IFComp09 reviews: Star Hunter
This was a rather less pleasant old-school treasure hunt. The setup wasn't bad, at least:
- You have a spaceship that can travel to various star systems.
- Within a system, you have a teleporter that will let you go to various places of interest.
- There is a major trading post where you can trade treasures you find at the various places of interest for additional navigational codes.
The ultimate goal is to trade your way up to the point where you have the ability to travel to and successfully loot a fabulous treasure, thus winning the game.
So, what went wrong?
Well, first, I only learned all of the things I described above by reading the walkthrough, entering 50-100 moves of it, and studying the results. The controls are not only completely opaque, my first attempt to leave the ship actually rendered the game apparently unwinnable, reliably getting me killed later with an unhelpful error message. The PC appears to have no knowledge of his own ship or systems, as well; an absolutely critical item (the device that lets you actually return to your ship once you have left) is never described more specifically than "a shiny gizmo" and if you are not capable of being transported back, the failure message is simply "Nothing happens. What were you expecting?" Someone who hasn't read the walkthrough would reasonably conclude that the device was worthless as opposed to repeatedly necessary to get anywhere at all in the game.
Cluing: not optional. Descriptions of things that the PC knows but the player doesn't: absolutely mandatory.
In addition to not really being discoverable, the transit sequence is extraordinarily cumbersome; dozens of moves, including a half-dozen GO commands, for what should really be two commands - maybe even just one.
The trading post is also problematic, in that the treasures you find are not of equal value and there does not seem to be a way to reliably appraise them. That is, a merchant that doesn't have anything that's more expensive than is tradable for a 'moderately valuable object' will appraise everything as either worthless or 'moderately valuable'.
As a result, it's far too easy to trade yourself into an unwinnable position because you purchased items in the wrong order or overtraded an item. Worse, some event triggers seem to be so finicky that the game becomes unwinnable even if you trade items of equal value to the wrong merchants. The CUBE chip never spawned for me until I restarted and played back to that point following the walkthrough exactly.
Not cool. This needs not just polishing and debugging but some serious thought put into reworking some core mechanics before it's even adequate. But once that's done, it will jump up to "cleverly structured treasure hunt" immediately.