News You Can Bruise for 2001 March 4

I got zero work done on Degeneracy this weekend. I got quite a bit of work done on the LoTechComp game, though. I know my priorities are inverted (I promised Degeneracy this month, the LoTechGame deadline isn't until tax day), but Degeneracy is a drag to work on. I need to just knuckle down and finish it so I will be free of its deadly curse.

The new game is really fun, almost in the same way robotfindskitten is fun. In fact, in a certain, well-defined sense it is MORE FUN than robotfindskitten. Blasphemy? Perhaps. I can't give you the name because if I give you the name then you know exactly what it is; let's call it "The Djinn Game" (doh) for now.

But check it out: I originally wrote it using the default Inform library. It was about 40K. Since almost none of the Inform library functionality was being used in the game, I wrote my own parser loop, taking it down to 7K (including a skeleton narrative). Since then I've added about 3K of text. I can and hope to add arbitrary quantities of text, which is what takes it into the robotfindskitten vein. Before entering the game into the contest I also need to work out a better theoretical underpinning for the game to make it more consistently challenging.