IF Competition: Building the Right Stuff

Back in October, I entered the Interactive Fiction competition. The voting results came through in November, and I managed tied 33rd place out of 42. Not great, but not the worst. If you want to take a peek at my entry, the link is here.

Here's what I learned from the experience.

Marvel at the high quality graphics...

Time
I instantly disadvantaged myself by discovering the competition one day before registering closed; this gave me a month to build a game that most people would have been working on for up to a year.
I deliberately made the decision to see if I could make a complete game in that time frame, and I did manage to do so, but it led to other decisions that weren't the most advantageous.

Engine
As time was of the essence, I didn't want to spend most of my time  getting to grips with a new engine. As a result, I used Game Maker, with the intention of making the text game a little more graphical. Unfortunately,  this led to a severely limited game, as I lacked a pre-built engine which would deal with decision trees and all the accoutrements one expects from a text-based game.

Graphics
I am no artist. My graphics work is, at best, rudimentary. Yet I persisted in making the game graphics based. This is especially ridiculous in a text genre, but was driven by my engine decision, which was driven in turn by my lack of time.

UI
The UI was rather clunky, and would have been better served on a single screen, rather than the crediting screens that players kept having to click through to initiate the next conversation moment. I had feedback to this effect that confirmed my suspicions, but by this point, the whole game was a precarious house of cards ready to fall apart the moment I tried to rearrange any aspect. It certainly could not have been fixed in the time frame available for updates.

It's Not All Bad
Having said that, there were aspects of the game I rather liked. The overall story worked; I had a number of people play it, and although everyone got it roughly correct, only one person worked out the full narrative. As I was going for a deliberately ambiguous story that the player figured out through play, this is a good thing.
The concept of having the computer wig out at key points also worked well, and the feedback I got from my beta testers is that it was genuinely creepy, so I managed to get my overall theme across.

How I Would Improve
The biggest thing I would have done differently is found out about the competition sooner! More time would have allowed me to make my other huge change and actually get to grips with a text engine. Having a more suitable engine would have freed me up to concentrate on the important matters of improving and expanding on the conversations the player could have, and on the surveying and travel tasks. I would still be able to create those unsettling computer effects through text, and if I could find an engine that incorporated sound, then all the better.

I'm definitely keen on seeing if I can spend some time recreating the game in a more traditional text engine, so watch this space...