Adventure Game Author

A challenging, engaging, thorough adventure game

I've always been a fan of classic style games that draw more upon your imagination than on fancy graphics. I decided to try my hand at creating my own adventure game for an amateur competition.

Using nothing but the documentation guide, I taught myself how to program using Inform 7. I held myself accountable to looking up how bits of code were to be created, called and implemented, and then I rigorously tested, tested, tested. Creating my own game was important to me, but even more was that it would work properly and be bug-free. Realizing my own limitations, I used networking to enlist half a dozen beta-testers, and fixed as fast as they could report. The game is a survival horror, set in a zombie post-apocalypse. I did my best to give the user options and create the sort of freedom that I find important in a game.

I ended up getting 11th place out of 26, and in a year where I'm told the mean and modal scores were ridiculously higher than average, I'm proud of that placement, but I do intend to come back next year better and stronger.

You can play the game online, but parser reactions are a bit slow (to me at least). To play the game on your computer, PC users will need Glulx and Mac users will need Zoom. Then the game file is here.

I did a lot of poking fun at what even I with my limited knowledge of traditional IF could suss out. You can see some of the jokes with the batteries, the lamp/flashlight. I updated that little puzzle to be more contemporary with modern times. I also had a bit of a twist at the end (spoiler, spoiler) where the protagonist meets a friendly male survivor at the very end, and the two of you can end up together (provided you're polite and free him immediately instead of examining the pipes or other time-wasters). Since I never revealed the protagonist's gender, it was interesting watching reviewers muse if they are a gay male or a hetero female, and I am not going to say which; either way makes me happy to poke at the boring same-same hetero male protagonist.

There did end up being several problems with the game, which was frustrating for me, but I don't want them to be frustrating for the players, so I will address here. Because I am working on a new project, I am unsure if these problems will be fixed, but I do want potential players to be aware of them. These contain spoilers, so read at your own discretion:

• Moving just the bench against the hospital entrance doors is not enough. You need to move the table too to prevent them from viewing you, so that they aren't motivated to try and come inside, otherwise they will keep coming.
• Shooting at the zombies as they bang against the entrance door is ineffective because there are so many of them.
• The arbitrary time limit to find a reusable weapon was a bit unfair, making the game harder than I intended.
• A currently untraced bug sometimes causes rogue zombie attackers to disappear. Since this usually happens when you are unarmed, it unintentionally makes the game as easy as it should have been.
• Because the PC is an employee of the hospital, he should recognize some of the corpses.
• I should add a human corpse with a warning painted on it "Keep out! infected or not." in the basement, to indicate how homicidal the crazy survivor actually is.
• The backstory with the man in the closet should be more personal. He is a coworker you've been flirting with.
• Attempting to eat corpses asks for a confirmation, then ends the game then and there.
• You do remember some of the backstory, fighting with the first zombie victim, and the spread of the infection. You don't remember how you survived.

Those were the problems that most of the people had with the game. As you can see, most of the issues weren't too big, but that first problem with the hospital entrance door really acted like a game-killer for several players, and any number of hiccups is really frustrating. As I said before, I look forward to improving and fixing my game-writing style in the game I have slated to be released next year.

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