My second entry to IF Writing Month is now up. This week’s assignment was to develop a winnable story with a unique player character, so I made mine about a woman with extreme social anxiety making a trip to the grocery store. It’s based in part on “Freedom”, an IFComp 2008 entry that purportedly stuck you in a day in the life of a person with social anxiety disorder — that game itself was poorly implemented and placed rather low in the competition, but I thought the premise was interesting, so I tried to put my own spin on it. Of course, since this once again was written in a couple of evenings or so, it’s far from perfect, but hey, I tried.
Anyway, you can play “Grocery Shopping” online here, or you can download the z-code file here. Have fun.
I really, really like the PC development. The “room descriptions” as well as the customized responses to some of the standard commands are really well done.
I feel a little slow, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to actually buy the groceries. I know I need to take them to the checkout counter, but I can’t figure out how to do that.
Did you try “go to checkout counter”?
Any particular reason you aren’t linking to parchment for this one and switched to a Flash-based ZIP?
The latest version of Parchment wasn’t working with my games (or any Inform 7 games at all, for that matter) earlier this week. Hence, I decided to update the provided links to use Flaxo instead, because I can at least host it on my web server and have a bit more control over what I do with it. If you prefer Parchment instead, just feed it the z-code link I provided.
Mostly I was just curious if you explicit reasons, in case they applied. It’s a shame to hear that Parchment devs keep breaking and then re-fixing I7 support. Another option would be to use a link to a specific revision of the parchment.html (or a local copy of parchment.html) rather than always linking to the SVN TRUNK version.
I just learned that the Conversation Package from Eric Eve bumps a game out of Z5 range (at least without any memory tricks), so now I’m debating just building it as GLULX (and not worrying about game size again) and probably the only and certainly the coolest way to do GLULX in the browser right now is the FyreVM in Silverlight 2.0. (And yes I realize that is an extremely geeky form of “cool”.) I’m tempted to build some weird Silverlight UI just for Amongst.
Deirdra, the Parchment devs solved the issue. To everyone: to play it through parchment is just a matter of applying the story file to the parchment link:
http://parchment.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/parchment.html?story=http://www.deirdrakiai.com/ifmonth09/squinky_2_grocery.z5
Nice one! And I like it how you allowed me to curse.