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Hi, glad to have you back.
1. The words I would say are counted by any delimiter so hyphenated words will count as two words, but words ending with an apostrophe s will be counted as one word. Numbered lists will be an exception, in that case then the prefixing number will not be counted, so long as the number is not part of the conveyed information.
2. Up to two words is the input (processing) restriction. The game should expect VERB, or VERB NOUN, or perhaps just NOUN. "GO NORTH" is already handled by adventuron and it will change the input the "NORTH", same with all other directions. Handling one word inputs is definitely allowed. Adventuron throws away extra words, so if the player types CUT ROPE WITH SWORD, then the game should only process "CUT ROPE", the "WITH SWORD" will be ignored.
3. Similarly, if the player types "ASK FOR HELP" and you create a matcher like : match "ask help", then FOR will be a word that is not in the game dictionary and will be discarded by the parser. Therefore the player can type "ASK HELP" or "ASK FOR HELP" and a matcher that just processes "ASK HELP" will process both inputs. It is expected that players will be informed on the game page to expect one or two word inputs.
4. Visual effects are allowed, but not graphics, if you can figure out how to do them. I won't help with this.
I have an issue with 1. If I have a hyphenated compound noun, then I would have thought that was one word. For example, if I go to my hypothetical hotel (from another thread) and I need to buy a six-pack to take home to my mother-in-law, then I can't do any of it. I can define six-pack as an object with six-pack as a noun, but your rule would prevent me doing anything to the six-pack. Can't examine it. Can't buy it. Can't get it. Similarly, I can define my mother-in-law as an object and a noun, but I can't examine her, talk to her or give her the six-pack. That's pretty harsh, isn't it?
I suppose this is maybe open to discussion, and I agree it is very harsh.
But without it, what's to stop you from doing something like;
monster : object "monster-with-a-huge-horn-and-an-angry-face";
?
Such names are not truly necessary. They can be reworked.
Trying to fit within the constraints of the jam will necessarily lead to things that are simply not possible. In my mind, the point of such a cruel and arbitrary constraint in the jam is to force the use of creative ways around them I suppose. It may require renaming things, or reworking characters (mother rather than mother-in-law).
The two word limit for objects, maybe could be reduced to a three word limit, but I think part of the fun of the jam is to try to fit under that limit. Hyphenated words are clearly a way to exploit the word limit. I did put in an exemption for 's, because it's a terminator and 's' by itself is a grammar modifier, not a conveyer of more information. But is mother-in-law one word or three words? Most people would say three, hyphen or no hyphen.
I was using six-pack and mother-in-law as an example. I would have thought that if it's defined that way in the dictionary, then it's fair game. "monster-with-a-huge-horn-and-an-angry-face" is not defined in the dictionary and is clearly cheating. Unfortunately, my object doesn't have any synonyms and the parts within the hyphenated word are crucial clues to a puzzle. So, in the spirit of the newly unveiled interpretation of the rules, I am going to ditch that puzzle completely. :-(
I suppose this is maybe open to discussion, and I agree it is very harsh
Open to discussion.
Maybe an "in dictionary" clarification is a good compromise.
S.M.A.R.T would be one word.
UX210 would be one word.
I will clarify a word to mean either a name, a dictionary word, or a codeword. Punctuation will be largely ignored. I think we'll know if someone breaks this rule in spirit.
Yes. Everything is great, but I have one question that haunts me. English is not my native language, so I don't know, will be articles "a/the" counted as separate words or not. If yes then it will be really hardcore with six-words restriction. "The blue key is in the room." is already seven words then.
Yes. The rules explicitly say that "Locations descriptions and object names should be a maximum of TWO words and displayed without an article". You can use articles in your messages, but these will add to the word count. In your example, you could say, "Blue key in room."
Now, imagine how hard it is for me. I'm using the optional two-word limit on ALL messages! So, assuming this is something you've just discovered, I would have to say something like, "See key." or "Find key." or "Discover key." The fact that it's in the room is implied and the fact that it's blue is in the object description.
object lists are listed simply using the TWO theme and the adjective noun of all objects have their own two word limit. You can can 20 objects in the room if you wish. This is the best way to display contents of a room.
The 6 word limit refers to a reponsr in the game...
Things like ....
"Something happened."
"You hear a click.
Then update the objects in the room, perhaps Garry has more time to explain this more.? Sorry , in airport now.
Hi,
DISCLAIMER : This is only my personal opinion, there are many other equally as valid opinions.
You can write the solution as a linear set of steps but personally, I think that writing a puzzle dependency chart helped me with two. Check out (one of my other tools) vizon:
I build Vizon after reading the following article by Ron Gilberts:
https://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts
You know you have a frustrating game, if the chart will be a linear sequence of actions from top to bottom, you want your chart to be wide at the beginning (which means that multiple puzzles are open to be solved at most points during the game). The game may feature one or more choke points where you have to solve all of the pre-requisite puzzles to proceed onwards. In a simple game, the only choke point may be the end game condition. In larger games, there may be several choke points.
See the diagram for TWO's puzzles below...
At the beginning of the game, there are multiple actions that can be performed in any order. This means that if the player gets stuck on one thread of the game, they can make progress on another thread. In the diagram, I create events that are conditions (in green), user actions (in blue), and high level goals (in red).
(right click and open image in new tab to be able to see it full screen and zoom in) :
C
The way I see it, there are three levels of assistance you can give to a player outside the game, i.e. not including the in-game hints. These are:
1. Hints
2. Walkthrough
3. Solution
Hints are exactly that. They do not give you a solution to a puzzle, just some pointers to what to do and where to look to find the in-game hints. They are usually cryptic and I usually provide one or two red herrings to trap people that are cheating.
A walkthrough is a descriptive explanation of what to do with a suggested strategy, the preferred path through the puzzle tree, what to do, what to avoid, an explanation of various alternatives, an explanation of how the scoring works and so on.
A solution is a minimum path command-by-command solution with no elaboration.
For the game jam, I am considering providing coded hints for my game, but I don't think you should provide a walkthrough or a solution until the jam is over. If Adventuron was to request a walkthrough for the judges, then that's a different issue.
By all means, provide a "Have you tried?" section on the game page, but it is damn near impossible to write one of these without giving spoilers. You don't want people reading this or the walkthrough before they've even played the game.
I think that there is a room status message and a command response , both of which have the response limit applied to them. That said, the top right of the screen (status bar) can sometimes be employed as an additional passive status indicator.
At the end of the day, the judges will judge the minimalism. Your baseline implementation is TWO. If you want to try to exploit ambiguity in the number of allowed responses, you can do that, but a judge may see that as less minimal than not trying an exploit
Regarding score, that doesn't really answer the question. I'll update the passive score indicator anyway, but people tend not to notice when that has changed, so I normally provide an extra active score indicator a la Inform/Infocom as a matter of course. Is this permitted?
Regarding multiple messages, TWO does this, so I guess it's okay. If not, the game is crippled, because you can't do any of the interesting background processing that normally takes place in text adventures - things like NPCs moving around or timed events taking place, e.g. "Starts raining", "Getting dark", "You're hungry", "Bomb exploded", "Mine collapsed" and so on.
Yes the jingles are configurable.
If you name subroutines the following names, they will be executed as a jingle:
Obviously these are only executed if jingles are enabled in the theme_settings {} of the theme, but the TWO theme and anything that extends it enables kindles by default.
Chris
Option 1 - If you extend the two theme (keyboard clicks already enabled in parent theme so no additional setting required):
start_at = my_location
start_theme = my_theme locations { my_location : location "You are in a room." ;
} themes {
my_theme : theme {
extends = two
theme_settings {
keyboard_click_pattern = 3, 3
}
}
}
Option 2 - If you don't extend the two theme (keyboard clicks need to be set on as off by default),
start_at = my_location
start_theme = my_theme locations {
my_location : location "You are in a room." ;
} themes {
my_theme : theme {
theme_settings {
keyboard_click = on
keyboard_click_pattern = 3, 3
}
}
}
I don't think it works. I'm extending the two theme. Before making any keyboard click changes, I get a click for the very first keystroke, then nothing else for the rest of the game. I thought this was a bug. After making the suggested changes, I get silence. (At least it got rid of that annoying initial key click.)
Booted up IE and couldn't get Adventuron classroom3 working at all. At first, I couldn't even get to the web site and discovered that I had to enable an earlier version of SSL & two later version of TTL in the options. Now I can't get past the loading screen after clicking the licence acceptance button. Any idea why that would be?
I think either is ok (if passwords are non random). Depends how strict you like to be. No harm in using is_know_passworda, but I think it's a fringe problem. If the player already knows the password then they already played the game to know them, so what does it matter if they cut a corner on subsequent runs?
Unless you are using password knowledge to assume so other pre requisite action has taken place (not recommended).