Want to love this game, but...

[tomatoes.dll]

...by 1980 I was programming in the only language anyone knew how to teach to middle school kids was the singular option: BASIC.

Using BASIC I built text adventure games early on, and while the concept and story in the first episode of Untold Stories is wonderful to see, I am a bit agitated with the lack of understandable player input responses. If I could do far better in that regard in the '80s, can't you guys consider upping that dictionary and, further,

So, my question is only this: Why was I, in the year 1980 programming text adventure games, yet in your game, it takes more time to figure out the required vernacular options and end-user trial & error to move forward.

This game is lookin' to be VERY awesome, but I can't reinforce enough my opinion that the dictionary and recognition system needs to be genuinely progressed.

I know you can do it; I did it, and I'm lame as hell.

Short bus Sammy. You know, the guy you hate to love.

[wjousts]

Originally posted by Fien:

Originally posted by Zotlerg:

Oh come on! You're making excuses for them. Seriously how hard is it to make abreviations? North South, In, INVentory, EXamine, Push, Hit, Take, take ALL There's a wealth of string libraries out there, including the ones that come with languages C# and C++. At least you are not constrained by 16K of memory in total, or whatever. The art was about how to making it fit, and compressing the text- all invisible stuff to the end user.

Unless the developers tell me I'm wrong, I'll repeat that IMNVHO the lack of abbreviations and the selection of commands was a deliberate design decision. They used the text adventure format to tell a story. We're not playing a text adventure, we're playing someone's fantasy of a text adventure. Not the same thing at all. You're on wheels the whole time, the game takes you by the hand and literally tells you what to do. It's impossible to go wrong.

Not true at all. It tells you to "go round back and turn on the generator". So you "go yard" which is described as the side of the house. I.e. not the back. And you don't see a generator there. So I tried "go back" which actually takes you back to the front of the house. There is no reason why the generator isn't included in the initial description of that location.

Like I said before in another thread, I was confused and a bit annoyed by the weird commands for the first ten minutes of the game. But I soon discovered you need very few commands. The most useful one is "use". You can type "use key" and the game will unlock the door for you, "use switch" and the light goes on, "use generator" etcetera. Something which would be totally impossible in a classic text adventure.

That is just nonsense. I remember playing adventure games in the 80's that had only USE as a verb. So you absolutely "USE KEY" to unlock door, "USE SWITCH" to turn on something and "USE SWORD" to stab a monster in the head. And they still managed to do things like "N" for "North". So I don't quite get how you take a huge step backwards as some kind of innovation.

[wjousts]

Originally posted by Zotlerg:

Well that's nice for you.

This is just bad coding skils. Deliberately frustrating the player is not game-play. It may give the devs a wry smile, but it's not actually fun to play. I played Level 9 Adventure games, they had a great input parser, and a good sense of humour. And they displayed the text quickly, just like they ALL did, right?

To be fair, I don't think it's bad coding skills. It's bad design decisions.

[Vogelmeister]

Originally posted by wjousts:

Originally posted by Vogelmeister:

I have a suspicion that coding text adventures is a bit of a lost and forgotten art. I mean, all the finest text adventure classics used to have large vocabularies for starters. And then there were other factors like brief and evocative descriptions, some semblance (or at least an illusion) of choice and, well, writing quality in general. The whole TA genre got pretty refined at one point.

That's just silly. Head over to the interactive fiction archive and you will find a small by still active community of people making text adventure games and a ton of tools that exist to help you make them.

The idea that it's some how a lost art when we are talking about some very simple string processing just doesn't make sense.

Oh, I never said it wasn't simple. But you still need to know how to do it properly, right? Maybe if No Code or Devolver had hired some of those people, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.

[Feesh]

Text parser is very simple. I don't think it's a problem for the game though.

Edit: After doing Case 2, I take it back.

[The thing in the cellar]

I have only played the first one so far, but it seems to me that this isn't a text adventure in the sort of way they were in the past. The first game at least is a linear experience. The parser is bad because anything more complicated is not just unnecessary, but might mess up the format. They are deliberately limiting what is possible because they only want you to take one course of action. It is like a short story that has found a way to put you in the main role. I would even say that the simplicity of the parser and of the plot made it easier to find the correct responses. I used to have huge trouble working out the correct responses back in the 8 bit days, and it wasn't just because I was young, as I have played a few of them recently. The simplicity of choices in this game made it very easy to work out the next command. Given that it is only nominally interactive I can even allow some leeway on the speed of it, in the interests of building atmosphere, but not enough leeway to say that the speed was acceptable. Once I had turned down graphics settings and used a lower resolution that problem kind of half resolved itself, so it is clearly more hardware related than design led. That needs to be fixed, but the parser doesn't, because that is simply not what this is about.

[Zotlerg]

It could do with some compass directions at the very least. Maybe an 'U'p and 'D'own short cut. We're supposed to be playing the game, not the game's user interface! - that's not game-play, it's frustration.

[StormyFae]

I don't know how many of you are complaining about the way the game is actually designed to run and how many about the way the game actually runs. I watched a let's play video of this game and the text and movements were WAY faster than what they are on my computer. Sure I'm not running the fastest game setup but I play a lot of graphically intense games just fine. I can't understand why this game should need more horsepower than say Guild Wars2 or Overwatch?? Can't get through the game because of stuttering and interminable text displays. Might be a nice game but I simply can't stand to play it.

[Zotlerg]

Are you saying the games slowly on fairly high spec machines?
Haha, I guess they must be really bad at writing font rendering code!!! :)
Either that are the screen bloom effect is ridulously expensive...

[The thing in the cellar]

My laptop tends to top out at the level of Modern Warfare 2, so naturally I am going to find it uncomfortably slow to play a text adventure on a near static screen, even if I turn down all the details as far as they will go. /S