Recent comments

Thanks for the encouragement!

I’m happy to see that SCMRPG has at long last reached an audience that finds it meaningful, perhaps even useful, in understanding Columbine and in provoking questions of themselves. It was a long and rocky journey before and after the game came out, as my documentary attempts to chronicle, but in the end I am happy to read of players who find the effort worthwhile and helpful. Thanks for the review, Jordan.

Possibly “zipping” could be internally implemented using something like this:
1. Find the (shortest) path to the destination point, show something if it’s impossible to reach the target location.
2. Simulate actual movement through the locations selected during pathfinding. It could be as simple as showing “You start moving to …”.
3. If there was nothing worthy the user’s attention in those locations, simply show that the user arrived at the destination location. If some of the “virtually traversed” locations contains something the user would notice if she visited that location “explicitly”, the game could stop at that location, tell what location is this and why the game stopped. Something as silly as “you feel as something has changed here since your last visit”.

Actually, I’ve seen something like this in the “Space Rangers” game [1] in which you normally navigate your spacecraft in “real time” (in other words, you control it as you would do in an action game), but if the game sees some “important” object is approaching (like an asteroid or an NPC’s spacecraft), you’re dropped into the turn-based mode, in which you can examine the situation at hand and take whatever countermeasures your want. That is, a trip from A to B in this game can complete without interruption (“zipping”) or can be interrupted any time to draw the user’s attention.

1. http://elementalgames.com/eng/r_all.php

I don’t play IFs regularly but have some at least superficial familiarity with the genre, its history and its conventions, so it was very interesting to read these newcomer’s impressions. The criticism of “step-based” travelling really caught me by surprise, as I guess that’s just one of those gameplay mechanics which the vast majority of players (even someone with such a limited IF experience as I have) simply takes for granted.

As IF mastermind Emily Short helpfully points out in the comment above, some games do include faster and arguably less artificial means of transporation, but my own worry would be that it could sometimes be hard to combine such fast travel options with gameplay which not only includes backtracking of some sort (as most IFs do) but also revolves around changes (some of them quite small and subtle) in the environments you’ve already explored. In some IFs, progressing to the next area after having completed the previous area’s One Big Puzzle is all there is to it, but often there’s considerably more to do in a single “screen” than that, and if you include an option to skip these rooms the player might easily miss something important which has changed since he or she last visited these places (which is also why fast travel is not always advisable in graphical adventure games which has such options, such as the Zip Mode in “Myst” and “Riven”). I haven’t played Anchorhead so maybe the “new items magically appearing” variant of this which you disliked about that game might not be the smartest way to implement this general design choice. But it’s not difficult to imagine many scenarios in which it would be legitimate to introduce new elements, puzzles and details to old rooms A and B - which you might miss entirely if you’re constantly zipping between room Z and X where you already know there are puzzles you haven’t solved yet. Sure, even with a fast travel option available there’s nothing actually stopping the player from moving about the game world in the old-fashioned, step-based way - but at the same time I’d be willing to bet that human nature is such that if you introduce a new convenience, most players (myself included) would find it psychologically difficult not to use it all the time…

Perhaps one way to get around this problem (and I don’t know if any game has tried that) would be to always list the rooms you’re travelling through while using the fast-travel option and at the same time include some kind of symbol (like an asterisk [*]) to indicate if things have changed in one of those rooms since you were last there. Now, I have no idea how difficult and/or tedious this might be to implement with IF programming - and it’s also possible that it might make certain games too easy - but the basic point here is simply that fast travelling may introduce certain problems which individual IF developers will have to solve in one way or the other if and when they include such options in their own games.