw.
More or less at this point we said "This idea is great, why don't we do
something like it in Italian? We can do it better". So the design phase
started.
Now, "design phase" is a rather pompous expression: in fact, we just
thought about it from time to time, came up with ideas and discussed
them. That's my standard way of designing when I'm not under pressure,
and it usually works well because my subconscious mind does all the
work: I just have to be patient and wait for the results. Chiara had an
important role in the design: she discussed, corrected, often rejected
my ideas, besides of course contributing with original ideas of her own
(we can't really remember which one of us had which idea).
As soon as we had a minimal map and some puzzles in place, I started
coding in the evenings. I was the coder, because Chiara wasn't really
interested in programming on personal computers (she worked in assembly
language on microprocessors at the time).
The first program was rather primitive, sort of many big
IF...THEN...ELSE with just PRINTs for output, but it worked and it was
promising enough to push us forward. We went on for a couple of months
adding locations and puzzles, until I hit the memory barrier: the texts
filled the 48 kB (actually, rather less in practice) available on my
Apple ][.
So I learned to effectively use the floppy disks and moved all texts to
an indexed file to free RAM, then redesigned the program to be more
table-driven and, generally speaking, saner. As a side-effect of the
program's growth, I encountered two new problems: the extreme slowness
of BASIC's garbage collection (it could hang the machine for many
minutes at unpredictable times) and the relatively long time it took to
look for a word (parsed from user input) in the dictionary. So I did a
good thing and a bad thing.
The good thing was studying the insides of Applesoft BASIC and reading
around a lot, which lead to a simple but very effective way of
partitioning strings in two areas: "collectable" and "non-collectable".
As the vast majority of the strings were constant, this approach did
away with the garbage collection problem completely.
Of the bad thing I did I'm still a bit ashamed: having had no exposure
to computer science and algorithms, I was naively doing a linear
search. A simple binary search would have solved the problem with
minimal effort but, being unaware of it at the time, I did what I knew
how to do: I recoded the linear search in assembly language. It worked,
of course, but it's still a dark stain on my (otherwise almost decently
clean) programming history scroll.
The game progressed and evolved, design and implementation going
hand-in-hand, and a few more months went by while new ideas and puzzles
were added. We certanly had many sources of inspiration, first of all
the large number of games I played: I'm sure some ideas were stol...
er, inspired by early adventure games, but it's difficult to remember
what came from what (for example, somebody pointed out the similarity
of the plane-crashing introduction with
Cranstor Manor,
which I vaguely remember playing, but I've no idea when I played it).
The "graphic" fall from the plane came from
Adventure's chasm,
of course, while the maze was patterned after that of Umberto
Eco's
The Name
of the Rose;
being tired of senseless mapping, I had long been thinking about a
non-conventional maze and the library in that book gave me the right
idea. Speaking of non-conventionality, the whole game was designed to
be a challenge to "standard" ways of problem-solving in games (such as:
"go and kill 'em all") and we're rather proud of the results.
Testing played a very important role too: during many months, I looked
at friends playing and took note of everything they wrote, however
strange or unexpected (especially if strange or unexpected!) then added
most of it to the game. I think this should actually be considered part
of the design: in fact we were using other people's minds in addition
to our own.
About the choice of a Scottish castle background, I really have no
idea: perhaps it was the influence of Stevenson's books, or Poe's, or
some gothic novel... but when (many years later) we actually went to
visit the wonderful country of Scotland, we were happy to realize that
we'd been rather accurate in our settings.
torredifuoco: You
managed to
sell Avventura nel castello, you're one of the few Italian
authors
who made some money with this kind of software. I know you began by
selling it yourself (and this reminds me of Roberta & Ken
Williams). What problems did you face? Was it hard to find a software
house, later? Could you inform readers about the Italian software
market in the 80s? Your game had a long life: three commercial
editions, and the third was for MS-DOS. At the end of it, did you get
rich?
Enrico: At the beginning, it was just a favour a couple of friends did
me: they had this computer shop (possibly the first one in my town)
where we exchanged knowledge and tools, and they sold... well, they
sold 12 copies around the end of 1982, according to my records.
Next year, the publisher I had begun writing technical articles for
(Gruppo Editoriale Jackson) started a software marketing division
(J.Soft), so I was able to propose them a couple of games,
including
Avventura
nel castello (which had just won 1st prize at the first
Italian computer game contest,
Computer Play 83).
With the support of their computer magazines, they sold about 600
copies and, more importantly, managed to reach an agreement with Apple
Computer Italy to have the games bundled with the new Apple //c, so a
lot of people was able to play them. The other two games (my board
game
Melopoli
and a friend's well-designed strategy game,
Signori della Galassia
[
Lords of the Galaxy])
made a less-lasting impact, though.
The software business didn't prove to be a stellar success, due to
hostile conditions in Italy, i.e. few computers around, lack of
technical culture, and widespread piracy (often done in full daylight
by the resellers themselves and sometimes tolerated if not encouraged
by some hardware vendors - Commodore comes to mind).
I still hoped to be able to live by designing and selling games, but it
proved to be impossibile. In the meantime, other countries were
starting a real computer game industry; I even made a half-hearted
attempt to contact a French publisher, but to no avail (I've never been
good at marketing).
The nail in my ambition's coffin came when Apple declared it wanted no
games for the Macintosh (I was developing one at the time). I continued
to earn my bread (and butter too) with computer courses and
encyclopedias; as for the games, alas, I had to content myself with
playing them, usually on the IBM-compatible PC that was fast becoming
the new standard after Apple's marketing suicide (but this is another
story).
Anyway, I wanted people to be able to play my games, so I made an
MS-DOS version. It was a complete redesign, based on a specialized
language I had been designing, and it taught me a lot. For example, I
learned that using a specialized language to write IF is not
necessarily a good idea, at least when the author is also a decent
programmer (later, I got much better results by using a hybrid
approach).
Ah, the MS-DOS version sold about 100 copies through Hi-Tech (for which
I was writing on a magazine for Apple users); a much, much larger
number of copies was undoubtely pirated, but at that point I cared more
for diffusion than for income.
About getting rich... well, I made millions! Unfortunately I got the
timing wrong: the Euro wasn't there yet, so they were million liras, to
be scaled by about a 2000:1 factor. But, technically speaking, text
adventures made me a millionaire.
You mention Roberta & Ken Williams: they were undoubtely
pioneers,
and I enjoyed some of their early graphic adventures, but the IF
authors I loved were in the Infocom camp, Steve Meretzky above all but
many others also (by the way,
Enchanter gave me
the basic idea for
L'Apprendista
Stregone).
Most of their adventures had good stories, good prose, good
ideas
and good care of detail. It was good, while it lasted.
torredifuoco: After your
first game,
you hit bookstores with two books, Avventure (Adventures)
and Scrivere un gioco d'avventura (Writing a Text Adventure
Game).
The first included an audio tape or diskette with three programs: two
example games (L'Astronave Condannata and L'Anello di Lucrezia
Borgia) and the tool you used to write them (Modulo BASE). It was quite
a plain tool and you chose BASIC. Did you have a model in mind, i.e.
Scott Adams' adventures? Did you look for a wider audience? Now I can
say you had a deep impact on (nearly all) Italian IF developers:
everybody strove hard to add features, and someone (i.e. Bonaventura Di
Bello) even sold games which had your tool as backbone.
Enrico: Actually, the title I requested was
Imparare il BASIC scrivendo
avventure (
Learning
BASIC by writing adventures)
but my publisher didn't like it and publishers are always right (I
mean, their checkbook is). The idea was... well, self-explanatory:
programming was pleasure and no degree was needed to learn it.
The only model I had in mind was the engine of
Avventura nel castello;
Scott Adams' interpreters were designed to save every bit of RAM in
really small machines, while I worked in comparative luxury and had no
such need for data compression. However, my engine was too complex for
beginners to handle and for me to explain in a decent way, so I made it
simpler by cutting off features; for example, objects couldn't have
states anymore (e.g. a bone that could be whole or broken), but had
instead to be replaced by a different object (a whole bone, a broken
bone).
To my amazement, the 'reduced' engine proved in some respects better
than the original, and certainly easier to use. Redesigning after a bit
of experience can yield better results, especially when the aim is to
distill and preserve the essence, discarding redundant junk.
Later, the second version of Modulo BASE reintroduced some
useful
concepts, such as indexed files on disk and a few (often-used) commands
embedded in messages, reaching a good balance (as I see it) between
power, flexibility and ease of use.
Most people, however, were contented with the capabilities of the first
version. It was simple code (at places rather primitive), but I had
thought about the underlying concepts for years, so it was an useful
tool. Others, such as Bonaventura Di Bello you mentioned, exploited it
to the core and beyond: one Sunday morning he called me (waking me up)
asking, if I remember well, how to ease some of the program's intrinsic
limits (for example, the maximum number of different words, which
wasn't as simple as it sounds). Version 2 didn't exist yet, so I gave
him some suggestions that he put it to good use: he released a string
of acclaimed games for the newsstand, some of which used my tool. At
last, that's how I remember it; I hope I'm not confusing him with
another power user... you know, old age and all that... I'm sure about
the phone call, though :-)
About Modulo BASE, the program had a simple 2-word parser but
I
still think, after all these years, that a more complete and
'realistic' parser and world model don't necessarily imply more
enjoyable games, even if they would certainly be more interesting from
an AI (artificial intelligence) perspective and in view of
(always-almost-here-but-never-quite) real speech recognition. I feel
that's very easy to fall in love with technology and forget playability.
torredifuoco: L'Apprendista
Stregone is your favourite, and I like it very much too. It's an
ambitious work though you claim you wrote it in a fortnight. Did
anybody help you? You had it well planned in advance, right? I guess
you had a deadline you couldn't miss: do you work better under
pressure? It has an iffy vibe I can spot also in your previous example
games: you paid particular attention to the story. What about
characters (human or not) and setting? Where did you find the magic
system idea?
Enrico: Chiara contributed, as usual; her classical knowledge was very
useful, even if I too know, er, should know, a tiny bit of Latin (but,
sadly, no Greek). Choosing appropriate names for the spells was an
amusing exercise.
The claim that it was written in a fortnight is true... the trick is in
the "written". The design took much longer, as usual: we let ideas
float and slowly take form, not unlike crystals (with or without flaws,
it's for the players to decide).
The forest, for example, came from a trip to Saltzburg: we admired it
while comfortably traveling by coach, and wondered about it. On the
other hand, we carefully avoided putting in the game the incongruous
gnome-miner that sat in the famed salt mines of that beautiful town. I
suppose he's there for American tourists to admire, or at least I hope
so. But I digress.
The not-to-be-missed deadline suddenly appeared when my publisher asked
me to add something for the new edition. I really cared to see
L'Apprendista Stregone
published, so I put in long hours for a couple of weeks.
I don't know if I actually work better under pressure: the only sure
thing is that I work more ;-)
The magic words idea was unashamedly lifted from Infocom's
Enchanter,
but left for the player to discover, while the narrative approach was
of course a design choice: I wanted people to enjoy the story and the
settings without having to draw complex maps or to solve fiendish
puzzles. The challenges I chose to put in were mostly of the 'lateral
thinking' type and I'm quite satisfied of the result, even if I'd have
liked some extra time for refinements (but then I'd surely have asked
for more).
For the main characters, the old mage Artemio and his young apprentice
(the player), I can think of no definite source; it's a common theme,
after all. But we had fun placing ourselves in the game, even if
there's little resemblance with the originals: for example, Chiara does
not do fortune telling but writes programs... uhm, actually, now that I
think of it, unpredictabilty plays a big part in both jobs. As for
myself and the illusionist... after all, games are a sort of illusion,
aren't they? By the way, my math professor scolded me for dropping out
of the University, so I made her do the same in the story, disguised as
an old wizard.
Lastly, I liked the name I chose for 'my' character, so I adopted
"Erix" as my signature on the Net, in those misty pre-Web times, and
I'm still happily using it.
torredifuoco:
With Idra you
steered the wheel towards CYOAs. Could you briefly introduce this tool
to readers? Why did you develop it? You didn't release any CYOA, indeed
the two examples included in the package are by other authors. I can
assume you like this form, and maybe you read similar books in the past
or shared this liking with friends.
Enrico: I'm not sure about Idra being exactly a Choose Your
Own
Adventure tool: it can certainly be used to that effect (in fact, it's
the easier way to use it) but, in the hands of a good programmer, it
could be quite flexible. I wished to write a complex adventure to show
off its capabilities, but that implied complex planning... and time...
and resolve... in short, I never got around to do it.
Idra was born from a question: does most people avoid text adventures
because they have no wish to read, or because they have no wish to
write? So I wrote a simple HTML/Javascript tool that, in a sense,
emulated point-and-click graphic adventures, but with no graphics.
The results, I should say, were inconclusive: yes, more people accepted
to play the games (as compared to people willing to play text
adventures where writing was required), but on the other hand they were
easily bored by long texts (I should say, by non-infinitesimal texts).
So, in the end, it must be a combination of factors (like having grown
up with more books than TV) that controls interest in the written page,
be it a book or a game.
By the way, the first time I encountered a Choose Your Own
Answer
book, it wasn't a game at all. I still have it: it's an "Introduction
to genetics" from the
Tutor
series, 1967 (a few years before the WWW craze...). It posed a question
and redirected the reader to another page according to the answer, to
explain the mistake or to reinforce the learning. It was well designed.
Much later I bought game-books and found their design rather
disappointing and primitive... even if I played them anyway :-)
Back to Idra, I recently started another project: a full DHTML/CSS
engine for writing text adventures, with a few interesting twists and a
more "pseudo-graphical" approach. I learned DOM and CSS, wrestled with
compatibility problems for a couple of months, wrote a library, proved
beyond doubt that it was feasible... and then I abando
