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Comments on 'The Perfect Gem'

A topic by Dee Cooke created Mar 12, 2020 Views: 201 Replies: 10
Viewing posts 1 to 6
Submitted(+1)

Embarrassingly it took me about half an hour to get out of the first room, because I didn't realise that the 'with what?' messages were prompting me for an additional response.  Once I figured that out, though, the game was very straightforward and fun, with a lovely charming story.

I think I'd scored 120/125 by the end.  Wonder what I missed?  Unless dropping the treasure gets you the final few points and I hadn't noticed...

Loved the reference in the safe code ;)

One apparent bug - when I pressed the button to go back up in the lift, it activated twice and so I ended up at the bottom again.  I can't quite remember how I solved this because I was panicking slightly about getting out in time!

Great little game overall.

Host(+1)
Embarrassingly it took me about half an hour to get out of the first room, because I didn't realise that the 'with what?' messages were prompting me for an additional response. 

Same thing happened with me. I understand some additional prods and pointers are on the way for the first puzzle.

Submitted (3 edits)

Indeed.  I've changed the flow a little, and I've made the game start to remove unnecessary items as you slowly solve the puzzle, to reduce the 'search space' in the first room.   I've also tweaked the help text and changed some of the descriptions to make the link between the _____ and reaching the ______ more obvious :)


As for the lift, that's unusual... I have noticed that if you put in a "pause", like for 1000 millis, and press the enter key during the pause, the game seems to interpret it as a command.. But not sure about the double-press of the lift button...   Aha! found it!  There was an error with doing an action in a room, and then during the action code moving the player to a new room that the same action is permitted in , without "done:"... It was falling through and evaluating the same code in the new location.. I fixed it!  But, as you found, you can just go "u" and "d" as well... as synonyms for pressing the button :):) Thanks for the feedback! :)]


re: the safe code:-   :)    tee hee.. I'm glad you got the reference..  I'm a star wars nerd at heart :)

Host

Hi,

I think you left in some debug code in this fix. When you restart a game now, you go straight to the lift location (intro skipped, no cold room puzzle).

Chris

Submitted

oops... Fixed it :)  Thanks Chris!  I'm such a doofus sometimes! Thanks for the save! :) :)

Submitted

I must confess that I haven't read the background story yet, but the adventure pretty much spoke for itself. One thing that was confusing was that the goal was ambiguous. As I knew it was a treasure hunt, I just assumed that my goal was to find the gems and I would not be able to rescue the rest of the team. The twist at the end was unexpected, but didn't really seem to fit in with the storyline. I guess it was meant to explain why there was a sudden glut of diamonds.

Anyway, I quite enjoyed it. Once I found my way out of the first room, the puzzles were pretty straight forward. Here's some comments on the issues I came across.

I played version 1.3.0.

Please check your display settings. I found that I could not resize the window below a certain size without the edges being truncated. The display itself did not scale down and the border was zero pixels wide.

The introduction sets up the android aspect quite well with some nice animations, but it abuses the three-sentence limit on introductory text.

Delete the full stop after the room description in the status bar in the large freezer.

You have provided a two-word room description for every room in addition to the room description in the status bar, e.g. "Cold room!". This is not allowed in the game rules. Instead, you should create a scenery object for each room with conspicuous = "false". When the player examines the noun in the room description, you can then provide the extra two-word description. This leaves the top area less cluttered and you are not breaking the game rules, but a player can still see the extra description if he/she decides to. As a side benefit, if a player tries to GET NOUN (where NOUN is the room) it no longer says it's not there when it clearly is there.

"You see :" should be "You see:", i.e. delete space before colon.

Consider overriding the system CREDITS with something more appropriate for your game. You can still see the system credits with *CREDITS.

Add full stops at end of sentences in all responses.

Avoid excessive use of exclamation marks. Only use an exclamation mark if it's really an exclamation. Something like "Frosty pipes!" or "One loose!" is not an exclamation. And NEVER use multiple exclamation marks!!!

There are far too many disambiguation menus, especially with the gems. You should be able to refer to the gems by their adjective, e.g. rather than EXAMINE GEM and get prompted which one, also allow for EXAMINE ICE.

When using '' for inches, this should be a double quote, not two single quotes.

You can EXAMINE FROST multiple times and the rubber glove keeps reappearing, even if you've used it and it has been destroyed. If you were carrying it, then it reappears in the room. Use has_not_created to avoid this.

When you USE GLOVE, "with what?" is lower case, but everything else in the game (except for a couple of system messages) is upper case.

When you USE BULB, it responds with "Can't... yet." followed by "What bulb?" I think the latter is a bug, as it's already recognised and responded to the bulb.

When you EXAMINE DOOR after it's open, "Swings open" should be just "Open.", as it has already swung open and it doesn't swing open each time you examine it.

"Captains Cabin" should be "Captain's Cabin", i.e. possessive, not plural.

"Engines shutdown" should be "Engines shut down."

"Flawless,beautiful" should be "Flawless, beautiful.", i.e. space after comma.

There are several actions that cause an extra press_any_key that is unnecessary because the auto_redescribe takes care of it. Check these.

HELP says, "Use fuel" after you've used it. You need an extra help message here.

Is it really necessary to have so many pointless ramps and ledges in the long descent from the bottom of the lift?

The last two rooms were not dark, even though they were deep underground. I tried to reason with myself that this was because they were lit by diamonds, but if that is the case, then the two glittering rooms shouldn't be dark either.

When the lift ascends, it doesn't print "Lift halts...", as it does when lift descends, unless you are going through the end-game scenario.

After the rockfall when ascending the lift in the end game, you can still descend in the lift once you get back to the surface. It might be better if that was prevented.

There doesn't seem to be a limit on how many turns you can take at the end. It might be better if you have a countdown timer of some sort to increase the sense of urgency.

The game finishes quite suddenly in an unexpected location. I think it would make more sense if it finished when you got back to the sandy beach.

I'm presuming you score the last 5 points when you successfully escape the underground area, but you never get to see it, as the status bar clears for the end game messages.

The end-game messages are longer than 3 sentences. They're short sentences, admittedly, but I counted 7 sentences.

I found the use of USE and the continual prompting with messages like "With what?" a bit annoying. It took me a while to work out that this was not a rhetorical question, but a real question that was preceded by a question mark prompt (?) rather than a greater than prompt (>). Once you get the second prompt, you can't get out of it until you answer the question. It would have been better if you'd just used a more appropriate verb in the first place and implied the indirect object.

Anyway, good game. I enjoyed it much more than your first one (The Castle of Death), primarily because it was smaller, it had more puzzles and there were no random factors to contend with. Keep 'em coming.

Submitted (2 edits)

Thanks.   Some of the above is intentional.     There was guidance about an intro *graphic*, but not a loading sequence before the game starts, so I stuck to the two words rule, keeping it to two words per line.  If you check there is only one space character and two sequences of letters and hyphens on each line, even though the line might be quite long :)


re: the ramps.. Initially this was meant to be a spiral, with a puzzle, but I ran out of time.   I wanted to keep the idea that it was deep underground, but the two-word limit prevents an idea of depth, so I just kept the ramps.    They also give a sense of panic when you're escaping the rock fall.    And yes, there is a timer, if you hang about too long you'll get crushed.  And yes, there is an indicator when you're running out of time... But you hadn't hit it yet (I didn't want to kill the player TOO soon, it's meant to be a fun easy game, not a punishing one).  


The end of the game is meant to be a twist.  I had considered having the missing human return, but it just seemed a nice place to end.   After all, humans aren't all that important by the end, it's all about the AIs :) 

I'll block off the lift after you ascend.


I'll have a look at the other suggestions... Some of them aren't possible, but I'll see if I can sort the rest out!   In some places, the two word limit just makes a game unnecessarily obscure. I had difficulty making some things meaningful.   Room descriptions especially.  We have up to six words to make a room description. I chose to use two to try and keep the spirit of the game, but it's tricky to avoid just having synonyms  "Empty Galley " -> "Abandoned Kitchen"  for instance...   I


Thanks for the breakdown, will go through it with a fine toothed comb later on, with a strong coffee and see what can be amended.


 Cheers!

Submitted(+1)

Quoting from the game jam rules (4th bullet point):

"Locations descriptions and object names should be a maximum of TWO words and displayed without an article ("a", "an", "some")..."

I could have sworn that it once said you could not provide any descriptive text for the room description, only what was in the status bar. So I must have misread it, or the rules changed at some point. I saw the rules very early (before submissions were open) and based my design on that. Imagine my surprise when I wanted to check something a few weeks later and the rules had just about doubled in size. Whoa...

Submitted (5 edits)

Aye... It says that the location DESCRIPTIONS could be only two words, but didn't say anything about the location NAMES, so I took that locations were a sort of object, and gave them two word names as well.  If Chris says you're not allowed a name and a description, then I can just change the layout to remove the description, easy enough :) 


The thing I worry about, though, is that the game is already very spartan with just two words, paring it down even more might make it even more spartan... But, I guess them's the rules.. Easy enough to fix :)


I've added an option to have a "compliant start".. So if the judges want to be fully compliant, they can skip all the good stuff. :)  I'll remove it after the jam.

p.s. I greatly  enjoyed the comment  "And NEVER use multiple exclamation marks!!!"  :) hehe.   It's hard to draw a player's attention to something important with just two words.  Punctuation can help.  Exclamation can mean shouting, or surprise.. In this case I'm using it to draw attention to something important to the plot that's happened without saying "You found an X, this looks like it could be useful" :)  Similarly, there is one timed element in the game... That uses exclamation marks to indicate peril level  "TIME LOW!!!" for example.  It's just a modern stylistic idiom used in these kinds of things.  Not oxford english, but useful.

Submitted

Please take all my comments as suggestions. Don't feel obligated to change anything that you don't want to.

Strictly speaking, your interpretation of the rules regarding location descriptions and names appears to be correct, although everyone else interpreted them the same way I did. I wish I could remember where I saw the guidelines, as they were very explicit. Anyway, as I said above, don't feel obligated to change the descriptions if you don't want to.

Regarding exclamation marks, it's a bit of a sore point with me, as I'm also a technical writer (among other things). The excessive use of exclamation marks always reminds me of the amateur school boy adventures from the dim, distant past. It always screams out "I'm an amateur and I don't know how to express myself clearly without using excessive punctuation." If you don't use exclamation marks unnecessarily in the first place, then you don't need the extra exclamation marks where one would suffice. The two rules go hand-in-hand. Don't use exclamation marks where you don't need them and don't use multiple exclamation marks. Once again, it's up to you whether you follow the advice.

In the case of your "TIME LOW!!!" example, it's in upper-case red text, so that draws enough attention without the extra exclamation marks. Incidentally, one of the disadvantages of using all upper-case text is that you can't distinguish between common nouns and proper nouns and you can't use UPPER CASE for extra emphasis. This is why I didn't use the optional rule of doing everything in upper case in my own game.

Submitted

Indeed,   The very strict restrictions, coupled with the " bonus" restrictions mean you've not got much to play with.  I've taken out a few of the exclamation marks, but other than those of us who deal with prose and would find multiple exclamation marks an irritation, I feel it's a useful device to induce urgency.   I've implemented all the suggestions I could, and fixed the multiply-spawning glove bug.


Ironically, some of the issues were caused because I found a bug in Adventuron... I let Chris know about it, but there are some cases where having the game *enforce* all-capitals can break something which I was using... So I had to refactor a lot of it by re-typing it all back out in caps.. I must have missed a few here and there... :)  In a few cases, the response-checking didn't take account of this because it made some assumptions... That's resolved now :)