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Message: 3177

Author: andrewbroad

Date: 19/12/2002

Subject: Re: My thoughts on goodnite luddite..

 

dan_richardson_uk wrote:

>
> I thought it was very good but... my only objection was the shear
> difficulty of the game. I don't know all of the quirks/bugs of the
> game and therefore didn't appreiate it as much as other JSW gamers
> out there.

I aim to teach! :-)
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/features.html

> I have to say that the complexity of this game is for the hardcore
> JSW fan. But I prefer the likes of JSW: lord of the rings for it's
> linear style. I found it far more playable than any other of
> Broadsofts games (and any other JSW game for that matter) and
> I hope that you will release more games of that calibur.

I try to find the happy medium between tediously linear and
frustratingly branching. I think I got the balance pretty good for
Goodnite Luddite, but I think I can get it better in the future.

I believe the optimum may be to divide the rooms into several
clusters, where the rooms in each cluster are completely separate from
the rooms in other clusters (apart from the entrance/exit to each
cluster). Maybe the start-room of such a game could be a room of
teleports, one for each cluster.

Each cluster could have, say, sixteen rooms, and they could be as
branching or as linear as you want. But it's much easier to get lost
in a branching game where there are no clear boundaries between
clusters, especially if there are a lot of one-way exits, &c.

> Still, I think GN is a fine example of how a JSW rewrite should be
> done.

Thank you! It's GL, though, not GN! ;-)

> I hope my game (JSW: the journey home) will breath new life into
> the genre.. we'll soon see :-)

Yes indeed. It's nice to play a linear JSW game once in a while
between the usual branching ones.

--
Andrew Broad
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/download/

 

 

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