IFCOMP 2008 - Project Delta: The Course

     Maybe this is the year of the far-too-short game?

     Project Delta: The Course weighs in at just 15 minutes, and part of that comes from experimenting with the various built-in color themes. This is little more than a tech demo for Emilian’s new console-mode CYOA system, Node-X.

     Most of the effort -- well, nearly all of the effort -- went into the development of Node-X rather than the game that’s meant to showcase it. It’s fitting, then, that this review is going to focus primarily on Node-X (and mostly in the form of suggestions). The story, billed as a prequel to a larger upcoming Node-X game, does nothing to distinguish itself or captivate players. An amnesiac military woman is given a very short demonstration of the Node-X interface by a generic military man. It’s not even as entertaining as the introductory interface training in a video game, although presumably it serves the same purpose. Really, there is nothing here. No story. A generic setting. It might get a player interested in Node-X, but nobody is likely to play The Course and develop anticipation or hunger for the as-of-yet unreleased The Assignment.

     So, I’ll focus on the Node-X engine.

     It’s odd that the author chose a console-mode presentation. I suppose there’s nothing here that makes it a bad choice -- only, if it has to be PC-only, a Windows-based or web-based interface would provide more future flexibility. At the risk of self-promotion, I developed something sort of similar to this (CYOA with game saving, inventory, system commands like “examine”, and more) using DHTML and JavaScript. I’ve never released it (it needs a little work, anyway), but since it supports multimedia and works on many platforms, it seems like a better direction to take for a CYOA engine.

     From The Course, it seems the author intends for it to be more for menu-based IF than CYOA. (Mine, incidentally, is the same way. You could do traditional CYOA, but the advanced feature set also lends itself to more traditional IF where there are puzzles and inventory and fewer wildly branching CYOA-style plot lines.) Still, the more IF-like your CYOA becomes, the less justification I can see in a text-only console-mode PC-only implementation.

     Node-X needs a transcript feature, with annotation. My “transcript” for Project Delta: The Course is just a few notes taken in NOTEPAD while playing. This is handy not just for IFComp judges, but for eventual beta-testers of Node-X games. A running transcript, which a player can turn on or off and add comments while playing, would be a nice (and useful) addition.

     An UNDO feature would be nice. My own CYOA engine (sorry, sorry -- it may be bad form to keep referencing it, but it’s my basis for comparison) has this, and it’s just a matter of remembering the previous state (in this case, probably inventory) and returning to the prior page (or “node”).

     An open specification for the game’s binary format (*.NX1) might be a good idea. It would probably be something others could use in creating non-Windows interpreters, and (maybe) even work into multi-format interpreters like Gargoyle or Spatterlight. It will take something like this to gain a wider acceptance within the IF community (assuming that’s even a goal -- and it may be, given that this was submitted to the IFComp).

     I noticed a tendency in The Course to show extra blank options sometimes. I’m not sure what that was all about. A bug? Intentional, as a means of showing that there aren’t any more options? I’m just not sure. It seemed like a bug.

     It’s unfortunate that The Course isn’t an interesting game. The IFComp is a good way to get exposure in the IF Community, and a more worthwhile game could really have been a showcase for Node-X. I’m left with mixed feelings about the interpreter. On the one hand, it does seem to work fine (although in a far less sophisticated way than even the least popular of IF development languages). The author has probably worked as hard on this game as any other of this year’s participants (albeit on the engine, not the game). On the other hand, the “game” itself would be worthless no matter the platform.

     So, what I’ve opted to do is give 1 Technical point (for Node-X itself), 1 Writing point (this is generous -- the writing isn’t horrible, but there are frequent problems and it’s just not very interesting), the free point, and -- both as encouragement to consider my suggestions and because I still have a soft spot for the optimism shown by home-brew authors -- the bonus point. That’s a composite score of “4,” and that’s (sad though it may be) about double what I expect the game’s competition average to be.