One has to learn to deal with the parser it is not intuitive, and the experienced IF player has a list of verbs in his head that he knows are likely to be useful. The only additional thing I can offer on this topic, from my conversations with non-IF-playing friends, is that IF is difficult to get into. I don't think I've *bought* a computer game since 1990. I don't, really with the exception of the Myst series, I have not played a computer game that cost money in about eight years. People debate this all the time, of course, and I'm not sure I have a better insight than anyone else if anything, I'm probably less attuned to what goes into making commercial success than the average denizen of r.a.i-f, since many of them are programmers by trade and also tend to play modern commercial games. Most (or all) people say that today is impossible to make money with adventure games? Why today not and tweny years ago yes? It's because there are wonderful graphics and high technology today? They've all been difficult, but Pytho's Mask comes to mind as having been the most grueling, because I had this grand plan and about 8 days to do it in (and part of that time including overhauling my conversation system to do the menu stuff). You need to have your own vision.Īmong your games, which one was the most difficult to write and why? The NPC should be as complicated or simple as the rest of the game demands, and it would not work to put a Galatea-sized character in the context of Heroine's Mantle, say.ĭon't settle for the obvious (in terms of genre, puzzle-design, etc.). NPCs who take the initiative to pursue goals, change the subject, etc., improve the illusion. Conversely, even a technically unadvanced NPC can be fun if given The NPC who is a colorless question-answering-machine is boring, even if thoroughly designed. It just happens that a lot of the stories I'm interested in telling involve characters, and that means developing the techniques to portray them properly. I don't think there's a hard and fast rule about elements that you have to include in a good game. Obviously, I'm in favor of having NPCs done well, if they're going to appear but I've also enjoyed games that had minimal NPC interaction or none at all. In your games Npc are always important: do you think that a good game should have good NPCs? If you mean by that commercial or graphical adventure games, I don't play them if you mean, should we call this stuff 'adventure games' or should we call it "IF", then I think IF is a broader and thus more accurate term for the range of things so produced. What's the difference between adventure games and IF? I tinkered with them all but never solved any until Wishbringer and Plundered Hearts, both of which have a special place in my affections for just that reason. I was more computer-savvy by that time and also generally more capable of following the storylines of Infocom games, and we had a number of them: the Zork trilogy, Enchanter, Infidel (though I don't recall that I every played it), another copy of Deadline. Some time later, we got our first Macintosh. I can't say I really understood what it was for or what was going on, but I observed my parents and tried to play it myself. (I think I was the only third-grader who showed up with typed reports.) But it did play Deadline. It was an Osborne 1, and most of the things it could do didn't interest me very much, though I did use its word-processing abilities to write papers for class. My parents got our first computer when I was a kid, in 1982. And her ability shows also how it is possible, today, to bring home some money writing IF.įirst question: how and when did you get involved with adventure games? But these games are an example, models to imitate for who wants to write IF today.
Who likes this sort of things must read her essays about game design and NPC, while her games, perhaps because (sometimes) "experimental", perhaps because ahead with times, can turn out little attractive for people accostumed to the adventures old style. One of the few women writing IF, Emily Short has a peculiarity: she always tries to improve the genre with her games.
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