I’ve just submitted a game to the Interactive Fiction Competition that you can play now if you like.
You play Tony, a fourteen-year old thief who needs some help looting the legendary Oakville Manor. Luckily it’s the 1980s and finding fellow adventurers is just a modem squeal away…
Notes on the game below.
UPDATE: “Suffice it to say that it’s one of the most evocative portrayals of our collective disaffected BBS-enhanced adolescence I’ve experience in a game, effortlessly giving surprisingly rounded life to characters you only know briefly via a few descriptive lines and Hammill’s skilled caricature.” —Brandon Boyer, Venus Patrol
Me and Matt Hammill (who made the awesome iOS game Gesundheit) prototyped it during TOJam 2012 in May. We originally had another idea in the works but Matt expressed an interest in doing a text game featuring animated ASCII art, and I was happy to work with that — especially since it allowed us to try out of Vorple‘s new graphics-handling features.
It’s also the third text game I’ve made featuring teenagers in Toronto suburbs — this one’s set in Etobicoke, Everybody Dies (2008) was set in Scarborough, and Punk Points (2000) was set in North York. I didn’t set out to make a teen text triptych twelve years ago, but there you go. Maybe something to do with the fact that my initial obsession with text games began as a 14-yr-old suburbanite?
Whatever the reason, I know 14-year-old me would be stoked to discover that 40-year-old me writes for videogames a lot. Thanks to interactive fiction, I’m typing this from the lobby of a gorgeous art deco hotel in Los Angeles as Indiecade is happening here tomorrow, having just come from the Fantastic Arcade in Austin (where Filmmaker Magazine interviewed us).
Your games looks very interesting, and it’s great that Vorple is already being used. Do you think you could provide an offline version, though? Apparently it’s just a matter of you providing a downloadable zip file of all the files you get when you compile the game. Does your game use any online features that would make this impossible? Even so, it would be interesting for some of us to see how a game with online dependencies would react offline, at this point in Vorple’s development.
Sure thing Peter, see above update!
I could kiss you.
Oh what the hell.
Just don’t tell my girlfriend.
Ok, note to self: anything between “” doesn’t show up. Let me retype.
***
I could kiss you.
Oh what the hell.
SMOOCH!
Just don’t tell my girlfriend.
Congratulations on Unmanned! Well deserved.
This was awesome – thank you! Just won… my favorite moment was definitely with Chris 🙂
This game is really nice, but actually the “SAVE” option is broken. It produce a bad “URL” that can’t be reused to resume the quest OR the page is not able to handle it correctly… 🙁
Save is broken, yeah. In the new version of the game I’ve given a “you can’t save” message when people try to.
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I’ve been playing this for 3 minutes, and it’s really really good. I love the way you write. Signed up on your mailing list – will be keeping an eye on YOU, sir!