Category Archives: video game

The Imitable Process of Ryan Veeder

or, “How to Write the Way I Write, in Inform 7”

Good afternoon. Possibly you would like to learn about how I write my text adventure computer games. There are a lot of angles to this subject, and the one I’d like to focus on here is the stage right after all that horrible “coming up with an idea” and “figuring out the story” stuff—the corpus callosum between design and implementation, getting the world to a state where the player can at least walk around and look at stuff.

I’m going to assume a basic familiarity with the Inform 7 programming environment, but if you have no idea how I7 works, you may be able to glean that basic familiarity from this post. Plus you will get to see my terrible handwriting!!!

Okay, so! First I draw a map.

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Some new stuff!

I’ve got a new game for you about cavemen; it’s called Reference and Representation: And Approach to First-Order Semantics.
I’ve got ANOTHER new game for you about a docent; it’s called An Evening at the Ransom Woodingdean Museum House.
The above games were supported by nice people via Patreon.
If you haven’t checked out Clash of the Type-Ins recently, you may have missed various new episodes featuring such luminous guests as Dan Schmidt, Jason McIntosh, and Andrew Plotkin.

The First Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction

Read about it here.

What have you been up to, Ryan?

Plenty!

Currently I am most excited about my new text adventure, an interactive documentary called WINTER STORM DRACO. You will remember Winter Storm Draco, the 2012 blizzard, of course. If you don’t, you will learn an awful lot when you play this text adventure.
Less recently I released another game called THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR WOOBY, about felt dinosaurs. The felt dinosaurs in the game are randomly generated, and I had a lot of fun drawing the various dinosaurs that players found. Plus it got written up by Emily Short!
My felt dinosaur game was preceded by the construction of some flesh-and-blood felt dinosaurs, for a window display at Plaid Peacock, which see photos of here and here.
Clash of the Type-Ins released several new episodes.
Clash of the Type-Ins had a Kickstarter to cover hosting fees and it was wildly successful!!! WHY DID I NOT POST ABOUT IT HERE. COME ON.
I started and never finished working on a weird time signature version of Scarborough Fair.
I played a LOT of Super Mario Maker. Here’s the code for one of my levels: A98D-0000-0025-56BE

If you are eager to know what I’m up to at any given moment then your best shot is to follow me on Twitter. Thank you for your interest!

Westerado: Double Barreled: Additional Title

I was lucky enough to get in on an advance version of Westerado: Double Barreled, a remake by Ostrich Banditos of their Adult Swim browser game Westerado. I wrote all about Westerado a while back, and I have plenty to say about the differences between the remake and the original—and what the differences mean to me as a game designer, and what they mean to me in terms of game genre theory—but let’s get the most superficial facts out of the way and work from there.

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Clashin’ and Typin’ with Emily Short

Only recently have I gotten around to editing and uploading a few episodes of CLASH of the TYPE-INS that Jenni and I recorded with Emily Short way back in September or something. Now they are all up, though. The episode where we play Bronze was crazy good, in my opinion: Some IF design-theoretical issues got brought up and Emily expounded on them with a cogency that Jenni’s and my antics often lack. If you listen to only one episode of our dumb podcast this year, make it Episode 10.

But you should listen to all of them! Why not?

Someone Keeps Moving My Chair

I have a new game! It’s a prequel to The Statue Got Me High. My intent was to make a little sub-game that would briefly explore one of the characters from Statue, but this game is actually about 153% the size of that one.

I think you can play them in either order, but whatever or however you play, I hope you have a good time, and if you have anything to say about them I hope you’ll let me know!

My Wii Fit Trainer amiibo mod

Addendum, 3 September 2015: I did this project with a Wii Fit Trainer from the first amiibo run. I am led to understand that the reprints are better-constructed, and in particular the foot and the cast are glued much more securely to the stand. People who have executed this mod with the reprints have had to “club it straight off and mighty glue it,” albeit with gorgeous results. It’s still very much possible to execute this mod with your newer WFT amiibo, but you probably won’t have as easy a time as I did.
This is what the Wii Fit Trainer amiibo was supposed to look like.

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Dial C for Cupcakes

I have a new text adventure called Dial C for Cupcakes and you can play it! You can play it right now!

The Dark vs. Ghost Question: A Rope of Sand

This was a post on Google+, but it ended up being so long that I’ve convinced myself it belongs here too. It is an analysis of Pokémon types.

I was wondering what the philosophical distinction between Ghost and Dark Pokémon was, and my friend Zach said that Dark is evil, while Ghosts are dead. This sounded good at first, but as we thought about it it seemed overly simplistic. For one thing, it’s not totally clear that Ghost Pokémon are straight-up dead Pokémon. Maybe the better word for Ghost Pokémon is “spooky”?

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