Gamecamp

[undyingking]

On Saturday I was at Gamecamp 6, which I thought a few people here might be interested in.

(I seem to have degenerated to LJing solely about games just lately. Sorry about that… although in my defence, they are occupying almost all my work and leisure time at the moment.)

Comments

[bateleur]

Regarding Twine - It's turning into quite an important tool for a reason which I suspect is very much in line with its design goals: it's easy to use. People who not only aren't programmers but wouldn't even be able to handle a non-code-based game design tool can pick up Twine and tell interactive stories. The people complaining about Twine's many shortcomings tend to miss the point that even if Twine is always the worst tool for the job it can still be very useful because sometimes it's the only tool for the job! (And it isn't really always the worst, either. At least not IMO.)

[bateleur]

(Anyone reading this who has always wanted to write an interactive story but never felt able to, I recommend giving Twine a quick look.)

[pengshui_master]

Actually twine's not powerful enough - at least not obviously for the IF in my mind. But that's because it needs to have a hideous amount of hidden state tracking embedded.

Having just looked at twine (well the video and the SVN repo) it looks like a well designed system , if anything that simplicity is a bonus for it's target audience.

There are UI elements I want to (and may well) rip out and use in my own MysteryMachine project , but MysteryMachine deliberately has a much greater scope, is less usable at the moment, and less complete.

It is very definitely food for thought though.

[bateleur]

Yes, indeed.

I think there's quite a bit of room for all sorts of different tools between Twine and Inform 7, which I've also played with and enjoyed.

Another system I've been playing with recently is the (pre?) alpha version of thickishstring, which seems to be trying to bring some measure of accessibility to multi-user dungeons.

What is MysteryMachine? I'm having trouble websearching it for obvious reasons!

[pengshui_master]

MysteryMachine, is my freeform game writing app, you used to be able to google it easily, but then google started trying to be helpful.

The best link these days is the bitbucket repo "https://bitbucket.org/rgammans/mystery-machine" , before the old Trac installation died there was a wiki about design choices, with some documentation.

(Eek, I've just seen many ,many typos in the README)

It not quite feature complete, the most important missing feature is also preventing it being able to self host it documentation.

In essence it's a wiki database, which you can cut across with template documents (like character sheets) to get different views of the same data. But where it differs it it splits out the databases into objects and attributes (rather than pages). Each object can have a parent from which it inherits a set of defaults.
Attributes support macro replacement of relatively pathed references.

[bateleur]

Wow! That's an interesting approach - I've never seen anything like that before!

[undyingking]

Mm, most of the people in the discussion were non-technical, and very enthused about its usability. Having looked at it myself a bit since getting back, I'm pretty impressed.