Play interactive fiction
The Laboratory of Many Sizes's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Creativity | #5392 | 2.362 | 3.125 |
Enjoyment | #5717 | 1.984 | 2.625 |
Overall | #5740 | 2.142 | 2.833 |
Style | #5770 | 2.079 | 2.750 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
It is about how varying scales are explored in science.
Development Time
48 hours
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
https://www.online-python.com/
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Comments
This is a novel take on the theme of Built to Scale: a very short almost-an-interactive-fiction game describing the world at a few different scales. It pretty much doesn't have gameplay and it's not really a text-adventure game because it doesn't give the player any meaningful agency, consequences of their actions, or interaction with the world (for example: a lot of text-adventure games give people puzzles to solve, or ways of talking to people that have different outcomes depending on how you interacted with them).
Most people won't know how to run this because it's a Python 3 script with no way of independently running itself; it doesn't run in the browser and it must be run in a Python 3 interpreter, either installed on their computer or online in a website.
Besides that I think it fits the theme really well and it was fun to read through, and it's nice to see such a unique entry to the jam. The maker of the game only used Python's "print" and "input" functions to make this and only used "if" statements, which is an extremely difficult & time-consuming way to write a program, and is kind of amazing — unfortunately the lack of loops means it's really easy to break the game by typing something wrong.
I remember writing games like this too when I first learnt to code in a scripting language. Don't feel bad about it! This game jam has many experienced programmers, and some of them didn't even finish their game in time; you're already ahead of 75% of the people who joined. Thank you for joining!
It's different than what I'm used to and ngl I double checked to be sure that it was not a virus, but it was a captivating experience for sure.
I was not expecting to experience a science-based existential crisis delivered via the medium of interactive fiction, but here we are. Genuinely was not prepared for it, but I was both overwhelmed and rather impressed. I genuinely respect the hustle.
Not sure what feedback to give - but having some coloured text to indicate whether a line is a prompt/place name/a thing/words text (should be doable without external modules via using ansi escape codes) probably would have helped to make it a bit more readable. But still, nice work.
It took me a moment to realize that I had to open the .py file in Notepad or some such to put the text into the linked website. Interesting text adventure.