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A friend asked me to beta-test his entry for the 2009 Interactive Fiction Competition, and doing so reminded me that hey, I really enjoy text adventures, even though I suck at them. So I spent a few hours on Sunday playing some of last year's IFComp entries. In particular, I played through Jeremy Freese's Violet, last year's winner, which I hereby recommend to you all. Download just Violet here, or all the entries here.
Violet endeared itself to me from the start by being about a graduate student's struggle to write 1000 words of his/her¹ dissertation, in the face of difficulties and distractions; but I would have loved it anyway, because it's so well written and so clever and so funny. Seriously, it's worth playing just for the descriptions of the tracks on your iPod. I found most of the puzzles were just difficult enough to be fun without being frustrating: the game's good about warning you if you're about to do something deadly or solution-preventing, which also helps prevent frustration. It's obvious that a lot of care was put into the game's construction - there was almost no guess-the-verb nonsense (more precisely, there were a couple of instances of guess-the-preposition, and one case of guess-that-the-game-wants-the-plural-of-this-noun, which meant that the first solution I'd thought of worked after all). And the way that the backstory was incrementally revealed was very nice. Violet, by the way, is the name of your girlfriend, who narrates the game: as a trick to motivate yourself into writing, you're imagining her voice encouraging you. Meanwhile, the real Violet is back at your flat... but enough of that. Play the game yourselves.
Unfortunately, getting Violet to work under Linux was more challenging than some of the puzzles. Most IF these days is distributed in a format called Z-code, which you play by opening it in a Z-code interpreter (much as you open JPEGs in an image viewer), but Violet, for reasons that presumably make sense to the author, is distributed in an extended form of Z-code called Blorb, which isn't supported by most of the common Z-code interpreters. If you're on Windows or Mac OS, you shouldn't have any problems: just download the interpreter bundles from the IFComp 2008 download page. On (Ubuntu) Linux, however, the procedure is as follows:
Edit: or you could just play this Flash version. Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mrkgnao for the link!
¹ The default is to play as male, but you can become female using the FEMALE command, or the slightly classier HETERONORMATIVITY OFF. The text and backstory are altered to fit, and some of the puzzles are slightly different.
Violet endeared itself to me from the start by being about a graduate student's struggle to write 1000 words of his/her¹ dissertation, in the face of difficulties and distractions; but I would have loved it anyway, because it's so well written and so clever and so funny. Seriously, it's worth playing just for the descriptions of the tracks on your iPod. I found most of the puzzles were just difficult enough to be fun without being frustrating: the game's good about warning you if you're about to do something deadly or solution-preventing, which also helps prevent frustration. It's obvious that a lot of care was put into the game's construction - there was almost no guess-the-verb nonsense (more precisely, there were a couple of instances of guess-the-preposition, and one case of guess-that-the-game-wants-the-plural-of-this-noun, which meant that the first solution I'd thought of worked after all). And the way that the backstory was incrementally revealed was very nice. Violet, by the way, is the name of your girlfriend, who narrates the game: as a trick to motivate yourself into writing, you're imagining her voice encouraging you. Meanwhile, the real Violet is back at your flat... but enough of that. Play the game yourselves.
Unfortunately, getting Violet to work under Linux was more challenging than some of the puzzles. Most IF these days is distributed in a format called Z-code, which you play by opening it in a Z-code interpreter (much as you open JPEGs in an image viewer), but Violet, for reasons that presumably make sense to the author, is distributed in an extended form of Z-code called Blorb, which isn't supported by most of the common Z-code interpreters. If you're on Windows or Mac OS, you shouldn't have any problems: just download the interpreter bundles from the IFComp 2008 download page. On (Ubuntu) Linux, however, the procedure is as follows:
- Download the file
nitfol-0.5_linux.tgzfrom here. - Unpack it, either from a graphical file-manager or by typing
tar xvzf nitfol-0.5_linux.tgzat a command prompt (having firstcd'd to wherever you saved the file). - Put the contents of the zipfile somewhere useful.
sudo mv *nitfol /usr/local/bin sudo mv nitfol-0.5.so /usr/lib
- Try to run Nitfol now and it will complain that it can't find
libpng.so.2. This is a shared library file that contains code for reading and writing PNG image files. Look in your shared libraries directory to see if there's anything promising.cd /usr/lib ls *png*
- In my case, that came up with
libpng12.so.0andlibpng12.so.0.27.0, the one being a symbolic link to the other. Let's cross our fingers, makelibpng.so.2a symlink tolibpng12.so.0.27.0, and see what happens.sudo ln -s libpng12.so.0.27.0 libpng.so.2
By the way: ever have trouble remembering the order of arguments toln? It's the same ascpandmv: "from" then "to". - Change directory to wherever you installed Violet, and invoke Nitfol on the file
violet.zblorb.cd ~/if/Comp08/zcode/violet nitfol violet.zblorb
- All being well, you should now be looking at the start of the game. Happy adventuring!
Edit: or you could just play this Flash version. Thanks to
mrkgnao for the link!¹ The default is to play as male, but you can become female using the FEMALE command, or the slightly classier HETERONORMATIVITY OFF. The text and backstory are altered to fit, and some of the puzzles are slightly different.