Catchphrase: The Text Adventure

And for no extra cost, an insight into mine too!

Okay, so I'm probably the only person who didn't do a graphical game for this, and from my pedestal of uniqueness I feel I should comment on how this came about because hey blog why not.

I didn't actually have any knowledge of this contest until about 3pm on the day, at which point I was like "Well, I won't be able to come up with a suitably bad adaptation so there's no point in entering."

It wasn't until someone said "game show" in the thread that it hit me: I could totally do an adaptation of Catchphrase!

Now I was in the middle of recreating Day of the Tentacle as my fledgling Inform 7 project, learning the ropes of the engine and all that. As I already had a project there I wasn't going to do a text adventure for my contest entry. Initially I had this idea in my head of using static images in RMVX and making shitty little Roy Walker sprites and spriting a game show studio tileset. Which admittedly would have been pretty badass and I honestly might revisit the idea at some point, but not the kind of thing I thought I could get done in 5 hours.

So then I looked at Inform again, and it hit me. I was about to make an adaptation of a game show that relied on absolutely nothing but graphical information to play properly...USING TEXT. The sheer irony of this was just too powerful for me to back down, so I fired up a new Inform project and began.

Ever one to push the envelope of originality in gaming (ha) I decided that rather than making the game about playing Catchphrase, it would be cool if I actually made it more of a realistic simulation and place the player in the role of the contestant before the show began, subsequently having to make their way to the studio in time for filming. This was my first mistake.

It wasn't a mistake because of the idea itself, which if I say so myself was brilliant. The problem was that I ended up spending too much of my allotted time modelling the world outside of the show, to the point where there's actually more game about getting to the studio than there is playing Catchphrase. Which depending on how you look at it is either great or awful.

Where I fell down having wasted all this time was that, when it came to writing the rules for playing the game itself, I hit two roadblocks. The first was when I started getting a fatal error when the game show itself started, and I could not for the life of me figure out what was causing it. All I knew was that deleting phrase hints from the table that stores them sometimes stopped the error from occurring.

After several painstakingly panicked minutes of deleting stuff and trying to play the project again, I eventually realised that the problem was being caused by my rule for drawing the status line at the top (it was conflicting with my catchphrase table for reasons that will elude me until my dying day). So I changed that up a bit and all was well.

At this point I had just under 20 minutes left, I reckon. I'd modelled an easy-to-add-to system for generating catchphrases, I had coded all the stuff that happens when you buzz in and when you wait (your opponent makes a guess; I had intended to sometimes make her pause because she doesn't know the answer but didn't have time to add that in)...everything worked...except one thing.

I hadn't coded in the player guessing the catchphrase correctly.

Unfortunately, when you're making a game of a game show, allowing the player to win is probably one of the more important parts. There was a finicky syntax issue where I wasn't able to match the player's guess against the table that contained the answer, so there was no way for me to tell when the guess was correct. I have since fixed that, but it was after my time ran out so I can't add it to my contest entry.

Which is really a shame, because I honestly believe if I hadn't wasted so much time at the beginning modelling the rooms outside of the studio (and I truly hope you explore all that's out there and get all the endings) and finished what I believe to be a pretty damn impressive textual version of the game show, I would have had a chance at winning.

As it is, at least I get my Dino.