Endless, Nameless by NamelessAdventurer (Adam Cadre)

Official Web Page
IFDB Link

This write-up doesn’t aim to be a proper review. The first bit is just some hints for people who have already begun the game but are a bit stuck. The second has some thoughts about the game but doesn’t try to cover it exhaustively. I’d only recommend the second block to someone who has played most- if not all- of the game.

Read the rest of this entry »

Flack and I did an episode of You Don’t Know Flack about text adventures, which you can listen to by going to this link.

When Cryptozookeeper came out, I sent a link to its page on the Internet Archive to bloggers, reviewers, journalists, my mother and others. A good number of people said, “That’s great, but can you send me the direct link?” So if you’d rather not see a whole bunch of tech and retro podcasts laid out for you… if that’s REALLY going to make the difference here, well, here is the direct link.

(The You Don’t Know Flack site is in a deep cyan though, so really, the colors between here and there won’t require you to restart your browsers so that your changes take effect next time.)

And look, here’s the thing. I just invoiced Ben Parrish for a new microphone. But even with a new microphone, there is some kind of interference on my side for this podcast. Flack did his best to overcome it, but… well, here’s how I would describe where I was when calling in:

- In Cleve Blakemore’s Fallout Survival Bunker
- On the surface of Mars
- Towards the gooey end of the ocean’s mysterious and inexplicable “Bloop”
- In the process of getting a full body scan from the TSA
- Fighting the X-Men
- Desperately trying to build a bomb that will blow up the breadbasket of the United States thanks to the treason and sedition I read from textfiles.com and boy FBI you’d better try to >use reason
- In a remote cabin in Belfair, Washington
- Looking for that icon that lets Atari 2600 E.T. go home
- Watching Panic Room
- In a world I never made

So, sorry for all that.

Flack had to sit on it for a while because he was waiting for technology to catch up to where it needed to be to fix the terrible sound from my point. That technology never came, but enough time passed to where Kate Upton got famous for doing the cat dance. So enjoy the future we have instead of the one we thought we wanted, Past-Me.

UPDATE: I have been told that there is a fair bit on The Bard’s Tale in this, for which I apologize. But in our defense, it’s because we were taking savage shots at The Bard’s Tale Construction Set, which has been quietly keeping to itself for 20 years, not hurting anybody. It got a job at a local library and helps under privileged kids study for their LSATs. It thought its time being a game everyone hated was well in its past, but revenge is a dish best served cold though, motherfuckers!

(I also did some segments on The Don Rogers Show, but maybe all that should be a separate post.)

“There’s going to be a point,” I thought, sniveling in a glass of Gatorade and white chaw, “where the rate that good things get made exceeds my ability to enjoy them.”

I thought it would be years from now, in a terrible, dark dystopia when people were forced to drink Gatorade. It happened on April 11th, 2012.

***

I was surprised by a gift from my girlfriend at the beginning of the month: scuba diving! Everything I know about scuba diving can be neatly summarized from the box to this Infocom game:

The following things, therefore, quite clearly happen in scuba diving:

1) Someone cuts your air line
2) Someone sinister comes up from behind you and cuts your air line (I know this shares a lot of the same qualities as #1, but I feel this can’t quite be overstressed)
3) There’s panicking
4) Look at that gentle blue and serene ocean! Quite beautiful, that

Implicit in the box artwork to eyes most deft is the fact that someone, both the “stunt throat” as they say in the biz, and the men who would cut it, can swim. I couldn’t swim. Couldn’t swim! And had scuba lessons in a week. To put a nice bow on all this, I’d probably rather get my throat cut in a two-star text adventure than disappoint my girl, so a week’s worth of swimming lessons were to begin. Which meant I’d miss a whole lot of freshly-released games.

***

First up was Lone Survivor. It is, as far as I can tell, a horror-themed side-scrolling graphical adventure. Rock Paper Shotgun did an article on it, and I purchased it after I had read the article, but before I had descended into the typically abhorrent RPS comments.

I would love to play and solve this game.

Next up was Wasteland — the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter became funded to the tune of two million (and later three million) dollars. I played Wasteland in the 90s, well after its initial release, but I wanted to solve it. I wanted to make sure I would get every reference that might be in Wasteland 2.

It wasn’t made by an 11-year old girl or anything, but I would love to play and complete this classic game.

I was sent Blur, the racing game that reminds me of Road Rash, except that it existed in the 2000s and didn’t suck pole. I’ve tried to not mentally refer to it as “Shut up, Blur.”

I would love to play Blur long enough until I got the Subaru WRX that I assume is in there.

Legend of Grimrock was released. Naval War: Arctic Circle. The contents of the new Humble Bundle. You know, I wouldn’t be totally against trying frigging Cutthroats, too, by the way, number of stars be damned. There’s A Colder Light, Muggle Studies and this year’s crop of Spring Things. It’s not a computer game, but the new BBC show “Sherlock”? I don’t want to say it’s brilliant, but I would say that I like it quite a bit and each episode is an hour and a half. It’s the sort of programme you have to pay attention to. All that, and I’m working on a new text game, I’m testing a friend’s text game and I also enjoyed swimming so much that I joined a gym.

I wish I had time for this (waves hands) ALL of this.

***

There’s one game left. It’s the only game that I have been able to play, because it’s the only game I have time for. It goes like this:

Remember bulletin boards? It was even more primitive tech than games that gave you cyan and magenta color schemes. There are quite a few aspects of bulletin boards that I miss, but one in particular was the whispered asynchronous communication: I called the telephone of someone in Rochester that I didn’t know… I accessed his or her phone line, the modem, the computer, and read messages. I scoured the file bases hoping that someone accidentally uploaded warez. I might have even hoped that they would read my posts and call my BBS.

And the only thing I seem to have time for is to do the same over Twitter. I logon to my @Cryptozookeeper account, where I follow everyone back. I try to find people who are also trying to make their fortune on Twitter by posting fun timelines and following others who haven’t taken off in meteoric fame yet either. Most of the time nothing happens, but sometimes… ah, sometimes two people do make that asynchronous connection and follow each other. When this happens, I consider that we both “won” this little, horrible, stupid game and gained a point. Or level? OK, a point. I know it’s not a great game. It’s not a good game, in fact, it’s a terrible game! But at the moment, it’s the only one I have the time to play.

My game Cryptozookeeper won some awards last weekend. There were many categories — you can see the list of winners here, the transcript of the on-line ceremony here, and the list of nominees here.

With the XYZZY Awards, I closed a chapter of my life. It took five years to make the game, and it’s been 9 months since I released it. In all that time, for every semi-exotic animal I encountered, my first thoughts were “Can I get a picture?” and “What cryptid would it make if crossed with MAN?” It’s different now. I jogged by the Denver Zoo with my girlfriend the other night. (Well, we weren’t what you would call extremely close, but elephants carry a scent that make the entire world seem tightly packed.) It was just a jog. There weren’t any thoughts of getting a ladder to scale the fence and a gas mask to snap some pics for the game.

In the aftermath, I realize I really left some things by the wayside. My house is a mess. A raccoon ate my chimney two years ago and I haven’t put the new panels I painted up. The sunflowers depicted in this Caltrops thread basically took over my entire back yard in the summers that followed. I have to clean that area up. I have dear friends I haven’t called on the phone to chat with, family members I haven’t been in proper contact with, and someone said something about a black President??

I’ve tried to thank everyone a zillion times since I put this game out there. But I wanted there to be one last spot where I did so. Gerrit, who played Vest, was the first guy I involved in the production: he sent me source pictures according to the snippets of plot I gave him over the course of three or four years. He kept the same purple shirt and his beard the same length to make it easy for me to digitally-manipulate him into New Mexico. There was something inspiring about another round of source pics. There were very few actual pictures of the player character in Fallacy of Dawn — mostly because my brother had aged 10 years from the main head shot I used. But there’s lots of Gerrit in this, and I think it makes the attempt at storytelling more complete.

Jonathan Blask’s scenes were shot in a hotel room in Las Vegas, during the 2007 Classic Gaming Expo. I remember that text game folks Nick Montfort, Adam Thornton and Jason Scott were around for this. Jason generously let me borrow his camera, which was clutch because half of the shots I took of Jon with my camera were blurry and unusable. Adam was also great sport, being OK with getting divided him in half, in Photoshop, to exteeeeeeeend him and create a giant mass of a man in Igor Cytserz.

I knew a couple things that would happen when I asked Alex to play Lebbeus: I knew he would knock it out of the park, and I knew it might take a year or two for him to get me the source shots. Both were right! I had no idea that in making this game he would introduce me to my dear friend Jennifer, who played Bleem in the house party scene. I met them both in Edinburgh three years ago, and the friendships that this silly little sci-fi game inspired will always be the thing I treasure most.

Clint Hoagland was incredibly generous to offer up his music to me. Clint and knew each other through Caltrops and I find him to be a kindred soul — I think, in another lifetime, under different circumstances, we would both be pursuing our creative passions full-time, but instead we’re, ah, in IT. I must have listened to his wonderful songs a thousand times each while making the game, and in putting that link in this article, I played Everything Seems Perfect one more time.

I will always be grateful to Dayna for putting up with me during the first few years of work on this game. I know I didn’t make it easy. She also introduced me to Alana, who played Jane — I knew I needed one genuinely nice character in the game, and Alana just has this sweetness about her that shines through. She’s adjusting the mannequin’s tie on the back of the DVD box, and I think that little black and white shot captures what a thoughtful person she is.

Greg, Lysander, Worm and hygraed from this website’s forum tested Crypto over and over again in the first couple of years, and Jon Blask, Marius, Michael, Johnny and Flack gave me tons of feedback to allow me to actually get it out the door. They found so many amazing things — when Deanna reacts to Grimloft in the end game? That was because Michael noted it in his transcripts. (Michael’s transcripts, in particular, were a delight to read, just filled with advice, questions he forced me to think about and more than a couple plot holes I was able to solve.) I was also greatly aided by people who only had a chance to run through parts of the game for a little bit: to Bananadine, Last, Juhana, Pinner, Brian, Sorrel, Zseni and Mike Sousa — I owe you all a debt.

(Oh, and Tdarcos as well, of course! The word “humbled” can also apply to his experiences with the game. Needless to say, I will be considering players that are new to text adventures in a way I didn’t when I started Crypto.)

I had blogged before about how my friend Randy is responsible for the game looking like it does — he runs a haunted house – but I didn’t get a chance to mention that we also got together with our friend Dusty and put him in some old robes to “be” Ukilicoz. I am blessed to have so many friends like Sarge, Vark, Worm and Pinner show trust in me that I would make them look good in my text game.

Lastly, my girlfriend has been wonderful throughout this (waves hands) all of this. I took her to see Get Lamp, and she has met some of my friends that I’ve met through interactive fiction enthusiasm, but this is… this is a bit of an esoteric hobby that so many of us are into. I don’t have a good answer as to why I’m not just trying to write a book, except for the fact that I feel so strongly for IF. She’s been amazing.

That so many people enjoyed the game I worked on means the world to me, and all I can say is that you have my promise that I’ll throw as much blood into the ones in the future as I did this one. Thank you. I remain humbled.

A couple years ago, Jason Scott flew around the US to promote his movie, GET LAMP. Paul O’Brian and I rented out a Cinebarre theater in Thornton, CO. (We actually arranged two showings – one was at the Nonesuch Theater in Fort Collins, Colorado, where I believe there were six people in attendance.)

The show in Thornton had something between 20 and 30 people, including some I already didn’t know! (That was my own criteria for success: people I didn’t already know showing up.)

Mike Maginnis, at 6502lane.net was at the show in Thornton! Even better, he recorded the Q&A that evening. This wasn’t linked on Planet-IF, so let me do that with this post.

Check out JET LAMP – The Lost Audio Files here. Thanks for recording this, Mike!

Welcome! The games are released! Here is everything you need to know for getting the 2012 Hugo MiniComp games.

UPDATE! What the %!$# is this but more games? See below for the two other additions!

Hugo is a language you can use to make text adventures. Hugo games work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. You just need to get the right interpreter. We are recommending the interpreter Hugor to play Hugo games. If you don’t have a Hugo interpreter, just click that link to download one for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X!

Here are the games for the Hugo MiniComp. Click each title to download the games individually.

Party Arty, Man of La Munchies by Jonathan Blask
World Builder by Paul Lee
The Hugo Clock by Jason McWright
Spinning by Rob O’Hara
Tales of a Clockwork Boy by Marius Müller
Retro-Nemesis by Robb Sherwin

And a game called Teleporter Test by Paul Robinson that introduces teleportation to Hugo players everywhere! Screw you, Cardinal Directions!

Perhaps you are on Windows and would like the Hugor interpreter and all the games packaged together? Download this.

If you’d like to make your own games in Hugo, there is a forum on Jolt Country where Hugonauts will be happy to answer questions and provide help. There is also a wiki called Hugo by Example that has lots of examples of Hugo code.

If you enjoyed these Hugo games and would like to play more, the Interactive Fiction Database is a great place to look. Click here for all listed Hugo games.

Thanks for playing the games!

Each day when I come into work, I am greeted by a widescreen monitor that shows how many failed regression tests exist in the program we sell. Over the last two and a half years I created thousands of tests. I feel pride and ownership in them, which is unsettling to me, because this is supposed to be my job, and not my passion or anything, right?

We hired a guy six months ago who quit last week. He was – still is! – a brilliant automation engineer. He left the tests I made in better shape than when he started. He created dozens of new tests and I would work with him again in an instant. But there was a reptilian part of my brain that wouldn’t shut its goddamn mouth every time he made something new. It objected to the very concept of stuff I didn’t myself make. This stunned me. It bugged me. I couldn’t put my finger on any of it until I read Machine Man by Max Barry. That feeling, and many others that you experience in an engineering job, are deftly captured by Max Barry here.

Machine Man is written in the first-person and gives us an often painfully accurate voyage in the mind of a brilliant and successful autistic nerd that nobody would want to spend any time with outside of work. And even that is probably pushing it, Christ. Dr. Charles Neumann (our protagonist) loses his leg in an industrial accident and figures out pretty quickly that the prosthetic industry is a bit shit. He’s inspired to develop a kind of leg that will make him bigger, stronger, faster than before. What Barry does throughout the entire book is capture the inspiration that can consume a dork when all distractions have ceased, and you can truly focus. We (apparently I will selfishly align with Dr. Neumann when it serves my purposes) understand that being in the uncanny valley creeps everyone out. Mimicking human behavior is thrown out for all manner of robotic improvement.

It’s funny without picking on autistic people, which they pretty much deserve for ruining the Wikipedia, so credit Barry there. I can’t articulate why I am able to finish his novels in a night or two, but I got into the same vibe that I had with his books Jennifer Government and Company.

There is a kind of character that Barry does extremely well. (Dr. Neumann is characterized perfectly, and I don’t remember anything like him in one of Barry’s previous works.) The character of Cassandra Cautery is an intelligent, capable woman who gets in over her head, and I was reminded of a similar gal from his previous novel, Company. (I’m going to be honest: I can’t remember her name, but she was the woman who was obsessed with working out.) (OK, I got out my hardback of Company, and her name was Holly Vale.) Everything Cassandra said felt genuine, even though most of it was horrible, because I find myself listening to car insurance ads on the radio during my commute home, and somebody without a soul is churning those out.

What’s really stopping Machine Man from being brilliant instead of just really good is that there are many other characters that don’t feel as well-developed. I thought that the character of Lola Shanks felt less fleshed-out, because we were getting to know her exclusively through the tortured prism of Dr. Neumann, who is not all that great with women. I can’t decide if, therefore, it’s pretty cool that she was filtered that way or what. Regardless, I remembered that I became slightly attracted to the woman who did my rehab when I tore up my knee many years ago, even though I swore I wouldn’t let myself be, because I knew it was extremely cliched. C’mon son. So this is another thing that felt right about Machine Man to me. I can’t completely dismiss the nagging feeling that when Barry spends as much time with his characters as he does with his (quite fun) plots, he’s going to blow up the world.

With that in mind, the ending made my skin crawl. A couple pages that were just brilliantly written, where I was, like, scratching myself to remind my own brain that I’ve got my body and didn’t lose it or abandon it. I felt sick when reading it. In the good way. Kicking the covers so I could see my own legs, I felt ill while reading text on a page, which is some of the highest praise I can give a novel. I don’t want to give anything away, but I think the last two pages of Machine Man make an argument that its genre is horror instead of sci-fi. That’s a trick I don’t think I’ve ever seen before and wish I’d thought of myself.

Welcome to the upcoming Hugo MiniComp! What is Hugo? Hugo is a language by Kent Tessman for creating text-based video games.

Roody Yogurt had this to say in the original announcement of the comp:

2011 saw the Hugo release of Robb Sherwin’s Cryptozookeeper, one of the largest multimedia-enhanced IF games ever. That alone makes it a good year for Hugo, as we Hugo users are few. A handful of us thought we’d end the year on a good note and challenge ourselves to a SpeedIF. Schedule-fitting and unexpected interest from some non-Hugo-savvy authors have turned that idea into an altogether different thing, though.

Now, we christen that thing, “The Hugo ‘Open House’ Competition.” The rules:

- Games can be any size and can even be a work already in progress.
- Games are due the morning of December 31st. The entrant is then free to (and somewhat expected to) celebrate the transition into the new year heartily.
- Waiting until the last week (or day) even and writing a classic-SpeedIF-sized game is viable (we made the coding-time intentionally vague so newcomers can as much time as they want acquainting themselves).
- Links to games can either be posted here or at the joltcountry forum. If you don’t have any place to upload your game, e-mail your entry to roodyyogurt at gmail.

Games will not be ranked. There will not be prizes other than acceptance into a small yet tightknit group of IF enthusiasts.

People new to Hugo may want to look at Hugo by Example’s “Getting Started” page.

Questions about Hugo coding can, of course, be answered on this forum in the “Other Development Systems” base or at the Hugo base at joltcountry.com.

Good luck!

I know one game is finished and I am going to try to finish mine tomorrow. We’re going to have the games available by December 31st. Won’t you join us?

pinback: So, DOTA.
Ice Cream Jonsey: DOTA?
Ice Cream Jonsey: Day of the Tentacle?
Ice Cream Jonsey: Dark Age of Camelot?
pinback: “Defense of the Ancients”. The “Ancient” is the big thing that you lose the game if you do not “Defend” it.

pinback: I am watching a professional match and do not understand it.
pinback: Looks like a buncha fuckin’ nerds.
Ice Cream Jonsey: Who are these fucks?
pinback: Koreans, probably.

Ice Cream Jonsey: I heard that the best player in the world of DOTA, his girlfriend is Ms South Cleveland.

pinback: Apparently it’s a five-on-five team game, with each player controlling one “man” who can gain “levels” and “skills”.
pinback: It was the most popular WC3 mod, apparently, and now both Valve and Blizzard’s biggest upcoming releases are “DOTA 2″. They’re each making one.
pinback: It’s the biggest thing in gaming today.
pinback: Is what I hear.

Ice Cream Jonsey: I don’t like any games any more that are supposed to be “big.”
pinback: It’s BIG. Everyone’s playing it, Robb.
Ice Cream Jonsey: I don’t like Defense of the Ancients, League of Legends, Call of Duty or Gears of War.
Ice Cream Jonsey: I wish I could narrow down what those four games have in common.
pinback: I SENSE A THEME.

pinback: I don’t understand DOTA though. And these broadcasters might as well be speaking, I dunno… some sort of… what, alien language? Or something?
pinback: Man, I don’t get any of this.
Ice Cream Jonsey: I can help. I made a reference that only YOU would get in another place. Would you like to see it?
pinback: Yes.
Ice Cream Jonsey: http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3787&start=40#p27486
Ice Cream Jonsey: You are the only person who will get the reference.

pinback: heeh eheh kekeke and the plagooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Ice Cream Jonsey: OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Ice Cream Jonsey: Aw man. I wish customized jerseys were cheaper.
Ice Cream Jonsey: Because I would get a Saints #22 PLAGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
pinback: HAHahahahah
Ice Cream Jonsey: (Until they ran out of letters.)
Ice Cream Jonsey: I would hope that the Os would flip around to the front.

pinback: I always wanted to get a #79 Avs jersey with the name “PHO”.
pinback: THen I would go into Pho #79 and demand free soup.
Ice Cream Jonsey: (turns around, points thumbs at back of jersey) EHHHHH???

Ice Cream Jonsey: If either one of us ever makes more than $300,000 then that will be our pact. We get us both our customized jerseys.
pinback: PACT

There’s an interview with me over at FWONK*, the Creative Commons-based music site that helped me get the majority of music for Cryptozookeeper in place.

You can download lots of free ambient and electronica tracks from FWONK*. For instance, I recommend:

Imploded View: An Exploded View
I Have a Box: Bunnies
Bachelor Machines: Fatal Error
Per: Ettertid

Should be another interview coming shortly, and I’ll update the site when that happens. A few other things:

Kickstarter, more like KICK ASS STARTER! Jason Scott hit $118,000 to fund three future documentaries. I assume they will be documentaries. I’m trying to elbow my way in to make TAPE a movie about one man’s timeless tale of courage and self-sacrifice as he discusses life with a giant tapeworm. I picture our protagonist grabbing a random on-looker and shouting the tale at him, Rime of the Ancient Mariner-style. The entire special effects budget will be used for when the tapeworm switches hosts at the end. Gross!

Jimmy Maher ported The King of Shreds and Patches to the Amazon Kindle. It plays pretty nicely. It’s a little slow to update the screen after you type a command, and the Kindle’s keyboard is pants, but having a small tablet play IF is sooooooo nice.

zarf and Jason Shiga just released Meanwhile for iOS devices. I read a little of this at Boston PAX, and as a hard copy, it captured the attention of everyone who picked it up. My iPhone has a splintered, slightly shattered screen, so everything I play on it comes off looking like the tortured software of a spurned lover. That won’t stop me from making Meanwhile the fairest of them all, as soon as I can remember which PC I left iTunes on.

Our very own Jon Blask has been reviewing interactive fiction in the JC forum. He revived it from a few years ago, and the thread starts to get hopping on page 2.

Lastly, Rob O’Hara released HANGAR 22 a little while ago, and I don’t think it got the attention it deserves. It is a fun little romp, maybe an hour’s worth of gameplay. Rob is a great, witty writer. Play it on-line here.