Constant Story “Test”;
Constant Headline “^Because red, green, and blue are good enough.^”;

Include “Parser”;
Include “VerbLib”;

Object TestRoom “Test Room”
with description
“A pretty boring room.”,
has light;

Object -> red_plate “red plate”
with name ‘red’ ‘plate’ ‘small’ ‘translucent’,
description “A small red plate, slightly translucent.”;

Object -> blue_plate “blue plate”
with name ‘blue’ ‘plate’ ‘medium’ ‘rectangular’,
description “A medium-sized rectangular blue plate.”;

Object -> green_plate “green plate”
with name ‘green’ ‘plate’ ‘large’ ‘heavy’ ‘thick’,
description “A very heavy green plate, the largest and thickest
plate you’ve ever seen.”;

[ Initialise;
location = TestRoom;
];

Include “Grammar”;

and a short transcript, based on what you said:

Test
Because red, green, and blue are good enough.
Release 1 / Serial number 041230 / Inform v6.30 Library 6/11 S

Test Room
A pretty boring room.

You can see a red plate, a blue plate and a green plate here.

>grab plate
That’s not a verb I recognise.

>lift plate
That’s not a verb I recognise.

>get plate
Which do you mean, the red plate, the blue plate or the green plate?

>red
Taken.

>x blue plate
A medium-sized rectangular blue plate.

>get rectangular plate
Taken.

>get plate
(the green plate)
Taken.

So you see here that the standard inform libraries (pretty commonly used nowadays) at least do the “Which plate do you mean…” thing correctly. As far as unknown verbs (grab, lift), and really stupid name choices (dish), that’s kind of a “Of course, if a moron is writing the game it will be bad” problem. On the one hand, I didn’t add “grab” and “lift” to my example, because “take” and “get” are really the common verbs for that action. On the other, I didn’t do something stupid like give “red plate” the names ‘red’ and ‘dish’ and not ‘plate’.

So there’s a certain amount of “The author has to be smart enough to do smart things” going on here. For example, I write my plate game (above), and see that you (a playtester) try these commands:

grab dish (not a verb I recognize)
lift dish (not a verb I recognize)
get dish (you can’t see any such thing)
get plates (you can’t see any such thing)

This tells me a couple of things: First, I need to expand my repertoire of verbs (not really that likely, get is pretty common, but for other actions it’s quite likely.) Second, I haven’t covered all of the bases on the plates for names. Someone might call them dishes (not at all unlikeley), and more importantly, I haven’t included plural names. So I change the source like so:

1) I add after the Include “Grammar”; bit:

Verb ‘grab’ ‘lift’ = ‘take’;

(Note that this is almost identical to an example given in the Inform Designer’s Manual, on how to extend the set of verbs.)

This just says that “grab” and “lift” are synonyms for “take”. It’s possible that I’ve already added a verb “lift” for something else, like “lift curtain” to raise the curtain on a stage or something. If so, I may have to do a bit more work here to differentiate the possibilities. But still, it’s my job as the author to do that.

So now, grab and lift plate will work.

2) I change my plate definitions like so:

with name ‘red’ ‘plate’ ‘small’ ‘translucent’ ‘dish’ ‘plates//p’ ‘dishes//p’,

I’ve added the noun “dish” that can be used to refer to these, and also added “plates” and “dishes”, with //p at the end to indicate that they’re plurals. So now:

>grab dish
Which do you mean, the red plate, the blue plate or the green plate?

And this works for all of “grab”, “lift”, “take”, and “get”. And more importantly:

>grab dishes
red plate: Taken.
blue plate: Taken.
green plate: Taken.

and more interestingly:

>grab all the dishes except the red plate
blue plate: Taken.
green plate: Taken.

So now the system knows that dishes is a plural (and plates is a plural), it all works better.

And of course, I carefully check over the rest of the objects in my game to make sure that they all have plurals defined when they should. And I send it through another round of playtesting to look for more problems.

So it’s not a constraint of the *system* of text adventures that these things don’t work, it’s a question of whether the author has done all of his or her homework. It’s true that certain things are expected of a player of adventure games–that she’ll know that “get” or “take” is the common verb for taking, for example. (And Zarf has recently released a great new game, “The Dreamhold”, which is an attempt at a tutorial text adventure: it watches what the player does and tries to give advice on what things might work, and includes an excellent help system describing the basics of text adventures.) But it’s also true that most games will add new verbs, and that certain puzzles have to be careful about which verbs work and which don’t. This “guess the verb” problem is one that writers of IF have to watch out for.

In any case, the point is that a text adventure is a program like any other: there are certain expectations of the user interface (which, since text adventures tend to be small and short, it’s hard to teach a new user about in *every* game), but there are also usability concerns. A game that doesn’t handle these issues well is a *bad game*, but that doesn’t mean that all such games are bad. Just like it’s possible for a graphical user interface to break the user’s expectations, but that doesn’t means that all graphical games are bad.

John.

So, in the first two chapters, the demo part, there are no puzzles. However, chapter 3 begins to introduce puzzles, all sorts. They’re mostly simple ones, except for the ‘killer death puzzle from hell in 4D’ lurking in the ice cream shop. The idea was to offer a variety, of which players need only to solve three to proceed past all of them. And you get, in Chapter 2, a pass to solve any one of the puzzles. From there the game presents progressively harder puzzles, hoping to coax new adventure gamers into discovering another kind of fun with adventure games.

I will say this about the CineProse scripting language. The original goal was to make a script look as much like an honest to gods screenplay as possible. We didn’t succeed well enough, but it’s a very friendly language for this kind of game.