I'm trying to get into the mindset of players, and often wonder if the the type of commands I'm likely to try for any given scenario, are similar to those that others would try.

That said, I wonder if any of you would be kind enough to take part in this little experiment. I'm not going to tell you what commands I've set for this, but could you simply list the commands you yourself would most likely input when presented with the following scene.

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The first thing you notice as you step out of the entrance corridor and into the main bar is how empty the place is. You step down a couple of steps to the seating area, where you stop breifly to weigh up the place.

There are five people in this area; two couples who are busy drinking and conversing, and a young woman on her own.

Over by the bar itself are two more people - a man and a woman who appear not to be together.

On the far side to your left, the toilets.

>

x couples. x young woman. x people.

I'm trying to get into the mindset of players, and often wonder if the the type of commands I'm likely to try for any given scenario, are similar to those that others would try.

And this is pretty much precisely why beta testers are usually recommended, the author never has any idea what crazy thing their players are going to try, and the players never have any idea what crazy thing the author expects.

OurJud wrote:

The first thing you notice as you step out of the entrance corridor and into the main bar is how empty the place is. You step down a couple of steps to the seating area, where you stop breifly to weigh up the place.

There are five people in this area; two couples who are busy drinking and conversing, and a young woman on her own.

Over by the bar itself are two more people - a man and a woman who appear not to be together.

On the far side to your left, the toilets.

>

First impressions: briefly is misspelled OMG fix it! Also I've heard the phrase 'size up the place' but never 'weigh', might be some weird brit thing though, always gotta make allowance for brits and the weird things they say.

Second impression: It's the 'two couples' that are tricky here. But I'd probably just start with >x couples and see if the game gives me any more details to use to select them individually. Though you might consider covering those details in the main description itself to make this unnecessary, even if it doesn't flow quite as well. 'There are five people in this area; a noisy couple busy drinking and conversing, a middle-aged couple enjoying a quiet chat, and a young woman on her own.'

There are two women as well but I think it'd be pretty obvious to >x young woman for the first one. Then >x man and >x women for the two at the bar.

Arrgghh! This could turn into a nightmare!

By this point the player should be armed with a good few leads (names), so I'm going to have to add responses for 'ask woman about [any one of four names]'

Change of plan. I'm going to set this scene just as the bar is closing. The place will be empty but for the barman. I'm not skilled enough yet to handle the headache of multiple NPCs.

Well yeah obviously the next step would be trying to talk to the people, the first thing most people do in a room is look all around though. And for either talking or looking you need and obvious way to refer to them.

(and fwiw I have a habit of trying to >talk to NPC to see if there's anything they want to say in general before I start asking them a bunch of specific questions.)

Also if they're not plot relevant it's just fine if they all just have a generic response telling the nosy player to piss off or make a point of ignoring them. I mean I wouldn't just sit there while some weirdo wanders up and starts asking a bunch of questions.

Marzipan wrote:(and fwiw I have a habit of trying to >talk to NPC to see if there's anything they want to say in general before I start asking them a bunch of specific questions.)

Have you EVER had a response to that, other than "I don't understand that command." ?

It's a pretty common command.

Even if a lot of times all they have to say is some variation of, 'What do you want to ask me about?' or whatever that character's generic response is for being asked something they don't know, it's still better than the game engine's default response.

Marzipan wrote:It's a pretty common command.

"talk to NPC to see if there's anything they want to say in general before I start asking them a bunch of specific questions." is a pretty common command??

Oh, I think I get you now. You mean 'talk to npc' is a pretty common command.

Sorry.

I think I've pretty much lost the plot on this game of mine. I'm losing enthusiasm for it every time I work on it. Time to shelve it I think and work on something fresh.

I've got to get out of this mindset that makes me think I need to allow for every conceivable input and command at every location. If I carry on at this rate I'll be adding commands for 'scratch leg', 'pick nose'...

Yes, that's what I meant!

Though maybe I'd better start adding that entire sentence as a command in any future games, just to be safe and make sure I cover every possibility.

Losing enthusiasm for a game you're in the middle of writing is a pretty common experience too, sadly, especially if it's a big ambitious product. When that happens it usually is best to either work on something else, like you said, or at least take a step back and figure out where exactly you're trying to go with the current one and what's the most efficient way to get there. No sense in forcing yourself to keep slogging along until you hate even looking at the game.

At least you can take the lessons you learned writing this one and apply them to a new project from the beginning, which should make things go a lot smoother.

But I definitely do agree with your last point; being a perfectionist trying to cover every possibility while trying to get a handle on a program you're brand new at at the same time is the worst thing you can do to yourself if you want any hope of actually finishing a game.

Look at me, I'm writing a ridiculously simple 'collect the magic gems' style of game just for practice with Quest and it still gives me a huge headache most days. Writing an IF game is never easy, and writing some huge epic one is something you have to work up to.

I agree with everything you say there, but wanting to run before I can walk has always been my downfall - in pretty much everything I attempt. If I can't do it like a pro on my first attempt, I get discouraged and lose enthusiasm.

if you're using the Command Bar (input from the person playing the game) for everything, that means A LOT of coding and a lot of COMPLEX coding.

Personally, I'd use the tools that the quest editor and built-in code stuff (features) that it already provides (like 'show menu' and etc), as, as at least, you'll be able to make stuff much faster and thus more progress on your game, and not get frustrated~depressed so quickly.

As much as I want to make a game, I too am all excited, but immediately realize that there's still a lot more I need to learn first, as I just don't have the skills to make a game, heck I don't even have the skills~knowledge on how to even go about making a game, laughs. Ya, it's boring to learn things, but when you're like me, we really don't have a choice, we got to just plow through the slow~boring learning of things, and hold on on making a game, despite how exciting it is to try to actually make progress on making your game, as we're just not really able to make much in our game, to begin with, sighs, laughs.

We need to learn more methods for and~or on how to do things, so that we can craft efficient methods, which will take us far less time, then if we just went into game making without those methods, making a riduculously long long long script block or process of doing something that we want, when if we learned better methods, we could do the same thing in far less time and work.

For example, just look at all of these code pros' libraries that they made, they're all so short and seemingly simple... if I tried to implement~craft any of these same systems (pretending~assuming that I could, lol), it would be like 5 minutes of scrolling down the library page, compared to their library requiring no scrolling down to see all of it.

OurJud wrote:I agree with everything you say there, but wanting to run before I can walk has always been my downfall - in pretty much everything I attempt. If I can't do it like a pro on my first attempt, I get discouraged and lose enthusiasm.

Nothing wrong with pushing yourself. I suspect most people have that to some degree but there's another element: They want to do it like a pro on their first attempt quickly.

If you're willing to invest enough time to get it right you're halfway there to being a pro I'd say.

Marzipan wrote:

I'm trying to get into the mindset of players, and often wonder if the the type of commands I'm likely to try for any given scenario, are similar to those that others would try.

And this is pretty much precisely why beta testers are usually recommended, the author never has any idea what crazy thing their players are going to try, and the players never have any idea what crazy thing the author expects.

OurJud wrote:
First impressions: briefly is misspelled OMG fix it! Also I've heard the phrase 'size up the place' but never 'weigh', might be some weird brit thing though, always gotta make allowance for brits and the weird things they say.

Depends on the context. You weigh up the odds (of something).

https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/i ... 050AAvkEkO

I seem to have quoted the wrong text in that post lol.

Silver wrote:I seem to have quoted the wrong text in that post lol.

LOL - I was wondering why I was calling Brits weird

Got no idea at all how I got that to happen. Was only meant to quote the one paragraph by Marzipan relating to 'size up room'. My magicka must be misfiring. Must recharge.