{"author_name":"Will Edwards","cat":"LD #23","comments":[],"epoch":1335293460,"likes":2,"metadata":{"p_key":"56048","p_author":"Will Edwards","p_authorkey":"10313","p_urlkey":"91768","p_title":"The Small World of Professor Strange \u2013 autopsy","p_cat":"LD #23","p_event":"LD23","p_time":"1335293460","p_likes":"2","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"10313","us_name":"Will Edwards","us_username":"william_edwards","event_start":"1334880000","event_key":"10","event_name":"LD23"},"text":"<h2><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-23\/?action=preview&amp;uid=10313\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Play it online here<\/strong><\/a><\/h2>\n <p>After an engineered launch on <a href=\"http:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=3883721\" target=\"_blank\">Hacker News<\/a> a few hours ago, Google Analytics tells me that we have had over <em><strong>9000 players and wasted over 100 hours<\/strong><\/em> of their collective time so far! <img src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/simple-smile.png\" alt=\":)\" class=\"wp-smiley\" style=\"height: 1em; max-height: 1em;\" \/>\u00a0 (Yeah, average time\/visitor not so high, but hey)<\/p>\n \n <style type='text\/css'>\n #gallery-1 {\n margin: auto;\n }\n #gallery-1 .gallery-item {\n float: left;\n margin-top: 10px;\n text-align: center;\n width: 33%;\n }\n #gallery-1 img {\n border: 2px solid #cfcfcf;\n }\n #gallery-1 .gallery-caption {\n margin-left: 0;\n }\n \/* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes\/media.php *\/\n <\/style>\n <div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-139228 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><dl class='gallery-item'>\n <dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n <a href='http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/The-Small-world-of-Professor-Strange_01.png'><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/The-Small-world-of-Professor-Strange_01-150x150.png\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"Illustrated mode\" \/><\/a>\n <\/dt><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n <dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n <a href='http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/The-Small-world-of-Professor-Strange_2.jpg'><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/The-Small-world-of-Professor-Strange_2-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"Programmer safe-for-work mode\" \/><\/a>\n <\/dt><\/dl>\n <br style='clear: both' \/>\n <\/div>\n \n <p>We are super proud of the game.\u00a0 <em>I<\/em> am super proud of the game.\u00a0 I am rather in awe of Mr War&#8217;s artwork and the pace he works at.\u00a0 And he uses MS Paint!\u00a0 The top-down map for a text adventure gives a spatial feel that works really well.\u00a0 Anyone ever played a game like it?<\/p>\n <p>Text adventures really bring back warm memories.\u00a0 And they are shockingly underrepresented in LD, so we tried to remedy that!\u00a0 We deliberately didn&#8217;t want to fall into the point-n-click improvements trap and we wanted an overall Victorian HG-Wells \/ steam-punk feel to it all.<\/p>\n <p>Back when we were small we used to make text adventures in Basic and later Turbo Pascal with still images in VGA 13h.\u00a0 I actually can&#8217;t remember <em>how<\/em> we did it, but I imagine it took far more technical planning then.\u00a0 Nowadays RAM is so cheap we just have big JSON arrays of everything in dynamic languages&#8230;<\/p>\n <p>We did a dry run back in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/minild-31\/?action=preview&amp;uid=10313\" target=\"_blank\">mini 31<\/a> in January.\u00a0 That showed that artwork was our strength but that we were under-resourced programmer-wise (my area) and we completely lacked musicians.<\/p>\n <p>We didn&#8217;t recruit any musicians for this LD either.\u00a0 Tempted?<\/p>\n <p>We prepared the weeks before by acquiring permission from loved ones and deciding the kind of game we wanted to make.\u00a0 We settled on a text-adventure, using HTML\/JS, and the top-down spatial map idea.\u00a0 I wanted the programmer UI but that didn&#8217;t need Mr War, so would have been a solo entry.\u00a0 Not cool.\u00a0 And I&#8217;m so glad we did the illustrated one; its by far the defining feature of the whole experience.<\/p>\n <p>I didn&#8217;t actually know Javascript, so the week before I set about asking on Stack Overflow how to do things like the scrolling that I thought I was going to need.\u00a0 I got not leads.\u00a0 I also asked on <a href=\"http:\/\/gamedev.stackexchange.com\/questions\/27004\/what-are-some-strategies-for-parsing-user-input-in-a-text-adventure\" target=\"_blank\">gamedev<\/a> about parsing, but the advice there was to use Inform; not what we had in mind!\u00a0 I settled on super-simple string matching in the end.<\/p>\n <p>This entry was low code high content.\u00a0 The basic engine &#8211; in Javascript &#8211; was workable within hours, and by the end of day 1 we were more content oriented.\u00a0 We panicked a little bit about the actual narrative, and roped in James at short notice to give us some lines.\u00a0 By the end of day 2 we had 90% artwork done, 90% coding done, but only 60% of the puzzles complete.\u00a0 You could play the game but not solve it.<\/p>\n <p>Day 3 was of course a Monday &#8211; a work day.\u00a0 It was also the day that my flu kicked into overdrive and I was feeling decidedly groggy.\u00a0 We didn&#8217;t return to the challenge before the evening (Europe-time), just hours away from the deadline.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We managed to get the puzzles complete and get some of the <a href=\"glest.org\/glest_board\/index.php\" target=\"_blank\">glest<\/a> community to do play-testing for us.\u00a0 We submitted in time and went back to our families.<\/p>\n <p>This went super-smoothly.\u00a0 We ended up with a playable game that can give several hours of fun (if you enjoy slow-paced text adventure puzzle games without bloodshed).<\/p>\n <p>Technically, it has some weak points:<\/p>\n <p>The command parsing is primitive in the extreme.\u00a0 Its just a list of legal commands.\u00a0 (You can see them all by pressing shift-space).\u00a0 I had planned text auto-completion.\u00a0 Its not the meaning that you have to guess the commands.<\/p>\n <p>The programmer SFW mode doesn&#8217;t have the auto-completion I imagined as central to its look&amp;feel.\u00a0 I experimented with code-like layout of text, but the shortcuts I tried to massage text into code nesting and adding faint punctuation and camelCasing etc made it completely unreadable.\u00a0 Chopped.\u00a0 I think with more finesse such a mode could be successful.<\/p>\n <p>The NPCs don&#8217;t have the full role we imagined.\u00a0 We had wanted much more emergent dialogue, and work in how they all knew each other and what a coincidence it was that they converged to retrieve the treasure.\u00a0 That got cut on time grounds.\u00a0 And writing dialogue lines is <em>hard<\/em>.\u00a0 The NPCs were to have a role in the solution, and be a hindrance, but that never got fully developed.<\/p>\n <p>And we forgot to add the vicar.<\/p>\n <p>With 50+ locations, 30+ items and 7+ NPCs its quite a full enough game anyway?<\/p>","time":"April 24th, 2012 1:51 pm","title":"The Small World of Professor Strange \u2013 autopsy"}