Fun little dungeon crawler. Are you planning to do a source code release at some point? I've never tried implementing a dice system in Inform before, and I'm curious to know how it works.
This is a nice gothic horror piece with a mechanic that reminds me of Liza Daly's The Ballroom. We played it during the Seattle/Tacoma IF Meetup this month.
I enjoyed playing this game during IFComp. One thing it does well is to use reflective choices to define the main character's relationships and motivations.
A couple of minor bugs: 1. For the mine cart, if you click on the "fast" or "slow" links more than once, it keeps adding more instances of the text "lever set" to the line.
2. The lava worm is described as a drillbot in one or two places.
3. In the playthrough I did, it said that Frymock was unconscious as he went back through the rift.
What's the approximate play time again? I didn't time myself when I did it after the meetup, but I'm thinking about an hour total, does that sound right?
Anyway, here's a playlist I put together to accompany the game:
Fun concept, though I found the navigation a little confusing and I wasn't able to interpret the clues very well. I'd like to see it polished up after the competition.
We played through a decent chunk of Nyvo the Dolphin during the Seattle/Tacoma IF meetup and enjoyed the Metroidvania aspects, though I will admit the amount of body horror was more than I had expected.
Thanks for sharing this game with us at the meetup! I really liked the setting and the atmosphere. If you're looking to expand it after the jam is over and want a play tester, let me know.
Good fun; we played through this game at this month's Seattle/Tacoma IF meetup. I enjoyed the branching paths. I also appreciated that there were seemingly always options to either (1) drink more or (2) fight someone.
Thanks for your response. I would definitely be interested in a detailed postmortem for this project, and I am sure there are people in the community who would appreciate code snippets and examples that could be generalized to use some of the same techniques on other projects.
It's interesting to see a game that recreates so closely the look and feel of a classic English detective novel. Was there a conscious decision to create this experience in Adventuron rather than Inform, and if so, what was the motivation behind it (considering the latter very likely required a lot more work)?
I beta tested this game so I will not be posting a rating. However, it was a lot of fun to play and is full of references to Chandler Groover's works (some of them more stomach-churning than others). Overall, Grooverland is very well constructed and has a high degree of polish, with in-game adaptive hints to keep you from getting totally stuck on any one puzzle.
You are right that the mine passages part is just a goof on the maze in Adventure. Likewise, asking or telling the skeleton about something is a single-joke response; the statue is the only one that has varied responses. I would encourage you to ask the statue about lots of topics, and tell me if there are any you can think of for which there should be better answers.
I've thought for a long time about the exit portal in the Great Altar; I was influenced by Doug Egan's Afflicted and similar games where you can just leave at any time, should you want to. I'm still learning about good puzzle design, so I'll have to think about how to make puzzles for my next game that are both satisfying and fit with my conception of how the story should play out.
Manny, thanks very much for your feedback. I appreciate you taking the time to provide suggestions and let me know about those errors. I've tracked down the typo and the stray punctuation in the source code and will make sure those fixes are incorporated into the next update. I'll think about the portal a little bit.
