{"id":219,"date":"2007-10-07T05:19:34","date_gmt":"2007-10-07T10:19:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/219"},"modified":"2016-07-08T18:46:25","modified_gmt":"2016-07-09T01:46:25","slug":"ifcomp-2007-lost-pig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/219","title":{"rendered":"IFComp 2007: Lost Pig"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lost Pig<\/em> concerns an orc named Grunk, familiar to some parts of the IF community for his Livejournal<\/a>. Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Grunk is a nice juicy character to get into, not really evil but sort of perpetually confused, like an enormous green child. One of the first things I do in any adventure game is take inventory. In this game, I was told that I’m carrying a torch and wearing pants. So I immediately took off the pants, then tried to eat them — I don’t make a habit of doing this sort of thing in games, but this is well within the realm of expected behavior for orcs, and I was pleased to find that the author had provided reasonable responses in orcish patois. (“Grunk chew on pants, but pants too tough. And them need ketchup.”) In fact, now that I go back and look, pretty much every object has a unique response for trying to eat it, some with permanent effects. If Grunk eats a whistle, for example, he goes “Tweee” every few turns for the rest of the game. This is what we call “attention to detail”, and this game has it in spades.<\/p>\n

The story takes place in Grunk’s pre-livejournal days, when he was working at a Warcraft<\/em>-style pig farm. A pig has escaped, and Grunk is charged with bringing it back, even though it’s probably capable of outsmarting him. This leads to getting trapped in a small dungeon crawl with alchemical gimmickry. It’s good fun, but there isn’t a lot of area to explore, and I did manage to get stuck a couple of times.<\/p>\n

To elaborate, at one point I was stuck due to imagining things wrong: told that a stream was too wide to vault across with a pole I was carrying, I imagined it as much wider than the pole’s length. It took a look at the hint menu to tell me I was wrong, and the experience leaves me wondering if the stream was narrower than I imagined it or if the pole was longer. Problems of scale like this are one of the banes of text adventures (although graphic adventures aren’t completely immune either — I recall a part in Sierra’s Lighthouse<\/em> that was rendered harder than it should have been because I didn’t know the relative sizes of certain inventory items). A lot of games deal with it by adding numerical measurements to descriptions: if you have a 15-foot ladder and a 15-foot chasm, it’s patently obvious what to do. I wouldn’t suggest that approach here, though — putting such a clinical detail into a description would be difficult in Grunk’s voice, even ignoring the fact that he can’t count to 15.<\/p>\n

Rating: 7<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lost Pig concerns an orc named Grunk, familiar to some parts of the IF community for his Livejournal. 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":[84,53,182],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-if","tag-if","tag-ifcomp","tag-ifcomp-2007"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","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=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3608,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions\/3608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}