Play game
Yesternight's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Overall Rating | #18 | 1.054 | 1.308 |
Implementation | #18 | 1.116 | 1.385 |
Presentation (Text, Graphics & Sound) | #18 | 1.612 | 2.000 |
Puzzles | #18 | 1.054 | 1.308 |
Writing (General Quality) | #18 | 1.302 | 1.615 |
Story (Plot, Setting & Objective) | #18 | 1.116 | 1.385 |
Help, Hints and/or Instructions | #18 | 1.116 | 1.385 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Overview of Game
My debut text-adventure using AdvSys. You have been sent to a small town. You have your trusty coin in the pocket. Be prepared for some adventure!
Requirements to Play
Please visit the Yesternight game-page for full instructions. For Windows users, download "Yesternight.zip" and double-click on "Play.bat" icon in order to play!
Update note: For Windows, Mac and Linux users - you can use Gargoyle interpreter to play my game.
Just load "Yesternight.dat" to the interpreter.
https://github.com/garglk/garglk/releases
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Comments
I fully agree with @hawkbyte . The game is playable and complete-able, the vaguely fantasy-like setting is fine, the starting location is intriguing enough, there are some items that are 'common-sense-coherent', but that's really about it.
The game actually reminds me a little bit of 'The Cave of Magic' which is - in reality - Tutorial A in the Adventuron Text Adventure System.
Now, all is not lost for the creator, but - again agreeing with @hawkbyte - I, too, think they might greatly benefit from migrating to an IF system that integrates standard verbs and more, sensible standard responses.
'Yesternight' is also an interesting name.
Thank you for your comment. AdvSys is really not a problem here! :-) This system is amazingly flexible and allows to create beautiful games. I made some useful classes. I will add AdvSys source code to the uploaded files.
Of course there are a lot of other adventure systems! As for "Yesternight" I stick with AdvSys. I also like Adventure Definition Language (ADL).
The game is short and also can be used as a tutorial - like the mentioned "The Cave of Magic" from the Adventuron. My game contains 4 puzzles and 5 locations. As I mentioned, this will be extended after ParserComp.
Yesternight is an extremely sparse game. Room and object descriptions are only a few words, or outright absent. It’s also very short, with only two simple puzzles, and no plot except the player’s natural motivation to go forward.
What’s there is a charming, fairy-tale adventure; but there’s so little of it!
The main flaw of the game is the painfully lacking implementation. There is no scenery at all: if a game says “You see a grocer” in a grocery store, it should know the word “grocer”. The puzzles suffer badly from guess-the-verb syndrome.
The game’s English is poor. In particular, it omits many articles. One verb is used in a non-standard way, which affects the solution of a puzzle. I’m unclear if this is a deliberate stylistic choice, a limitation of the engine, or the author having difficulty with English.
Walkthrough and map (major spoilers)
For the author
Have you considered writing this game as a graphical, point-and-click adventure instead? This would lend itself much better to the narrow options.
Alternately, have you considered a different parser (e.g. Inform or TADS), that comes with sensible responses to a lot of common verbs?
If you want to focus on AdvSys, try playing The Sound of One Hand Clapping, a fleshed-out game you can use to get more ideas.
If you’re having trouble with English, do feel free to ask for copyediting/proofreading help. Come to any of the English-language IF Discords, I (and probably quite a few others) will be happy to help.
Hello. The game is very short, contains few puzzles, few responses and the descriptions are not rich.
But it's not the AdvSys interpreter or parser fault. It's my fault as a novice writer. It is a prologue to the game instead of the game itself.
I'm planning to extend this text-adventure game after the ParserComp. As a normal text-adventure.
The descriptions will be extended, there will be many improvements in some areas including non-standard responses.
The plot will be extended. The medicine book found in the library is an item that has no use in this prologue.
AdvSys allows to add articles to the adventure vocabulary ("a", "an", "the"), but I didn't use it.
I'm a computer-science student and I passed English language exam, but seem to not use it well in practice.
Thank you for deeper insight into my game and many useful hints! This will help me improve.
As this is an AdvSys game, it is also playable with the Gargoyle multi-interpreter and therefore playable also on Mac and Linux in addition to Windows. I think you should mark your game file as playable on Mac and Linux too, as many IF players are not using Windows and they might think they cannot play this game. The Windows-only games are the only games with zero ratings in the time of writing.
I just completed this game using Gargoyle. It was very short, like a concept demo, and could use some testing by others, but still, I managed to enjoy it briefly.
Thank you for this information. I didn't know that Gargoyle is capable of interpreting AdvSys games. I will add this into the game information.
Yes, I know it's very short. It's my debut. :-) Thank you for playing and I'm glad you enjoyed it overall.
Thank you very much for rating my game!
I uploaded updated version - the Play.bat script pauses when the game is complete and I added some adjectives for items.