Tabblewoop by Hexen

Review Silver

You fall into a cave that is very dark which makes it difficult to see. This is illustrated perfectly with the dark green text on black background that you must squint at to make sense of. If only you had some kind of light. Well actually, you do! It's in your pocket. But the game gives no hint what-so-ever about this and only by reading the comments section prior to playing was I alerted to it which extended my playing time from one minute, to two minutes. The light illuminates a chest with nothing in it. There's a statue there. I assume the statue needs to be interacted with in order to open the locked gate, but will what is on the other side really be worth the effort?

Comment Jay Nabonne

I think for the pockets, if you could add the verbs without the "inside" as well, it would be great. For example, I had done both "look pockets" and "search pockets". I think, especially for the latter, the "inside" could be considered implied. :)

To be honest, I haven't played tons of IF games (some messing around when younger, etc), so I do wonder if it could be my own inexperience!

Comment Hexen

I appreciate the honest and critical feedback. Though my intent was to make the game in the vein of some of the more challenging old text adventures (somewhat vague, not using the inventory/map systems, expecting you to come up with some things on your own that would be obvious where you actually experiencing it like the pockets) in somewhat of a comedic form I do understand that some things might have been too much and I'll definitely try to add things like looking at the jeans to find the pockets in the future.

Some of the things you mention where a silly jab at or a result of the basic system of Quest. Things like the flashlight, for instance, is based around that some verbs are 'set' and cannot be changed (to my knowledge anywho.) The jab for trying to use the flashlight was meant in that manner - if you wanted to use a flashlight of course you'd be turning it off and on, but the system doesn't really work that way and I didn't really want to set it up as something like 'use flashlight on darkness', so I basically made it say what to do with a bit of a joke since it would generally be understood what to do if you'd tried that. As for verbs, I tried to add as many as I could when applicable - the pockets actually had look in/side, search in/side and check in/side as possible choices... again an attempt to make it somewhat cumbersome by design, but not impossible. The sand also had a few verbs (empty, clean) and a hint if you tried to take the sand... I honestly couldn't think of too many verbs there.

Again, thanks for playing and for giving feedback!

Comment Jay Nabonne

One more thought: I thought that maybe I was meant to examine myself to find my pockets. So I tried "x me" and saw a description that mentioned shoes, hat, jeans, etc. Aha! I figured I had just missed it, so I tried "x jeans" and it said it didn't know what those were. So, not even an "in" there... You could at least add a description that the jeans have pockets, to point the user in the right direction. (I know, jeans have pockets. But they also have stitching, material, belt loops, etc. Again, there need to be constraints, else we could get down to the molecular structure.)

On the plus side, I did like the tone of the text. I laughed in a couple of places at the cleverness of the wordplay. You have a knack for that. Keep that up, but give your player a break! :)

Comment Jay Nabonne

Just an initial comment. I didn't get into this very far, because it was too frustrating. Perhaps it's intended to be hard, but if it's too hard, then people can't be bothered.

First, the whole "pockets" thing, to me, is too hidden. I happened to find it by accident due to the interface when I typed "use skull", and it brought up a list of things I could use it on. I saw "pockets" in the list, but there has to be some other way to find it than that. It could be shoes, your mouth, etc. There should be some constraint, at least in the beginning.

Then, once I found the pockets, along with their promise of something contained within, I couldn't figure out how to get at it. Finally, I just punted and looked at the game source and discovered that the *only* verb that works is "look inside". I would highly recommend that you expand the verb list a bit to cover more common cases. (I found it highly ironic when I tried "use flashlight" and it admonished me for not being specific enough. I think someone should be able to work through a game naturally without having to guess single, specific verbs that the author has decided are the only way to do something.)

With the sand, I tried the usual things: search the sand, dig in the sand. So, it turns out you have to *remove* the sand to see what's underneath it. I guess you can figure at this point, that if I was facing a chest with 3 inches of sand, I would tend to root around in it as opposed to sitting there and scooping it all out by hand.

Take those as just my input. My two big gripes: don't hide things completely that are important (like the pockets), making the person either guess at things or go through contortions to find them. And second, let people approach things in natural ways. Be forgiving. If you have come up with a single, *custom* verb that is the only one that can be used, you're almost certainly going to lose players as it's just too frustrating to figure out (especially if the verb has more than one word