Retro Fatale

Usually, whenever there's a push for some kind of game to be made on the site, I don't participate because I don't have any ideas for games rattling around in my head. This one was no different, but a few days after it started, I suddenly really wanted to make a text adventure game, and so I went about learning Inform 7 when I had a spare moment. What I learned intrigued me, since it's actually very easy to get a few rooms up.

So, I just started with the first thing that popped into my head, and then the next thing, and the next thing. Everytime I got stuck, (the syntax can be especially picky sometimes - I almost wish it was a real language instead) i would look at the provided examples.

After I was about half done making the rooms, I finally decided to seriously look at all the items I had just made up on the fly, and decide what else I should have. about halfway through the making of the whole game, I settled on the puzzles.

By far the most trying thing was character interaction. I really tried to make the characters be as interesting as possible, and interact in interesting ways. mostly, this is achieved by the "ask someone about something" command, but a couple fo times you get funny reactions by giving things to people. Also, people say things out loud, in their sleep, or follow you around.

I have a new appreciation for how complicated these games can get, although many aren't that complicated.

I also wanted to make the game easy, in the sense that the puzzle progression is fairly linear, and there are many places you can get hints for each puzzle.

Overall, I learned a whole whack of things making this game. I think it's fairly impressive for a first attempt EVER at making a text-adventure, and I tried really hard to make it so that there was no way to sequence break. I even included multiple endings! And there's only one place to die! I hate it when you die too often in these games...

Anyway, if you play it, I hope you try to beat it without looking at the walkthroughs first, it's much more fun.