Haunted House goes public!

 

 

Five years later… 🙂

No, really… five years after I announced at this very same blog that my project of a Haunted House remix was entering beta stage… it’s finally seeing the light of day!

I could tell you a lot of lame excuses. Yeah, real life stood fiercely in the way, having to deal with lots of time-consuming distractions and so on… But in the end it was all about facing the worst of enemies: my interest in it vanished for no apparent reason. Big mistake! as even if the game wasn’t worth it, the time and efforth invested by my testers and the support I received from them, which I still consider my greatest experinece on the internet ever, deserved not to go unnoticed.

You can read the whole story, where the game came from, the different ports I made of it, its incarnation as an entry in the 2011 Indigo Speed-IF Comp, the subsequent process of real betatesting and proofreading, the five year hiatus… in the accompanying booklet. Let’s just add that as the game features a short story placed upon the scenario of a really succint 1979 TRS-80 text adventure, it seemed to fit entirely in the «Year of Adventure» jam orgnized by IF-Comp winner Robin Johnson last year, giving me the perfect motivation to finish it up and give it some proper, actual release.

Right now Haunted House, An Interactive Fiction Remix, can be found and played on-line at:

http://www.rockersuke.com/if/hauntedhousei7/index.html

Or you can also look for it at IFDB:

http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=pps1ho75c2rannke

That said, there is still a loose end to this story. Right after the Indigo-Comp, whose rules required the use of a developmente tool participants were not used to, was held, Jacqueline A. Lott asked us to write some lines about the experience of using an IF creation tool for the first time. These short pieces were meant to be published together in a posterior issue of the SPAG ezine but, as many things in life, that never actually happened :-)After digging for long in my hard drive, I found the text I sent where I try to tell everyone about how does it feel writting an IF work with Inform 7 the very first time you put your hands on it. It was written in a rush and not corrected at all, so read it at your own risk! The most bizarrely fun bit is the part where I assume Jaqq A Lott is a Canadian girl, just becuase, IIRC, she lived in Alaska at the time. Don’t ask me where my mind was at that moment! 🙂

https://lineadura.wordpress.com/making-haunted-house-for-the-2011-indigo-speed-if-comp/

And now let me finish with a couple of aditional acknowledgements not included in the game:

-First of all, a big thanks to Robin Johnson for being a really nice fella and admitting the game into his jam even when I submitted it 3 days after New Year, the official deadline and right when he was urgently forced to switch focus towards stronger and more demanding real-life priorities, which says a lot, and I mean a good lot, about him!

-And last but not least, another thanks to Robert Holmes and his band The Scarlet Furies (featuring the astonishing vocals of his daughter Raleigh Holmes) for the soundtrack of Jane Jensen‘s 2010 game Grey Matter, which was playing in the background for most of the writting sessions, and helped to set the right mood!