{"id":2127,"date":"2011-11-12T13:41:15","date_gmt":"2011-11-12T21:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=2127"},"modified":"2017-02-28T17:32:17","modified_gmt":"2017-03-01T01:32:17","slug":"ifcomp-2011-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/2127","title":{"rendered":"IFComp 2011: The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>This is basically just a bunch of hack fantasy place descriptions strung together. You start in a graveyard, travel roughly northward through an almost entirely linear sequence of places with names like &#8220;Dunlak&#8221; and &#8220;Skymrod&#8221;, pick up a stone, return, and put it in a place that&#8217;s important for some reason. There are some references to a backstory involving a lover&#8217;s promise, but it didn&#8217;t make much of an impression on me, except that it all seemed a little precious.<\/p>\n<p>The scale of movement is wildly inconsistent: at one point you have a room that&#8217;s a place where the path you&#8217;re on curves, at another point you have a room that&#8217;s an entire desert. Nothing fundamentally wrong with that, but the game doesn&#8217;t acknowledge the change in any way, and given the lack of anything to do in these rooms, the player winds up galloping through the vast and the small without distinction.<\/p>\n<p>The author describes it as &#8220;A beginner level fantasy quest, made to be straightforward to finish without previous IF experience.&#8221; Methinks the &#8220;beginner&#8221; part refers more to the author than the player, which isn&#8217;t at all the same thing. Seriously, &#8220;for beginners&#8221; doesn&#8217;t mean, or even imply, &#8220;minimal implementation&#8221; or &#8220;author made it up as he went along&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>At least there&#8217;s no serious bugs. There&#8217;s some cosmetic problems, though. Actions with customized responses don&#8217;t always suppress their default responses. I&#8217;ve been seeing that a lot in beginner level Inform games lately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[84,53,507],"class_list":["post-2127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-if","tag-if","tag-ifcomp","tag-ifcomp-2011"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2127"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4990,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127\/revisions\/4990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}