The Storm is my second interactive fiction. It was written for the 2018 French Comp, organized by the french website Fiction-Interactive.fr and had the 4th place.
That version isn't available anymore and has been replaced by a debugged one, and with a bit more content.
I also translated it into English with the help of Jack Welch.
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The Storm is the adaptation of a (very) short story I had published on my website at that time :
"A man comes out of his house on a stormy night, after hearing repeated cries in the night. He follows the cries that seem always as far away as he goes. What does he finally find? Himself, naked and curled up, terrified. The house is an uninhabited ruin."
The theme was "Memory". Exploring that character and that situation seemed relevant to me : someone, human or not — we won't ever know — who has a totally imaginary, fictive life, and discovers it brutally. He or she is absolutely naked, literally and metaphorically. A false memory, thus, assuming "real memories" are something that exists.
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Half-jokingly I called the game a "self-portrait", realizing that the character's passion for cocooning, tranquillity and petty bourgeois comfort were mine.
"You would like to go back to bed, to sink into merciful, peaceful sleep, cosy and warm; but with that haunting wind... and these screams, you're wide awake with frayed nerves."
"You have always loved the night. Nights of peaceful sleep, in happy unconsciousness, protected by high, thick walls. Nights of reading. Nights spent wandering from room to room, enjoying the mere fact of being alive and there, of owning that place and all the things it contains, as if they were part of your very being."
"If you think about it, you don't have any friends. Nor romantic relationships. And you don't miss it. You live in a happy solitude. The most important thing for you is not being connected with some hypothetical, unpredictable and incomprehensible other. What matters to you is being at peace with yourself and the miniature world that surrounds you, that you created for yourself."
As I recently wrote in my diary :
"I do not hike in the countryside or on the forest paths, because I lose more and more the taste of nature; I just wander every night, or almost, in the residential neighborhoods that border my city. [...] I look at the houses, sighing with envy towards those who live there, and asking me endlessly [...] why me I was not entitled to that, to this delicious regressive and ancestral feeling of Home Sweet Home. I imagine a monster still to name, who would introduce himself to people; a vampire who would not be thirsty for blood, but for belonging to a place and owning a place, belonging to a family and to the world, but inevitably sent back into the darkness of the outside."
That "vampiric" stuff is almost the base of all the stories I could write about houses. And I'm far from being done with that theme.
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Thematic questions put aside, my other goal when starting this game (and at a time when I was working on Twine-like stories) was recovering that "good old" parser feeling that gave me so much pleasure when I played Untold Stories, episode 1. And above all I wanted to overcome that "I don't know what to type / I don't know how to formulate" problem.
A few directions :
• Maximal implementation — I hate having no response (or a generic error response) when I want to examinate or manipulate an object which is mentionned in the room description.
• Try to include as many synonyms as possible for verbs and nouns, and ensure that everyday expressions are correctly understood by the game. For example, "taking a bath" does not mean TAKING a "bath" object. Just as "pushing the door" actually means opening it... With this in mind, I have replaced most of the basic responses of actions, or created some. I have also tried to develop as much as possible the action "to use", which detects, according to the object to which it applies, the most relevant answer.
• I have simplified / automated a few things, such as the "turn on the light" command (which can be formulated in a variety of ways) that automatically detects all the lamps in a room and turns them on if they are off. The opposite works too. The goal is not only to add a technical gadget to the game, but to progress towards an understanding of the most everyday, banal, and natural expressions people use — excepted professional interactive fiction players, whose minds are perverted by decades of games with the ultra-analytical approach.
• The rooms are systematically doubled by backdrop that allow me as well to manage the movements that actions of all kinds (think, search, etc) that one can imagine. Thus, if anywhere in the house, the player types "go to the kitchen," or "think of the kitchen", the backdrop is detected and responds to the action. Either by a narrative response (The ThinkingResult of the KitchenBackdrop) or by a move (towards the EnteringDestination of the backdrop).
• Try to include as many synonyms as possible for verbs and nouns, and ensure that everyday expressions are correctly understood by the game. For example, "taking a bath" does not mean TAKING a "bath" object. Just as "pushing the door" actually means opening it... With this in mind, I have replaced most of the basic responses of actions, or created some. I have also tried to develop as much as possible the action "to use", which detects, according to the object to which it applies, the most relevant answer.
• I have simplified / automated a few things, such as the "turn on the light" command (which can be formulated in a variety of ways) that automatically detects all the lamps in a room and turns them on if they are off. The opposite works too. The goal is not only to add a technical gadget to the game, but to progress towards an understanding of the most everyday, banal, and natural expressions people use — excepted professional interactive fiction players, whose minds are perverted by decades of games with the ultra-analytical approach.
• The rooms are systematically doubled by backdrop that allow me as well to manage the movements that actions of all kinds (think, search, etc) that one can imagine. Thus, if anywhere in the house, the player types "go to the kitchen," or "think of the kitchen", the backdrop is detected and responds to the action. Either by a narrative response (The ThinkingResult of the KitchenBackdrop) or by a move (towards the EnteringDestination of the backdrop).
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