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An Adventurer's Backyard
Author: lyricasylum
Date: 2015
ADRIFT
Story: Plus ça change. As long as there are
parser authoring systems, there will be games like this, the lichen that
colonises bare rock and is eclipsed by brighter blooms: tasteless, flat,
enduring, indigestible.
Picture, if you will, the first unguided teenager, somewhere in the UK on
Christmas evening of 1983, sheltering from napping adults and overstimulated
kids, with a parent’s Speccy and a brand-new copy of The Quill. They are
suddenly in possession of heretofore-unimagined power. They can make anything,
now, this very night. The possibilities are – in a specific, difficult, yet very
real sense – boundless. And yet they will almost certainly make something very
much like An Adventurer’s Backyard.
Parser games are, first and foremost, a simulation of space, and so the first
thing that people tend to do is to simulate a space that’s very familiar to
them, and to do so with the most straightforward tools available. Story is not a
straightforward tool of parser games: it’s something you have to work into the
fabric of a game yourself.
An Adventurer’s Backyard simulates a generic suburban home and its yard; you are
a generic adventurer, and have to find treasures scattered around it. That’s
pretty much it.
So: no story to speak of, because this is a coding exercise. 1.
Writing: Tends towards the hyper-utilitarian, with little to hold the
interest. The great majority of writing is an affectless listing of objects:
Living Room
A comfy sofa sits against one wall. There is also a television set opposite.
Outside, through the door, you can see the patio. To the south is the dining
room and to the north is the foyer. East is a hallway.
You see a fluffy cat here. Exits are north, east, south and west. The cat sits
on the comfy sofa.
The cat sits on the comfy sofa.
To be clear, the listing of objects is a standard element of parser IF writing:
the craft part is transforming bare information into something alive and
compelling. This is, again, quite common if you’re learning to use an IF
platform: the reason this blog is called These Heterogenous Tasks is because
game-making involves the unification of many different skills. When you’re
training one skill, it’s often much easier to not worry about the others; again,
that’s a legit approach, but it does mean that what you’re working on is a
practice piece, not a finished work. 1.
Puzzles: Straightforward, basic – carry a stepladder to reach a high
place, and there’s a fly which you have to catch to deal with a spider, and a
bunch of inventory which is presumably going to be used in puzzles later, but I
had very little reason to do any of it. It seems likely that this is just meant
as an old-school treasure-hunt – I found a coin in a fountain and got points for
it – but even that isn’t ever really explained.
My voting standards say that a 2 is ‘trivial, unfair, or tedious.’ This falls
squarely into the ‘tedious’ bracket. It is not impossible to make simple puzzles
interesting, if you tie them to a story and make their details picturesque or
amusing or character-revealing or something; here they’re pretty much expected
to stand up on their own merits.
Theme: If it was ever used, I never saw it. 1.
Technical: A few minor bugs about alternate situations: for instance,
putting the sugar on the flypaper and then dropping the flypaper doesn’t attract
the fly (it wants you to do it the other way around). The fly doesn’t actually
disappear when the spider eats it, either. There’s a HELP command for hints on
specific subjects, but if you ask about a non-existent topic it behaves as
though HELP isn’t a command. You’re notified when the cat sits on the sofa even
when you can’t see the cat. Trying to TAKE the diamond-studded collar when the
cat is wearing it gives a misleading error message, and I can’t figure out what
verb it wants me to use. None of this appears to seriously break the game, but
it does not encourage me to keep poking at things. 2.
Overall: I wasn’t able to stay interested in this for very long at all,
though I stuck with it for long enough to solve a few puzzles mostly in the
interests of due diligence. Largely this is because narrative and prose are
really important to me, and the game is uninterested in them. 1.
Reviewed by Andrew Schultz
This is a short treasure hunt with a few
small puzzles. It very much feels like a first effort, and while there's nothing
to offend, there also isn't much to inspire. Still, I think we should all have
the fun of writing a game like this.
It's also written in ADRIFT, and
while I admire Campbell Wild's work on ADRIFT and ADRIFT programmers' focus on
just having fun, I'm spoiled by Inform's robustness, and the simplicity of
creation doesn't always match up with the simplicity of solving and navigating
the parser (e.g. must say OPEN TOP DRAWER and not OPEN TOP.) That happened a bit
here. It got in the way of a game that was intended to be just whimsical.
This is a "your back yard" game but thankfully without the messiness and
squalor. You find a rare coin in a fountain (nice backyard! From some other
quest, presumably) and a diamond collar from around a cat's neck (additional
words to a logical command are necessary--Mr. Patient on the intfiction.org
forums pointed that out, and the neat debug feature. This will help with other
Adrift games that troubled me.) This is all okay and minor fun, and I think the
puzzles with getting on the roof or in the treehouse are good enough to support
a low-key game, though again the treehouse didn't like when I used (VERB) BOARD.
Between this and the surrealism of finding money in a toilet tank, and stuff
like implemented household appliances and being able to drink water feel like
someone just getting a handle on things and saying, hey, neat, instead of, how
can I make this neat?
So I suspect the author was trying to have a bit of
plain fun, with puzzles seem there for the sake of puzzles. And that's okay, but
it's not terribly profound, and it needs to work all the way through. As it was,
I signed off, restarted, thought I got a point for a certain treasure in THIS
game when I got it in THAT game, and wound up doing a lot of tallying. There
were a lot of extraneous items and I wound up trying to wear different outfits
or even tempt the cat with various food before I realized the solution was
probably simpler.
Some of this could've been fixed with a more general
HINT message, or perhaps if SCORE listed the treasures found, and I think that's
on the programmer if they are looking for ways to polish. Also, it's okay to
spoil a puzzle with actual commands to type at the end--it may be a relief for
the player.
This game is deliberately unambitious and just wants to be
fun--different reactions to JUMP are nice--but a big problem for me was that the
parser got in the way of simplicity, especially with the diamond collar.
Reviewed by Sean M. Shore
In Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984), lunch comes
in cans marked “FOOD.” An Adventurer’s Backyard, by lyricasylum, could very
easily be served in a box marked “TEXT ADVENTURE.” It’s set in what seems to be
an upper middle class home — there’s a fairly extensive backyard, naturally,
plus a patio and a balcony — with treasures littered here and there. Some are
just sitting in plain sight, while others are in containers we must open. We
gather the treasures, and the game ends.
At its best, a game like this,
even if it had no ambition beyond a simple treasure hunt, might try to give the
player a sense of place or history or wonder, or even just try to generate a
laugh. But AAB has been written with an absolute-minimum aesthetic; we’re in a
regular house, where everything is described in purely functional terms, in no
more than a sentence or two, perhaps with an adjective like “nice” or “tasty.”
It feels like the game was assigned to the author as a task to be gotten over
with. There are a few implementation issues, too, most of which involve a cat
whose collar we need. This becomes a puzzle only because we need to guess the
syntax. I had to resort to the ADRIFT debugger to solve it.
This is
probably a first effort, and as such, it’s perfectly serviceable and something
to be proud of. To the author I would say this: Put more joy into it. Even a
simple treasure hunt can be made entertaining if it’s clearly a labor of love.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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