Blue Lacuna Presentation

Blue Lacuna: A Lighter Take on Interaction Fiction

Blue Lacuna is a work of Interactive Fiction(IF) created by Aaron A. Reed and is freely available at lacunatory.com. The game starts gently with a tutorial, using prompts and hints for the first chapter to allow beginners to get to grips with how the game works. The game places an early emphasis on decision making, initially you have to pick a gender for your character, a gender for your partner and finally must must chose to either make love or art. The text informs the player that they are a wayfarer, someone who must travel to new worlds and can never come back to one they have left and that when they hear a call to a new world it is irresistible. After a quick exploration of the starting house players must decide between answering the call to wayfare or staying with their partner. If the player chooses to go they are taken to the island where the game plays out, if they decide to stay they receive a stream of text scenarios requiring player input, however the player can say anything without affecting how this plays out. Eventually the game forces the player to leave this world and answer the call. At the end of the chapter the game asks the player if they want to play in story mode or puzzle mode, the differences between each is the complexity of the puzzles. After this the player arrives on an island and is presented with numerous puzzles to figure out. To play the game interactive nouns and verbs are displayed in blue and green text respectively to make it easy to pick out the action items within a 'room'.

Objectives – The game never poses an objective to the player but through exploration and contact with the sole NPC inhabitant of the island players gain an understanding of their objective. While the overall objective is obscured, the very act of exploring the world will be an objective for some players.

Rules – Players type context sensitive text commands and receive further information on an item or move to another 'room'. While objects that can be interacted with are normally highlighted it is possible to examine other items within the world. Actions can be carried out on the many items and there are a wide variety of verbs that the game will understand when typed within the right context.

Conflict – The main conflict within the game comes from the very nature of the puzzles and the mysteries presented to the players. The conflict comes from finding the solutions or hints to the solutions of these complex puzzles.

Outcome – The outcome of the game and many aspects of it can be altered or changed by the players input. Breaking your leg restricts certain actions, numerous puzzles interact with each other and how the other NPC on the island views you is affected by your actions. In comparison to linear story driven games such as Uncharted 2 this is a vastly different approach, made possible by the choice of a text only interface to the game.

Procedures – The game proceeds by using either nouns or verbs for objects or areas to explore or interact with. During conversation sections the player generally responds to the NPC but may sometimes lead the conversation.

Resources – The only resource within the game is information, to solve the puzzles the player has to explore different areas, the first puzzle requires players to explore and discover the island before they can figure out the solution. There is one item you can pick up but it is just a compass which changes the directions given from object based(Cabin, Forest) to directional based(North, West).

Boundaries – Play is limited to the rooms within the game world. Each room has a set amount of information or items that can be explored before moving on to other areas. You can return to an area later to try find more information if you think you missed something the first time round. A map of the game world is provided in the download.

Blue Lacuna is a difficult game to come to grips with for a player of my generation(SNES onwards) as I've always had the benefit of at least being able to see game worlds and choose what to interact with. Truth be told I came to it with a negative view, seeing interactive fiction as something that isn't really a game, from Blue Lacuna I realised that if you treat it as a game it will return the favour and provide rewarding and often enjoyable experiences. One of the most interesting aspects of this style of game is the branching story and player agency within the world, most objects I could interact with and I never got too frustrated at something that I couldn't interact with in the way I wanted to(Generally in the hopes of breaking the game or exploiting the system). Triple A titles can't manage to compete with a game like this in terms of gameplay outcomes and the repercussions from player actions, the amount of time to program it and to create the art assets required would be insane for the amount of gameplay created. This game leverages the power of your imagination to create vivid and interesting spaces within the game. Overall Blue Lacuna offers something different and very digestible to someone new to the genre and is worthy of its status as a game.

Games and the Real World

Dr Richard Bartle presented at GDC Online last week(Slides available here) where he discussed MUD(Multi-User Dungeon) ,the first virtual world, predating World of Warcraft by over 2 decades. In it Richard talks about how they created the physics of the world first and this allowed them to then know what would be possible within the game. They used the principle of mimicking reality whenever there was no reason to differ from expected norms. When talking about modern virtual worlds he had this to say:

Sadly, however, although the principle of mimicking reality was carried forward, the reason for it was not. This has inevitably led to its dilution.
Here are some modern phenomena that would Perplex the MUD
players of 20 to 30 years ago:

• If the goblin was carrying a sword, why was it hitting me with a stick?
• You can dye armour but not paint it? But you can paint the walls of your house? But not any other walls?
  
• I can build a snowman in a fire, and neither is affected?
• Why don’t those foul creatures come to assist their allies? I can see them, can they not see me? Does this axe have a silencer?

Now I don't play World of Warcraft but in most modern shooters you get shot 50 times and your avatar isn't visibly affected, you can place a grenade beside a wooden door and the grenade blows up with no damage to the door and you can jump up on a box but not on a pile of rubble that is the same height beside the box. These are simple things, that should at least be explored in games, in fairness Bad Company 2 has a lot of room for the player to interact with the physics of the world. Its something about modern games that's a bit disappointing, it seems like the worlds just got better looking since Quake and Doom and haven't advanced in terms of player interaction within the world.

Maybe Black Ops. will try some new things this November...

Board Game Testing

Earlier today our board game assignments underwent some rigorous testing. We each had a game and separated into groups of 3 so that we'd each get to play our games and the others in our group.

Alan went first in our group, his game involved a hex grid where you would colour in sides based on dice rolls in order to capture a hex, the winner was the player with the most hexes at the end. It worked well until the end when we were running out of hexes and our dice rolls were too high to continue. Alan won, with Basil coming second and myself a distant last place!

Basils game was next and involved strategically moving pieces of "mess" around an apartment for control of the board, if two pieces overlapped they would fight and the winner stayed on the board while the losing item was removed. I somehow managed to win this one but I think it was down to luck more so than skill as Basil cleared the way for me to play my last piece safely.

Lastly we played my game "8 Legged Warriors", its about using spiders to gain territory and wipe out the competition, the presentation on my previous post explains the rules. I was a bit worried starting out about how the game would scale as I had only playtested with 2 players over the weekend, luckily the 3 players worked really smoothly. I had been worried about a game breaker or exploit in the rules being found but I think its actually pretty well covered as theres not much room for someone to become over powered. I think for the game to be more fun the cards need to be more balanced in terms of their effect and quantities, it was the imbalance in some of the cards that threw up the only real issues but these weren't major and the game still worked well. The game takes on a visual style that I really enjoy seeing develop as the game continues, essentially the quantity of coloured tiles by each player hints at their overall power within the game. I think this happens because the player with the most spiders has the most resources to capture tiles. One slight issue I think is that larger stacks are as mobile and effective as smaller stacks so currently there's no incentive to to use smaller stacks. Having single spiders move 3 spaces, 2 spiders move 2 spaces and a stack of 3 move 1 space might be interesting but I'd worry about the effect of that on the playability of the game given that there are only 19 unique spaces on the board. Lots to think about but overall I'm calling this design a success!

For next week we're moving ahead with developing Basils game further, so it should be fun.

8 Legged Warriors