Season V, Episode 8: It’s sort of a vocabulary dick-waving contest

Interfaces are vastly important. They are what allows you, the player, to interact with the game world, and just as an intuitive interface can enhance the story of a game, a non intuitive one can conversely bring the whole thing down. With the interface playing such a pivotal role in narrative-driven games, it’s not strange

Continue reading Season V, Episode 8: It’s sort of a vocabulary dick-waving contest

Interfaces are vastly important. They are what allows you, the player, to interact with the game world, and just as an intuitive interface can enhance the story of a game, a non intuitive one can conversely bring the whole thing down.

To be fair, that game rocks. It’s just that the narrator takes ages to describe all those damn icons.

With the interface playing such a pivotal role in narrative-driven games, it’s not strange that lots of players tend to have very specific preferences. Some favour a point-and-click-type interface – be that Sierra icon bar, LucasArts verb bar or coin, Wadjet Eye one-click interface, etc. – while others (your three hosts included) are partial to the text parser. But who says it has to be an “either-or” situation? Who says you can’t have both?

Phil Fortier of IceFall Games would not dream of saying such vile things. In fact, Phil is working on a highly ambitious game called Cascade Quest, which works as a bona fide two-fer, by including both parser and point-and-click interfaces. Players who wish to comb through the environment and cuss at the characters can do that – aided by the predictive text that also prevents your text messages IRL from looking like they were jotted down by a stroke victim – while others, who wish to cut to the bone and stick with the most important interactions, are free to do that.

Furthermore, Phil (a name I appreciate more each time I write it) is also trying to bring back the SCI look of Sierra On-Line games circa 1987-1991 not as it actually was, but as you remember it. Technological advancements that have only recently become available in comparison, such as particle effects, find their way into an environment they never existed it in the first place. Phil’s first title Snail Trek acts a kind of litmus test for this design philosophy.

Give me a text parser and half an hour and this hole will be spent.

Our discussion with Phil winds its way past the challenges of making such a multifaceted game, the technical nitty-gritty of how he makes his “SCI on steroids” work, being licenced to print money (hitherto known as “the business side of things”) and the endearing qualities of the name Phil. It all makes for a great listen, and you should all head over to YubTub and do so, or let your eyes crawl a bit further down this page for audio.