Inspired by James Mitchelhill’s recent post on bugbears for IF Comp
judges, I’d like to offer some hints that I learned from entering the
IF Comp last year. As a quick recap, I entered my first game "Mix
Tape". It got equal 18th place out of 36. This post is not about the
game itself, but what I learned from writing and entering it, so
please keep this in mind.
1. Betatest, betatest, betatest
You need to leave a lot of time to do betatesting. You need to have
several testers. You cannot test your game. Your friends who aren’t
familiar with IF cannot test your game. Your mother cannot test your
game.
My mother didn’t look at my game, but I failed on the other bits. In
the real world, I had one less week to work on the game because I was
going to a conference in the week before IF Comp was due. I knew this
and didn’t plan accordingly. I was writing and testing until a few
hours before my flight left at 6am. While I caught a few bugs, there’s
only so much you can do. You’ll be too familiar with the game to bring
it close to the rough parts of the implementation. I had a few friends
giving me feedback under extreme time constraints, which was great,
but I should have allowed for more time, more testers and a few more
experienced testers. My personal feeling is that you need at the very
least a month before submission to test. This gives you and your testers
breathing space. It also allows you to implement cool additions that
make the game experience smoother.
Another way of looking at it: do not, under any circumstances, believe
that IF Comp judges are there to betatest your game or will be as
forgiving as your testers. I didn’t personally feel this, but if
anyone gets the feeling that you didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t betatest
your game before submitting it, you’ll be torn to pieces.
2. Know your scope
IF Comp games can only be an hour’s worth of play. If you leave time
for judges to look around, poke at the cool bits, and take their time
thinking about their review, then you’ll do better. On the flip side,
don’t try to stuff too much into your game. You have a deadline to
write to.
For those unfamiliar with Mix Tape, the basic premise was to tell a
break-up story as a mix of songs accompanying scenes. The game I
entered had (basically) 6 tracks. Throughout development the number of
planned tracks depended on the songs I wanted in, and some philosophy
regarding the best way to order a mix tape. I didn’t think that adding
a single track added weeks worth of work. When the deadline quickly
approached a few tracks were ditched, and others had their
implementations cut drastically short. The original idea was to have
two sides (Side A and Side B) where one side was the break-up story
and the other was IF inspired by random songs. This was far too much
work and the game would have been too eclectic even if I did finish
that plan.
My approach was essentially the wrong way to go about it. Have a plan,
fulfil that plan and then maybe add more if you have loads of
time. This requires you to plan well ahead and know how much you want
or need to put into the game. Keep your scope tight and the game will
be more powerful as a result.
3. Know your audience
Judges come from all walks of life. Make sure your game appeals and
makes sense at a base level to everyone. Not everyone knows what you
know, and they may not get your in-jokes, jargon, references or
cultural assumptions. For example, if you write a sci-fi game, make
sure it’s not only for hardcore sci-fi fans. A good way to do this is
to give the game a good story or characters. Beware that both of these
things should not rely on your genre. If you confuse or ignore your
judges, they will respond. Some will not rate your game. Some will
rate you harshly. IF Comp is for a wide audience. Respect this.
Mix Tape has a lot to do with music. More appropriately, it has a lot
to do with music I listen to. All the tracks I refer to are tracks I
own. All the bands I refer to I know. Most people wouldn’t. It’s fair
to say that very few people were familiar with all the songs I used as
the basis for my game. Part of the problem is that I referenced a band
called Little Birdy, which is pretty big in Australia, and maybe
Japan, but that’s it. This meant that one of the foundation songs of
my game would make no sense to a lot of people, and so the whole
premise stumbled. I also had a few references to the reasonably
obscure Japanese band Cibo Matto. One reference can be ignored but I
made the frequency and prominence of the references too large. One
reviewer exclaimed in their review: "Who the hell are Cibo Matto?"
Pick your references well and make it accessible and not distracting.
Another problem Mix Tape had was that it was a break-up game. This
translates to a sad, emotional game. A lot of people got bummed out by
the theme and I didn’t make it uplifting enough at the end (if the
player got that far) to redeem it. Make sure your players can take
away something from your game other than a bad mood.
4. Survive the judging period
You might feel exhausted from all that IF writing to judge any of the
games but your job isn’t over. Play, rate and review the other games.
You’d want them to do the same for you. Give feedback to the other
authors. Thank anyone for feedback they give to you and take it on
board. When reviews come out, thank the authors for giving your game
a chance. This is not to suck up to anyone, but to give respect where
respect is due and to properly participate in the comp.
Luckily I did these things (for the most part). It helped me get over
the anxiety of my game being out in the wild and I didn’t know if it
was worthy to be out there. I traded a few emails with Jason Devlin
who had some interesting comments and gave me some support (and I
tried to reciprocate). Comments from the other authors were
interesting and I think it’s good to keep at least some
camaraderie. It’s a competition, not a war. I personally tried to
thank everyone who wrote a review for Mix Tape, good or bad.
And on reviews, maybe I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, but take
every review constructively. If they say good things, then good. If
they say bad things, then learn from it and make your game better. If
the reviews are useless rants, then leave them be. Most of the reviews
for Mix Tape were very useful to me and I’ve used them to plan the
rewrite.
5. Miscellany
And I’ll finish on a bunch of points I don’t want to elaborate on too
much. Some of these are obvious. Some of these apply to outside the
comp.
– Your game needs to satisfy two conditions: it has to be interactive
and it has to be fiction. Allow people to play around with it without
the game exploding, and provide a good story.
– Run your game through a spellchecker. A grammar checker if you
can. But most importantly, run it by several humans.
– Don’t throw in puzzles for the sake of it. Keep your focus.
– Don’t spend too much time implementing things that have little
impact. Focus on the story and the implementation of that story. If
you have time, then details. (See the CD collection and the old man in
Mix Tape for violations of this)
– Make your characters understandable, and likable if you can. This
especially goes for the PC.
– Catch everything you and your testers can think of.
– Implement helper verbs. Mix Tape had one good one (CHECK MAIL) and
missed an obvious one (SERVE FOOD).
– Test your game on a variety of interpreters and platforms. If you
find any problems, let everyone know via the Readme.
– Include a walk-through. Make sure it definitely works, exactly as
typed. Preferably make sure it works even if they use different
phrasings or do other things midway through the walkthrough.
– Consider a "full walkthrough" which is a transcript of the game if
you went through the walkthrough. Make sure the two are exactly the
same sets of commands.
– Add in as many hints as you possibly can. Make them adaptive if you
have time.
– Betatest, betatest, betatest!
Best of luck!
BrettW