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On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 23:37:57 GMT, John Campbell
<jcampbel@lynn.ci-n.com> wrote:
>David Fisher wrote:
>
>>>Remembering things
>>
>>
>> This one is very interesting to me. How would "remembering" work in a game ?
>> Are you thinking of remembering something that has happened in previously in
>> the game (ie. a reminder of what someone said), or remembering something
>> that the main character knows but you don't know (to get information about
>> something) ?
>
> I don't know that it makes any less sense than > THINK, which is
>included as one of the standard verbs in the Inform library.
I used a "Consider / Think About / Remember" verb in my one and only
game, Photograph. It made sense as a device in that the game/story was
about a character who was essentially trapped in his memories and
unable to move forward in his life because of them.
It's not an easy thing to do and to do properly, especially if you
chose to do it the way I did, and allow the player to "consider" not
only objects in the game but people and things that aren't present, or
even abstract concepts, such as "Consider life". I had mixed success
in achieving what I set-out to do with this aspect of the game.
On the more general subject of "allowed" responses, I think it's
important to make some effort to respond meaningfully to things that
players (including those unused to IF) are *likely* to type at the
cursor given the context of the situation and game.
My game was tightly scripted (read as "on rails") and this made it
relatively easy (and arguably important) to go for implementation
depth.
So I went through the transcripts of my beta-testers sessions looking
at the things they tried and where they were getting stuck and then
attempted to put in something sensible for almost all of them. I was
working on the assumption that if a tester tried something then
someone else would also try the same thing when playing the game and
would be just that little more pissed with the game if it didn't
respond appropriately.
As a somewhat extreme example, at one point in the game the PC needs
to take a bath:. Due to the different approaches testers took to this
mini-puzzle, I ended up implementing:
> Run bath
> Take bath
> Enter bath/tub
> Turn on tap(s)/faucet(s)
> Sit in bath/tub
> Lie in bath/tub
> Fill bath/tub
> Run water
> Wash
> Bath
> Bathe
....and probably a few other variations.
At another point the PC meets a rival NPC and one of my testers had as
their first response:
>NPC, F&*% off
That response (and some variations on the theme) seemed perfectly
reasonable to me. As a result, the game allows you to tell the NPC
where to go and give the PC some degree of satisfaction in the
encounter (not to mention a broken nose). A similar but slightly less
satisfying result is obtained by the more obvious action of "hitting"
the NPC.
Obviously, there must be limits on how far you can and should go with
this sort of thing, and I know there are things I spent time
implementing that probably no one will ever see or try.
If I write another game I'd like it to be far more open and I'll
therefore be forced to adopt a much less pedantic approach to the
issue depth of implementation.
--Steve