IFComp 2017 Games Announced

[rotter]

This years IFComp games have been announced.

I can see at least two ADRIFT V5 games in the list -

Land of the Mountain King by Kenneth Pedersen

Temperamentum by Matthew Sawchuk

[P/o Prune]

Thanks Rotter.
Here's hoping that others than me will give them a go and vote for them.

[David Whyld]

I had a quick browse through the comp games yesterday and spotted one ADRIFT game but completely missed the other. Is this the first time someone's entered an ADRIFT game in the comp since 2012?

Anyway, good luck to both entrants (and a special Nerves of Steel award for entering a game with randomised combat in the IFComp).

[David Whyld]

I'm actually tempted to vote for some of the games this year for the first time in... oh, ages. I'm still not sold on the updates during the voting period idea (still seems at odds with it being a comp to me), so if I go ahead and vote, I'll download all the games right now and not play any of the updated ones.

But... 80 games. That's a lot. I've played maybe half a dozen IF games over the past year so 80 games within the voting period is a pretty daunting amout to get through. Not with the best of intentions am I going to get them all played.

[rotter]

I'm actually tempted to vote for some of the games this year for the first time in... oh, ages. I'm still not sold on the updates during the voting period idea (still seems at odds with it being a comp to me), so if I go ahead and vote, I'll download all the games right now and not play any of the updated ones.

But... 80 games. That's a lot. I've played maybe half a dozen IF games over the past year so 80 games within the voting period is a pretty daunting amout to get through. Not with the best of intentions am I going to get them all played.

Well, you can always play one from an old Drifter.

[David Whyld]

Well, I've managed to whittle the list down quite a bit. There are quite a few games whose subject matter doesn't interest me at all so they're off my hard drive and a lot of others are just point 'n' click web-based games with very little interaction (literally read a long piece of text, click a link, read another long piece of text, click a link, read another long piece of text... seriously, why not just write a damn book?) so they're gone as well. Along with the troll efforts. So I might (at a pinch) actually be able to get through the rest by the voting deadline.

[rotter]

So, has anyone played the two Adrift games yet?

[David Whyld]

I've played both and didn't really like them a whole lot. One has randomised combat, which has never been a favourite of mine, and the other had some annoying guess the verb problems - THROW MUD AT MIRROR doesn't work but THROW MUD ON MIRROR DOES. TALK TO CHIEF returns a message indicating the game doesn't know who you're referring to but SAY HELLO TO CHIEF works fine. I found I could only make progress by constantly referring to the walkthrough, which didn't make it much fun to play.

I've played a few of the other games but I've been slacking for the past week or so and really need to crack down and get some played.

[rotter]

So, has anyone voted in the IFComp - like support ADRIFT?

[David Whyld]

I did (yesterday actually, as I'd forgotten all about it until I saw the deadline was today). Unfortunately, none of my ratings are very high as I seem to have run into some bad games early on and then I kind of got distracted by other stuff and didn't get around to playing any of the others.

[rotter]

Results are in.

Well, my Inform 7 game Word of the Day managed a reasonable 13th place.

The ADRIFT games came -

58th place (tie) Land of the Mountain King by Kenneth Pedersen
72nd place Temperamentum by Matthew Sawchuk

[Lumin]

Results are in.

Well, my Inform 7 game Word of the Day managed a reasonable 13th place.

Congrats!

58th place (tie) Land of the Mountain King by Kenneth Pedersen
72nd place Temperamentum by Matthew Sawchuk

Ouch...

[David Whyld]

Well done, Rotter. 13th is good, especially considering how many games were entered into the IFComp this year.

Too bad about the ADRIFT games but, to be fair, not exactly surprising. One had randomised combat - which is never going to go down well - and the other suffered from some fairly nasty bugs.

[rotter]

Thanks David and Lumin. I honestly didn't expect it to do very well, particular not against 78 other games. Trouble is I'm not going to be creating another one of these games very soon, took me years to get Word up and running.

[David Whyld]

That's one of the things that put me off Inform 7. As much as I liked using it, it seemed to take an age to get anything done. ADRIFT spoiled me by hiding away all the nasty code so I could just sit and type without being constantly faced with problems like "okay, how do I program this?" and having to hunt through the manual or ask online for help. With Inform, I'd often find myself being forced to compromise a lot on game design because I genuinely had no idea how to implement some of the stuff I wanted to do, so instead of much banging of my head on the desk and screaming in frustration that things weren't working, I'd chicken out and redesign my game so the nasty complicated code wasn't as nasty or complicated. Even then, it took so much longer to get things done.

I'm really impatient when it comes to my game writing. I like to sit down and just write. With ADRIFT, I can do that and watch the size of my game jump up a bit (well, a few Kb) every time; with Inform, I seemed to spend as long trying to figure out how to do things as I did actually writing, so I'd often end up sitting there for an hour and my game would be pretty much the same size it was when I started. Of course, a lot of that's down to familiarity. I'm sure if I spent as long using Inform as I have ADRIFT, I'd be a dab hand at figuring out all the code and my game writing would just fly along, but I'm not sure I have the patience to persevere with it for that long.