Remember text adventures? Games like Zork that were super popular back when computer graphics sucked horribly. It was a fair fight for gamers’ attention back then: either play a game that looked like a word processing document, or try the one where the yellow square rescues the purple dot from the evil red rectangle. For some Freudian/nostalgic reason, I am completely obsessed with these games. Fortunately, I’m not alone; nerds (myself included) are still playing and making them.
I’m writing a game of my own called Manifesto. It’s far from playable (well, far from enjoyable, anyway), but most of the plot and puzzle elements are worked out on paper. Or pixel. Whatever. The whole project is at a bit of a standstill right now. But if you’re interested, you can take a look at some of the documentation I’ve gathered of my creative process.
Resuming work after reaching a crushing point of despair a few days after the last update. The good news is: since I was so organized in the rebuild I started, it was pretty easy to pick up the ball again. I’ve also posted a new set of transcript sequences (this one & this one) over in the creative development section which you shouldn’t read if you plan on playing the game. If I ever actually finish making it.
Uh. OK, I experienced a little bit of a setback this weekend. I wasn’t as disciplined as I should have been with organizing my code. Even though I was trying to stay bare-bones with everything, I made a lot of patches as I went. So I bit the bullet this weekend & started an organized rebuild of the bare-bones implementation, richly commented, organized and hopefully bulletproof. Oy.
OK, I think that’s pretty much everything. The bones are all built & in there. This would be tough game to play right now, since there aren’t many text clues about what you should or could do, but it is completely playable from beginning to end. Now I start the fun work of fleshing the story out around the superstructure I’ve made. The mechanics were sort of fun, but are not really the reason why I wanted to try making an IF game.
Plugging along. There’s an extension cord in the game that I’ve been finding particularly difficult to implement, so I broke out the problem into a little mini playable prototype.
Ok, I’ve started to build a bare bones implementation. My goal is to get all the mechanics working first, then flesh out the gorgeous flowing prose after everything is doing what it needs to do.
Work has begun on Manifesto, my first attempt at creating an interactive fiction game.