{"id":251,"date":"2009-10-02T14:12:24","date_gmt":"2009-10-02T19:12:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=251"},"modified":"2010-02-01T11:24:23","modified_gmt":"2010-02-01T16:24:23","slug":"new-game-released","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=251","title":{"rendered":"New game released!"},"content":{"rendered":"

What did I do with my summer?<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Answer: helped a friend write a new text adventure game<\/a>. After extensive beta-testing on our friends, we’ve released it to the public this week and submitted it to the yearly Interactive Fiction Competition<\/a> to compete against twenty-something other new games.<\/p>\n

The whole experience was really fun. Jack normally writes brilliant D&D adventures<\/a>, and bunches of us travel the country to gather once a year and play them for a day. This year Jack decided to write the adventure as a solo text-adventure concept. Emily Short has written quite a lot about methodologies for writing a text adventure<\/a>, and Jack used the “transcript fully” method: he started the entire process by emailing me a complete script — that is, a hypothetical start-to-finish transcript of what the entire game would look like to somebody playing it. The plot and puzzles were fantastic, so I got excited and volunteered to help him code it. <\/p>\n

Over the next few months, I did help with some coding, but I mostly played ‘product manager’ and ‘editor’ roles. Jack has huge ideas, and I helped him edit them down, sculpt the shape of the plot, sanity-check puzzles and assumptions, manage beta-testers. As my buddy Andre would say, “everybody needs a friend who can be an ass-filter.” I also forced us to use standard software engineering tools and discipline: a real bug tracker, version control, tagging, etc. (Writing interactive fiction is traditionally a solo sport, so I think the whole experience of applying traditional collaborative software-development processes was particularly interesting.) All of our collaboration took place (of course) on this Google Code Project<\/a>. We’ve released the source to the public under a Creative Commons license; however, I don’t recommend you start reading through it until you’ve played the game first. Spoilers, you know. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

To play the game:<\/p>\n