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(+2)

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.

(2 edits) (+1)

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.