Author Archives: Ryan

Thoughts and High Scores on Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder

Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder (working title; also, release title) was not originally intended as an Interactive Fiction Competition entry. In late 2012 and early 2013, as Emily Boegheim and I were trying to pick up steam on Robin & Orchid (working title; also, release title), I thought to myself: I just need to make a tiny game, to stretch my dang legs. After I finish a little game, I can finish this big game.

Verdeterre was not that game, but for a while I thought it was. From the beginning my goal was to make a slight game, unambitious in scope or plot or theme or mechanics, and to a certain extent I think I succeeded.

And yet here I have written many words, a lot of words, about the design of this game. You will have to scroll past them to see the high score table.

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IFComp 2013 is OVER.

FINISHED. Here are the results.

The winning game, Coloratura, definitely deserves its victory and its .41-point margin over the second-place game. If you haven’t played it yet you have got to get on that.

I am very proud of the second-place game, and I’m immensely grateful to Emily Boegheim for all the hard work and genius she contributed.

I’m also very glad and kind of astonished that my other game got fourth place. If you look at the statistics, Captain Verdeterre beat Tex Bonaventure by only a hundredth of a point, and Tex beat Solarium by the same tiny margin. A very serious and interesting game was edged out by two very goofy games by a very narrow margin. You ought to give Solarium a look is what I’m saying.

With 35 games in the running, one will naturally expect some games that are not that great, but a lot a lot of these games are quality pieces of work that deserve your attention. Go ahead and direct your attention to these games.

I’m planning on releasing the source code from both games I worked on, and I have some words and thoughts about Captain Verdeterre to broadcast, and maybe I could stand to pretty up this page a bit, and now this post has become a checklist purely for my own benefit. This post is OVER.

IFComp 2013

The 19th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is going on right the heck now. Go look at it. I’ve entered two games:

Captain Verdeterre

Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder is about pirates. The cover art above was created by Caitlyn Harris.

Robin & Orchid

Robin & Orchid is about high school newspaper students who are looking for a ghost. I wrote it with Emily Boegheim.

There are a ton of other games as well. You should play as many as you want, and then you should vote in the competition before the voting period ends on November 15.

Koholint Island in Crayon

THE WIND FISH IN NAME ONLY, FOR IT IS NEITHER

Please click, and view a huge version

I drew this map of Koholint Island on one of those paper tableclothes at a local pizzeria last night.

Koholint is the setting of the fantastic Game Boy game The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, released in 1992. Given limited space, I had to exclude many of the details, but the eight main dungeons are there, along with Kanalet Castle, Yarna Desert, and of course Mount Tamaranch. That guy in the lower left is Link, the famous left-handed hero of Hyrule, and that vague curvy shape at the top is a seagull.

Text Adventure Stuff: HANDLED

I’ve uploaded some browser-playable versions of my IF games—the ones that aren’t already hosted at PR-IF.org (since the versions there are so pretty already). Crucially, Taco Fiction didn’t have any online play available anywhere, at all, so that has been fixed.

If you haven’t had a chance before, I hope you’ll give them a shot. There’s an introduction to Interactive Fiction (c/o the authors of Inform 7) that might help you if you haven’t played this kind of game before.

And please let me know if something is screwed up!

Play Taco Fiction

Play Nautilisia

Play You’ve Got A Stew Going!

You can play Dig My Grave or The Statue Got Me High at The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, and while you’re there you should check out the rest of the Apollo 18+20 Tribute Album games.

 

Girl of the Horses Galloping Flying Free Ranch

With a gilded finger the sun traced a lingering line up her leg, and her stomach, and across the brass mirror of her shoulder, so that she shone like a reclining Colossus on that dusty beach. All the men gazed on her, and all had to shield their eyes.

“Are you maybe like from Greece or something?” a babbling boy asked.

“No; I am from Montana,” she said, and the crowd hummed in disbelief.

“I didn’t know they had pretty girls in Montana,” another joked, from his seat behind the woman, where he could see down the top of her bikini. From there, he knew, he had no need to fear her frightful glare.

But she twisted her radiant body around like a lithesome cat’s amber tail on her stripèd towel, and fixed him to the spot with sunglass-lenses burning like twin suns: “The girls of the State of Montana are as beautiful as its horses,” she said. “That’s why the girls and the horses get along so well.”

“I’ll tell you all about it,” she said.

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