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by David Welbourn

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Islands Far Away

by Shanon Fernald

Humor
2010

Web Site

(based on 2 ratings)
1 review

About the Story

Islands Far Away is my first work of interactive fiction. I created it as an entry for the Ludum Dare 48 Hour Game Competition #17.

The game is about a programmer who is trying to create a game in the Ludum Dare 48 Hour Game Competition, but is constantly getting distracted by various things. The game has dark humor, strong language and lots of toilet humor. I think it should appeal to programmers and techies.

I would not recommend the game for children because of the nature of some of the puzzles. The game is short and I consider it very easy. I don't think it would take anyone familiar with interactive fiction more than 15-30 minutes to finish the game.

I'm very satisfied with the work considering that I only had 48 hours to create the game and more importantly I had never used inform 7 before. The stuff I was doing with the language by the end of the 48 hours was 100 times better than the stuff I was doing at the beginning. I really wish the inform IDE had a spell checker though. I think the big problem with the game after reviewing what I had accomplished was that the parser is weak. I didn't have time to try to figure out all the responses players would come with, so I imagine the frustration level of the game might be high, even though the game is super simple.

Finally, I do think the ending is particularly inspired and I would like to hear any feedback you might have on it. If anyone cares or likes the game, I may do some cleanup and improvements on all the problems and things I left unfinished. Thanks.


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3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Good First Effort, April 27, 2010
by Matt Wigdahl (Olathe, KS)

I haven't had a chance to play yet, but I wanted to address what you said about your Inform 7 code quality getting much better by the end of the game compared with the beginning.

This is common -- in fact, it's exactly the same experience I had. It can be maddening to look at some of your early code and realize just how broken it is! Regardless of what you or anyone else thinks of your first effort, I congratulate you on finishing it and encourage you to keep moving forward with your newfound skills.

**Update**

Just finished it. Not bad for a quick first game! If you enjoy this type of scenario you should also check out Violet by Jeremy Freese, which has a similar type of set-up. For a 48-hour coding turnaround it's pretty impressive. The main problem I found was with underimplementation -- certain things you mentioned in room descriptions were not implemented as objects. There were also a couple of fairly bizarre responses:

(Spoiler - click to show)
>code
(the game)
But you're already on the broken chair.


(Spoiler - click to show)
>smell
You smell nothing unexpected. [[oh, really?]]


(Spoiler - click to show)
Typing "get shit" when you have the poster gives you the scooping message (and the point awarding message) no matter how many times you repeat it. The "for the first time" clause would probably help here...


(Spoiler - click to show)
The command "feed corky" works, but "give sandwich to corky" doesn't.


With a bit more time and polish I could see this being a 3-star short game. I look forward to playing your future work!

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Islands Far Away on IFDB

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