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!

 

Haunted House goes BETA!

At the worst possible timing, just in the middle of the annual IFCOMP, my Indigo speed-if post-comp release of Haunted House enters public beta-testing phase.

This should have happened long ago, but I fell under a severe writer’s block when I was just a few paragraphs away from consider it finished. I think there is still a lot to improve, but I guess it’s time to stop the neverending polishing loop and give it a go!

All kinds of feedback are wellcome, but proofreading of my not-precisely-state-of-the-art English is the most desperately needed.

Volunteers for beta-testing will receive a link with the game website. They can play it on-line or download the z8 file and play with an ordinary interpreter and send me transcripts.

A proofreading of the accompanying booklet will also be quite appreciated!

During beta-testing the source code will also be available at the game’s site, just in case any tester feels like taking a peek into it. It is reasonable short, so it can also help proofreading.

Volunteers can contact me at rockersuke in that evil ugly thing known as hotmail or sending me a private meesage at the IF Forum.

As the whole thing is about hanging around an abandoned house It would be nice to make the final release somewhere around the upcoming Halloween, but that’s not mandatory (and we’ll have a bunch of Halloween games out there with the Ectocomp anyway 🙂 )

Thanks everybody in advance!

 

Haunted House under development

My votes for the IF TOP-50 – Hi, Planet-IF!

If the last thing you were expecting from a Línea Dura update was an English speech then don’t panic. It’s not that yours truly has been possesed by the ghost of Shakespeare (though that would be real cool!), it’s just that I’m inagurating the «Planet-IF» category, intended to be added to the rss feed of Planet Interactive Fiction, an aggregator of english Interactive Fiction related blogs. Spanish posts will still be appearing here… as randomly as usual, that’s to say, don’t hold your breath, but they’ll eventually be there!

My first english post is a copy-paste of my votes for the Interactive Fiction TOP-50, as I sent them to the IF Forum a few days ago. It’s just meant to check this category is seen where it should be seen and not where it’s not expected! If you hadn’t heard about the IF TOP-50 this thread at the IF Forum tells everything about it. Now there goes my list:

My top! These are not exactly the works I personally consider the «best» according to my taste, but the ones I both consider as great works (so it doeesn’t pretend to be objetive) and would recommend to anyone wether she shares my tastes or not (so a few of my «masterworks» list get excluded).

–Cozumel. (A.K.A. Diosa De Cozumel) Aventuras AD, 1989
Spanish commercial IF at its peak. It was released for most active 8 and 16 bits platforms at Europe in 1989, and it had evrything in the exact right measure: clever, challenging puzzles, a nice plot, a detailed enviroment which helped inmersion, good NPC characterization, sense of good old clasic exploring and adventuring… all of it as basicly developed as expected for 80’s home computers, but so wisely mixed that it makes all prior and subsequent spanish IF production (incuding current modern works) look, well, unbalanced!

–Floarea Soarelui. Colin Woodcock, Serban Ovidiu Morcan, 2006
–On Reflection. Lee Tonks, 2007
These are two very different approachs to a same goal. Floarea is a spies comedy located in a little village. Reflection is an atmospheric daunting sci-fi thriller. Both are modern works made for an old school 8-bit computer, and they make more than one current platform work pale by comparision just with their carefully stylized writting and powerful ambientation. Strongly recommended.

–1893 A World’s Fair Mystery. Peter Nepstad, 2002
Now there goes a lesson on how to make commercial IF viable nowadays. Select your audience and give them something of their true interest. There is a fair chance of reaching outside your target if the product is nicely crafted. I was never into History or world’s fairs and had a great time with it, anyway. Worth every penny!

–Violet. Jeremy freese, 2008
Cheerful romantic comedy at its best. Casual IF players (if such a thing exists ) could love it just like casual moviegoers could enjoy a Kevin Smith flick. Incidentally, It also has some twist that makes it groundbreaking in terms of IF narrative, but that’s not the point now. Play and enjoy!

 

Real copies of Cozumel and 1893