Caltrops - The King of Shreds and Patches

Forum Overview :: The King of Shreds and Patches

by Bananadine 03/06/2010, 11:26pm PST

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:

It's wonderfully written. Gentry's ability to, at least so far, not fall into you a "You are in" or "This is..." trap for each new room is outstanding. He managed to make it fee like there were real people in the watering hole without there being real people by making me not want to talk to any of them concerning their miserable lives.

Yeah, the first part is really nice, when you're just settling in and you haven't yet done much unfettered roaming and you haven't yet seen just how many locked doors, and uniquely shaped keys that unlock the doors, there are in the eldritch world of H.P. Lovecraft.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:

I have always avoided playing it because of how you can get it into an unwinnable state. People always seem to say that about Anchorhead. Well, first they say it's the best text game they've ever played, but some also say they could not finish it. The beta testing thing is... that's a huge problem with text games in general. I'm honestly considering contacting a betatest shop and trying to negotiate a fee and have them test my WIP. I don't know.

I speculate that there's a lot of room for improvement in automated testing of text adventures. Since they're text and there's such a thing as regular expressions. It seems like you should be able to sort of draw the basic framework of your game as a network of possible paths, and specify some basic goals and some kind of a playing strategy for each path section, and then set the testing engine loose on it. Or something vaguely like that. And then the computer would blunder through a thousand runs and tell you whether it ever crashed or got stuck and you'd read through however many of them you wanted in order to see what your game really looked like when it was played through by a mildly competent player.

It should be noted that I probably didn't actually run into one of those permanent failure modes you've heard about, in Anchorhead. I mean, I did reach the point where I'd have had to spend a few frustrating hours banging my head on various puzzles before the crucial one would have opened up, and by my standards that means I was permanently stuck. But I suspect that there was another way to solve the puzzle than the one my walkthrough used.